World history is the history of states; the history of states is the history of wars.

World history is the history of states; the history of states is the history of wars.

Oswald Spengler


'The Right affirms inherited hierarchy, favors the particularistic while being suspicious of what claims to be the universal, aims at preserving social traditions where possible, and opposes the Left by every means at its disposal. The Left takes the opposite positions on the first three points out of a sense of fairness, a passionate commitment to the advancement of equality, and a conception of human beings that stresses sameness or interchangeability. Whereas the Right believes in what Aristotle defined as the order of the household—in which elaborately defined distinctions are deemed “natural”—the Left recoils from nonegalitarian arrangements. Its advocates are delighted to have state managers and judges abolish the vestiges of inherited hierarchy.

'The Left is committed to removing, as far as humanly possible, social, racial, and gender inequalities. Furthermore, the more control it accumulates, the easier it is for the Left to reconstruct or recode those who resist its planning. German social theorist Arnold Gehlen was struck by how younger Germans in the 1960s exhibited what he called “hypermorality.” Contrary to the opinion that such youth, who frequently turned into militant antifascists, suffered from a lack of values, Gehlen noticed their hysterical moral zeal spilling over into their entire lives.'

Paul Gottfried in 'Revisions and Dissents: Essays' (2017)


'Biological science may be called on, but only for the proper ideological ends, that is, for those egalitarian purposes that are to be fostered in today’s predominantly leftist political and academic culture—in the same way that the theory of evolution is fine for the Left as long as it can be directed against religionists.

'But the Darwinian hypothesis about change in the natural world becomes problematic if someone dares to turn to a forbidden subject, say, the rootedness of gender differences that have been necessary for the perpetuation of human as well as animal life.'

Ibid.

'No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution, one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.'

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

·

Aug 28

"The lockdown was an experiment in authoritarian government unmatched in our history even in wartime....Throughout history, fear has been the chief instrument of authoritarian rule. During the lockdown it was what enabled the government to silence dissent and inhibit discussion."

Daniel Hannan

@DanielJHannan

· Aug 30

It is happening even earlier than expected. People who supported the lockdown have now backdated the moment that they changed their minds, and are retrospectively furious about policies they demanded at the time.

The US states in many ways have more rights than EU member states or states that adhere to the ECHR

I learnt from The Times today that 19 states in the USA allow corporal punishment in schools. Whatever one thinks about corporal punishment, how lucky Americans are to make their own laws without the European Convention on Human Rights or any international body to stop them deciding their laws.

The same is true of many things. Employment law for example.

One battle was won

“The thing that’s really changed is that students used to take care not to upset the university authorities. Now it’s the other way round.”

Marie Daouda the French-Moroccan academic who led the fight to stop Oxford’s Oriel College pulling down its 115-year-old statue of Cecil Rhodes speaking to William Langley, two years ago.

The plans were shelved partly thanks to her. (Naturally, Oriel intended keeping Cecil Rhodes’s vast endowment).

Last summer she wrote in the Daily Telegraph that she was "perplexed" by the condemnation by Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations of the decision. 

"As an African female tutor at Oriel, I would be glad to see less emotivity in the way some members of the university deal with Rhodes and with the whole race craze in general."

From the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy's Guide to Good Practice in 2018

 

A priest and lector sing the divine liturgy in the Răzvan Church on a summer morning, as they have done for four centuries.

The Palace of Justice and the Dâmbovița two years ago today

 

Edmund Burke loved freedom and never defended slavery

Edmund Burke is on a list of men who “supported slavery, had financial or family interests in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery”. 

This list is part of a review by the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art, chaired by Dean Russell, a supposedly Conservative MP, intended to make Parliament’s art collection “more representative of diversity” . He has a BSc in Physics and Business Studies and an MPhil in Physics and Material Science from De Montfort University.

The list of slavery-related works of art now includes a life-size statue of Burke which stands in St Stephen’s Hall and a portrait in the Member’s dining room.

The evidence for Burke’s connections to the transatlantic trade is a 2013 report by Historic England on the links between slavery and British country houses, which mentions that Burke’s younger brother Richard was a “successful merchant and Caribbean land speculator“, but Edmund Burke himself had no dealings with the Caribbean.

How strange that the death of a criminal in the USA at the hands of a policeman led to this.

Tom Lehrer: 'When Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize, satire died'

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has been awarded the Unesco Peace Prize 2022 for “her efforts to welcome refugees” (over a million young men) into Germany in the summer of 2015.

