The myth of Britain’s decline

Robert Tombs, who supervised me at university, has written a timely piece on Brexit and declinism entitled

The myth of Britain’s decline

 with the encouraging sub-headline

Our glory days are not over – they’re in full swing

I quote him.

Who would deny that Britain is no longer the great power it once was? Well, speaking as a historian, I would. Declinism is at best a distortion of reality, and

Quotations

They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one's self,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking--
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.

A.H. Clough

White marble and white supremacy

In a recent article, Professor Sarah Bond, of the University of Iowa, reminds us that classical statues were painted in lifelike colour (they must have resemble Madame Tussaud's) and argues that "the equation of white marble with beauty" contributes to "white supremacist ideas today". 

“The assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region - [provides] further ammunition for white supremacists today, including groups like Identity Europa, who use classical statuary as a symbol of white male superiority.”

This is not just another crazy America story but an example of a very important trend in current thinking. It's connected to the reasons why many clever Americans thought Donald Trump, by extolling the West in his Warsaw speech, was racist.

Is the French revolution responsible for most of the world's problems today?

'For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.' Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

An academic called Dr Cliff Arnall has discovered that July 14 is the day when we English feel happiest each year. 

I love the balmy days of July in Bucharest, despite the merciless heat, but July 14th is Bastille Day and not a day on which a conservative can rejoice.

I have always been one of those who blames most of the world's problems on the 1914-18 War but I start to think Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn may be right. 

Quotations

It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely, well, and justly without living pleasurably. Epicurus


The presence of oceans on much of the earth's surface makes it impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony. John Mearsheimer

Quotations

'The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible.' Camille Paglia

'A sexy woman can have almost any man she wants. And a rich guy can have almost any woman he wants.' Oliver Markus

Posted on Facebook by the late Peter Risdon

How much I wish he were here to comment on the fall of Mosul on Facebook, even though I am sure I would completely disagree with him - as I always did on the Middle East.

The language of the 21st century

"Globally, people now spend nearly four times as much time accessing the Internet from mobile devices as they do from desktops. 'Computers' are on their way to becoming an anachronism rarely seen outside of the office. I’d argue that even the way we think is increasingly mobile in nature: for better or worse, small visual bites have replaced big chunks of text as the language of the 21st century."
Ryan Holmes

5 quotations

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge."
Daniel Boorstin

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
Sir Thomas Browne

Europe’s Last Battle

Here is a fascinating account of Georgians and Germans fighting in Holland, just before and after the Second World War ended. The Georgians were sent back to Stalin, despite their hopes of finding safety in the West by killing Germans.

More quotations from Lord Salisbury

                                                      

The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

Letter to Lord Lytton (25 May 1877), quoted in Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume II, p. 145

...the splitting up of mankind into a multitude of infinitesimal governments, in accordance with their actual differences of dialect or their presumed differences of race, would be to undo the work of civilisation and renounce all the benefits which the slow and painful process of consolidation has procured for mankind...It is the agglomeration and not the comminution of states to which civilisation is constantly tending; it is the fusion and not the isolation of races by which the physical and moral excellence of the species is advanced. There are races, as there are trees, which cannot stand erect by themselves, and which, if their growth is not hindered by artificial constraints, are all the healthier for twining round some robuster stem.

Bentley's Quarterly Review, 1, (1859), p. 22

Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.

Quarterly Review, 110, 1861, p. 281

Quotations from Lord Salisbury

[For Salisbury's thoughts on Romania, click here.]

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

Letter to Lord Lytton (15 June 1877)

After all, the great characteristic of this country is that it is a free country, and by a free country I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like. That is not my notion of freedom.

