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Smartacus - Shadow Banned it

@fivestarmichael

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51m

The authoritarianism the past two years had the amazing effect of uniting a lot of people of disparate political beliefs. It has united the free-thinkers and clearly identified the order-followers. Using persuasion, not ridicule we can pull more people out of the matrix.

Emily Kate 

@BucketsOf_Rain

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16h

The Ardern worship comes from the same brain that thinks women are inherently better leaders - and indeed made this claim regarding Covid policy. There's not much point highlighting the counter-factual evidence here. Spoils the warm fuzzy feeling of contented self-righteousnesss.

Emily Kate 

@BucketsOf_Rain

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16h

On every matter, whatever the evidence, people rush to their safe positions. Not only does evidence not count for much anymore, but even when it does, it is very quickly forgotten in favour of the grander narrative of whatever it is. In this case, the Glorious Girlboss

Petronella Wyatt

@PetronellaWyatt

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Jan 15

Some friends and I were discussing the demise of the hostess, as in the brilliant and intellectual women who used to lead society and politics. Now everyone is either a “socialite” (implication, braindead), or an influencer (implication, thinks Metternich is a luxury brand).

Chris Arnade writes about Bucharest in a blog called 'Chris Arnade Walks The World'

"I quickly saw the city was roughly divided into a wealthier, more modern, more American influenced northern half, and a poorer southern half, so I focused on the south, because wealthy neighborhoods, no matter the country, are pretty much the same.

"They are all variations on the same privileged theme. All have upscale shops and malls filled with the same stuff. All have bespoke restaurants serving the same food. And all are filled with residents who are careerists who happen to be where they are because that is where they have the biggest edge, by birth. They are best at making money in Romania since they grew up there, but if they ever get the chance to go elsewhere to make more money, they would happily do so."

I thank my loyal reader Toma for putting me onto this great writer.

French historian Emmanuel Todd thinks the Third World War has already begun

He said so speaking to Le Figaro last week, as quoted by UnHerd.

“It’s obvious that the conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and escalated to a global economic confrontation between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war,” 

“The resistance of the Russian economy [to sanctions] is pushing the American imperial system towards the precipice.” 

[If  Russia] “managed to exhaust the European economy, while maintaining Chinese backing, American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for the United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing.”

Quotations from King Charles III

I was a teenager in the 1960s and remember witnessing what I realise now was a kind of cultural revolution which swept out the poor old baby with the bathwater.
Speech at the Prince of Wales Education summer school, October 4 2002

Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?

Putin seems as indifferent to human life as the Kaiser

Yesterday I quoted the late Paul Johnson saying of Putin that 'though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life'. He could have compared his indifference to human life to that of the extraordinarily bloodthirsty Emperor William II of Germany, as described by his Anglo-German biographer John Rohl.

As far as I know, which is not very far at all, the Kaiser's horrible wishes were never put into action. He seems not to be to blame personally for the killing in German South-West Africa of tens of thousands of people from the Herero and Namaqya tribes.

Paul Johnson died on Thursday aged 94

I met him once at the inaugural meeting of the GK Chesterton Society in the Reform Club and quoted to him Chesterton saying 'The wildest hope of a healthy person is to get back to his first Christmas party, and be shy enough to be happy.' 

He replied 'And do you remember how Chesterton said you can remember what it is like to be six. By getting down on your knees.' 

I promptly got down on my knees and reported that GKC was right. 

I never much liked his writing, middlebrow and bad tempered. I did not at all share his keenness on Mrs Thatcher or Reagan, but now they both seem much better than their predecessors or successors. 

Geoffrey Wheatcroft must have enjoyed writing his obituary in the Guardian, from which I extract these plums.

Paul Johnson and Margaret Thatcher on Putin

Paul Johnson, April 2014

‘I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike since Stalin died. Though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life. There is a Stalinist streak of gangsterism too: his ‘loyalists’ wear masks as well as carry guns. Putin also resembles Hitler in his use of belligerent minorities to spread his power. Am I becoming paranoid about Putin? I hope not.’

