Danielle Lloyd and other wags

Danielle Lloyd is a mildly famous British WAG (WAG is a back-formation from WAGs, which means footballers' wives and girlfriends). She is famous because her picture sells newspapers and gets clicks on websites, including, I hope, mine, and famous for racist bullying of an Indian contestant on the reality television show Big Brother, though that was years ago. She should be famous for this answer that she gave on BBC One's quiz show, Test the Nation (sic). She was asked: "Who is Winston Churchill?" and answered: "Wasn't he the first black president?"'

More quotations:

Judge: I have read your case, Mr Smith, and I am no wiser now than I was when I started.
F. E. Smith: Possibly not, my Lord, but much better informed.






Judge: Are you trying to show contempt for this court, Mr Smith? 

Smith: No, My Lord. I am attempting to conceal it.






Judge: Mr Smith, you must not direct the jury. What do you suppose I am on the bench for? 

Smith: It is not for me, your honour, to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.




What is a man, after all, but his old jokes?
John Mortimer

Lord Kilmuir, who heard about his dismissal from the woolsack on the wireless: You have given me less notice than I would a housekeeper. 

Harold Macmillan: But good housekeepers are so hard to find.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them. -- Evelyn Waugh

Prince Phillip, in 2000: ‎"People think there’s a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans."


When a Protestant sins he has no-one to whom to confess except his solicitor. Philip Guedalla

'England does not love coalitions.'

The New Statesman says Mrs. Merkel told Mr. Cameron before the 2010 general election that in coalitions: 

"The little party always gets smashed!"

It certainly looks like it will be so in England this time, but it was the majority party in our last two coalitions that got smashed - the Liberals in 1918 and the Conservatives in 1945. The Liberals lost in 1918 because David Lloyd George, the Liberal Prime Minister, split his party and the Conservatives lost in 1945 because the Conservative Prime Minister Churchill was seen as a non-party figure. The Conservatives were blamed in 1945 for leading us into a war which they could have prevented. As Harold Macmillan put it:

“It was not Churchill that lost the 1945 election it was the ghost of Neville Chamberlain.” 

The coalition before that, between the Conservatives and the Liberal Unionists, led to the two parties morphing into one. The Liberal Unionist Joseph Chamberlain's two sons, Austen and Neville, both went on to lead the Conservative party. The pact - it was not a coalition - between the Liberals and the Home Rule Party led to the latter being smashed and Southern Ireland tragically leaving the UK - but the First World War and treason is to blame, rather than the pact, which might have kept Ireland British.  Treason was being plotted against the Government by the Conservative leaders until the moment England went to war with Germany and treason by the Irish Republican Brotherhood accomplished the Easter Rising.

I look forward this time to the Liberal Democrats being smashed. It couldn't happen to nicer people. Except possibly the Blairite wing of Labour. As Enoch Powell said,

"I despise the Labour Right as much as I despise the Liberals. More than that I cannot say." 

Remember the Liberal Democrats want legislation to prevent goldfish being given away as prizes at funfairs. They want to regulate the press. The few real liberals left in British politics sit on the right wing of the Conservative Party.

Romania’s Rotten Oligarchy

This interesting article by Kostas Vaxevanis in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune this week about Greece reminded me of Romania:

DEMOCRACY is like a bicycle: if you don’t keep pedalling, you fall. Unfortunately, the bicycle of Greek democracy has long been broken. After the military junta collapsed in 1974, Greece created only a hybrid, diluted form of democracy. You can vote, belong to a party and protest. In essence, however, a small clique exercises all meaningful political power.

For all that has been said about the Greek crisis, much has been left unsaid. The crisis has become a battleground of interests and ideologies. At stake is the role of the public sector and the welfare state. Yes, in Greece we have a dysfunctional public sector; for the past 40 years the ruling parties handed out government jobs to their supporters, regardless of their qualifications.

But the real problem with the public sector is the tiny elite of business people who live off the Greek state while passing themselves off as “entrepreneurs.” They bribe politicians to get fat government contracts, usually at inflated prices. They also own many of the country’s media outlets, and thus manage to ensure that their actions are clothed in silence. Sometimes they’ll even buy a soccer team in order to drum up popular support... 

Romania like neighbouring countries is not really a democracy and how could she be? Will she be one? Some look to the EU to help but how can the EU remedy a democratic deficit? 

On the whole there is a lot more freedom in Romania than in Western Europe. People smoke in restaurants and make sexist remarks and disregard EU regulations. But they do not think government is on their side. Romanians do not have a party system which allows people to choose between parties that reflect different points of view. 