The Economist: 'Why the Russian economy keeps beating expectations'

I didn't believe the Yale University report that said that the Russian economy was reeling because of sanctions. My perhaps unfair reason was that it came from Yale. So little credibility do Ivy League universities have, in my eyes. 

The Economist has now published an article contradicting the report.

But the Economist’s analysis of data from a wide variety of sources suggests that Russia’s economy is doing better than even the most upbeat forecasts predicted, as sales of hydrocarbons have fuelled a record current-account surplus. Take, for example, a “current-activity indicator” published by Goldman Sachs, a bank, a real-time measure of economic growth (see chart 1). This declined dramatically in March and April, if not on a scale comparable with the global financial crisis of 2007-09 or even the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In subsequent months it has recovered.

Over 1,100 scientists, including a Nobel prize winner, have signed a declaration stating that “there is no climate emergency"

Over 1,100 scientists, including one Nobel prize winning Norwegian-American physicist Ivar Giaever, signed a declaration stating that “there is no climate emergency” in late June.

I quote from it.

There is no climate emergency 

Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming 

The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

Warming is far slower than predicted 

The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change. 

Give peace a chance

I support Ukraine entirely in her struggle but I hope (but do not expect) that peace is made as quickly as possible, before Ukraine is destroyed. Ukraine will benefit from peace much more than from retaking Kherson. It's true that Russia will use a peace to rearm and refresh its troops, but so will Ukraine and to a much greater extent as the Americans and British are supplying them with arms. Sanctions are proving horribly damaging to Europe (not so much so to Russia, really) and economic catastrophe will have unforeseeable consequences.

Why is no-one marching for peace in Romania or England or America or in any other countries, like they did at the time of the invasion of Iraq or countless other times?

Cozmin Gusa said this morning talking to Adriana Bahmuteanu that a quick peace was essential. Are other Romanian politicians saying this?

Peter Hitchens agrees with me in his article today in The Mail on Sunday.

Douglas Murray today

"From the moment Joe Biden was sworn into office two questions hovered over American politics. The first: does he want to run again, and if so how can the Democrats stop him? The second: does Donald Trump want to run again, and if so how can the Republicans stop him."

Actually, that's four questions.

Amen

I just looked up the two pronunciations in English (British, Canadian, American, whatever) of the word Amen. I learnt it is because something that happened in 15th century England called the Great Vowel Shift. 

In Middle English (ME) "a" is pronounced as the "a" in "father." Early modern English (EME) pronounces the long "a" as in "gate."

ME pronounces the long "e" as the long "a" in "gate." EME pronounces the long "e" as the "e" in "tweet."

ME pronounces the long "i" as the "e" in "tweet." EME pronounces the long "i" as the "i" in "light."

ME pronounces the long "o" as the "o" in "tool." EME pronounces the long "o" as the "o" in "goal."

I try to remember to pronounce the word with a long a, because this is how it was pronounced in England in the years before the Reformation and for centuries after by Catholics, until Italian priests in the 19th century introduced the Italian pronunciation of Latin into the Mass. 

But it really doesn't matter. 

As Arthur John Balfour said, nothing matters very much and most things don't matter at all.

Patrick Benson tells me that 

"Many traditional Catholics following the old recusant pronunciation will say Amen (AY-men) and if the prayer is in Latin will use the Latin pronunciation AH-men. [Cardinal Heenan] the Archbishop of Westminster in the 1960s, encouraged Catholics to say Ah-men as it was the standard protestant English way and so they would be ecumenical sweeties and NICE! The traditionalists reacted by ensuring that they always said Ay-men. But then what about the evangelical, often, southern states Americans who say Ay-men ----was this the standard 17th cent. English pronunciation taken by them in The Mayflower?"

Ukraine and the neo-cons

This is very interesting and,  if true, is very important. It's from an article written by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, an economist and well-known expert on sustainable development and the fight against poverty.