Margaret Thatcher, September 2000

"Now we have the new Mr. Putin. I looked at the pictures of Mr. Putin, trying to look for a trace of humanity. I should, within a few weeks, have known better.

Today would be Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 109th birthday

This is his description of Ireland.

'Through all our history she clings to us, a poor, half-witted, gypsy relative, defying our improvement, spoiling our appearances, exposing our pretences, an irredeemable, irrepressible slut, dirty when we are most clean, superstitious when we are most rational, protesting when we are most complacent, and when we are most prosaic, inspired'.

Today is the Reverend Martin Luther King’s 94th birthday

Today would be Martin Luther King’s ninety-fourth birthday.

Martin Luther King's famous speech “I have a dream” was actually written by Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones, both of whom were said by the FBI to have been Communists. 

Both are alive and I do not want to be sued. 

Levison is said to have complained about King's marked lack of intelligence.

The body of Pope Benedict XVI was brought to St Peter's by van. Pope Francis preached a brief homily at his funeral which scarcely mentioned Benedict and did not attend his interment

 

An Italian blogger writes that after his abdication Joseph Ratzinger was styled pope emeritus "but the mortal remains of this pope were taken from his residence to St. Peter's Basilica almost stealthily, aboard a van that would be good, at most, for delivering mail. Following the coffin were his papal family, but no official representatives of the Holy See. And the pope emeritus (which means, I repeat, that we are talking about the pope) was let into St. Peter's Basilica through a side entrance."

226 years ago today the first top hat was worn in public, by a London haberdasher who was charged with breaching the peace and incitement to riot. Several women fainted at the sight.

 

Things I read this weekend

"People ask me, ‘What did you learn?" [in Sobibor, an efficiently run German death camp where few people lived more than a few hours]? And I think I’m only sure of one thing – nobody knows themselves. The nice person on the street, you ask him, ‘Where is North Street?’ and he goes with you half a block and shows you, and is nice and kind. That same person in a different situation could be the worst sadist. Nobody knows themselves. All of us could be good or bad people in these situations. Sometimes, when somebody is really nice to me, I find myself thinking, ‘How will he be in Sobibor?’" Thomas ("Toivi") Blatt

[Satire] "presupposes homogeneous moral standards – the early Roman Empire and eighteenth-century Europe.” Evelyn Waugh quoted by Frederick Stopp in Evelyn Waugh, Portrait of an Artist, 1958

"Politicians are not people who seek power to implement policies they think necessary. They are people who seek policies in order to attain power."

Evelyn Waugh in his diary

Quotations

 

'In 1995 the New York Times invited its readers to try to name the era in which they were living. The paper argued that, more than five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the term “post-Cold War era” carried an air of “self-doubt”. The entries submitted were no better and included the “Age of Uncertainty” and the “Age That Even Historians from Harvard Can’t Name”.' From the review in the New Statesman by Gavin Jacobson of The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Sperber.

'The state has no business running schools or hospitals.' Stephen Pollard. He is probably right. He also said he blocked someone on Twitter for 'Neanderthal antisemitism' for saying the political wing of Hezbollah was not a threat to the UK and should not be banned. I didn't follow his logic there or when he argued that, as well as Hezbollah, golliwogs should be banned too.

A world where there is no longer an elsewhere

'Along with the decline of popular political participation, the mass availability of television – “a distinctly national medium” as Sperber rightly notes – and the balkanised info bubbles of the internet, the second half of the 20th century was, as one political scientist put it recently, “a wasteland of sociability”.

'This isn’t to say that interconnections didn’t exist, but there are reasons the phenomenon referred to as globalisation – the extension over the whole earth of markets and networks of information and communication – was so profoundly alienating. One of the more radical answers came from the French anthropologist Marc Augé, whose Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1992) described “a world where there is no longer an elsewhere”. Modern life was now dominated by homogenous “non-places” where people spent most of their lives: airports, motorways, hotel rooms, leisure parks and supermarkets. These spaces of eternal traffic and deadening consumption, in which “people are always, and never, at home” represented the real End of History.