The essence of democracy is that one party leaves office after defeat to be replaced  by another party which brings in distinctly different values and laws from its predecessor, as happened in the UK in 1979 and 1997, in France last year, such as has not happened in Russia. This is democracy, rule by the masses, and this fear of the electorate colours everything democratic governments do. In Romania parties leave office regularly but the same 'Structure' of shadowy interests seems to rule. The 1996 election in Romania which ousted the revamped Communists and the 2000 election which brought them back  did represent real change but since 2004 all parties have seemed corrupt and not to represent divergent philosophies. In Eastern Europe it is hard to think that there are coherent right wing or left wing programmes. The liberals here are not liberal, by which I mean pro-business, and the socialists are not socialist. There are no conservatives as people do not think there is much worth conserving.

The present political class or their successors will In power for generations. I wonder if real democracy is possible in Orthodox countries. What Romania needs is a public minded elite and a moral revolution from below but it is not her destiny to resemble Norway or England. Perhaps corrupt but not too corrupt  Ireland might be a role model.

Economics springs from culture which springs mostly from religion and genetics. Roger Scruton writes interestingly on this  here.

Thank God Romania unlike Greece is not in the euro. 

Amman and the Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom

I must stay in Amman a second night. I cannot cross the Allenby (a.k.a. King Hussein) Bridge till tomorrow, because the Israeli side closes early on the sabbath. The other two crossings remain open all day on the sabbath but they are too far away.

I learnt this from the concierge before I paid for a taxi to take me to the bridge. I felt pleased that the journey was now taken out of my hands and someone else was running things. For a day I am no longer a tourist, a subjective person who travels for no good reason, but am here for a very good, objective, grown-up reason, that the crossing is closed. I walk around the centre of the town (in the shabby little centre, it does not feel like a city), in the pouring rain. My memory of Amman will be of somewhere grey and chilly. Tomorrow, as I leave, it is expected to snow. 

I suspect that back in 1948 there was not a burqa in sight and Jordanian women wore knee length skirts, just as I have seen Egyptian women did in films of the period. Now headscarves are common though so are blue jeans. I saw one pair of women wearing the full veil with only peep holes for their eyes and happening to be behind them in a queue at a street stall I notice that they were English, spoke with classless (meaning middle middle class) English voices and one of them was white (I could tell by her wrists). 

It was good to chill after much effort yesterday at Petra. Good to swim in the pool of the very comfortable, somewhat pricey Hotel Toledo, use the steam bath and blog. I would advise you, though, gentle reader, to get a five star hotel for this money.

Amman had 2,000 inhabitants when King Abdullah I chose it as the capital of Transjordan and it is now the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, known to foreign correspondents as the Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom.  Abdullah I first chose the town of Salt, a larger place, but changed his mind after someone in Salt was insolent to him. Amman had no house fit for an emir, so he used the railway station as his palace. 

By the time Transjordan gained independence from England, in 1949, the population had grown by 150% to 5,000 but in 2010 the population of the Greater Amman area numbered 2,842,629. Despite or because of this, the city centre is a non-event, a busy road full of shabby shops and a vegetable market rather than a souk, very unimpressive, but attractive because poor. Like many modern cities, Amman is a driving city not a walking city and has very elegant parts, like the one my hotel is in. The centre, however, has the great charm of letting you know that you are in a small country. You feel a weight lifting from your shoulders in small countries. It is the same in Luxembourg. 

Nevertheless, Amman is not a new place. It was known to the ancients as Philadelphia (there is a W.C. Fields joke here) and was ruled by the Nabataeans, who built Petra, before they were conquered by Trajan. To prove its antiquity, Amman possesses two magnificent monuments, the citadel, built by the Romans and substantially rebuilt by the Umayyads, and the Roman amphitheatre (actually there are two but one is in great condition). I went over the citadel without a guide and enjoyed it. I was not in the mood for the repetition of unimportant and not necessarily accurate facts.

The Jordanians are probably Palestinians but then all these identities and nations are pretty new ideas in what were parts of the Vilayats of Damascus and Jerusalem in the Ottoman days. (I repeat myself, I know, but what a shame a democratic Ottoman Empire did not emerge and survive into our day, at peace with Britain and ruled by Greek ministers, with no modern Middle East.) At any rate, Jordanians on the street looked happier than the Arabs in the West Bank and have, despite what Israeli Arabs told me, a much higher standard of living. GDP per capita here is about twice that of the West Bank.

My unscientific but persuasive survey of four taxi drivers and two guides suggests that Jordanians love their King, their Queen and the memory of the old King, King Hussein. On the other hand, all six of my interlocutors were over 40 and the median age here is 22. They all spoke English well and did jobs which earned them good money from foreigners. My last driver, a Bedouin who was born in a tent, was an East Banker, to be distinguished from the West Bank refugees from 1948 and 1967. East Bankers love their king, he says. I asked him why so many of the refugees are still living in tents and realised that until a certain number of years ago most people lived in tents. This is the kind of insight you don't get from reading the newspapers.

