'Military idiot and bar'

It is tempting to think that retired army officers are stupid. The ones who become British Conservative MPs, for example, or the ones who write for the papers. The explanation for the things they say must be more nuanced, that they are trained to be soldiers not geopolitical analysts. 

Colonel Richard Kemp was in charge of the British troops we sent to Afghanistan (why didn't we know better, after losing three Afghan wars?) and writes in the Daily Telegraph  In February of last year he hoped that Ukraine could take back the territory lost to Russia the previous year and part of Crimea, 'but only with our support'.

A total Russian collapse is surprisingly close

"Sunak unveils biggest military spending increase in a generation"

Why is Rishi Sunak increasing defence spending massively when Great Britain is not threatened by any state actors? Why should we care what China does or what happens in the Middle East? Does no British politician understand anything about foreign affairs?

Will there always be an England? No.

For Saint George's Day a tweely expressed but devastating thought by Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, former Telegraph and Spectator editor (and former boss of Boris Johnson), Charles Moore. "Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years."

Travel

Laurence Durrell got it right. Travel is one of the most interesting forms of introspection. And Mircea Eliade when he said one travels to foreign countries to explore ones unconscious mind.

Quotations

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Only press on : no feeling is final.”
Rainer Maria Rilke


"In a general way it's very difficult to become remarkable. People won't take sufficient notice of one, don't you know." Joseph Conrad, quoted by Anthony Powell as the epigraph to his memoirs.

'The least eventful war ever'

This is how wars generally begin, rather than because of plots by evil men. 

The Portuguese banknotes scandal of 1925 and the end of the first Portuguese Republic

This is the fascinating story of Alves Reis that could have been written by William Le Queux, Edgar Wallace or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, never dreamt of BUYING the Bank of Portugal with forged notes.

I am staying in the Hotel Metropole in Lisbon where Reis stayed until he had enough "money" for the Hotel Alvenida Palace.

In the story of Aladdin the Chinese empire is gripped by massive inflation because Aladdin was turning so many things into gold. Reis's forgeries created a boom and bust in Portugal which led to a coup against the First Republic and the benign despotism of Dr Salazar. 

Reiss became converted to Protestantism in gaol and converted many other prisoners.

The pursuit of happiness

Five suggestions for how to be happy, based on replies to questionnaires by people who had completed the Bristol University 'science of happiness' course:

Talk to strangers

Spend more of your money on others

Spend time in nature

Count your blessings

Be kind to others.

Quotations

"Real love simply means being able to say to someone else, 'What are you going through right now?'" Simone Weil

“Everything about this [English] society is disagreeable to me – from its limited way of thinking to its indecent manner of cooking vegetables”. Portugal’s greatest novelist, José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900), was a Consul in Newcastle and Bristol. He was one of the fairly few famous men to have lived and died in Queen Victoria's 63 year reign: Oscar Wilde and Charles Stewart Parnell are two others that spring to mind.

Franklin Foer says the Golden Age of American Jews began in 1967 and is drawing to a close

Subscribing to centre-left Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz provides me with a critique of IDF actions and the Israeli government that is absent in the UK and Romanian press and leads me to all sorts of interesting things.

Like this very interesting audio discussion with Franklin Foer about how liberalism benefited American Jews after 1967, as set out in his recent Atlantic article The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending. The Ha'aretz interviewer and he agree that American Jews believe in liberalism as a creed but also as a means to protect Jews.

This sense of security ended when Donald Trump became President. This was despite Mr Trump being the most philo-Semitic and Zionist of American president ever, President Biden possibly excepted.

From the Atlantic article:

10 Commandments of Propaganda

A summary by Belgian historian Anne Morelli of Lord Ponsonby's 'Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War' (1928).

1. We don't want war, we are only defending ourselves!

2. Our adversary is solely responsible for this war!

3. Our adversary's leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil

4. We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!

5. The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention

6. The enemy makes use of illegal weapons

7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable

8. Recognized intellectuals and artists support our cause

9. Our cause is sacred

10. Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor

Quotations

"I do not believe a word that comes out of your mouth. Your entire policy consists of provoking the Palestinians." Jacques Chirac, 'red with anger', talking to Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant." Sir Roger Scruton

"Love and do what you like." St Augustine

Before progressives were progressive about race

The Progressive movement in the USA in the first quarter of the last century were not like modern progressives. Carrie Chapman Catt was an American Emily Pankhurst - a leading suffragette who founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904. She argued that "White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage" because more white women than black ones would vote.

Quotations

Amnesic 

@_amnesic

It may be slightly inconvenient to remember Extraordinary Renditions, or US ambassador to Tashkent John Herbst being "livid" at the rogue UK ambassador, Craig Murray, for publicising the "not uncommon" practice there of boiling people to death

"Modern man is painfully confused.
He spends his vacation visiting the wonders of what the old world built, yet hates the beliefs that inspired them to build it."
I,Hypocrite (Twitter/X)

Christ is risen!

 

The Jesus Seminar, a group of liberal, publicity hungry New Testament scholars who were very fashionable in the USA around the turn of the century, disbelieved most of the Gospels, thought Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God and his corpse was probably thrown into a shallow dirt grave, where it rotted away or was eaten by wild dogs.