'“The space of non-place,” Augé wrote, “creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude”....'

From a review by Gavin Jacobson in the latest edition of the New Statesman of The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Sperber.

Quotations

We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us... but what if we are a mere after-glow of them? (JG Farrell)

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. (Robert Louis Stevenson. Acknowledgments to my reader Toma who quoted this in a comment here, five years ago. I agree with Stevenson.)

Celestino had noticed in Paris that any innovation whatsoever, sooner or later, without fail – literally without fail – turned out to have been copied from the Americans. As a result he had come to the conclusion that the French had lost the art of invention and creation. But it was the same in Madrid. This servility went

Peter Hitchens today in his blog

'The creepiest and most fascinating thing on the internet is the trailer for a new film, M3gan (pronounced ‘Megan’), which has absolutely nothing to do with Prince Harry or his wife. It portrays a sinister child-sized doll robot, which starts out claiming to be the heroine’s friend and protector, and then turns out not to be. Be especially wary when she starts to dance. Make of it what you like, but to me it’s a good metaphor for the whole new electronic world, a glowing, seductive shop window which has beckoned us into a world of censorship, surveillance and, I suspect, despotism.'

Beware of experts

'Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialised character.

'To manage men, to explain difficult things to simple people, to reconcile opposite interests, to weigh the evidence of disputing experts, to deal with the clamorous emergency of the hour; are not these things in themselves worth the consideration and labour of a lifetime? If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible. Wherefore I say from the dominion of all specialists (particularly military specialists) good Lord deliver us.'

Winston Churchill in a letter to H.G. Wells, (1901)

'No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.'

Lord Salisbury, in a letter to Lord Lytton (15 June 1877)

Apocrypha about the Romanian army in the two world wars

'The Destruction of the European Jews' (1961, revised 1985) by Raul Hilberg quotes from a secret report by a German journalist in Romania: ''In many quarters we have been told that Marshal Antonescu has syphilis, a disease that is notoriously as common among Romanian cavalry officers as in Germany the cold.''


It reminds me of the story, according to Norman Stone widespread in Germany, that when Romania entered the First World War in 1916 on the Allied side the Romanian General Staff issued an order that no soldier under the rank of major was allowed to wear rouge. I came across that long before I set foot in Romania and from a couple of sources.

A rambling post about Freud, Christianity, Judaism and America

'The hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity, and it is not surprising that in the German National-Socialist revolution this close connection of the two monotheistic religions finds such clear expression in the hostile treatment of both.' Sigmund Freud, 'Moses and Monotheism'

Freud was also hostile to both, though in his old age, suffering from cancer, he began to see Judaism as having progressive qualities.

Papal abdications and funerals

'Medieval papal resignations were not generally voluntary renunciations of power by those who recognised that they could no longer wield it effectively. And the one which may have been, that of Celestine V in 1294, ended with that Pope brutally murdered by his successor.'

Miles Pattenden, an ecclesiastical historian, in Spectator Australia, 2 January

Why migrants are fleeing Albania

I love Albania, which is now, with Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and probably Russia, one of the last European countries that is not yet modern, but she is very poor and the people are leaving, which is another example of the harm done by mass migration. 

Here is a well-written article on the subject.

David Goldman asked what does it matter who takes over Germany, since Germans aren't having children? He said that they could leave the country to their dogs.

The same goes for every European people, as well as lots of non-European peoples including the Persians (so feminism is not to blame). In Eastern Europe, on top of low birth rates, there is mass emigration.  

Quotations from the late, much lamented Pope Benedict XVI

I loved Pope Benedict XVI very much indeed, more than any other public figure in my lifetime.

