Faces Of The Balkans, 100 Years Ago

"Barbers Mean Nothing In Life: A horny-handed son of the Balkan soil. He has lived the allotted three score and 10 years and then some. And despite the vicissitudes that have swept Romania, he still believes in the future of his country and the goodness of his God. He was a patient in the [Red Cross] hospital but refused to remain if his hair was cut. It is a 50-year growth and he wouldn't part with it."

These very interesting pictures from the Radio Free Europe site were taken in different Balkan countries by American photographer Lewis Hine, who was here with the Red Cross, in 1919 and 1920. 

The captions are original and Radio Free Europe feels it necessary to apologise to its readers for the 'sometimes patronizing perspective of a Western observer of the time' that they display. 

I think almost everything written before the 1990s requires an apology or condemnation from Radio Free Europe, the Guardian and from English literature departments.

Reading the captions and looking at the pictures I think not for the first time that Wallachia and Moldavia are only half Balkan at most, because Balkan is a state of mind, not a place, and a state of mind strongly coloured by centuries of rule by Turkey. Wallachia and Moldavia were only a Turkish protectorate, ruled by Christian princes, though the people including the landowners and princes dressed like Turks until the 1850s.

Smuggling and bear hunting in the Carpathians in the late 1830s

I mentioned a few days ago John Paget's lovely book Travels in Hungary and Transylvania, which I read at university. 

Here is a passage about Wallachian peasants smuggling salt, shawls and Turkey carpets from Bucharest to Krondstadt (Brasov) and on occasion from Roumelia or even Adrianople (Edirne), followed by an account of a drunken Austrian general in a bear hunt being pursued by a bear and calling out 'Back! rascal, back! I am a general!'

Being pursued by a bear is no joke, even if they look like they want to give you a friendly hug. From time to time they succeed in killing people, sometimes in towns. One killed someone in Sinaia a few years ago. 

For some reason the technocrat government, the one before last, decided to make hunting bears illegal. The number of peasants and tourists killed by bears will doubtless increase.

I was fascinated by Hungarian (including Transylvanian) early nineteenth century history at university and some years ago was sad to find the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford specialises in Hungarian history, which when I was up was an incredibly obscure subject. 

I admit I feel jealous. Failure is not the only penalty for sloth. There is also the success of Sir Richard Evans. 

Rod Liddle today

Now Oxford University has said it intends to “decolonise” maths and science. How will it do that? Surely the speed of light, and Boyle’s law on the pressure of gases, are exactly the same whether you’re black or white?





I have read papers on decolonising the sciences and in every case the subtext seems to mean “make them a lot easier”. Ask students not to calculate the pressure of a gas as its container decreases in size, but how the poor gas feels, alone in its airtight container.



There should be a name for this fervid dismantling of western thought. I think “The Unenlightenment” fits pretty well.

Captain Cook, Lord Nelson and Clive of India were racists

An anti-colonialist 25 year old Australian historian disapproves of statues of Captain Cook, Lord Nelson and my great hero Clive of India.


What would the Whig Lord Macaulay say? His dazzling Essay on Clive was the best thing I'd ever read when I was twelve. Clive's greatness is beyond dispute. He was the conqueror of India, something no Greek or Roman ever was.


Countries live in the imagination. To renounce England's wonderful past is to renounce our country herself.


The wisest man I ever met was an illiterate Pole who came to England after the war and told me England was the best country in the world. 

Every man thinks his country the best country in the world, in one sense, in the sense that his wife and mother are the best wife or mother in the world, but in England's case it's objectively true.

What is the alternative? The only competitors are France, Ancient Athens and Ancient Rome and we are even better than them, even if being opposed to slavery is the only test. (Just think of the French revolution, if you would put France in first place.)

Oh and I suppose another alternative is China, where political prisoners today provide slave labour.

55% Of Americans Believe Joe Biden Is In Early Stages of Dementia

55% of 1,007 “likely voters” in the USA told polling company Zogby International that they think Joe Biden, 77, “is in the early stages of dementia.”

It's a small survey but it doesn't sound unlikely.

Having seen a recent clip of him I think this will become a much more widely held assessment as the election proceeds. 

I think Joe Biden is very unlikely to win, just because of his own weaknesses.


Donald Trump said in March at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina,

“They are going to put him in a home and other people are going to be running the country. Sleepy Joe, he doesn’t even know where he is or what he’s doing or what office he’s running for. Honestly, I don’t think he knows what office he’s running for.”

Donald Trump has a knack of sensing weaknesses. 'Low-energy Jeb' and 'Pocahontas' (Democrats said that epithet was racist) killed Jeb Bush and Elizabeth Warren. 

Jeb Bush told him, 'You're not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency', but President Trump proved him wrong.

In addition to Biden's mental state, I imagine the BLM protests and riots will also help Donald Trump very much.

The BLM iconoclastic outbreak is another attempt by his opponents to destroy Trump, after the Russian allegations and the Ukrainian allegations failed to do so. By opponents I mean his main opponents, the American media, this time in alliance with angry crowds, that on occasion became angry mobs.

But BLM is a Morton's fork for the Democrats. They cannot denounce BLM and I don't think they can win if they endorse BLM.