The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine....
This approach was spelled out first by Paul Wolfowitz in his draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) written for the Department of Defense in 2002. The draft called for extending the US-led security network to the Central and Eastern Europe despite the explicit promise by German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1990 that German unification would not be followed by NATO’s eastward enlargement. Wolfowitz also made the case for American wars of choice, defending America’s right to act independently, even alone, in response to crises of concern to the US. According to General Wesley Clark, Wolfowitz already made clear to Clark in May 1991 that the US would lead regime-change operations in Iraq, Syria, and other former Soviet allies.
The neocons championed NATO enlargement to Ukraine even before that became official US policy under George W. Bush, Jr. in 2008. They viewed Ukraine’s NATO membership as key to US regional and global dominance. Robert Kagan spelled out the neocon case for NATO enlargement in April 2006:
'[T]he Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in [the “color revolutions” of the former Soviet Union], only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western influence in strategically vital parts of the world. Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union—in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony?'
Kagan acknowledged the dire implication of NATO enlargement. He quotes one expert as saying, “the Kremlin is getting ready for the ‘battle for Ukraine’ in all seriousness.” The neocons sought this battle. After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the US and Russia should have sought a neutral Ukraine, as a prudent buffer and safety valve. Instead, the neocons wanted US “hegemony” while the Russians took up the battle partly in defense and partly out of their own imperial pretentions as well. Shades of the Crimean War (1853-6), when Britain and France sought to weaken Russia in the Black Sea following Russian pressures on the Ottoman empire.

From Anatole Lieven's review of Philip Short's new biography of Putin

'Short’s ultimate conclusion is a profoundly pessimistic one: that largely irrespective of individual leadership on either side, American determination to pursue unilateral global leadership (and European acquiescence in this) was bound to bring America and Russia into confrontation, given Russia’s determination to remain one pole of a multipolar world. “America, the global power, believes that its role is to lead. Russia refuses to be led.”'

The review is here. Jack Matlock, the penultimate US Ambassador to the USSR, posted it on Facebook with the one word 'Important!"

Romanian Health Minister Alexandru Rafila yesterday

"We have more than 8 million vaccine doses in warehouses for which there is no longer any interest. And I'm not just referring to the interest of the population, I'm referring to anyone's interest, either to buy them or to receive them for free."

Yesterday early evening

Antim.

                                                    Radu Voda

                                                    

                                                    St. Spiridon

 

Time

"Time wasting is symptomatic of a lack of self-belief." Elisha Greenbaum

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.” Jorge Luis Borges

"Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer—and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are in siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another." Hilaire Belloc

Boris, the Hitchens brothers and Shirley Williams on Rushdie's knighthood

The BBC's Question Time, 22 June 2007. Christopher Hitchens (looking very good at 56) and his conservative brother Peter defend Sir Salman Rushdie's knighthood, as does the Labour Party minister, Boris Johnson opposes it simply because his books are unreadable and Shirley Williams says it's 'not wise and not very clever'. Christopher Hitchens says 'that's a contemptible statement'.

Christopher Hitchens wasn't bad for a Trotskyite, right about free speech but wrong about most things. A very good writer and great speaker. I heard him at the Cambridge Union when I was 19.

Putin biographer Philip Short, yesterday in the Guardian, explains why Putin invaded Ukraine - please take note, people

'Why, then, did Putin stake so much on a high-risk enterprise that will at best bring him a tenuous grip on a ruined land?

'At first it was said that he was unhinged – “a lunatic”, in the words of the defence secretary, Ben Wallace. Putin was pictured lecturing his defence chiefs, cowering at the other end of a 6-metre long table. But not long afterwards, the same officials were shown sitting at his side. The long table turned out to be theatrics – Putin’s version of Nixon’s “madman” theory, to make him appear so irrational that anything was possible, even nuclear war.

'Then western officials argued that Putin was terrified at the prospect of a democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border, which would threaten the basis of his power by showing Russians that they too could live differently. On the face of it, that seemed plausible. Putin hated the “colour revolutions” that, from 2003 onwards, brought regime change to former Soviet bloc states. But Ukraine’s attractions as a model are limited. It is deeply corrupt, the rule of law is nonexistent and its billionaire oligarchs wield disproportionate power. Should that change, the Russian intelligentsia may take note but the majority of Russians – those fed on state propaganda who make up Putin’s political base – would not give two hoots.

'The invasion has also been portrayed as a straightforward imperialist land grab. A passing reference to Peter the Great earlier in the summer was taken as confirmation that Putin wanted to restore the Russian empire or, failing that, the USSR. Otherwise sensible people, mainly in eastern Europe but not only, held that Ukraine was just a first step. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” a former Swedish minister told me last week, “if, in a few years, Estonia and Latvia are next in line.”