I regretted the Diana-ification of the Papacy under Pope John Paul II. For a monarchist the monarch's personality is not important and for a Catholic nor is the Pope's, but a pope should be holy and holiness is loveable. He should also be profound. Pope Benedict XVI was extraordinarily loveable and profound. I admired him without reservation. 

I suspect Benedict was the most intellectually exciting head of state since Marcus Aurelius, though the late Queen Elizabeth II was probably equally nice. 

I once said that Benedict and Donald Trump were the only conservative heads of state since Charles de Gaulle. 

Was that an exaggeration? I expect so.

Vox populi

In the Turkish holiday village of Dalyan I'm having dinner with a Turkish bar owner in his 30s. Predictably, he loathes Erdogan, a would-be dictator.  

'What do you think of the war in Ukraine?' 

'I support the Russians, actually.' 

'Why?' 

'Because they are being attacked by America.' 

'Do many Turks think this?' 

'Some do. Some don't.'

Quotations

'Just be yourself. You'll save a lot time, money & energy by not trying to seem better than you really are.' Carmen Jurgens

'If Moses supposes his toeses are roses, then Moses supposes erroneously. For nobody's toeses are posies or roses, as Moses supposes his toeses to be.' Anon.

What a twisted society we have become. We stir up wars in other people's countries and praise ourselves for doing it...

Christmas brings news of terrible ultra-violent crimes in supposedly peaceful suburban areas. Migrants stride boldly ashore in unknown numbers. We pay heavy taxes for pitiful services, cratered roads and a health system that is the envy of nobody.

Yet, nothing happens about all this. The surest way to gain praise in politics is to make simple-minded statements about a crisis abroad and demand that we send bombs and shells to some strife-torn state, or actually bomb it ourselves.

Jesus the carnivore

According to the Gospels Jesus ate fish. 

We would know if Jesus had been a vegetarian and if he was not no Christian need be.

A similar point can be made about other things. If Jesus had been the only first century rabbi to approve of homosexual acts this certainly would have been recorded in the Gospels and known to the apostles. Norman Tebbit, a very clever debater, made that point.

The same goes for pacifism, capital punishment, revolutionary socialism and countless other things.

Vegetarianism and veganism are supererogatory mercies. Not required. Like giving away all your property. 

Freedom

 

Twenty Years After: Russia warned Nato against expansion in 2001

It used to be the 50 year rule, then the 30 year rule and now British government papers are released after around 20 years.

We learnt today that in early 2001, Anthony Blair told the new American Vice-President Cheney that Vladimir Putin was a Russian patriot, sensitive to Russia's "loss of respect" in the world, and had a similar "mindset" to Charles de Gaulle, though the two men were not directly comparable. Exactly my opinion.

Mr Putin told Mr Blair that he did not want to be seen as anti-Nato, but the Russian defence minister Igor Sergeyev told his Nato counterparts that further enlargement would be a major political error, in response to which Moscow would “take appropriate steps”.

Mr Putin was friendly to Mr Blair but a briefing note from January 2001 to the Prime Minister said that Russian spies continued to operate as during the Cold War. It listed many assurances that Mr Putin has given that were false, including that Russia would not help Iran develop nuclear weapons.

Mr Putin is a paradox, a shameless liar who nevertheless also tells the truth quite often, as in his May 9th speech, when he explained why he invaded Ukraine because of what he thinks is US aggression.

Margaret Thatcher hated Menachem Begin, according to her official biography by Charles Moore

 

Stanley Baldwin said freedom was England's secret

Even as recently as the 1960s England was a free and Christian country. Abortion was illegal. Now a Catholic woman is arrested for PRAYING silently outside an abortion clinic. 

Fact checker check thyself

As you probably noticed, the fact checkers are often or even usually the enemies of truth. Here is a good example. The Cambridge Dictionary (something I had never heard of till today but which dates back, apparently, to the remote era of 1995) changed the definition of woman to include transgender man. 

Or rather, not. 

This was not, say the fact checkers, a change of the definition, only the addition of a subsidiary definition. 