I was discussing this last night with a very clever and well-informed American businessman, who thinks the same. 

He also thinks that in 2024 a Democrat will win the presidency, of which I am certain too, and then America is finished.

Black Lives Matter UK say they aim to dismantle capitalism

On Black Lives Matter UK's GoFundMe page, a statement was uploaded a few days ago. It explains that the organisation intends to be ‘guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world’.

On the BLMUK Facebook page, the group declares that it is opposed to 

‘homophobia, lesbophobia, biphobia, queerphobia, transphobia, sexism, misogyny, misogynoir, enbyphobia, ableism, racism, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, whorephobia, ageism, fatphobia, eugenics, discrimination, stereotypes, respectability politics, the stigmatisation of HIV and the stigmatisation of addiction.’ 

I learnt all this from an article in the Daily Mail, which makes this point.

If those behind Black Lives Matter UK really do intend to ‘dismantle’ capitalism, what might they wish to replace it with? And how would that benefit people of colour?

The only alternative system practised elsewhere in the world is communism. But as China’s Uighur Muslims, or the 1.5 million people from ethnic minorities who were deported or sent to gulags by Josef Stalin, would attest, that system can be very racist indeed.

Of course the Mail is right to mention Communism, but the one thing Communism is not guilty of is racism. In fact Communists coined the word and invented the concept.

I don't know if the Chinese Communist treatment of the Uigur Muslims is racist, but I'd be surprised. I suspect it is their religion, not their race, which makes the Communists see them as a threat. 

Still, it's a very illuminating article from a much maligned but often very good paper, one which sometimes somewhat timidly critiques the ruling ideology, though often is very PC itself.

As it is in another article in the Mail, which lavishly praises Patrick Hutchinson, who rescued Mr Bryn Male from a BLM mob. It is right to do so but omits to mention that he said he did so to prevent a death making BLM look bad. 

Mr Male, who had ended up on the ground before his rescue, is described by the Mail as 'an ex-police thug' who had a shaven head and a Millwall tattoo. 

Witnesses said he drunkenly declared ‘f*** Black Lives Matter’ before being punched and kicked by rival demonstrators.

The Mail does not say he did anything beyond using a four letter word to bring down an attack that might have cost him his life. It brushes over this, but gives me the impression that it thinks protesting against BLM and hoping to protect statues is damning. 

The article tells us Mr Male is vice-chairman of the social club in the village where he lives.

But for how much longer? A petition to remove him has 380 signatures. 

The ‘Get rid of Bryn Male’ campaign says: ‘On June 13 we all witnessed an honourable man, Patrick Hutchinson, carrying an injured stranger to safety. We are now aware that the injured man was Bryn Male. We cannot allow those... attitudes to be part of the club.’

The Book of Covidicus - Chapter 5 - No BALM in Gilead

I spent far too much time on the internet as it is and rarely read other people's blogs, but I just read Bruvver Eccles' latest post and it's so funny I decided I needed to post the link here.

In the US and UK the left is an alliance of younger urban graduates and ethnic minorities

The British Labour Party commissioned Ed Miliband, who knows about losing elections, to report on why they lost badly in December 2019. His report found that Labour was a party of younger city-dwelling graduates and of ethnic minority voters. 

Age, education, ethnicity and location are now more important than class.

This is the future of the left in England and America.

In Romania the sizeable ethnic minorities are well established, neither cause or are caused many problems and have lived here for centuries, except the small Jewish community, who are mostly descended from late nineteenth century immigrants from Russia. They have their own ethnic parties, though the gypsy party doesn't count for much. 

Graduates are usually centre right and graduates with jobs in multinational companies, like everywhere, are often globalists. 

The left-wing party, the post-communist Social Democrats, gets the socially conservative, less well educated, especially from the countryside where people so hated Communism in 1948. 

They are somewhere people, but so are most of the centre-right voters. Most Romanians are social conservatives and almost none approve of single sex marriage, few of feminism.


The big drivers for change will be Romanian graduates returning from Western universities with up to date 'woke' ideas, the European Union and Third World immigration which has begun. 

In other words the drivers for social change in Romania are essentially the same as in the West - but Romania is two generations behind. And over two generations much can happen and will, in Romania and in the west. 

In the less than twenty weeks till the US presidential election a lot can happen. That election will have far reaching consequences. 

A victory for Biden will be the end of the attempt at counter-revolution. A victory for Trump will probably kick the can down the road for four years.

The crisis in the Catholic Church is part of the crisis for Western civilisation

Damian Thompson, until recently editor of the Catholic Herald in London and the best religious journalist there is, tweeted on Thursday:

Francis has just re-employed at the Vatican bank BIp Zanchetta, charged with aggravated sexual assault of seminarians, fraud and misuse of funds. Papolatrous ‘orthodox’ journalists say nothing; liberals vigorously cover up.

Googling I find that Bishop Zanchetta was one of the first bishops appointed by Francis, was suspended from his Vatican post after reports that he had sexually abused seminarians and had homosexual pornography on his phone. 

According to the press, he has not satisfactorily explained what happened to almost a quarter of a million dollars he received in public money.