Quotations

Bror Duktig‏ @nijinskyforever
Lefties want "Day of Rage" "Shut down London" "Bring down the Government" But when little girls are blown to pieces - it's love and flowers


How could people feel any affection for a system that created the gulag? Alexievich says this ignores the unique atmosphere of the late Soviet period, a time of equality, deep friendships and love of literature. “Despite the poverty, life was freer,” she says. “Friends

The revolution turned out, when it came, to be Islamist

"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society." Antonio Gramsci

The revolution that Marxists expected for so long has turned out, when it came, to be Islamist. 

What Marxism and Islamism have in common, of course, is nihilism.

Just as God sublimely says 'I am Who am', meaning He is life itself, evil is essentially destruction. Evil is a very real thing but wholly negative, death not life. 

The best political quotes from the last three or four days

Mark Steyn:
The reality of what is happening in Britain and Europe is that this problem was imported and that, until you stop importing it, you're going to have more of it.

Mark Tapson:
European leaders on climate change: the world must act NOW.
European leaders on terrorism: Hey, that's life in the big city. Everybody carry on as before.

Eric Kraus:

Trump is a godsend in the most unexpected form imaginable. It matters not if he is right or wrong (sometimes one, sometimes the other) but that he disrupts the idiot consensus.

Falling birth rates mean the end of the West - Lord Sacks

“Europe is going to die because of this because Europe can only maintain its population by unprecedented levels of immigration.

“Now those could be integrated into Europe but they won’t be integrated into Europe because when a culture loses its memory it loses its identity and when a culture loses its identity there’s nothing left for people to integrate into."

Patriotism, the love that dare not speak its name

'Patriotism...is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity and increases his arrogance and conceit.' Emma Goldman. 

She was a Communist but I wonder how many British people nowadays who are not Communists (so excluding Jeremy Corbyn) also think patriotism a bad thing.

It shows you how the Communists have succeeded to a very large extent. Many, perhaps most, of their ideas have triumphed. Sexual equality; free love, including for homosexuals; contraception; abortion; internationalism; the end of colonialism; racial equality; confiscation of property from the rich; atheism; materialism; the general idea that tradition is oppressive. 

The fascists, by contrast, lost the battle of ideas comprehensively. 

De Gaulle would have opposed immigration and the modern EU

I have always been a Gaullist. The General wanted a "Europe des nations" and knew England would not be suitable to join the Common Market (E.E.C.) He strongly opposed Arab immigration into metropolitan France. I imagine if he were alive and politically active today his political causes would be dismantling the modern EU and opposing further immigration.

I wonder had he come to power a year or two sooner whether the EEC would ever have come into existence. Had it not this might have saved Europe a vast amount of pain and wasted energy.

De Gaulle, of course, began his memoirs with the very stirring words

Labour since 1900 has achieved nothing really

The British Labour Party is essentially a 20th century (wrong) answer to a 19th century problem.

Labour was always a mistake. The Liberals were much more radical, much more intelligent and would have fought the 1915 general election on land nationalisation. Labour, at least for a long time, didn't have many ideas, till the Webbs taught them nationalisation. They existed originally to get working class trade unionists into the House.

The first Labour government's one memorable achievement was adding the words 'patriotism is not enough' to the statue of Nurse Cavell. The second Labour government's big achievement was the Lido in Hyde Park. At least the latter was useful. Later Labour governments had only one important positive achievement. They raised the perception and self-perception of the working class.

But this would have happened anyway, without Labour.

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of fascism

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre not of communism, as Marx proclaimed in 1848, but of fascism or the far right. 

Spectre is the right word, for spectres are imaginary and the threat of fascism is imaginary, just as the threat of communism was in 1848

But, as in 1848, it's a fear of the people by their rulers.

In case you hadn't noticed, the left is nowadays terrified of the workers. Needlessly, as the workers are brainwashed too.

I do not think it is especially useful to call Islamists fascists as they are different in quite a few ways from Mussolini's movement, but if they are fascists then they are a fascist threat that is certainly not imaginary.

Steve Bannon may have been right when he said,

I think we are in a crisis of the underpinnings of capitalism and on top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.