'Given that Putin once called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, that may seem to make sense. But he also said: “Anyone who does not regret [its] destruction has no heart; anyone who wants to see it recreated has no brain.” Leaving aside the fact that the Russian military is already hard-pressed to achieve even modest successes in Ukraine, an attack on the Baltic states or Poland would bring them into direct conflict with Nato, which is the last thing that Moscow (or the west) wants.

'In fact, Putin’s invasion is being driven by other considerations.

'He has been fixated on Ukraine since long before he came to power. As early as 1994, when he was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, he expressed outrage that Crimea had been joined to Ukraine. “Russia won Crimea from the Turks!” he told a French diplomat that year, referring to Russia’s defeat of the Ottoman empire in the 18th century.

'But it was the possibility, raised at a Nato summit in 2008, that Ukraine should become a fully-fledged member of the western alliance that turned his attitude toxic.

'Bill Burns, now the head of the CIA, who was then the US ambassador to Moscow, wrote at the time in a secret cable to the White House: “Ukrainian entry into Nato is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests … Today’s Russia will respond.”'

Belarus 2020

I wrote this today two years ago.

Lots of high minded British people want democracy in Belarus but spent two years trying to prevent the Brexit referendum result being implemented. They like democracy but not the demos, not hoi polloi. A lot of Americans want democracy in Belarus but hate it that ordinary people defied the bipartisan political establishment and brought Donald Trump to power. They then draw parallels between Trump and Lukashenko. Many of these people are very clever, very silly academics.

Talking of which, Timothy Garton Ash said,

'One worker at the Minsk tractor factory where Lukashenko was heckled, gave this impressively downbeat assessment: “The oligarch who runs the factory next won’t be any worse than the state is now.”'

The Christmas before last was the most fun I ever had, in Bitez near Bodrum with a great bunch of people who had floated there and stayed because of the pandemic. One of them was a Venezuelan with a Slavic name who lived in Minsk. He said he couldn't understand what the protests are about. 'Everything is so well run in Belarus.'

Philip Short thinks Putin may well win

"I’m not convinced that the risk [Putin]’s taken is going to prove his undoing. I put that very cautiously. He may get perhaps even the most important parts of what he wants from the war in Ukraine, it’s not over yet, it’s going to be very nasty and it’s going to go on.”

So says Philip Short, former BBC man and graduate of Queens' College, Cambridge, who has just brought out a biography of Vladimir Putin, in a recent interview.

History is the only discipline at which you get better in old age. Mr. Short is in his 70s and writes with wisdom.

He wrote an article on the Guardian from which I quote this.

"Moscow does not have to achieve a great deal for Putin to be able to claim victory. It would be enough for Russia to control all of the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea. He would certainly like more. If Russian troops take Odesa and the contiguous Black Sea coast, it would reduce Ukraine to vassalage. But even more modest gains would show the limits of US power. It is possible that Ukraine, with solid western backing, will be able to prevent that. But it is far from certain."

The decline and rise of the West

I do not have a great rapport with economics, but I am listening to a very interesting interview of Dr Steve Davies, an historian at the Institute of Economic Affairs. 

He is a monetarist who thinks things will be hard for the west for the next decade or longer, but ultimately will be peachy. 

Inflation isn't anything to do with the price of oil. (He didn't mention that Switzerland and Japan have 2 percent inflation.)

He blames the current crisis on European and American folly. I suppose he means the war. He thinks European countries have themselves to blame for not standing up to the USA at the Bucharest conference in 2008. He means George W. Bush's announcement that Ukraine and Georgia would join Nato.

How disastrous the Americans are as the world's policeman. 

Sanctions are hurting the West more than Russia but they are hitting Russians. Nevertheless Russians have come behind the invasion and see the conflict as existential. Most countries are not imposing sanctions and financial Sanctions have much less effect than America expected. As Russia depends on exporting commodities it is less vulnerable to sanctions than more sophisticated economies.

Nuclear energy is important but not the silver bullet for the West. We shall continue to use a lot of oil and gas, but Dr Davies thinks we might use much less energy in the future, as  happened in the mid-1970s in the West.

Was there a more wonderful opening to a book review?

 

How people misunderstand the Ukrainian war

I got round at last to hearing this, a talk by Sky News Australia host Cory Bernardi, criticising Zelensky and the Americans for their role in Ukraine before the invasion, which I left unwatched before I went on holiday. 

I don't like watching or listening rather than reading and clicking but it's worth ten minutes, it's interesting and mostly fairly true, though he gets the details of the Minsk accords wrong. They offered Ukrainian Russians home rule, not independence.