Since his time as a bishop Francis has surrounded himself with priests against whom serious allegations of sexual or financial irregularity have been made. Why? 

Such men are beholden to him. That's one reason, I presume.

Quotations for this revolutionary moment in the West

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"You never compromise with violence. You never compromise with intimidation. You never compromise with those who want to use it to extinguish freedom and democracy, because if you do then the very things for which you stand are extinguished." Margaret Thatcher

"I watched greedily, and concluded with absolute certainty that night that nobody was in charge, and that I could do anything I liked from now on. And I duly did." Peter Hitchens on 1967

Quotations, stolen from Toma

I express my thanks to Toma, who comments regularly on my blog and who collected these and posted then on his.

The first quotation expresses what I feel British foreign policy should be.

We can regard the troubles of others with sympathy and patience. We hold out the hand of friendship and peace to every nation in Europe. But the affairs of Europe are not our concern. Every time we have involved ourselves in these affairs, it has brought us great burdens and great loss. We have prospered when we have kept clear of European politics.

Our one duty is to mind our own business. We should set an example of ordered freedom and sensible economics. These things are well within the genius of the British people, even if our Government finds them a bit difficult. For this, too, is one of the lessons of history: the British people are always a good deal wiser and more sensible than those who govern them.

A.J.P. Taylor

Boris was right to want to avoid lockdown, but then bottled it

I agree with Fraser Nelson's article in the Telegraph and am terribly ashamed of how my country clings to the lockdown. It's a sort of Stockholm syndrome. Is that also the explanation for the way people back home kowtow to the Black Lives Matter movement?

Boris Johnson was right the first time. He resisted lockdown for as long as he could, regarding it as a draconian, untested experiment that might cause far more harm than good.
Far better, he thought, to ask people to keep their distance, work from home, self-isolate if anyone in their household fell sick. Why pass needless laws and ask the police to pursue workers, lovers and dog-walkers? It’s better, he said, to level with people. Give them the facts, offer advice and trust them to do what’s right.
Only now do we know how well this was working. Most people were staying home on government advice (and their own concern). The virus seems to have peaked by lockdown on 23 March. None of this was known at the time. Instead, we had panic and Prof Neil Ferguson saying that 250,000 would die unless rules were mandatory. So politically, the Prime Minister had no choice.

Quotations

Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, misattributed to his son, the judge.


Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
Follow the three Rs:
Respect for self
Respect for others
Responsibility for all your actions.
Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

'History will judge those who emerged from lockdown to fight the ghost of Cecil Rhodes'

Marie Daouda is a stipendiary lecturer in French at Oriel College, Oxford, and wrote a wonderful article for the Daily Telegraph, entitled 'History will judge those who emerged from lockdown to fight the ghost of Cecil Rhodes'. I quote from it.

I come from a country with no statues.

It is not that Morocco never had statues. Not that long ago it had statues of French officials – of which only one remains, hidden in a consulate garden. It had, a bit earlier, statues of Christian saints and Roman dignitaries, of which there is no trace. Before that, it must have had statues of Phoenician deities. All have been destroyed, and with them visible proof of the complex history of North Africa.

...I will not say that as an African I am oppressed by Oriel’s statue of Rhodes and by the buildings Oxford owes to imperial largesse, nor that I feel incomplete, as a Catholic, by the absence of statues in some of the other niches. I do not wish to change a single stone of Oxford, because I love it. I love it as much, and maybe more, than I love any city I have lived in before.

There is no shame in loving the country you belong to. We immigrants love it, too. It is possible to criticise a country and the people who built it, while still loving it. Without a French presence in Morocco, I doubt I would have had any chance to enjoy an international academic career, let alone as a woman. My mother insisted that I should be educated in the French system; my grandmother’s pride was that I ended up teaching French to French teenagers.

Could I decolonise myself? No; nor do I wish to. I am proud of what the complicated past of colonialism made me. I feel no guilt about it, and the last thing I need now is the apologies of a French person feeling sorry for me.White guilt is unhelpful and condescending. Whenever someone tries to deploy it, I tell them that my ancestors were involved in the slave trade, too.

He wanted his scholarships to create amity between the English speaking peoples and I assumed he did so because Anglo-Saxons and Germans are Teutons, but Dr. Daouda quotes from his will: 

“no student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a Scholarship on account of his race or religious opinions.”

Why did England leave it to football supporters and the far right to protect the Cenotaph?

A very intelligent and highly successful Cambridge educated Facebook friend posted this status about the recent riots in London.