I asked about whether you got into trouble with the police for criticising the authorities and was told you can criticise the Prime Minister and the ministers but not the King. 'There is a red line drawn around the King.' 

King AbdullahII has an English mother, is a fresh-faced blue-eyed Harrovian, one month younger than me (a child, in other words) who speaks Arabic badly and is obviously as British as the flag, despite having a curious beard that looks like it may be stuck on with paste. He has a young, innocent, honest face. He followed Harrow with Sandhurst and a year at Oxford. He is the only decent ruler in a region full of horrible leaders. And the King is a king. Monarchies have innumerable advantages over dictatorships. The first of these is that they are legitimate, ipso facto, without need for elections. Elections in this past of the world mean the triumph of religious parties and then, often, no more elections. As Mark Steyn said, a king is his own ideology.

Jordan is the last of the British-client monarchies north of the Gulf. Like the famous Haroun al-Raschid, King Abdullah II likes to go out among his subjects, I was told, in disguise, to hear about their problems incognito. If only he had married Jemima Khan he would be quite perfect for a Richard Curtis film but in fact he is married to a lovely queen from Ramallah in the West bank who has won the country's love.

For other views of Jordan, by people who, unlike me, know something about the country, click here and here.

Talking about blue-eyed Jordanians, my second taxi driver, with skin as pale as vellum and blue eyes, turned out to be one of the Circassians I had read about, Muslims who came to Palestine from Czarist Russia. My waiter at lunch also had white hair and blue eyes but denied being Circassian and I realised he was an albino and wondered if I had caused offence. An albino Arab waiter - straight out of the pages of Bulldog Drummond, John Buchan or William Le Queux. 

The hotel restaurant has filled up since I came in here to blog. Then I was alone except for the secret policeman who was pretending to do the Amman Times crossword. (Joke). Now it is full and not of businessmen but holiday - makers. Who are these people who go to a $120 three star hotel in Amman for their holidays in early January? Many of them are Antipodeans and all seem placidly content though only one table of bibulous Australians are positively excited. 

Since the albino waiter I saw a third pale man with white hair and wonder what story John Buchan could have spun from this. Probably he would have me called to see the Minister of the Interior and be told I had to offer my services to save both the King and vital British interests. 

Petra, one of the wonders of the world

My Seven Wonders of the World

The Great Pyramid of Giza,

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem,

Petra,

Taj Mahal,

Grand Canal, Venice,

St. Peter's, Rome,

The British Museum.

I decided NOT to include the Great Wall of China, which is only a wall, after all, nor Niagara, the first disappointment of American married life. I decided on Petra after today's visit. It is better than Palmyra or Cappadocia or any of the wonders carved out of rock like Lalibela in Ethiopia and the underground city I saw near Gori in Georgia. The Great Pyramid heads the list as the sole survivor from the original list and The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is there for religious not aesthetic reasons. I thought of Trinity College, Cambridge and the Royal Maritime College, Greenwich but decided that though sublimely beautiful, as beautiful as architecture gets, they were not wonders. Why didn't I follow my instinct and apply to Trinity? But no regrets was one of my New Year's resolutions.

By the way, until about eight years ago I had only seen the last (but not the least) entry on the list.

A very PC list: 3 in Asia, 3 in Europe (or 2 if UK not in Europe) and 1 in Africa. I hope no-one will suggest I should have looked in the New World for some Inca thing.

'Lord Sebastian Coe'

The BBC World Service refers to 'Lord Sebastian Coe' - it makes you despair, which is the only unforgivable sin.

Christmas Eve in Bethlehem and Christmas Day in Jerusalem

Christmas Eve in Bethlehem and the streets are choked with boy scout and girl guide processions in the afternoon. Pretty girls where traditional costumes and it is a carnival. The Church of the Nativity is unreachable through the crowds I decided. Later the church is closed and Manger Square at 6 p.m. has an electric buzz. I feel ashamed that I do not make it  to stand at midnight in the Square  and watch the Mass on television screens. I do not make it to the church at all which is the reason I am here.






Once, recently, Bethlehem had a Christian majority  Now I am told Christians make up only 27% of the town's population. There are many reasons why Christians leave, including the political situation, the security wall which prevents Bethlehemites going to Jerusalem without permission reduces trade. There are also problems with Muslims, including, I was told, some cases of Muslim men harassing and raping Christian girls. Every Christian and Muslim I speak to bewails the economic problems and the wall but nevertheless I see signs of prosperity and plenty of new buildings, including the new four star hotel, The Shepherd Plaza, in which I am staying. A very hospitable and pleasant hotel that I enjoy and recommend. Palestinian Arabs are the most hospitable people in the world.