That does NOT mean I think Russia's invasion of the Ukraine is in any way justified but I do think Russia was provoked by the US State Department and Zelensky.

Mark Galeotti on a recent podcast said he sees that Putin believes he is on the defensive against America 'however ridiculous that may seem', although he is very anxious repeatedly to assure listeners that he is not 'advocating this'. 

In fact, Putin is right but Mark Galeotti cannot see this. He sees that from around 2020, but he can't be too exact, Putin's policy to Ukraine changed. 2019 was when Trump started arming Ukraine heavily to create jobs but the election of the fiercely anti-Russian Joe Biden was probably the big trigger. 

Depressingly he thinks a negotiated peace was possible in the spring but no longer is. Everything points to a long war in which Ukraine is ruined and a pointless cold war. The first cold war served little purpose, because Communist Russia was not going to attack Western Europe but at least that was its raison d'etre. A second  cold war would not have a raison d'etre, except in the minds of paranoid people who think Putin wants, after somehow defeating Ukraine, to march somewhere else.

How did the war happen? Because of American and EU folly and of still greater folly on the part of Putin. Lawrence Freedman said, ‘Autocracies tend to make catastrophic decisions. That’s the case with Putin’. Yes indeed but America has made some catastrophic decisions too. Think of the second Iraq war, Libya and add others to taste. Syria is not the Americans' fault but they would have made very bad much worse had Hillary won. 

She said 8 days before her defeat at the polls that regime change in Syria was her number 1 priority. 

Thank God we were spared that. Had she won I suspect the Ukraine war would have started years ago, partly in response to her actions in Syria.

All are invited to the Transylvanian Book Festival next month

All are invited to the Transylvanian Book Festival next month. I am so looking forward to it and warmly recommend it. September 14-18. Great craich last time, in 2018! Very nice people. Rather Chiantishire. Transylvania is becoming slightly Tatler, which is fine by me, and lots of interesting people come from England and from Hungary.

How wonderful to be back in Bucharest

How wonderful to be back in Bucharest. I felt that every time I returned from holiday. I like this town in summer more than any other place I've been on the globe, possibly excepting Havana.

Great one-upmanship. 'Possibly excepting Havana'. I didn't intend it like that. I was just being pedantic.

Girl in the park.

Antim monastery.

Party PM!

The attractive female Finnish Prime Minister has been filmed dancing at a party and this makes headlines.

Move along. Nothing to see. Though odd to have a young and hip female PM.

How very different from the home life of Harold Macmillan. Though he and Harold Wilson did drank a bottle of whisky a night they were not hip at all. Eden was drugged up to the eyeballs, -'half mad baronet, half beautiful woman' but not hip. 

Do the young people still say 'hip'?

As Mr Macmillan said at the time of the Profumo scandal, I move so little among young people. Actually that's not true. Well actually, yes it is.

Ain't that the sorry truth?

'Writers are the engineers of the soul.' Stalin

Writers include academic writers, of course.

Reception

 

The Moldovan (ethnic Romanian) receptionist in my hotel in London says Putin is completely to blame for the war in Ukraine. Her Ukrainian (ethnic Ukrainian) colleague thinks America is partly to blame for the war and wants peace as quickly as possible, not a war to oust Putin.  Both young women think people behind the scenes benefit from and will probably prolong the war. Hotel receptionists, waiters, barbers and taxi drivers know much more about human nature and life than academics.

I am eating a full English in St James's Square

 'You can eat better in England than in any other country in the world, so long as you eat breakfast three times a day' (Somerset Maugham).

Legacies

Margaret Thatcher's three biggest legacies are devolution, Brexit and Tony Blair. Tony Blair's legacy is the same plus: more immigrants into England each year than in the period 1070-1950, England ceasing to be a free country, giving into the IRA,  unjust and pointless wars for values that led to the loss of countless, innocent lives and too many other things to enumerate. Boris’s legacy is Brexit and the AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine.

Do not believe the media

The newspapers are full of propaganda and untruths on every subject. The Taliban are not the reason Afghans are selling their children. Sanctions and the Americans stealing £7 billion from the Afghan reserves are. Sanctions are very cruel to the innocent and almost never do any good.

Moon over Budapest

I saw this huge glowing golden moon resting above the rooftops in Budapest last week. It is here in Edinburgh, where for some reason the Times calls it the Sturgeon supermoon.