Why did we rely, complacently, on the Football Lads Alliance and Britian First (sic), to support the veterans who wanted to protect the Cenotaph that commemorates Our Glorious Dead? It should have been the Police's job to do that, over the past three weeks, and just to be clear, All Cops Are NOT Bastards, particularly in the UK. But, as part of the mainstream conservative majority of our great nation, I am hanging my head in shame because I, and millions of us, were too frightened to come out last weekend and contest the hateful narrative that Great Britain is a historically and systemically-racist nation, rather than a shining light that did more than any other nation over the centuries to end slavery. For those of us who are Conservatives, marching, even protesting, isn't really our thing. We were worried that, if we supported the veterans and stood up for ourselves, some people (who, for some reason, we would still like to consider our friends) would openly denounce us as racists. Yes, we wanted to obey the law and socially-distance; yes we didn't want to antagonise our children some of whom were were marching with BLM; yes, we were surprised that some people off the telly, that we quite like, came out to support BLM; yes, we were horrified by the capitulation of our Police, forced to kneel, initially for their own safety, but then advised to do so by their useless commanders and yes, we were disgusted when the leader of the opposition followed suit. Some of us probably still believe what we are told by the BBC. But, none of us should welcome the Cultural Revolution being encouraged, and perhaps soon to be demanded, by these protests

Not so Imperial College - not Imperial at all in fact

Imperial College London has dropped the motto “scientia imperii decus et tutamen” (“scientific knowledge, the crowning glory and the safeguard of the empire”) from its crest, but has not asked the Queen to change its name.

Imperial College said the move would help promote diversity.

“We know that this motto is a reminder of a historical legacy that is rooted in colonial power and oppression.”

Bristol University said it was reviewing using the crests of Edward Colston (whose statue was toppled into the harbour), Henry Overton Wills III and the Fry family. The Frys made chocolate, were Quakers and therefore pacifists and were leading liberals and social reformers, as I recall.

Oriel College Oxford, the last Oxford college to admit women, is going to get rid of the statue of Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia.

Rhodes donated scholarships to help amity between the English speaking peoples and their German cousins, but now they are open to people from anywhere and promote left-wing causes he would have detested. Someone should sue the trustees.

So farewell then, Dame Vera Lynn and Jean Kennedy Smith

Dame Vera Lynn has died.

Her songs are not my cup of tea, but another figure from the Second World War and the end of British glory is gone. Rest in peace and God save the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, who served in the forces in the war.

I cannot mourn Jean Kennedy Smith, Bill Clinton's Ambassador to Eire and one of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement, by which we let the IRA share in running the Six Counties, but may her sins be forgiven her.

Lionel Shriver is 'controversial'

Anglo-American writer Lionel Shriver was interviewed by Alison Pearson on a Telegraph podcast. She has said she is "profoundly disappointed" in the British people for their tolerance to the UK's strict lockdown during the global pandemic.

"The British people have never more profoundly disappointed me. It seems so un-British to say, alright then I’ll just roll over and I’ll stay home. I think part of it was being able to feed into the Blitz narrative....
"The bizarre attachment to being confined to your homes and not making a living and relying on the government...I’m just dismayed." 

She is a Democrat and feminist who likes Mr. Obama very much, came slowly to like Hillary and absolutely detests President Trump, but the Telegraph, a supposedly Conservative paper, feels it necessary to call her "controversial" to distance itself from her views on identity politics. 

And possibly the lockdown.

She said that in 2008 

'Ever opposed to nepotism, I disliked the prospect of our first female head of state achieving the position through marriage to a previous president, a cheap shortcut I considered anti-feminist. Besides, I opposed the political dynasty in principle. The US famously rejected monarchy in 1776, and phenomenons like the Kennedys, Bushes, and Clintons seemed antithetical to the American project.
'When in those early, why-can't-we-all-be-friends days of the Obama administration, the new president called a truce by appointing his rival secretary of state, I was disgusted. The woman lost. She wasn't due a compensation prize. By then well weary of her strained attempts at populist folksiness, inconsistent put-on drawl, unpersuasive tearfulness and gratingly nasal voice, I didn't want to have to keep looking at her face.'

She was absolutely right, but later changed her mind about Hillary, despite the destruction of Libya.

BLM in Iceland

Gunnar Smári Egilsson, founder of the Socialist Party of Iceland, wants the statue of founder of Iceland Ingólfr Arnarson taken down because he “murdered” and oppressed “freedom heroes” and owned slaves. He wants to replace the statue with that of slaves.

The revolution in the American media

It became very clear as soon as Trump was sure to win the Republican nomination that most American journalists working for major newspapers, sites and even TV channels had become political actors rather than news-gatherers but this process has this year gone even further. Very much further.

I just found two must-read articles on this subject. 


From an article on a site new to me:

Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime? During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:

I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix. 

Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang’s, Akela Lacy, wrote, “Tired of being made to deal continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after being repeatedly asked not to. This isn’t about me and him, it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired.” She followed with, “Stop being racist Lee.”

Boris Johnson, Evelyn Waugh and Churchill: three very different Tories

Evelyn Waugh on Churchill:

'Rallied the nation indeed! I was a serving soldier in 1940. How we deplored his orations.'



'Churchill was a radio personality who outlived his prime.'

Boris Johnson on Evelyn Waugh on Churchill: 

There are some people…who may be tempted to dismiss or downplay the virtuosity of Churchill as a writer …. Indeed, he has always had his detractors. Evelyn Waugh, that inveterate Churchill-basher, said he was a “master of sham-Augustan prose”, with “no specific literary talent but a gift of lucid self-expression”. After reading Churchill’s Life of his father Randolph, Waugh dismissed it as a “shifty barrister’s case, not a work of literature”…

Why did Waugh sneer at Churchill’s writings? Notice that he–Waugh–had actually tried to emulate Churchill in the 1930s and got himself sent out to cover a war in Abyssinia. He produced Scoop of course, one of the great stylistic landmarks of the twentieth century. But his reporting had nothing like the same journalistic impact as Churchill’s. Is it that Waugh was just a teensy bit jealous? I think so; and it was not just because Churchill had become so much more famous than Waugh had been, by the time he was twenty five, but that he had made such stupendous sums from writing. And that for most journalists, alas, is the truly sensitive point for comparison.

