Frank Furedi: for anti-populist ideologues democracy is an afterthought

Frank Furedi says very truly:

For anti-populist ideologues democracy is an afterthought - especially in places like Hungary. Why because the people are unreliable and then to vote the wrong way. And yet they dishonestly go on about threat of dictatorships.

He has written a very good article which says everything you need to know about the election result. It includes this insight.

The emergence of Hungary as the bad boy of Europe has little to do with its supposed plunge into authoritarianism. As I argued in my book, Populism and the European Culture Wars, the pathologisation of the Orban regime is largely due to its promotion of national sovereignty and its willingness to uphold traditions and values, including those of Christianity. It is hostile to those who would dismiss the legacy of Europe’s past as the ‘bad old days’. Hungary is hated by the Western political oligarchy for the simple reason that it dares to challenge post-traditionalism, identity politics and anti-humanism.

Easter in Bucharest - acknowledgements, Octav Dragan

What did I think of Uzbekistan?

Tashkent is a very eery, quiet place with wide roads, few cars and few pedestrians. The Bradt Guide said Samarkand was bustling but it was nothing of the sort. It too was almost deserted. Neither city had a centre or much life.

The mosques were beautiful, over-restored for the benefit of tourists but empty of worshippers. Islam I felt was repressed by the Communists much more than was Christianity in other parts of the Soviet Union and this repression continues now, though

Tamburlane's tomb

I saw the tomb today of Tamburlane in Samarkand and must now read the play by Marlowe, which I can download on my kindle. 

I found the Samarkand Necropolis much more beautiful. Here among many others are buried Tamburlane's favourite two wives. He had 90 legal wives and very many concubines.  

He is responsible for the death of perhaps 17 million people, perhaps 4% of the world's population. He is naturally regarded as a very great man and a national hero of the Uzbeks, despite being no more Uzbek than Boadicea was English. Coach parties swarm converge on his tomb. 

How will Hitler be regarded in 700 years?

Nobody knows.

From beyond the far distant Oxus

Alim Khan, the last Emir of Bukhara, delighted to watch his enemies boiled in oil. I am enough of a Tory to think he was slightly better than the Bolsheviks who deposed him.



The Registan in Samarkand. Lord Curzon, as he then wasn't, thought it the noblest public square in the world. Now I can agree with him. 

Sandy Arbuthnot in Greenmantle knew some interesting places in Samarkand and Sir Fitzroy Maclean, as he then wasn't, walked here through semi desert from Bokhara, followed by an NKVD man in an ill-fitting dark suit.


I read once that Tennyson's poems are like objects that you hold in your hand and are one moment astonishing diamonds and the next pieces of coloured glass.

Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand are like that.

Each of them in turn has impressed me at first sight as the most impressive place I ever saw in my life, but each, like some famous beauty, on closer inspection proves to have had a lot of work done to make her stunning. 

I am never sure what is centuries old, what Brezhnev era and what created under the unlamented dictator who died last year.

A German designer who comes here because Bukharan patterns are alive and German ones lifeless (at first I thought she meant patterns of life but she meant patterns) told me that if the Acropolis were in Uzbekistan it would be completed and roofed. This is exactly right. 

The Soviets were not romantics: romanticism was bourgeois and decadent.  They saw no poetry in ruins. Nor did President Karimov after he sloughed off Lenin.

It could be much much worse. They are building a huge tourist centre close to the Ark in Bukhara, the fortress from which the Emir watched his enemies killed with cruel and unusual punishments.

Already Bukhara has 150 mostly small hotels but still the number of tourists is relatively few. Samarkand and Bukhara feel remote despite the occasional coach party, often of Indians.  

Marrakech is perhaps equally beautiful but it is a tourist trap and now almost as familiar as Bournemouth or Southend. Though these things change fast.

Gertrude Bell was the first white woman to enter Samarkand but when she left she noticed advertisements for charabanc excursions.


Enoch Powell said the life of nations like the life of men is lived in the imagination. Travel is lived entirely in the imagination and being somwhere distant and little visited fires the imagination. 

Lord Byron proudly said 'I have seen the ruins of Ephesus' but so can anyone for the price of a budget flight to Ismir. Lord Curzon boasting about Samarkand still moves us to envy.

I arrived in time to see the fairly deserted Registan at Samarkand tonight at dusk, the birds making a deafening noise and the tourists gone. I envy myself.