  

Salman Rushdie has been stabbed in the neck but is still alive

Salman Rushdie has been stabbed in the neck and badly hurt at a talk which had been advertised and was open to the public in New York. Barbara Amiel said 33 years ago that she couldn't forgive the Ayatollah for forcing her to defend Rushdie, but we all do have to be on his side.

Rishi Sunak has blown his chances and perhaps that's a good thing - except Liz Truss looks pretty useless

Rishi Sunak is a humbug and, worse, he badly lacks political skills, as this damning article by Patrick O’Flynn, a UKIP MEP who became SDP, points out. Not only was he filmed pulling a pint even though he does not drink, he was filmed putting petrol into a car that was not his but much cheaper than his. As Sherlock Holmes said of the villain in The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, 'Touch him where you would he was false'.

On the other hand, Liz Truss is very far from clever and looks like another Theresa May, as Edwina Curry said. Neither wants to take the UK out of the ECHR or the 1967 Protocol to the Geneva Convention on Refugees which obliges the UK to accept refugees from outside Europe. Neither seems to know what a man or a woman is or to oppose Carbon Zero. 

I suppose, on the evidence of Rushi's behaviour this year, she is slightly less bad than he is. She is a phoney too, of course, but slightly better at hiding it. She is also a useless debater and has no charisma, but if debating skills were enough Penny Mordaunt would have been best and she was the least conservative and least able of the candidates.

Both candidates for British Prime Minister are phonies and humbugs

 

Rishi Sunak still seems the least bad of the two to me but he's a phony. He is a lifelong teetotaller but had himself filmed drawing a pint in a pub. That's as bad as Liz driving a tank, in imitation of Mrs T. Then there is this.

On the other hand he has a good brain. Roy Jenkins played a game with his civil servants guessing how far his cabinet colleagues would have reached in the civil service. Had Ernest Bevin, Woy said, not been Foreign Secretary the only other job in the FO he could have held would have been liftman.

Rishi would have probably been a Permanent Secretary with good luck and Liz Truss would not, not even for diversity reasons, but the qualities of a good civil servant are not the ones a Prime Minister needs.

Men and women

'No woman minds the first look. It's the second that offends.' Lady Diana Cooper


2 foreign women told me they hated England because they felt invisible there. 2 Romanian women complained to me that Italian men call out compliments in the street to all women, including ugly ones. Both objected not to the compliments but to their being paid to their ill favoured sisters.

The death of Europe: will anyone live in central Spain in fifty years time?

Will anyone live in central Spain in fifty years time, asks the Financial Times today.

In 2016, in his book España Vaciada (Empty Spain) local reporter Sergio del Molino wrote:

'There is an urban and European Spain, in all its characteristics indistinguishable from any European urban society, and an inland and unpopulated Spain, which I call empty Spain.’

An España Vaciada electoral coalition was formed to fight elections but the right-wing party Vox surged in the elections in Castile and Leon and now govern in coalition with the mainstream conservative People's Party.

T.S. Eliot, is prescient in 'Notes Towards the Definition of Culture'

“We are destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.”

End of an era: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph quotes a Deutsche Bank director

'Germany in particular has manoeuvred itself into an economic and political crisis of Zeitwende proportions by outsourcing everything: its energy supply to Putin’s Russia, its aggregate demand to Xi Jinping’s China, its military defence to America, and its monetary policy to the ECB – in the lapidary words of Deutsche Bank board member Paul Achleitner.'

Zeitwende is German for 'end of an era'.

Stripping away all the accretions of “defending liberalism” or “promoting democracy” with which American politicians are accustomed to shroud their defence of empire

'Stripping away all the accretions of “defending liberalism” or “promoting democracy” with which American politicians are accustomed to shroud their defence of empire, Colby breaks down the raw facts of power to their essentials. Asia is the most important economic sphere in the world, and thus, to maintain its global preeminence, America must maintain hegemony in Asia."

I like this sentence from a review by Aris Roussinos, published in Unherd in November last year and just republished, of a book about Taiwan by an American strategist Elbridge Colby called The Strategy of Denial.

It applies to Ukraine too.

For Americans extending or defending democracy means extending or defending their empire and vice versa. 

This is not a polemical point. It is simply a fact.

The review explains the argument of Mr Colby. Does it throw light on the war in Ukraine?