This explains one important reason why British journalists so much dislike Boris, though there are certainly others. Boris, when writing about Churchill, is talking about himself. 

Charles Moore made the case the far left should make about the European Union

Labour, writes a well-known political journalist, embraced the idea of Europe in 1998, as it was the best opponent of Thatcherism and seemed to mean trade union and welfare rights. But this came at a high cost, he writes. "In doing so, however, it abandoned the classic left-wing vigilance against the 'bankers' ramp' , the device which allows democracies to be overpowered by banks, central banks and their lackeys to run an economy in their own interests. The euro is just such a ramp. It was imposed without democratic endorsement and cannot be unstitched by democratic rejection. Hence perma-slump in large parts of the eurozone, 50 per cent youth unemployment in the worst bits, and German domination of the whole. Never, since the age of the dictators, have the workers been further from control over the means of production, distribution and exchange than they are in the EU today."
Oh glory be, at last someone has spelled out the left-wing (very left-wing) case for Brexit. But who is this seer? Gosh, it's Charles Moore, a high Tory, in the Spectator, the weekly conservative magazine. And some of you criticise me for writing in the Daily Mail. But it is here, on the right, that the left-wing case for Brexit is being made. Where Is The Thinking Left in this debate? 

Adam LeBor, 17 June 2016, six days before the referendum which changed everything.

Theodore Dalrymple's words are very topical this week

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

BLM is gaining support

This time, a positive spike. https://t.co/6SmAx7pOKr

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) June 10, 2020

A poll by Rasmussen yesterday showed 62 percent of likely American voters have a favorable opinion of BLM, higher than the numbers who approve of Messrs Trump or Biden.

Tucker Carlson is losing sponsorship for his TV show because he criticises BLM. A number of prominent people have lost their jobs for doing so or for prejudiced remarks, often on social media.

How will this impact the election? Lord Black says Trump should win but that does not now provide any certainty that he will.

Meanwhile in England Professor Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, has told students that they can apply for “mitigating circumstances” if their performance in exams was affected by George Floyd’s death. She said that the university is “determined to support our black students in every way possible”.

There has been widespread disorder at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in France and at night disturbances involving Chechen gangs in Lyons and Dijon. In Dijon the Chechens have been fighting Arabs for four nights. Some reports suggested Chechens had travelled to Dijon from all over France to take part as well as from Belgium and Germany.

Quotations

From "Watermelons" by James Delingpole

 
Mark Thompson, Sky News reporter

Would You Care if a White Man Cured Covid-19?

That's the title of an article by Heather MacDonald published in the Wall St Journal on April 17, 2020, which someone sent me and I just got round to reading. It's more topical now, two months later, thanks to Black Lives Matters protests. The sub-headline precises the argument: Hiring researchers by sex and race rather than scientific prowess is dangerous nonsense.

'Scientists at Oxford University and King’s College London are racing to develop an inexpensive ventilator that can be quickly built with off-the-shelf components. Should it matter that all the lead researchers on the project are men? If you believe university diversity bureaucrats and many academic deans, the initiative will be handicapped by the absence of women among the project heads. If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it may be to expose as dangerous nonsense the practice of hiring researchers by sex and race rather than scientific accomplishments.

How to have style

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
Gore Vidal


A mind that is stretched by new experiences can never go back to its old dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The real man

Sir Joshua having also observed that the real character of a man was found out by his amusements, --Johnson added, "Yes, Sir, no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."

Boswell's Life of Johnson

The Guardian backed the South in the American Civil War

I have written a lot about slavery in America and about the US Civil War on this blog. As the Confederate heroes are being toppled, it seems topical to link to this post about the Liberal Guardian newspaper backing the South in the American Civil War, as did the British establishment, but not the Lancashire mill girls thrown out of work by the war. 

The Conservative magazine the Spectator, on the other hand, always opposed slavery and lost readers by backing the North, as its editor recently explained.

Lockdowns must never be repeated

It seems that Covid-19, fortunately, is not a very dangerous infection, though it can cause a very unpleasant death and possibly (we don't know) lasting harm to the lungs of patients.

We must not end up with a new normal but return quickly to the old normal. Whatever happens, the lockdown must never be repeated, even for a much more dangerous infection, in the future. 

Former British Foreign Secretary, Conservative Party Leader and destroyer of Libya William Hague agrees with me, but he spoils it by agreeing with Tony Blair on the efficacy of testing, which quite a few epidemiologists argue persuasively are pointless.

The top American epidemiologist Dr Anthony Fauci seemed impressive when he entered the stage, though perhaps his Jesuit education should have made me doubt him. He lost all credibility in my eyes when he suggested that mankind would have to stop shaking hands. 