I came from Bethlehem to Jerusalem early on Christmas morning. I suddenly decided to escape from the somewhat yeastless people I was with  and my intuition was right. Intuition always is. I was shriven in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre close to Golgotha by a Polish Franciscan priest-friar. A half remembered line from Ronald Firbank novel swims into my mind:

'I know of no joy,' she airily began, 'greater than a cool white dress after the sweetness of confession.' 

An Armenian Christian lady gave me coffee and told me about life for Arabs in Jerusalem.

The internet let me down  by promising me a Latin Mass at the Franciscan church. Experience has taught me that when Mass in Latin is advertised it always turns out not to be in Latin but this was in Italian and in Latin and was exceptionally lovely. We sang:

Adeste fideles læti triumphantes, 

Venite, venite in Bethlehem.

Lunch involved turkey but not Christmas trimmings or pudding at the American Colony Hotel.  The American Colony predates the coming of the Jews to Jerusalem and has a relaxed, aristocratic air: a mixture of the London Ritz and the Levant. The food is good but not exceptional and not as good as the ambiance. There a Jewess, originally from Ilford, felt drawn to start a conversation with me and we had a wonderful conversation. She is a so-called Messianic Jew, who accepts Jesus as the Messiah and God. I ended up sitting with her women friends.

My Christmas dinner was in a kosher Mexican restaurant with a clever Jewish journalist friend with whom I was at college. We discussed Middle Eastern politics and college and pretty girls we knew in common like the very gorgeous Vanessa Feltz. He mentioned that Stephen Fry was "so funny at Cambridge, never funny afterwards". Glad I am not the only one who thinks this. We agreed Hugh Laurie is better, though not in the dire Jeeves and Wooster.

I think this has been the best Christmas of my life though not a carouse though fairly gluttonous. I chastely drank two glasses of wine with lunch and two with my dinner and went to be stone cold sober.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

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

Roses are reddish.

Violets are bluish.

If it wasn't for Christmas,

We'd all be Jewish.

Christmas card I once bought

A very happy day in the West Bank

I love Israel and love Jews but it is an enormous joy today to reach the West Bank, Arabs, a good, welcoming hotel in Bethlehem, the Shepherd, and to hear the sound of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer. There is a feeling of warm, chaotic humanity. Blessed are poor countries, certainly from my point of view as a visitor staying in a very comfortable hotel, though, actually, I did not choose this hotel and I usually prefer to put up in dives.

The Greek Orthodox monastery St. Elias on Mount Tabor, supposed site of the Transfiguration. 

I had an enchanting day which began on Mount Tabor where the Transfiguration happened, according to St Matthew. We stood outside the Greek Orthodox monastery, feeling like the souls of the dead waiting to be judged, knocked several times but received no answer. The nuns were breakfasting. Finally an elderly nun shouted to us in good Romanian, 

'Ask the Lord to give you patience' 

and after another five minutes the doors opened and we entered. Like most churches in the Holy Land it was not interesting from an architectural or historical view, but to think this is to miss the point. Location, location, location is the thing. And as well as location the monastery was pretty and it and its garden possessed an incomparable peace which comes from prayer and goodness.

A long journey into he West Bank and the Judean desert, the smallest desert in the world, then a surprise, this wonderful Orthodox monastery of Deir Hajla, near Jericho, founded in the fourth century. This monastery was ravishingly pretty indeed. It stands near the site of St. Gerasimus's cell and on the site where the Holy Family is said to have sheltered when fleeing to Egypt. Do I believe they fled to Egypt or that Herod massacred the innocents?

Orthodox monastery of Deir Hajla, near Jericho, in Judean desert.

Everyone knows the story of how St. Gerasimus tamed a lion by removing a thorn from its paw and taught it obedience. He is the patron saint of animals and one of those rather few saints who appeal to unbelievers (most saints do not and many were pretty difficult people - think of grumpy, choleric St. Jerome who is unconvincingly also said to have tamed lions).

Qumran.

Then the ruins of Qumran, the Essene centre and source of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have all read about the Dead Sea Scrolls but I never imagined I would ever one day visit Qumran. The ruins are not interesting in themselves but the view beside the Dead Sea, overhung by mountains is dramatic. More interesting though is the Dead Sea, where I floated. I stayed in, as advised, only ten minutes but I was wonderfully relaxed.

A place that I had not visited before because it was not interesting enough is Jericho which claims, along with Damascus Aleppo and Erbil (Irbil, Arbil) in Iraq, to be the oldest city in the world. All four cities were millennia old when Rome was forest.

