St Petersburg

When I was 22, after I went down from the university and when all careers seemed like rival prisons, I made several large commonplace books. As a result quotations stick in my mind and I am a walking dictionary of them. I collected famous last words and here in St Petersburg I remember - as I very often do - the Decembrist who was walking up to the gallows, when it broke down and he had to go back down and wait. His last words were, 'Nothing ever goes right for me'.

Two feet from where I sit back in the B & B after long hours tourist work a young man is sitting one leg hanging off a window ledge cleaning the windows three stories up. In a way this disregard of health and safety is inspiring and makes on like Russia. In another way it gives me vertigo. 

Russia is enchanting, un-Western, backward. People are wonderful. Men are real men, women real women, all replete with Russian soul, except the vulgarians who walk into you as you cross the road..

Yesterday was a very serendipitous day. ! met and was invited to join a group of lovely young women being guided around St. Petersburg (I went to L to type Leningrad, oddly) by two lovely St Petersburg girls. As Nina who steered me around last time I was here said to me -"How I love these Russian girls - so beautiful and so kind." I decided not to wait in the long long queue for the Hermitage with the girls but as I walked away Vadim the seller of contraband caviar who knows the boy on the door fixed it for me to skip the queue and pop straight in. I bought some caviar from him for 1000 roubles = EUR 17 which is half the price of dinner at a cheap restaurant and it tastes good. I spent a very long time looking at the seven Claudes. He is the greatest of all painters for with him painting becomes poetry. He paints light itself. 

And, dropping an intellectual level or five, of course St Petersburg is a reason for me to retell my favourite joke.

What have Catherine the Great and Winnie the Pooh got in common?

Answer: the same middle name.

Stereotypes, whatever they are

I slept very comfortably last night on the train when conductress finally relented and found me a carriage to myself. St Petersburg is cold and grey and I am glad of my Nigel Farage overcoat. The fedora protected me from the rain in Red Sq last night. I wonder if this station is the Finland station. No jokes about Lenin. Keep your head down.

In Moscow I visited a British diplomat friend. His ten year old daughter came home from school while we drank tea, he asked her what she had studied in school and she answered 'Stereotypes'. I don't know what stereotypes are exactly but I know indoctrinating schoolchildren against them is bad news. 

Oddly enough, children have not been taught catechism for two generations and are no longer taught Christianity, except in the context of comparative religion.

In fact children are being taught a new religion, called human rights, though these rights are not the same as freedom and in many cases diametrically opposed to freedom. They are being taught the rebuttable assumption that equality is a good idea when it is usually a very dangerous idea indeed.

I imagine the idea of stereotypes is an attack on socially conservative ideas. I would have enjoyed kicking against these ideas were I at school or university but young people tell me it is best to keep your head down and pretend to accept them. 

Racism is unpleasant but antiracism is responsible for many evils. It is essentially a quasi-religious phenomenon, a specifically Protestant one, a mutation of puritanism crossbred with Marxism, a left wing movement disguised as simple decency, essentially irrational.

Romanians are fairly happy

A recent survey shows that Romanians are about mid way in world happiness rankings. Details here.

They are certainly much happier than Hungarians or most Slavs.I am not convinced Scandinavians are necessarily very happy but their culture (it's their culture, innit?) tends to make them say they are when asked.

Bucharest is changing

Davin Ellicson a brilliant young American photographer wrote this to me today, which is worth sharing.

I went to the night of the galleries last night and it was as if the Bucharest I knew is long gone. It was a shock. Bucharest is unrecognizable these days. Romanians have transformed themselves in every way. Since around 2011, Bucharest hit a new period. Romanians look different now, they carry themselves differently, they've traded BMWs for bikes. The city looks different with new streets, no wires, no dogs, bike lanes, all sorts of hip cafes and bars (even no smoking ones). Everyone has cameras and wears the latest fashions, many have the iPhone 6 and Apple laptops. There's an altogether different spirit about the place as if Bucharestians are finally reclaiming the city that Ceausescu took away from them for so long. At the route level it's about economics it seems to me. Money doesn't just buy new cars, it can buy a new found confidence. Many have traveled widely and globalization seems to finally be hitting up Bucharest, albeit in a sophisticated way. Bucharest is transforming itself in a way and at a speed you never witness in the West.


Calea Victoriei was also shut down for the light show and I had never seen so many Romanians in the streets except for the Rosia Montana protests. Romanians are taking back the urban environment that for so long was stolen from them. It's becoming their city again.