I say this because the remark is obviously bonkers. Shaking hands is not something we Englishmen like doing. I do it a lot, but that is because I live in Romania where all men shake hands all the time except when they kiss each other. (Men used to air kiss women's hands but that seems to have entirely died out.)

Unfortunately lockdowns got entangled in politics, even though epidemics have nothing much to do with political philosophies, though admittedly the idea for lockdowns comes from the Chinese Communists. 

To quote the late Denis Healey, we were out of our tiny Chinese minds to close down the world economy. 

If we stop now things might be saved. I do not know but I know that we are on the brink of a catastrophe. 

The economic disaster caused by lockdowns, along with the BLM riots, does make it look like Western civilisation is in grave trouble - but there were already many other reasons to think this. The French left are gripped by the ideas of 'collapsology' and the French right by 'the great replacement'. 

Politicians must not shirk their responsibilities by delegating them to or hiding behind scientists, though I understand why they did. 


Politicians are in general cowards. They find safety in crowds and

Romanian Shepherd Family from the Sibiu area

A Romanian Shepherd Family from the Sibiu area, wearing very similar clothes to what the Getae wore on Trajan's Column and in statues found in Italy. The painting is XIXth century, by Hungarian painter Miklos Barabas.

I like it very much and it reminds me of the English writer John Paget and his interesting book Travels in Hungary and Transylvania. I read it when I was at university, even though Hungarian and Romanian history were only a tenth of a question on the 1848 revolutions. It's available on Google Books free.

From today's Spectator Covid-19 update: Is London now virtually Covid-19-free?

'Barely three months ago, face mask adverts were banned by the UK Advertising Standards Agency for ‘misleading’ claims that they help protect against Covid-19. Now, we have police enforcing such masks, and without any debate in parliament about the need for such a measure. Whether this will boost confidence or undermine it remains to be seen.'

Man is imprisoned for urinating near a statue - BLM protesters who defaced statues and threw one into Bristol harbour not charged

A man who was photographed urinating against or through the wall of the Houses of Parliament has been sent to prison for two weeks. The fact that trial and sentence was so quick and that somebody called the Chief Magistrate (a title devised by New Labour in 2000) delivered the sentence suggests an example is being made. 

I don't like the way England has become a nation of police informers but he did deserve to be arrested and charged and did deserve a not too heavy fine. Poor man, after many pints of beer he had little choice. 

The BLM protesters who defaced statues and even threw one into the sea meanwhile have not been charged.

The Avon and Somerset Constabulary made clear their sympathy with the reasons for which the statue in Bristol was thrown into the sea, even though they regretted law-breaking.

The Chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot said: 

Better to ban cars, not shops and restaurants, if Romanian lives matter

In 2019 Romania had the highest road fatality rate in the European Union, 96 deaths per 1 million inhabitants, according to preliminary figures published on June 11 by the European Commission. It marks a big improvement on 2010 though, when there were 110 deaths per million.


Almost 2,000 deaths. How much better had the Romanian government not had a lockdown but banned all journeys by motor vehicle for a year, with exceptions only for police, ambulance, fire engines and girlfriends of politicians.


It would have caused huge inconvenience, it's true, but it would have saved two thousand lives to make up for any excess deaths from Covid-19 caused by not having a lockdown ('carantina' in Romanian). 

Unlike the people dying of Covid-19, the people whose lives would have been saved would be of all ages and mostly in good health. It would have caused infinitely less damage to the economy and infinitely less suffering in the long term.

Raining on the parade - and mentioning Drummer Lee Rigby

The British media makes much of the incident of the anti-BLM protester who allegedly urinated on (in fact not on, but close to) the statue of murdered P.C. Palmer, at the wall of the Houses of Parlament.

Labour Party (socialist) leader Sir Keir Starmer called it 'beneath contempt', but the media said little and he said nothing about BLM men urinating on, not beside, the Cenotaph and Churchill's statue. This happened the weekend before last.

The BLM protesters who attacked the police last weekend were treated with tenderness by the press, in contrast. The BBC headline said

27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.

The media distort the truth and lie about the BLM protests/riots

The untrustworthiness and bias of the New York Times and Washington Post beggar belief. There is simply no reason to read them. But the British media are not so much better when it comes to Black Lives Matter.

A white protester was snapped urinating on the curtilage wall of the Palace of Westminster, which is bad behaviour and contempt of Parliament, but all the urinals had been closed by order of the Mayor. He no doubt did not notice that beside him was a statue to PC Keith Palmer, who was killed by a terrorist, Khalid Masood, three years ago.

The papers all report untruthfully that he urinated on the statue. They know it's untrue because the photo makes it clear that he did not.


The media makes much of this incident but the media said little about BLM men urinating on, not beside, the Cenotaph and Churchill's statue. 

The BLM protesters who attacked the police last weekend were treated with tenderness by the press in contrast. The BBC headline said

27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests in London.

BBC listeners know that they are to understand that anti-racism protesters are good and, on the other hand, anti-BLM protesters are racist and wicked.

Now we have reported the story of the wonderful BLM demonstrator who rescued a white rival protester. And indeed he is to be congratulated, because he may well have saved the man's life.