Then the mountain in the desert where Jesus resisted the temptations of Satan, the generic psychopath, the Father of Lies. I should do the same. Underneath a man sold overpriced but delicious pomegranate juice and another had tethered a camel, brought from some other desert, to make a little money.

Bethlehem used to be a majority Christian town thirty years ago and now alas Christians are only 27%. The Christmas decorations are up for commercial more than any other reason. Christmas is the town's principal industry.

Yesterday I saw Nazareth and the Catholic church built on the place that St. Helen, the former barmaid, decided in the early 4th century was the scene of the Annunciation. No doubt local Judeo-Christians had preserved a tradition going back to the first half of the First Century on the matter and an ancient inscription has been found saying, 'Blessed is the family'. The church was built in the totalitarian architectural style of the mid-1960s yet is more impressive than one expects from that disastrous decade. 

An Orthodox church built in 1750 on the site of the spring where a legend, current among the Orthodox, says that the Annunciation happened. The priest told me through an interpreter that 'Israelis were very good for Christians'. 

Then another church that might be built on the site of St Joseph's workshop but probably, I assume, isn't. In the crypt, however, is a ritual bath carbon dated to the first century, the oldest in the Holy Land. This church was built in 1914. The Holy Land is not a good place for old churches. Too many churches were destroyed too many times. 

The long history of religious war continues to this day. Christians made up 20% of the population of the Middle East in 1900 but now only 2%. The million Christians who lived under Saddam in Iraq, for example, have fallen to at most 300,000 today. Christians are now leaving Egypt and Syria as well as the West Bank. Christians suffer in the Middle East because they are seen as sympathetic to the West, which Muslims rightly see is another word for Christendom, when in the West the links between the public culture and Christianity are being deliberately severed. 

I spent yesterday afternoon in Tiberias, a pretty, spotlessly clean and tidy, unexciting lakeside resort. The Sea of Galilee is the thing, not the town. it was the sabbath and the place was empty which reminded me of Sunday afternoons in the seaside resort of my boyhood, also a rather Jewish place. Boring, I reminded myself, is another word for peaceful. 

Yesterday I felt a sense of listlessness as I always did on Sunday afternoons in the 1970s but today was a wonderfully happy day and tomorrow I stand outside the Church of the Nativity, for midnight Christmas Mass. This church really is old, founded by St. Helen in the early fourth century, but, standing on the supposed site of the Virgin Birth its antiquity and its beauty (it has none) are again not the point.

“You can take possession of the whole world, but NOT of my wife!"

I am indebted to George Teodorescu for this incident from the tortured history of German-Italian relations during the Second World War.

“Il Duce protests against the conduct of German soldiers in Italy, especially the non-commissioned officers, who are presumptuous, quarrelsome, and drunken. Last night in Foggia two of them forced their way into the house of a man who was about to go to bed and said to him, “We have taken possession of France, Belgium, Poland and Holland. Tonight we are going to take possession of your wife.” To which the man replied “You can take possession of the whole world, but NOT of my wife! I haven’t any. I’m a bachelor.” In their disappointment, the broke all the furniture before they withdrew.”

Diary of Count Galeazzo Ciano (Italian foreign minister), entry of January 12, 1942

Jesus would “end up being lynched by Palestinians”

From Tuesday's Irish Times:

The Israeli embassy in Dublin has apologised and taken down a post on its Facebook page that said that if Mary and Jesus were alive today they would “probably end up being lynched in Bethlehem by hostile Palestinians”. 

By 3pm it had 20 “Likes”, though several comments expressed distaste for the post. Among them was one saying: “Have you no regard for honesty whatsoever? If Jesus Mary were alive today, they would be protesting against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, along with all the Palestinian Christians currently living in Bethlehem.”

Jesus would not be protesting against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, any more than he protested against the Roman occupation of Palestine. That was Barabbas. One can imagine Jews, Muslims and Christians hating Him, plus the abortion lobby, feminists, most of the Left, the American Right. He would hideously embarrass the Church of England hierarchy. His views on divorce, homosexuality, defence and capitalism and his predilection for the company of drunkards, gluttons and corrupt officials would outrage all the columnists - one can imagine it so easily. 

Thomas Carlyle imagined the Second Coming thus.

How the robin came to be on Christmas cards

How the robin came to be on Christmas cards. It sounds like the title of one of Kipling's Just So stories. In the beginning, oh best beloved...

I never asked myself why robins and Christmas were inextricably linked but just knew they were, until, when designing my company's e-Christmas card this Christmas, I found (stole, I suppose) a great picture of a robin sitting atop an apple on snowy ground and one of my Romanian colleagues asked, "What has that bird to do with Christmas?"  

That was when I asked myself the same question and this is the answer I found (isn't the internet a wonderful thing?)