Freedom of speech in England

Freedom of speech means the right to offend. The freedom to say inoffensive things isn't freedom at all. Far too few people are being offended these days. 

As Kingsley Amis said: 

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

And this is the motto for this blog. 

I think it's very sad that Labour in the British election have promised to bring in more restrictions on freedom of speech, this time to prevent 'islamophobia'. 

How recently England was a famously free country. Now Romania is much freer. You can say most things here, though if you are very unlucky you might get done for slander, which is a crime. People even smoke in restaurants here.

Why does Africa look away when Africans are drowned?

Why does Africa look away when Africans are drowned in the Mediterranean? Why do the Arab states look away when ISIS are killing Muslims Christians Yezidis? Are the Muslim countries less philanthropic than the (vaguely) Christian ones?

The United Nations predict 24 million will disembark from North Africa for Europe within the next ten years.This is not a humanitarian question or even a political one but an invasion.

Hillary won't win

Hillary Clinton won't win the US presidential election, simply because the dynamics of journalism require her to lose. Her winning would be such a boring story and America loves exciting serials: OJ; hanging chads; September 11; Lewinsky etc. Also she is too old, too physically unattractive, clearly an egoist and not really a politician, but a wife.

I read that the Taliban would have sold Osama to the USA in the 1990s and she told her husband that it would be wrong to give money to a country that oppressed women.

The Mar Mattai monastery five years later: Christianity is being extinguished in the Middle East

I was in the beautiful Assyrian monastery of Saint Matthew's (Mar Mattai in Syriac) in 2010, overlooking the plain of Nineveh. In those days Kurdish Iraq was the place along with Syria where Christians were safe.

Mar Mattai dates from 363 and was founded by a hermit fleeing from Julian the Apostate. Some parts of the nave of the church are very old indeed, though what you can see is late 19th century. The monk I spoke to there, of course, said that Saddam was a good friend to Christians. How could he not? The monk also told me that one of the departing Jews in the 1970s told him 'It is the turn of the Saturday people now but it will be the Sunday people later.' 

When we arrived there were three large coaches parked in the forecourt and I feared we were not the only foreign tourists, but I found that the coaches had brought pilgrims from Erbil. Now no pilgrims dare visit and only six monks are left. Jane Corbin has been there for the BBC and wrote this very depressing report. Her broadcast can be watched in the UK on the net.

Damn Mr Bush and Mr Blair. (Damn Mr. Cameron and Mr. Sarkozy too for overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi.) Swearing relieves my feelings but now we have to do what we can against IS. 

Exorcism and Christianity

Jesus was an itinerant exorcist. If you don't believe in exorcism, you don't believe in Christianity. Modern man prefers, understandably, to ignore this.

However, Pope Francis talks a lot about the devil and exorcisms are becoming more frequent, according to this interesting article in The Independent, by a writer I don't like, Peter Stanford.

It all comes down to our modern tendency to cherry pick the bits of Christianity that we like. Thumbs up to quoting Jesus, in the gospels, when he calls for a fairer, more loving society, but close your eyes when, in exorcist mode, he drives out evil spirits from the sick and afflicted. One is deemed real, the other, at best, symbolic. Yet for centuries the Devil was anything but a symbol. Priests would routinely deal with all manner of problems in their congregations by pronouncing the rite of exorcism, summoning out the terrifying reality of the Devil, confronting him with the crucifix, and applying holy water, salt and clouds of incense lavishly.

Modern man, and this includes bishops, likes Jesus when, in the gospels, he calls for a fairer society, but did he call for a fairer society? Not fairer in the sense modern politicians understand. 

Jesus also speaks often of hell and damnation. In the words of Henri De Montherlant,

Many are called but few are chosen, but devout Christians think this is the rhetoric of Jesus Christ.

Five wonderful quotations

"Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits."
Robert Louis Stevenson


"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back—
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Begin it now."
Goethe


“The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.”
Eduardo Galeano, who has died.

"In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first." 
Harry S.Truman

“Only one offence is now vigorously punished,—an accurate observance of our fathers’ traditions."
St. Basil on the Arian schism

Freedom is so last century

A New York yellow cabbie is facing $15,000 in fines for ordering two female passengers to stop kissing. It used to be the law not so long ago that London cabbies had to permit smoking in their cabs, a law that went back centuries. Kissing seems very reasonable between people of the opposite sex in London cabs where the driver is partitioned off but this cabbie had a no kissing policy. Meanwhile a cabbie who killed a 9-year-old boy as he held his dad's hand in a Manhattan crosswalk was fined $580.