But he saved him from dying by picking him up from the ground where he might have been walked on, beaten or kicked to death, so he says. And he did so, he said, to prevent the death tarnishing the BLM side.

What was the man doing on the ground? I don't know but my guess is he was knocked to the ground by thugs. The media do not want you to see that. 

Will the West collapse like the Soviet Union?

The Soviet Union ceased to exist because it couldn't offer its people rising living standards and because, outside Russia, it could not command their loyalty because it was a multinational federation.




But the most important reason why it failed was because its elite stopped believing in it. They saw that it was built on lies.




Some people, especially Russians, think the West is an illusion built on lies. It is not. But what if its elites come to think it is? What if this is what is happening now?




I hope it's not as bad as that but, if it is, the elites must be replaced by people who believe in their tradition. This should in fact happen anyway




Maybe, just maybe, the current statue destroying revolutionary fervour will give way to counter revolution.

From "Watermelons" by James Delingpole .

What is going on in England?

I have no idea and hope you can explain it to me. But it is very worrying indeed.

Last week a mob of left-wing demonstrators attacked what the BBC News referred to as 'the controversial Churchill statue'.

Please pause and think about that. 

I didn't believe it till I clicked on the link. Please click on it for yourself, gentle reader.

Only 25% of Brits approve of the protestors who pulled down the statues -Opinium, today

— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) June 13, 2020

Only?

Matthew Goodwin, whose tweet that was, is a bestselling author of a book about national populism.

Last weekend there were more protests and more rioting in England by Black Lives Matter supporters (essentially Antifa), because of the death in police custody of a man in Minnesota in the USA. (The case is sub judice and cannot be discussed for fear of prejudicing the jury, which doesn't stop people doing so, including Boris Johnson.)

The crowd defaced statues and attacked the police. 

In response, the British police got down on their knees to the crowd to show their approval for Black Lives Matter.

I am not making this up.

The authorities, the press, academics and big business have aligned themselves with Black Lives Matter. They do so not in order to calm the protesters in the street but from hatred of racism and from fear people might think them racist.

Nigel Farage lose his radio programme on LBC for comparing BLM to the Taliban. 

His dismissal was warmly applauded in several papers. The days are gone when journalists liked freedom of speech for professional reasons.

Of course, he was punished for making a very fair point.

A woman police officer was thrown from her horse and punctured her lung, but the BBC didn’t really talk about it on their news coverage.

A statue of a benefactor to Bristol was toppled into Bristol harbour by the mob because he had owned slaves. The police said they did not arrest protesters on the spot as it would have caused more disorder and disruption and that they understood the reasons for the crowd's action. The Chief Constable made a broadcast in which he asked viewers to imagine what the effect would have been of trying to fight back the crowd 

to protect a statue, the image of a man reputed to have made much of his fortune from the slave trade.

He said that Bristol should be proud that the incident happened without violence.

The Mayor of Bristol, who is of mixed race, said it was 

an act of historical poetry.

The statue of Churchill in Parliament Sq has had to be covered up, by order of the Mayor of London.

Yesterday men from a fringe party, Britain First, assembled to guard the statue of Churchill from left-wing demonstrators. The leader of the party said they were 

"extremely fed up with the way that the authorities have allowed two consecutive weekends of vandalism against our national monuments."

They were attacked by BLM protesters and this time the police intervened and made over a hundred arrests. 

The Prime Minister said

Racist thuggery has no place on our streets.

but said nothing about anti-racist thuggery.

I see tweets suggesting today was more violent than last week’s BLM protest.

I was there and filmed it. I can confirm it was not more violent.

The only reason you think that is because today’s violent footage was more widely reported by the mainstream media than last week.

— Mahyar Tousi (@MahyarTousi) June 13, 2020

When what the media call far right hooligans tried to leave London, as requested by the Metropolitan police, they were attacked at Waterloo station by the mob.

The tweet below is from a Russian stand-up comedian (whose politics are Liberal Democrat, should you worry lest he be a conservative). I saw him last summer at the Edinburgh Festival. Being Russian he knows a lot about the far left.

Watch all the people who said nothing about violence and destruction last week bravely speak out now.

Cowards, every single one of you.

— Konstantin Kisin (@KonstantinKisin) June 13, 2020

Quotations

"Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?"
Benjamin Franklin in 1751


“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [slaves] shall be free, nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live under the same government.”
President Thomas Jefferson in a draft of his autobiography, 1821. The first half of the sentence (only) was inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, when it was built at the suggestion of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Former Trump advisor hopes activists will confront the climate crisis, the coronavirus, poverty and inequality

There are two Fiona Hills, both very clever young British women from poor families. The Glaswegian Fiona Hill was Theresa May's disastrous Svengali, the Geordie one is an expert on Russia and was adviser to Donald Trump. 

The Geordie lass became an American citizen and was recruited into the Trump administration by KT McFarland, a Fox News chat show hostess turned deputy national security adviser. Miss Hill had been on her show to talk about Russia.


Miss Hill became famous when she was questioned by a committee of the US Congress as part of the attempt to impeach Donald Trump. She memorably said the Trump White House felt like the Bolshevik revolution, which is pithy but tells you a lot abut her distaste for the President. 