Postage stamps were first invented in England in 1841 and in 1843 an Englishman invented Christmas cards. Since not long after that, Christmas cards in England have usually featured the robin redbreast, a bird whose bright red breast perhaps subconsciously suggests the red cloak of Father Christmas. There is an old legend that when Jesus was suffering on the cross the robin, whose breast was in those days brown in colour, flew to Jesus’ side and sang into his ear in order to comfort Him. As a result, the blood from Jesus’s wounds stained the robin's breast and thereafter all robins carry the mark of Christ's blood. However, the robin’s association with Christmas is more prosaic, purely secular and nothing to do with the resurrection or, come to that, Father Christmas. Postmen wore red uniforms in Victorian England and were therefore nicknamed "Robin"; the robin on the Christmas card is a visual pun referring to the postman delivering the card.

Psychopaths are motivated by envy

The psychopath, like everyone, is attracted to the qualities he has repressed in himself. Therefore, according to Melanie Klein, he is drawn to good people, whom he envies and wishes to embrace but also to harm, thus relieving his painful feelings of envy. In the same way, good people are sometimes attracted by evil ones, because evil people do the things good people do not dare even want to do. This is why stories about psychopaths sell more than stories about saints.

Envy is one of the psychopath's principal emotions. If the psychopath cannot possess good qualities himself he can devalue people he recognises as good, by insults or harming them, in some cases even by murder. Psychopaths envy everything, for evil is a vacuum, negation. Evil is a very real thing (read crime stories in the press or read some history) and, paradoxically, also nothing, a kind of black hole. 

Envy and pride, not greed or cruelty, are at the heart of evil.  Particularly, envy of another's spiritual good, which the Church has always considered one of the greatest of all sins, a sin against the Holy Spirit. The myth of the fall of Lucifer is accurate, understood in psychological terms.

'His [Othello's] life had a daily beauty in it which made mine ugly.' 

was the only explanation Iago gave for his crimes at the end of Othello. Some people think this a cop out on the part of Shakespeare. In fact, it is good psychology and good theology.

This is one reason why psychotherapy for psychopaths is dangerous (the psychotherapist can be in emotional and even physical danger). Another is the fact that psychotherapy may make the psychopath worse, not better, in the sense of being better able to understand himself and better able to achieve his ends. In any case, as Freud said, the patient needs a conscience for therapy to work. It only works if the subject wants to be a better person. ('How many psychotherapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to be changed.')

The evil eye, which has always been feared in traditional societies, is supposed to be motivated by envy and inflict bad luck. It is interesting that evil people, or at any rate psychopaths, do stare in a remarkably strange way.

Ira Einhorn, environmentalist, psychopath and murderer

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors murderers, who tortured and killed children

For more about the evil eye, click here.

Karl Marx writes about the Satanic urge to destroy the world

Karl Marx's apparent admiration for Satan in his juvenile poems (this link repays reading) seems revealing. Like Milton, he was of the devil's party without knowing it. Or rather perhaps, unlike Milton, he did know it very well.

Perhaps Marx was a psychopath. Someone on the net has argued the case interestingly here. Reading it one sees parallels with the young Hitler, another bohemian who also lacked the German work ethic, although Hitler was much more charming, which is another psychopathic trait. 

Lines from Marx's poems, which he puts into the mouths of demons, include:

Worlds I would destroy forever,

Since I can create no world;

Since my call they notice never …

Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,

Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.

Every word of mine is fire and action.My breast is equal to that of the Creator.

…Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,

Made to be the foul-calendars of Time and Space,

Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,

So that there shall be something to ruin …

If there is a something which devours,

I'll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins-

The world which bulks between me and the Abyss

I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality:

Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,

And then sink down to utter nothingness,

Perished, with no existence — that would be really living!

Edward Norman on modern religion

Time to repost some wonderfully good quotations from the great Edward Norman, my favourite living historian and religious commentator. I wish I had met him for more than a quarter of an hour.

"The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches. Indeed the neo-Puritanism of the times promotes welfare considerations as exclusively important."

"Extraordinarily enough, the leaders of the Church manage to identify the present welfare idealism - which is based in Humanist materialism - as fundamental Christianity, an application of the love of neighbour enjoined by Christ. But preoccupation with material welfare, whatever higher considerations may become attached to it, cultivates worldliness, and is an enemy of authentic faith."

"The Churches themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism - the `caring society - as the very essence of Christianity. But it is actually quite pagan, concentrating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an academic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement."

"Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums."