In Scotland a Rangers fan who was arrested for sectarian singing while on his way to attend a game against Celtic has been jailed for four months.The sheriff described the words to the song as "inflammatory" an said it "could have led to horrendous violence".

Another man, Alexander Blood, from Saltford in Somerset, was given a community payback order after admitting acting in a racially aggravated manner.
Blood swore at police officers and called them "Jock".

Genius and childhood

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed." 

Charles Baudelaire

"Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence."

Norman Podhoretz

"Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life." G.K. Chesterton

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." 

Pablo Picasso

"One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste." 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



"A little boy sees and hears birds with delight.

Then his “good father” comes along and feels he should “share” the experience and help his son “develop.” He says: “That’s a jay, and this is a sparrow.”

The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way that his father wants him to.

Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the little boy starts his “education” the better. Maybe he will be an ornithologist when he grows up.

A few people, however, can still see and hear in the old way. But most of the members of the human race have lost the capacity to be painters, poets, or musicians, and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it secondhand.

The recovery of this ability is called “awareness.”

Eric Berne

Time management advice by Jung

If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. … you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. 

Carl Jung

Who are the best prose writers in English?

A friend of mine and I have just exchanged these mails. He wrote first.

Sat at home, sombre, listening to St Matthew's Passion. Thought some more about the best prose writers I can think of. 
Amis - Kingsley and Martin. Martin brilliant, complex, sometimes convoluted. Kingsley polished. 
Waugh - often brilliant and economical writing. 
Hitchens - very consistent, punchy, funny. His brother also good. 
Rana Dasgupta - superb long form journalist, wrote a brilliant essay on the ills of modern Delhi 
Jonathan Sumption - his books on 100 years war are exquisite although he sometimes meticulous to the point of dull. 
Russell Brand - ignore his Revolution twaddle. His autobiography is one of the funniest books I've read and he sets the scenes of his misdemeanours superbly. 
Kenneth Tynan - brilliant, funny, uninhibited.

My reply:

I forget it's Holy Week. Of course I should have listened to the Bach Passions. It doesn’t help that everyone here thinks Easter is in ten days’ time.

I would rate Jeremy Taylor very high but I brought Holy Living with me when I came here in 1998 and only dipped into it. The King James Bible is better if that counts. Robert Burton is fun.  I never quite went loopy about Sir Thomas Browne but he is good - all the early 17th century writers wrote great prose. And I love of course John Aubrey's unfinished Brief Lives that had he finished it would have lost much of its charm.

I must read Coleridge's prose. I am atrociously badly read in some areas. But without ANY doubt my favourite prose writer is Macaulay. I haven’t read Ruskin. Not much Newman or Carlyle. 

Of the 20th century I love Harold Nicolson’s diary, my favourite diarist (along with Macaulay). Sybille Bedford is wonderful. I like Belloc’s essays and The Path to Rome though not his novels. I like Eliot’s prose better than his poetry, much better. Churchill was very good. I also love William Dalrymple. Yes, I love Tynan very much. And Hitchens wrote great polemic – although I only read a 2 or 3 of his pieces.  This in particular sticks in my mind as great prose. 

I love Macaulay’s letters enormously, my favourite letter writer. Also Lady
Diana Cooper's letters, in her autobiographies and in Philip Ziegler's biography. I love The Faber Book of Diaries. Not a fan of Pepys unlike my beloved Dad, but Pepys is more fun than Evelyn.

My favourite sentence in English is by Landor. Quoted in '84, Charing Cross Rd', that enchanting play, then book and then film.

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave : there are no voices, O Rhodope ! that are not soon mute, however tuneful : there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.

Oh and I almost forgot perhaps the best prose writer of the 20th century was Raymond Chandler. I love Evelyn Waugh very much and rate him higher than Graham Greene but as a prose stylist I prefer Graham Greene. Greene's book reviews are wonderfully written as are Philip Larkin's.

Here is the best thing Macaulay ever wrote.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

I blogged about the best opening lines of books here but actually I think the opening lines of Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul might be best of all. 

Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag. Doctor Plarr found himself alone at that hour except for the one sailor who was on guard outside the maritime building. It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

Young fogeys never grow old

Young fogeys never grow old.