She completely lost my respect when she told the committee that the word globalisation was an 'antisemitic trope'. 

She was evidently not a politically impartial civil servant. Plus the remark was obviously outrageous nonsense, the sort of nonsense that clever people with closed minds spout.

Now an interview with her that took place last month is published in the Guardian. In it, she talks about how she got to Oxford, Harvard and the White House and how she was tripped up literally at the Oxford interview, by a spiteful fellow interviewee.

I was told by someone who knew her that she is very clever. Very clever people have excellent memories and often have rigid, schematic views of the world, into which they slot their erudite learning. Lord Macaulay is a good example and Fiona Hill might be another one. 

Tories, even erudite ones (they do exist), by definition tend not to be schematic.

For her Boris Johnson is a populist, which is not true (or Corbyn and the Liberal Democrat girl were as much so). 

She thinks populism is a political movement used by unscrupulous politicians to take in badly educated people who are the victims of deindustrialisation. 

That is a perfectly arguable theory, but from a girl from a poor family it sounds very patronising. I'm from a working class family too and it makes me feel very patronised.


She blames the populists for the death toll from Covid-19 too.

“It’s a story really about how the US, UK and Russia have all ended up in the same spot weirdly, not just in terms of Covid-19 but also populist politics and many of the same out-of-control inequalities.

“It’s all about style and swagger and atmospherics, with superficial solutions to things, with lots of sloganeering, and obviously dealing with a pandemic is pretty methodical and boring. It requires an awful lot of planning and logistical organization and you can’t just sort of do it on the fly with an ad hoc coalition.”

At least she is not silly enough to believe the theory that President Trump is being blackmailed and controlled by Vladimir Putin, but she says the Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian officials or Kremlin intermediaries (what is she implying?) and that Donald Trump appealed to Moscow to interfere in the election by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

This was a joke, for goodness' sake, and rather a good one.

She does sound like a student politician, but so do many academics these days.

The interview ends on this note.

Hill sees some hope for the future in citywide grassroots activism, to confront the climate crisis, the coronavirus, poverty and inequality. But those are more aspirations for the future. Right now, in Washington, London and Moscow, it is the populists who have the upper hand.

Fiona Hill is entitled to her political opinions and she is much better informed than people who are not paid to understand politics, but after this interview she is not entitled to be seen as an impartial witness. She is a political actor as much as anyone else, as much as Boris Johnson or Donald Trump.

Fiona Hill is a Russian expert and I am sure she is right when she says that Russians, "take advantage of every opportunity, every vulnerability, every open door they can walk through.” 

Putin, the KGB operative, has played Trump as he played George Bush the Younger and Hillary. 

I am reminded, though, of a conversation in 1943 between one half-American British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and a future half-American British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, about Oliver Cromwell. 

Churchill told Macmillan that Cromwell 

‘made one terrible mistake. Obsessed in his youth by the fear of Spain, he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?’

It isn't often said of him, but it should be. Churchill, obsessed from his youth by fear of Germany, certainly failed to observe the danger from Russia. 

The half-American Fiona Hill fails to see the dangers to both her countries are no longer from Russia. The populists whom she despises do see that and quite a number of other obvious things that are hidden from her.

Retired senior State Department official criticises retired ambassadors' attack on Trump

From 2000 to 2003 Ed Stafford worked as 'policy advisor' at the US Embassy in Bucharest and was one of the very cleverest foreigners in Romania. He comes from a working-class Catholic family and was possibly one of the minority of permanent officials in the State Department who sides with the Republicans rather than the Democrats. I urged him to hang around and serve the Trump administration for a year, but he preferred to retire before the Donald took office. He has just written this.

A group of retired U.S. Ambassadors and others with a background of public service in foreign affairs or national security affairs published June 5 an open-letter on the Just Security website excoriating the President for his comments about the potential use of federal troops and federalized National Guard units to confront and suppress rioting and looting. After reading the letter, I was perplexed at what could have induced the authors to write or add their signatures to it, for it has several glaring faults that render it an unserious effort. Those faults, failures to take into account material information, would have been very easy to avoid, which raises the question: was it just sloppiness brought on by the rush to publish before the news cycle had moved on? Or, simple ignorance of material information? Or, was there a deliberate effort to misrepresent the President’s statement?

The Queen hid in the bushes from the Ceausescus

Journalist and royal biographer Robert Hardman told a story on a TV documentary called Our Queen: Inside the Crown about the occasion when the Ceaușescus stayed at Buckingham Palace.

The Queen took the corgis out for a walk in the palace gardens and she could see the Ceaușescus coming the other way. She thought, 'I really can't face talking to them,' so the first and only time in her life, she actually hid in a bush in the palace gardens to avoid her guests."

She has to meet all sorts. The Emperor Hirohito, whose army tortured so many British soldiers, was her guest, though he seems to have been welcome. When she was required to shake the hands of IRA murderer Martin McGuinness she wore gloves. She did, however, get out of knighting Mick Jagger, whom she doubtless associates with so many bad things about the 1960s, and deputed the job  to somebody else.