So that is cleared up.

Another Brexit please

I wish England, by which I mean Great Britain and Northern Ireland, had a Brexit from America as well as from the European Union.

I wish we kept out of cold or hot wars with China, Russia or even Persia.

Had Stalin been clever he would have waited till the American troops left Europe before imposing Communism on Eastern Europe. But he was not clever and they stayed, seeing Communism as another Hitler. After the Cold War ended Nato, meaning American troops in Europe, continued and now the war in Ukraine means they will stay for the foreseeable future. 

Modernity is the enemy. Romania is an outpost of civilisation.

"People who say that 'you cannot turn back the clock' obviously don't know very much about clocks." G.K. Chesterton

"I belong to a generation which, in the space of precisely one generation, has seen a religion, a culture, and a country all but disappear." Alain de Benoist

“Europe is committing suicide… by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.” Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe.

Romania remains an outpost of Christian civilisation, like Ancient Britain in that short period after the Romans left but before the English migrants arrived, the mythical epoch of King Arthur.

Christmas quotations

 

Evelyn Waugh: 'Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas'
'Did you?'
'I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign, isn't it?'

Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer.... Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously?

Calvin and Hobbes

At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth.
One of Shakespeare’s three references to Christmas, in Love’s Labour’s Lost

He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.
St. Augustine

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year!

Christmas in the jungle.

One of the Christmas carols that was handed out to the congregation to be sung in the 'Trad Anglican' parish church of Loughborough.

Letter to the Times.

The English Republic 1649-60 abolished Christmas (it was Popish) and King Charles II restored it.

The wildest hope of a healthy person is to get back to his first Christmas party, and be shy enough to be happy. 

G.K Chesterton

Morrissey, in Melody Maker, 1984

I find that people who are knee-deep in emotion and physical commitment with human beings, I find they're often totally empty of any real passion ... I mean, if we look back on the history of literature, it's always these really creased, repressed hysterics, if you like, who are enchained in these squalor-ridden rooms, who say the most poetic things about the human race.

Tony Judt on the neo-cons

'In Bush's Useful Idiots he took apart the soi-disant liberals who had supported Bush's catastrophic foreign policy. He derided those members of the liberal intelligentsia who had supported the Iraq war but changed their minds after incompetent execution led to disaster. "Like Stalin's western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev's revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism," the liberal hawks were now "irritated with Bush for giving 'preventive war' a bad name".'

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writing Judt's obituary in the Guardian. I so disliked Judt's politics, but agree with and respect leftists of his sort when they condemn neo-cons and unjust wars. I came across last night Andrew Roberts praising Tong Blair for eschewing popularity to invade Iraq. My old friend Andrew and I are very different sorts of Tories indeed and disagree on so much, from Churchill and Margaret Thatcher to George W. Bush and Donald Trump (he likened him to Mussolini, when Trump is more a libertarian than anything).

Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “What they told us was, at the time, they felt it was the right thing to do”

An interesting insight into the Holocaust is provided here by Lawrence Rees, who became a historian of the Holocaust after he made the remarkable TV series The Nazis: A Warning from History. He was asked if those involved in the Holocaust still felt many years later when he interviewed them that they could justify it morally?

'Yes, and this is one of the reasons I’ve carried on with this subject for 25 years. You dig and dig and dig and you can’t get to the bottom of it, because often you don’t expect the responses you get. If you talk, for example, to former members of the NKVD (Stalin’s secret police), who were involved in the horrendous deportations of Kalmyks or Chechens or Crimean Tatars, in the most part what they’ll say is: “If I didn’t do it I would have been shot.” And it’s very hard to go somewhere in an interview after that. But what was extraordinary about all these former Nazis is that I don’t think we ever heard that answer in all the years we were doing this. What we tended to hear was at the time they felt it was the right thing to do.'

'Does this not make Holocaust denial even more ridiculous, when the perpetrators themselves don’t deny it?'