Str. Lipscani, my manor

Str. Lipscani, my manor, in 1942. It was a much more disreputable place, full of shabby shops which sold useful articles cheaply, when I moved in in 2000. The new Old Town was invented suddenly around 2008 just in time for the crisis but, I grudgingly concede, makes people happier than the slum I loved. They had much better music in Bucharest in 1942 than now, though the 1942 hits are still popular, one of the many ways in which this wonderful city is more civilised than other European capitals.

Books read and films seen this year of grace 2012

The High Window*, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye*, Raymond Chandler
Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor 
Defying Hitler, Sebastian Hafner
Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-45, Roger Moorehouse
This Business of Living: Diaries 1925-50*, Cesare Pavese
Relapse into Bondage, Alexandru Cretianu
Friends and Heroes*, Olivia Manning
Waugh in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh - I reviewed it here

As You Like It*, William Shakespeare
History of the Roumanians*, R.W.Seton-Watson 
A History of Romania, Kurt Treptow

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Victor Sebestyen

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
In Ethiopia with a Mule, Dervla Murphy - I reviewed it here
Tippu Tip: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar and Central Africa, Heinrich Brode
First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, Ryszard Kapuscinski - I reviewed it here
Here is New York, E. B. White
The Psychopath's Bible*, Christopher Hyatt
Remote People, Evelyn Waugh 

The Diary of Terror: Ethiopia 1974-1991, Dawit Shifaw 
Solitude*, Anthony Storr
Pagans and Christians Robin Lane Fox - I reviewed it here
The Shadow of the Sword. Tom Holland - I reviewed it here.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon.
The Early Church*, Henry Chadwick

Bold means I loved it. An asterisk means I have read it before. 

What a masculine, middle-aged list. I am even reading military history, which is the last refuge of the middle-aged male. In fact I tried Beevor's Stalingrad on a recommendation from an aesthete friend but it bored and repelled me. Gibbon though is great.

I read Chandler for the prose style not for the plot, though he is a good storyteller. I thought when 14 that The Long Goodbye was too long and too much trying to be a proper novel. Now I absolutely loved it except the ending with the silly twist which I merely skimmed without attempting to understand it.

Karen Armstrong on Muhammad is not worth reading as she does not mention that the evidence for her subject's life is extremely late indeed (two centuries after the event).

Hafner's book, to my great surprise, an account of his uneventful life in Berlin in 1933, found among his papers and published ten years ago, is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully written and deeply horrifying because of the sheer normality of his life as he describes it in Berlin in 1933 and the ease and rapidity with which Germans accepted Nazism and Nazi indoctrination. I hope it becomes a classic and is read in a hundred years' time as it deserves to be. People follow like sheep. I saw a somewhat faint parallel with another totalitarian ideology with a whiff of sulphur, political correctness, which has made cowards of us all in recent years. 



The Moorehouse book is not particularly well written or strikingly insightful, but it efficiently covers the ground. The story of Stella Kübler, the beautiful blonde Jewess who was used by the Nazis as bait to uncover Jews hiding in Berlin, chilled my blood. She was told that, by her collaborating, her parents would be saved, but unsurprisingly they were sent to the gas chambers anyway. She herself lived to an old age before she committed suicide. One solitary Jew was permitted to survive in the Jewish cemetery burying Jews according to Jewish practice. He was still alive when the Russians came. 

This is what a friend of mine calls Hitler porn but my excuse is that I know very little about German domestic history during the Nazi period, the subject is important and I am interested in biographies of cities, writing as I am one a book on Bucharest. 

Olivia Manning's third volume in the Balkan trilogy, set in Greece, which I reread while spending the weekend in Athens and Hydra, inclines me to think that the reason I like the first two so much is because of my love of and interest in Romania not Manning's writing. She does not create characters. Her characters are clearly drawn from life in many cases and therefore do not come alive. It is the invented ones like Yaki who live. 

Seton-Watson is magisterial and should be read by all foreigners who speak English in Romania. I am ashamed that I had only skimmed it before. I had never opened Treptow, which the author gave me in 1999, before he went inside, and had assumed it would be a facile popularisation but, despite the numerous mistakes and misspellings, it was a more vivid, condensed account than Seton-Watson and taught me rather a lot. Dennis Deletant tells me it was written by a  group of Romanian historians not by Treptow and completed very hurriedly - hence the mistakes and typos - so that Adrian Nastase, when he was Foreign Minister,  had copies to give away when he visited the USA.

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen is journalism rather than history, but very interesting.

I read Here is New York, by E. B. White, because Johann Hari tweeted that it was the best essay of all time. It is not but it is very well written and might inspire me to write about Bucharest if I am lucky. But reading Remote People by Evelyn Waugh immediately after Here is New York makes Waugh's prose seem even more dazzling than usual. White is a very good stylist whom Waugh effortlessly outdoes. Although perhaps I am biassed as I 'get' English writers so much better than American ones. Americans speak our language but do not think like we do. And they write in English but not in the setting of the English class system, which always makes reading them seem eerie.