As I strode on my way home through a decrepit part of town a gypsy woman in peacock-colourful dress just stopped me not to ask for money but to say how much she loved what I was wearing (brown fedora, Nigel Farage covert coat, check shirt, pink woolen tie) and ask if I was 'in the opera'.

If Conor Gearty were British Prime Minister things would be even worse than they are

An article by Professor Conor Gearty from today's Independent makes a plea for an internationalist United Kingdom, a sibling in Europe not merely a good neighbour. If he were Prime Minister, he says, he would speak the truth:

that Britain is a small place that should stop pretending it is a power, much less a super-power; that the future depends on sibling and not just neighbourly relations with Europe; that immigration is what Britain is, not what Britons should fear; that the country is horribly class-conflicted with the engine of inequality being driven not by the poor but by the upper middle-class with their different schools, accents, health plans and gated communities; that the "free press" is merely the commercial tool of capitalists who trade off the worst instincts of the people for their own gain; that the green belt is a rust belt standing in the way of British homes; that re-industrialization is a fantasy but that the skills to cope with post-industrial Britain can only be delivered by the higher taxation needed to fund the better schools and colleges we need.

His ideas are utterly mistaken, topsy-turvy. The class system is one of the few things that unites Britain and creates social cohesion. Immigration, on the other hand, gravely weakens social cohesion. It acts on our sense of national community like Agent Orange did in Vietnam on forests. So, to a lesser extent, do European integration and devolution, of course.

I am told and believe that Conor Gearty, Professor of Human Rights law at L.S.E., is very clever but this stuff does not impress. As a Southern Irishman, naturally enough, he does not particularly love English national identity, sovereignty, our tradition or our ruling classes. Which goes to make my point for me about immigration and social cohesion.

He might be right, though, that we should forget about being a second rank great power. It is the case that the main threats to us come from terrorists and extremists at home. Also from nationalists who want to dissolve the union and, I should argue, from the European Union.  But if we abandon our role as an American satellite and the USA becomes isolationist what ensues? I am not sure we would like it. 

So I am torn. Perhaps we should be isolationist ourselves, though I am not sure about this one. I think we should probably leave the EU and certainly resile from the ECHR. International law is a great threat to democracy in Great Britain, but so, even more so, is the authoritarianism of the British political class and the sheepish docility of my compatriots. By authoritarianism I am thinking, inter alia, of much human rights law, which extends rather than restricts the powers of the state to tell people what to do, while giving power to foreign institutions to tell the British state what to do. 

Short story set in London

Ernest Hemingway’s friends bet him that he couldn’t write a complete story in just six words. He wrote:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

They paid up. Hemingway said it was his best work.

Facebook statuses can have  a similar terse brilliance, rather like haikus. This is a status posted today by a beautiful, very right-wing Romanian girl, who recently graduated from the University of London. It's much better than Hemingway's six worder, but it does use 105 words.

So I'm sitting next to a middle aged couple having their first date. The lady, which is dressed very well, is a single mom with a newborn in her arms. I sit next to them and I admire the baby, we start talking she says 'oh just have him' and she placed him in my arms continuing her date. He is continuously on his phone texting while she is ignoring her baby and asking her date if he had a prenup with his ex wife... Then he suddenly leaves and she pays the bill and takes the baby away... I am loosing hope in love.

Someone asked me if this were an urban legend (I have experience of those) but my friend, an honest woman, promises me she heard this yesterday.

Talking of haikus, dreary things we had to write at school when I was reading Byron in my spare time, it is one of the semi-religious duties of the Emperor of Japan to compose these. I always have in mind this one of Hirohito who sat on the throne when I was in my twenties.

We had intended

To visit the flower show at Kyoto

But were prevented by ill health.

Christianity and European Culture

I keep coming back to this quotation, which seems to have more meaning and a different meaning from what it had years ago when I first came across it. Suffixed with the terse word 'Discuss', it would make a good question in a history general paper.

“It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe--until recently--have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning...I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”

T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940)

Had Richard III won at Bosworth, would England now be Catholic?

Yesterday King Richard III was given, as he would have wanted, a Catholic Requiem Mass, his body having been discovered under a car park in Leicester, not far from where he died on Bosworth field. His body was taken to the church where he will be buried this week, the procession being attended by thousands. As one man said,

You don’t go to a king’s funeral every day.