'China must be provoked into initiating any escalation of the conflict, so that it will always appear the aggressor; it must be permitted to strike as indiscriminately as possible (Colby urges the US not to provide potential civilian targets with air defences, reasoning that collateral damage will whip up the public anger against China necessary to winning a war); at every stage, China must be manoeuvred into situations where it is forced to escalate the conflict and so lose world sympathy, or back down. Over time, he reasons, the Chinese leadership will realise that the costs of seizing Taiwan will outweigh the benefits, and will be reassured enough by American pledges that the US will not aim to launch a wider war or dismantle their state that they will sue for peace.'

Catholic

'If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.'
Muriel Spark

A joke our family's priest friend Father Brendan Smyth told in his sermon at my sister's wedding. A boy is being catechised before being confirmed. 'What is matrimony?' 'A place where souls go for a while to atone for their sins.' Priest: 'No, that's purgatory'. Bishop: 'Leave him alone. He might be right. What do you or I know about it?'

Talking about Viktor Orban: I posted this on 30 July 2017 in a Facebook group.

Viktor Orban is a demagogue and, to use an oft misused word, a populist, the Hungarian government is corrupt and very unsatisfactory from some points of view, but on immigration and the future of Europe he makes sense.

 

Some things in this speech I dislike. Francis Fukuyama called this speech a 'full-throated defense of ethno-nationalism, replete with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories' but I see nothing anti-Semitic in it and Netanyahu agrees with Orban that Europe should shut its doors. Ethno-nationalism is an American concept, contrasted with civic nationalism, and is considered dangerous by Americans because the USA is not an ethnic state but a country with a long history of racism, trying to come to terms with its history of slavery. Hungary has its history of racism too, of course.

 

"However much of a taboo one is breaking by saying it, there is no cultural identity in a population without a stable ethnic composition. The alteration of a country’s ethnic makeup amounts to an alteration of its cultural identity. A strong country can never afford to do something like that – unless some global catastrophe forces it to do so....
"..Over the next few decades the main question in Europe will be this: will Europe remain the continent of the Europeans? Will Hungary remain the country of the Hungarians? Will Germany remain the country of the Germans? Will France remain the country of the French? Or will Italy remain the country of the Italians? Who will live in Europe? This is a historical question which we must face up to today. As regards the specific situation – and this is quite telling about the world that we live in today – there’s no concrete, reliable information on the percentages of traditional indigenous Christians and the incoming Muslim communities living in Europe’s individual countries. In practice it is forbidden to gather information like this. And the data which is gathered is not adequate for us to predict what the future holds for us, as migrants, immigrants, are not evenly distributed throughout the different age groups. So the general figures say little about what awaits us. We should focus most on people under the age of 15, and also those between 15 and 45. From those figures we can project, we can calculate, what the situation will be like in each country in, say, 2050.

Sunset over the Sava at Novi Sad.

 

Belgrade has finally won my heart

My Serbian historian friend who walks around Belgrade with me tells 80% of Serbs side with Russia in the Ukrainian war, which is unsurprising considering the American bombing of Belgrade in the Kosovo war. I'd have expected a higher number. Serbia has the best of all worlds, a candidate for membership of the European Union, a lot of Chinese investment and a free trade deal with China being negotiated, friendship with Russia, a lot of investment by the Gulf states. The President appointed a homosexual Prime Minister 'even though Serbs are stricter about homosexuality than Romanians' as a cheap way to gain favour with the West. Rich Balkan crooks invest in Serbia to launder their money. 70,000 Russians settled here last year, mostly IT people, and far more this year. Many Indians in IT come too. Lots of Africans who come here to study. I suspect they also come here under the misapprehension that it will help them get to the European Union. 

On maybe my eighth visit I found that there are a lot of charming 19th century buildings and the city has real charm.  It's less depressed and gayer (in the old sense of the word) than it seemed before.

 

Tim Stanley on 18 July in the Daily Telegraph

'Had it not been for Brexit, the Conservatives would still be Dave Cameron’s party and we’d be knee deep into Osborne’s second term (the borders totally open, the Tower of London owned by China). This generation of [Tory leadership] contenders are the product of that era.'

Three great Englishmen have died

I am so very sorry Bernard Cribbins has died. I loved him. Especially in The Railway Children and his songs Hole in the Ground (No 9 in the charts and chosen by Sir Noël Coward on Desert Island Discs) and Right Said Fred (No.10).

R.I.P. former British Ambassador to the USA Sir Christopher Meyer, who has died aged 78. He opposed Brexit but was very vocal on Twitter opposing attempts not to implement the result of the referendum. He seemed to me the wisest man who opined on Brexit.