The Psychopath's Bible is a reminder that psychopaths, though amoral or rather immoral, have values they believe in, which they cannot be argued out of - might is right, survival of the fittest, victims want to be victims, selfishness is good, the ideas of Ayn Rand. A reminder that morality, like art, is inspired by love not logic.

'Tom' Holland went to my college years after me and took a Double First in Classics and History and has many books to his credit. I try not to be jealous, but he cannot write.

I haven't decided whether I love Gibbon yet - reading a book on a kindle makes love more difficult, for some reason - but I am enjoying him, though his paganism and contempt for the early church disgust me. He is a very good historian indeed. Cardinal Newman said, "It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon."  

Four novels, which is much better than my usual score, although I am not sure the two Raymond Chandler thrillers really count.

Films seen

Six films is also much better than my normal score, which is none. None were any good, except In A Better World. Albert Nobbs was dull, pleasant but in the end a waste of time - please read George Moore's wonderful short story instead. George Moore is an unjustly neglected genius (like me).

The Blue Dahlia (1947)*
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Albert Nobbs (2011)
In a Better World (2011)
Thank you for Smoking (2005)
Goodbye, Lenin (2003)

Christendom and social democracy

 “Social democracy may be defined as an arrangement under which we all largely cease to be responsible for our own behaviour and in return become responsible for everybody else’s. The temptations which this way of doing things offers to synthetic anger, fraudulent penitence, all other forms of hypocrisy and the sheer evasion of duty are infinitely too great for fallen man.”  

T.E. Utley

The  Catholic social theory of the common good is the fruit of the continental mind which is dirigiste, when in fact a small state should be near the heart of Christian social thinking. The modern anti-discrimination ideology and welfare considerations have taken the place in Western European culture formerly occupied by religion and spiritual values. 

Dr. Martin Israel, a Jew who was a leading pathologist before becoming an Anglican priest and mystical writer, goes much further. He says:

Antichrist is not a demonic figure typified in our own century by the person of a fascist or communist dictator or one of his henchmen....Antichrist reveals himself much more subtly and plausibly than this. He appears as an outwardly enlightened man of apparent good nature and well-disposed to his fellows, who takes charge of the world and usurps the place of God. He organises the world into the form of an advanced welfare state and makes everyone happy provided they bow down and worship him. All who co-operate with him live pleasant, uneventful lives, have plenty of possessions, and strive for the maintenance of their present status. Their inner eye is no longer lifted up to the Figure on the cross, who is the way, the truth and the life in God. Therefore they are not themselves transformed. They remain comfortable, complacent people, selfish and blind to the greater world, living like intelligent animals. They do not respond to the existential problems of life until they disappear, like the followers of Korah, swallowed up by the earth that splits and opens to receive their mortal bodies (Numbers 16:31). This is the way of Antichrist, that great deceiver, who promises us all the kingdoms of the world in their glory if we will only fall down and do him homage (Matthew 4:9).

In fact Antichrist assumes many guises and some limited aspects of social democracy are positive.

I do not want the poor to go to the wall or the welfare state, which in America is used as a term of abuse, abolished. The British National Health Service will probably become unworkable but it is a fine example in some ways of social democracy, because in England it really does have great popular support - it is an example of social solidarity as well as of big government. As Nigel Lawson said, it is the British religion, which is making my point for me. Its greatest achievement is to make doctors work for much less than they would under a private system and keep the costs of drugs down far below what they cost in the United States. 

However the big state requires big money, which requires a baby boom, at a time when affluence and opportunities at work for women are reducing the birth rate to disastrous levels. This will bring about a catastrophe at some point, in some form not at present foreseeable. I am reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and wonder how many centuries Western civilisation has left. At the moment, we are still where Gibbon starts, with the wise and beneficent philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius and

‎"the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous." 

Or is this nonsense, on stilts? British, French, German, etc culture is strong enough to absorb almost any number of immigrants. Can civilisation carry on with different races in Europe and with a loss of religious belief by Christians or loss of belief in their tradition and culture by Europeans? Yes probably but it will be a new story, not the continuation of the old one. I trust we shall not have something like the  fall of Rome but whatever happens, like the fall of Rome, will be the end of a very old story and the start of a new one.

Hilaire Belloc said this on the subject:

I have never said that the Church was necessarily European. The Church will last for ever, and, on this earth, until the end of the world; and our remote descendants may find its chief membership to have passed to Africans or Asiatics in some civilisation yet unborn. What I have said is that the European thing is essentially a Catholic thing, and that European values would disappear with the disappearance of Catholicism.