Part of it is the name. Samarkand like Madagascar, Persia and Mozambique captivates by the sound of its very name. We visited Lalish the Yazzidi holy village because Noemi loved the name. Names contain magic.

We are not far from the Oxus here.

I take the golden road to Samarkand

Tashkent is not dour if you lived twenty years in Bucharest but it has no heart. Though a city of four million people, once the largest in the Soviet Union after Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, it is empty. It is very Soviet, which to me is charming, but my ignorant impression was that here was a place which had had its heart ripped out and nothing to replace it with.


The city is as old as Rome but badly damaged in an earthquake in 1966 and its ancient buildings have been rebuilt. The roads have little traffic but, as throughout the USSR, are wide enough for military planes to land on them,


I had a pleasant plov (pilaff, the national dish) at the city's best restaurant, Caravan, and a much better dinner at Florea. I attended La Traviata sung very well. The very talkative audience was almost entirely female and over fifty. This I read was the place where one came closest to the still beating heart of Tashkent. The beautiful opera house was built for the Communist administration by the architect of the last Emir of Bukhara.

Khiva

I remembered Colin Thubron's 'The Lost Heart of Asia' and wanted to miss out Khiva but luckily my travel agent persuaded me not to. Colin Thubron found it a lifeless over restored museum. That was in the early 90s and I suppose it is true, but Khiva is less well cared for than when he saw it, everywhere else is now much more restored than 25 years ago and it has far fewer  tourists than most beautiful places nowadays. Every vista makes your jaw drop

Marrakesh is less lovely but still very lovely. But Marrakesh is touristland. Khiva has what Marrakesh has lost, that wonderful feeling of being remote. Every scene looks like it's from the Sunday Times colour supplement but there seem to be no Sunday Times readers. An Englishman does not go abroad to meet Englishmen.

Yesterday was very hot. Today was supposed to be 31° Celsius but instead it is 3° which is a surprise. It's also raining, which one doesn't expect in a desert.

I have read about twentieth century Englishman in Uzbekistan like the heroic Colonel Bailey and that great writer Sir Fitzroy Maclean but the astonishing Captain Burnaby, who defied the Tsar by entering Khiva, was only a name to me until today. Here is an excerpt from the conversation he had with a worthy citizen who put him up in a large house in a village through which he passed.

' Which do you like best, your horse or your wife ?' inquired the man.—' That depends upon the woman,' I replied ; and the guide, here joining in the conversation, said in England they do not buy or sell their wives, and that I was not a married man. 'What! you have not got a wife?'—' No; how could I travel if I had one ?'—' Why, you might leave her behind, and lock her up, as our merchants do with their wives when they go on a journey.' In my country the women are never locked up.'—' What a marvel l' said the man ; 'and how can you trust them ? Is it not dangerous to expose them to so much temptation ? They are poor, weak creatures, and easily led. But if one of them is unfaithful to her husband, what does he do ?'—' He goes to our moullab, whom we call a judge, and obtains a divorce, and marries some one else.'—' What! you mean to say he does not cut the woman's throat?'—' No he would very likely be hanged himself if he did.'—' What a country!' said the host ; we manage things better in Khiva.'

From what I gather from my reading even seventy years of Marxism did not lift the condition of women very much higher.

This morning I went back to the Village Museum

How to fix the Irish border problem

The border between Northern and Southern Ireland and whether it will have to become hard again if the UK leaves the European Economic Area is much in news (the news that people interested in Brexit read). This article by Shanker Singham reveals the interesting information that 87% of Northern Ireland’s turnover represents sales within UK. Just 5% is sales to Eire, 3% to the rest of the EU and 6 % to the rest of the world. So Northern Ireland's primary economic interest is in maintaining the UK single market.

Shanker Singham argues that a customs border would give rise to few problems with

Cambridge Analytica and the Romanian election

My friend Rupert Wolf-Murray has made the headlines in Romania by telling Associated Press that Cambridge Analytica approached him before Romania’s 2016 parliamentary elections to work for the Social Democratic Party (PSD). 

He would have worked with another person and given strategic advice and assistance to the PSD campaign team for two or three months. Here Rupert is talking about it on television.

He declined the offer so does not know whether Cambridge Analytica did play any role in the election, which the PSD won by a wide margin.

Playing truant this morning in the Village Museum after a meeting

Evil and historical judgments: more reflections on R.H.S. Stolfi's "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny"

Historians used to have heroes and villains. Livy's hero was Scipio Africanus for good reasons, though Hannibal was too great to be a villain. Macaulay's wooden hero was the usurper William III. Leopold von Ranke's hero was Napoleon. 

American historians admired another high minded warmonger, Lincoln.

But no man is a hero to his valet and historians these days think like valets. 

Almost everyone has been debunked. They don't usually spend much time painting historical figures as heroic except when race comes into it, as it does with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parkes, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. With them old fashioned history, of the type taught around 1900 and parodied by Sellars and Yeatman, still obtains. 

Because of race,  Lincoln is still a great American hero, even though he wanted to deport the freed slaves to Central America because, as he told the first ever meeting of blacks in the White House, 

"not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours".

Mandela and Gandhi, you note, are the Americans' foreign heroes now. They have replaced the racist and imperialist Churchill.

Historians do not much use the word evil, except about Hitler and the Nazis.

As Lord Bullock said

"If he is not evil, who is?"

Lord Peter Hennessy

I find this absolutely incredible. I knew standards at my middle class university had fallen (and the politics faculty was always made up of Calibans) but for a university website to describe Peter, Lord Hennessy (an annoyingly P.C. life peer) as 'Lord Peter Hennessy' as if he were the son of a duke, marquess or earl....

The Village Museum, Bucharest, under snow

Pope Francis is a populist

The other  day I agreed with Daniel Hannan that President Macron is the ultimate populist. I also said his far left opponent, Jean-Luc Melenchon, was one. 

It seems to me that another populist is Pope Francis.

Women down under

The old cohesive, blokish, laid back Australia has changed in many ways. The 1960s social revolution is working itself out there as much as anywhere.

An Australian feminist last year was advising women who want to have careers not to have children. I can't find the link. 

Australian feminists have marched against Donald Trump but never against female genital mutilation, an increasingly common thing in Australia.

Feminism has always been a top down movement, in which a small group impose their views on the mass of people who couldn't care less. But that small group is not just a few activists and left-wingers but also academia and the global bureaucracy.

International organisations are just as feminist as anyone these days.

Australia's solid labour market performance is sullied by its failure to fully tap the potential of women: those with young children, single mothers and females in their late 50s. Women with children under five and sole parents with a child under 15 in Australia face an employment gap of about 25 percentage points to those without kids, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development said in a report on Friday. (The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 March 2017)

Islamism is a post-colonial movement

'Free market capitalism cannot provide for everyone or sustain the natural world. Its very imperative is of ever hastening exploitation of all resources including people, and it needs armies and weapons to secure those supplies. The political appeal, unchallenged in the 1990s, of this concept is fast fading by a combination of Islamic opposition and the radical popular movements of landless and poor peoples in many poor countries.' 

Jeremy Corbyn in the foreword to Imperialism: A Study, 2006.

“[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.”

Christopher Hitchens

"We do not have a plan. They do. History shows that those that plan, anticipate and have a coherent strategy usually win. We are not winning."

Fjordman

Quotations

"Whereas people of faith tend to accept the natural world, those who profess a material view often go to war with it. Such discontent has proved of great value to successive political movements that have promised to transform everything, from society to gender."
Toby Guise

"The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner."
Albert Jay Nock

Macron is the ultimate populist

Macron is the ultimate populist. So said Daniel Hannan the other day.

In many ways this is true.  He is up there with Napoleon III. But no-one calls him one. 

His left-wing opponent, Jean-Luc Melenchon, was also a populist and his right-wing opponent, Marine Le Pen. 

And Charles de Gaulle?

Immigration and robots

Professor James Newell of Salford University, in his latest posting in LSE blogs about the Italian election result, thinks that in Italy

immigration is essential to helping Italy overcome its economic problems, especially to ensure the sustainability of the pensions system, since immigrants are on average younger than Italians and have a higher fertility rate.

The same arguments apply to other Western and Eastern European countries. 

But why not use robots instead?

Donald Trump is being clever with tariffs, Korea and China

The global economic system, like NATO, was set up after the war by the U.S.A., with British help, to contain Soviet expansion. 

Like spending on Nato, which Donald Trump in his election campaign called 'obsolete', U.S. tariffs unfairly disadvantage the U.S. for reasons that ceased to exist in 1991.

The U.S., which is less dependent on trade than the other G-7 economies, could easily win a trade war if it conducts one cleverly.