Richard III will be buried in a Church of England church, despite having been a Catholic. He was given a Requiem Mass, naturally, by the Catholic Church but his funeral (actually reinterment, because he was given a very perfunctory funeral in 1485) should have been Catholic, sung and in Latin.

Had he won at Bosworth, Henry VII's son, Henry VIII, would not have been king. Would England still be Catholic?

I'm glad that the fact that Richard III was a child murderer and usurper does not prevent his receiving royal honours. There is a majesty doth hedge a king, even one who kills a king. When I was a boy, King Edward V, the boy-king whom Richard had murdered, was my favourite king and he still is, poor boy.

Thank God the monarchy and the class system do something to keep England, or rather Great Britain, united - I wish residual Christianity did, but I am not sure it does.

Archaeologists are to start digging for another of Britain’s ‘lost’ kings, King Stephen, under a school playing field in one of England's most beautiful towns, Faversham in Kent. Henry I is also missing..


Stephen was always another one of my favourite kings when I was a young boy. No idea why. I learnt about them all aged four from a wonderful book written between the Golden and Diamond Jubilees which my father gave me and which his father had bought him second-hand called The Royal portrait Gallery. So I have them all fixed in my mind with their portraits. It was exactly the sort of thing Sellars and Yeatman lampooned in 1066 and All That.

HENRY I was famous for his handwriting and was therefore generally called Henry Beau-geste. He was extremely fond of his son William, who was, however, drowned in the White City. Henry tried to console himself for his loss by eating a surfeit of palfreys. This was a Bad Thing since he died of it and never smiled again.

Do people today even get those jokes? Shakes head wistfully.

More gang violence in Sweden, racism and deprivation to blame

There's another story about gang killings in Sweden today in the Guardian.

Sweden used to be a country with extremely low levels of violent crime and a great deal of social cohesion. Now, because of immigration, this has changed.

When crimes are reported from Sweden the link with immigration is often not mentioned. The English language press reported widespread rioting in Sweden in 2013 without for some time mentioning that the rioters were Muslim.

Now two people have been shot in Gothenburg and the Guardian hint that the 

deprived borough where Wednesday’s killings took place... has high levels of recent immigration and overcrowding.

The Guardian is able to imply that ethnic minorities are responsible for these crimes by providing what is nowadays called a narrative and the narrative is this:

Poverty, racism and segregation are driving young men from immigrant backgrounds into gangs and gun crime.

I imagine there's much more poverty in their parents' countries. Is it really the fault of the racist Swedes?

Yes, if you begin with the assumption that people are basically good, unless things happen to them to make them bad, and that people of different religions and ethnicities are basically the same and should be able to live happily side by side, given reasonable goodwill. In other words, if you are a liberal, which is a kindly, high-minded and, in the face of history and of human wickedness, a foolish thing to be. 

The strange thing is that priests and clergymen, who should have a strong belief in original sin, are often the most liberal people of all.

Back in 2006 a Swedish sociology student, Petra Åkesson, found that 90% of all robberies reported to the police in Malmo were committed by gangs, not individuals. These gangs are said to be largely composed of Muslims. She interviewed gang members, one of whom told her

When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.

22% of the population of Gothenborg are not ethnic Swedes, much fewer than in Malmo where 30% of the population was born abroad and another 11% of the population was Swedish-born to foreign born parents. Most of the newcomers in both cities are from the Middle East or the Horn of Africa. It is very possible that in twenty years Malmo will have a Muslim majority, as may other cities in Europe, probably including Brussels.

A report on immigrant-related crime in Sweden in 2006 by Ann-Christine Hjelm from Karlstads University found that 85% of those sentenced to at least two years in prison for rape in 2002 were foreign born or second-generation immigrants. A 1996 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention said that immigrants from North Africa were 23 times as likely to commit rape as Swedish men. Men from the rest of Africa were 16 times more likely and Iraqis were 20 times more likely to commit rape. Men from Bulgaria and Romania were 18 times more likely to rape. 

I am surprised by the high number of Romanian rapists, as rape is uncommon in Romania, or so I thought.

The Swedes count many things as rape that other countries don't and have a very high rate of reporting rapes. This is why Sweden has one of the highest numbers of rapes per head of population in the world. Nevertheless, the numbers of rapes by immigrants is astonishing and outrageous. 

Then there are the increasing number of attacks on Jews in Sweden.