In fact few non-Christian historians doubt the crucifixion happened (the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus records it) and that something happened very shortly afterwards to create a movement which swept the civilised world.

The non-Christian New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann said ‘It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.’

These experiences were also enough to lead Peter and Paul to suffer death rather than renounce their faith that Jesus had risen from the tomb and was the Son of God. Their martyrdom under Nero is not questioned by any historian, as far as I ever heard. Peter is said to have been crucified upside down at his request because he did not believe himself worthy of the same death as Jesus, but this seems to be a legend.

The resurrection is the most significant event in the history of not only the West but the world, whether or not you believe it happened.

Talleyrand met a young man at a party who asked him for his advice about how to start a new religion. The renegade bishop turned pagan replied, 'First die and on the third day come again'.

Quotations

Ah! there is nothing better than a trusty friend, neither wealth nor monarchy; a crowd of people is of no account in exchange for a noble friend.

Euripides, Orestes 1155-1156 (translated by Edward Coleridge)

Question the world, the furniture of the heavens, the brightness and arrangement of the stars, the sun providing for the day, the moon which comforts the night; question the earth bearing its yield of herbs and trees, full of animals, completely furnished in every respect; question the sea, full of so many and such a variety of swimming creatures; question the air, pulsing with so many flying things; question them all, and see if they don't answer you, after a fashion in their own way, "God made us." Serious and great-minded philosophers have inquired into these things, and have come to a knowledge of the artist through the works of art.

Interroga mundum, ornatum caeli, fulgorem dispositionemque siderum, solem diei sufficientem, lunam noctis solatium; interroga terram fructificantem herbis et lignis, animalibus plenam, hominibus exornatam; interroga mare, quantis et qualibus natatilibus plenum; interroga aera, quantis volatilibus viget; interroga omnia, et vide si non sensu suo tamquam tibi respondent: Deus nos fecit. Haec et philosophi nobiles quaesierunt, et ex arte artificem cognoverunt.


St Augustine, Sermons 141.2 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 776; translator Edmund Hill)


I asked the earth, and it answered me, "I am not He" and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, "We are not Thy God, seek above us." I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, "Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God." I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, "Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest." And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: "Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him." And they cried out with a loud voice, "He made us."

interrogavi terram, et dixit, 'non sum.' et quaecumque in eadem sunt, idem confessa sunt. interrogavi mare et abyssos et reptilia animarum vivarum, et responderunt, 'non sumus deus tuus; quaere super nos.' interrogavi auras flabiles, et inquit universus aer cum incolis suis, 'fallitur Anaximenes; non sum deus.' interrogavi caelum, solem, lunam, stellas: 'neque nos sumus deus, quem quaeris,' inquiunt. et dixi omnibus his quae circumstant fores carnis meae, 'dicite mihi de deo meo, quod vos non estis, dicite mihi de illo aliquid,' et exclamaverunt voce magna, 'ipse fecit nos.'

St Augustine, Confessions 10.6.9 (translated by E.B. Pusey)


Thanks to Laudator Temporis Acti for the classical quotations.

An outside caterer preparing the nave ⁦of St Edmundsbury Cathedral ⁩ for a Masonic fund-raising dinner tonight

 

This is normal now in Protestant cathedrals in England. A silent discotheque took place in Canterbury Cathedral recently, which was the shrine in Catholic times of St Thomas a Becket, and the nave of the ancient Rochester Cathedral was used for crazy golf in 2019.

'Israel Is on the Brink of the Abyss'

'The Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence "completely failed" to detect what Yahya Sinwar, Hamas' leader in the Gaza Strip, had planned, one defense official acknowledged. "It's also true that a few days before October 7, the consensus of all the intelligence agencies was that Hamas was growing only moderately stronger and hadn't found an alternative" to the cross-border attack tunnels Israel blocked.

'"Nevertheless, the defense establishment's expectation was that if the government continued the judicial overhaul, Bezalel Smotrich continued his life's work of erasing the Green Line [between Israel and the West Bank] and Itamar Ben-Gvir heated up the Temple Mount and the West Bank, it would end in rivers of blood," he added.'

Vladimir Putin at the Valdai International Discussion Club in September 2010

'But I would like to remind you that in the wake of Kosovo we did not recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We stopped short of that. As I said in public quite recently, we "swallowed" it. The only thing that I did at the time was to sign a decree on the development of economic relations with these territories. By the way, that was in line with United Nations requirements, because the UN was against the economic isolation of these territories. That was all. In principle, we were prepared for further dialogue.

'And yet armed forces were used. Some quarters are so fond of shooting and bombing that they thought they would succeed here too. Why did they think that they would succeed here when they had no success elsewhere, in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East? They failed here as well, and those who believe that it is the most effective instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again.

'...One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor.'

“Six times in the past 12 years Netanyahu rejected plans to eliminate the Hamas leadership”

“Six times in the past 12 years [Benjamin Netanyahu] has rejected plans proposed by the heads of Israel’s secret security agency, known as Shabak, to eliminate the Hamas leadership.” 

So writes former Israeli PM and general Ehud Barak this month in the American defence establishment's house magazine, Foreign Affairs.