R.I.P. James Lovelock, distinguished scientist who took a 2:2 at Manchester University and invented the Gaia hypothesis.

He sounds wonderful. Lord Ridley says today:

He never wasted a moment on conventional thinking. His secret? I suspect it was his avoidance of being an employee for almost all his life.

BBC World Service sports news

The BBC World Service News is very woke. Even the sports news includes one sportsman praising another for his climate change activism and UEFA investigating Turkish football fans chanting about Putin to hurt Ukrainian fans' feelings. Why shouldn't the Turkish fans shout what they like?

Other news is that Boris Johnson’s spendthrift government wasted £778 million to get the Commonwealth Games held in Birmingham. What is the point of the Commonwealth? Answer: it has none.

As for the business news it's preoccupied by discrimination and inequality, of course. 

Quotations

“Bad times, hard times — this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: such as we are, such are the times." 

St Augustine

“Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it's not much use.” 

Ernest Hemingway

There is still some hope for England (plagiarised from Chris Carter)

 

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad

News item. Self-declared “anarchist archaeologists” are warning archaeologists not to assume the gender or race of ancient skeletons because they see the categorization of sexes as discriminatory to the dead and as enhancing “white supremacy.”

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. (Longfellow and plenty of others, including Enoch Powell. It's very well known.)

Dr Johnson: "Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat". Was he the first?

Sophocles' Antigone: "τὸ κακὸν δοκεῖν ποτ᾽ ἐσθλὸν τῷδ᾽ ἔμμεν' ὅτῳ φρένας θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν" ("Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction").

Quotations

"In its pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen, the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent…"

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” 

Dostoevsky 

'As always, Shakespeare furnishes a relevant quotation – in this case, for the Tory contest. Here, from Henry VI Part 2: “The commons, like an angry hive of bees/That want their leader, scatter up and down/And care not who they sting.” In this context, the word “want” carries its old-fashioned meaning of “lack”.'

 Charles Moore today in The Daily Telegraph

"Leadership is all about people. It is not about organizations. It is not about plans. It is not about strategies. It is all about people-motivating people to get the job done. You have to be people-centered."

Colin Powell

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

William Blake

Seen on Facebook 9 years ago

'The Liberal Democracies of the "West" fought a 6 year war against "Fascist" Nations. It then entered into a 45 year "Cold War" against Communist Nations where the world was under near constant threat of Nuclear Destruction. 22 years ago the "Cold War" ended, and all we have heard about since is the evils of Fascism intermixed with a loving film about Che and the odd horror story about the evils of the "South" during the American Civil War (just for variety) ... what is wrong with this picture???'

The Kamloops mass grave is the reason a frail Pope arrived yesterday in Canada to apologise, but historians are sceptical

The BBC didn't mention the sceptics this morning. The story is here.

In fact there is no evidence the Kamloops mass grave exists.

The Pope, however, dislikes colonialism and North American conservativism.

3 years ago today: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

 

Cișmigiu this morning

Cișmigiu this morning early before it became too hot. My camera didn't capture the green colour of the blossom.

England is ruled by lunatics

 

Charles Moore today

'Instead of reducing our carbon emissions to global benefit, we have merely exported them to China, which therefore – unpunished for its carbon sins – out-competes us. As well as now paying the crazy prices set by Putin’s war, the ordinary energy consumer bears the heavy capital, regulatory and subsidy costs of hitting net zero’s arbitrary targets. Energy-intensive businesses suffer terribly from cheap energy options foregone. Our steel industry totters on the brink.'

You'd think Germany would have a sign on the door saying 'Never again will we fight a 2 front war.' Instead, this is what the West is doing.

I don't watch or listen to things usually but you really have to listen to this astonishingly good analysis to understand the economic consequences of what the man calls ‘the war on two fronts, against Russia and climate change’. 

Not to mention China and Covid-19.

Louis Gave explains that politicians thought something needed to be done about Russia, imposing sanctions was something and therefore that was what needed to be done. 

The result: European Union countries tore up contracts to buy energy from Russia cheaply in euros and instead bought energy at a much higher spot rate set by Russia in dollars.

He sees two solutions. Start burning coal or agree a peace whereby Russia keeps eastern Ukraine.

I think both of these are very good ideas, the second for the sake not only of Europe as a whole but most of all of Ukraine, which will otherwise be destroyed.

"History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon