Charlie Dean Archives
Published Sep 22, 2013Three Canadian servicemen visiting London discuss the experiences of Britain that they have been writing home to loved ones about.
Trivia:
This film was specifically produced for Canadian audiences, in order to boost the relationship between the two countries, although it did receive distribution in other countries as well.Letter from Britain and Ulster are the only two films in the British Council Film Collection to feature Northern Ireland. It is also unusual in that it features real servicemen, rather than actors.
The poster seen on the Underground train at 06:00 was part of the government-sponsored “Billy Brown of London Town” series.
Letter from Britain was filmed no earlier than March 1945, as this is when the “Merchant Navy” class steam train Elders Fyffes — seen at 04:40 — was built.
Several ships are seen around Londonderry in Letter from Britain. These include HMCS Glace Bay, HMS Launceston Castle, HMS Loch Katrine, HMCS Penetang, and HMCS Petrolia. By comparing convoy listings, it can be deduced that these scenes were filmed around 15 March, 1945.
The song sung by “Paddy” at 13:05 is entitled “If You Ever Go To Ireland”, written by Art Noel. The song sung by the solider around 14:45 is an Irish ballad called “The Rose of Tralee”. The piece sung in the pub around 15:40 is “My Gal’s a Corker”.
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July 1, 2024
Letter from Britain / Canadian Soldiers (1945) – British Council Film Collection
June 29, 2024
Oh no! The filthy proles are getting too many calories! Let’s re-impose rationing!
Tim Worstall suggests that the regular “viewing with alarm” thumbsuckers about purchased meals having “too many calories” are actually an indication of a strong desire by the great and the good to stick their regulatory noses into the lives of ordinary people:
“Indian take away in Farrer Park” by Kai Hendry is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
This headline is, of course, wrong.
Some takeaway meals contain more calories than daily limit, UK study finds
There is no daily limit. We do not have laws stating how much food we are allowed to eat. Of course, there are those who want there to be such laws but there aren’t, as yet. What there is is a series of recommendations about the limits we should impose upon ourselves:
Some takeaway meals contain more calories in one sitting than someone is advised to consume in an entire day, a study of British eating habits has revealed.
That’s better.
Cafes, fast-food outlets, restaurants, bakeries, pubs and supermarkets are fuelling the UK’s obesity crisis because so many meals they sell contain dangerously large numbers of calories, it found.
That’s not better. Because a plate of food containing a lot of calories is not a danger. Eating many of them might be but that the average household can get a gutbuster for some trivial portion of household earnings is a glory of modern civilisation, the very proof we require that we’re all as rich as Croesus.
And this is actually true too. That we are gloriously rich and it’s our food supply that proves this. As Brad Delong likes to point out back 200 years (yes, about right, 1820s is as it was really changing but 300 years would be better) it took a full day’s work to be able to gain 2,000 calories a day for a day labourer. There are 800 million out there still living at that standard of living. We can buy 2,000 calories — if we go boring stodge — for 30 minutes work now.
By history and by certain geographies we are foully rich these days. Which is the complaint of the wowsers of course. They’re a revival of the puritans and their sumptuary laws. How dare it be true that people fill their bellies with food they actually like?
Six out of 10 takeaway meals contain more than the 600-calorie maximum that the government recommends people should stick to for lunch and dinner in order to not gain weight, according to the research, which was carried out by the social innovation agency Nesta.
One in three contain at least 1,200 calories – double the recommended limit.
And? So, folk can buy lots of food for not much money. This is the very thing that makes having a civilisation possible — cheap food. My wife and I do indeed partake of an Indian occasionally — and find the takeout portions rather large. So, we have one amount for lunch or dinner and we’ve a refrigerator in which to keep the excess for a supper or snack another day. This is not beyond the wit of man to organise.
We don’t order in food very often, but when we do we usually manage to get both dinner on the night and lunch on the morrow from a typical order. If the nosey parkers have their way, they’d limit what we were allowed to buy — for our own good, of course — so we’d almost certainly still pay the same amount for less food. Such a deal!
Underground, Tube, Subway or Metro?
Jago Hazzard
Published Mar 15, 2024Why do we have so many terms for the same thing?
[NR: So far as I know, Toronto’s subway system has always been called “the subway”, while Montreal’s system is “le Métro“. Goodness knows what those barbarians in New York City might have called their below-ground railway systems over the years …]
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June 27, 2024
The Toronto Star wants Ontario to adopt Scottish booze regulation (but ignore the failure)
The Toronto Star always loves a good moral crusade, and if it also happens to fly in the face of whatever Premier Ford wants to do, then so much the better:
The Toronto Star is looking to Scotland to teach it how to reduce alcohol-related deaths. In an article titled “How Scotland started to kick its alcohol problem — and what Ontario could learn from it“, it pushes back on plans to liberalise Ontario’s state monopoly on alcohol retail, saying:
Ontario officials say they are fulfilling a 2018 election promise to increase “choice and convenience for shoppers and support Ontario retailers, domestic producers and workers in the alcohol industry”.
But Scotland has cut alcohol-related hospital admissions by 40 per cent and deaths by almost half. While in Ontario, alcohol-related admissions have risen by a third and deaths by almost half, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.
How did Scotland supposedly achieve this public health miracle?
The key part of Scotland’s landmark policy was aimed at reducing drinking by introducing minimum unit prices to make drinking more expensive.,/p>
Ontario already has minimum pricing and Scotland doesn’t have a state alcohol monopoly, so it is not obvious what lessons Ontarians are supposed to be learning, but put that to one side for a moment and consider the main claim.
Anyone who has been following events in Scotland knows that alcohol-specific deaths have risen since minimum pricing was introduced in 2018 and have generally risen since 2012 following a significant downturn in the years prior.
It is that drop between 2006 and 2012 that the Toronto Star must be referring to when it claims that deaths fell by “almost half” (actually a third). But the Scottish government didn’t pass any anti-alcohol legislation in those six years and it certainly didn’t have minimum pricing. The newspaper mentions that the drink-drive limit was cut, but that didn’t happen until 2014 and the evidence is clear that it had no effect on road accidents.
Since the Toronto Star doesn’t mention when the decline in alcohol-specific deaths took place, it is leading its readers to believe that it coincided with the introduction of minimum pricing and the lowering of the drink-drive limit. I call that lying.
It is strangely fitting that Canadians are being lied to about the “success” of Scotland’s alcohol strategy since the Scottish public were conned into accepting minimum pricing, in part, on the basis of lies told about the “success” of minimum pricing in Canada. The neo-temperance academic Tim Stockwell, who is quoted in the Star article, published a series of studies in the 2010s making some absurd claims about minimum pricing that were parroted by campaigners in the UK.
June 26, 2024
Lord Balfour
Arthur Lord Balfour, Conservative Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, is perhaps best known for the Balfour Declaration issued during World War 1 that established the formal goal of an independent homeland for the Jews in the Holy Land. Who was he? Barbara Kay’s essay originally published in the Dorchester Review was recently reposted at Woke Watch Canada:
“Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC, Prime Minister and Philosopher” portrait in oil by Philip de László, 1914.
From the Trinity College collection via Wikimedia Commons.
Why was the aristocrat Lord Balfour, the social antithesis of this humble Jew from the Pale of Russia, so taken with Weizmann’s vision that he was willing to expend political capital and exert so much effort to see it realized? Who was Balfour? What was he?
Arthur James Balfour was born at his family seat, Whittingehame, in East Lothian, the “granary of Scotland”. A forebear had made a fortune in India in military materials, so he was financially secure for life, and socially connected at the highest levels.
Having lost his father when he was 7, Balfour was lucky in his mother, a strong-willed and educated woman who, according to Mrs Dugdale, inculcated the idea of duty as “the uncompromising foundation of his character”. He attended Eton and Cambridge, where he was described by a friend as “a man of unusual philosophy and metaphysics”, who could hold his own with the Dons (professors), “some of them men of undoubted genius”. He was devoted to his extended family, and much beloved by his nieces and nephews.
In his essay “Arthur Balfour: a Fatal Charm”1 cultural critic Ferdinand Mount cites “nonchalance” as Balfour’s defining trait. Legendarily indolent, he rarely rose before 11 a.m., claimed never to read newspapers, and disdained the ritual schmoozing of fellow backbenchers expected by his peers in the Members’ Smoking Room. Mount says he was “indifferent to what his colleagues, the public or posterity thought of him or his policies”.
This loftiness — echoed in his unusual physical height — was perceived as admirable or maddening according to the observer and circumstances. Churchill said of him: “He was quite fearless. When they took him to the Front to see the war, he admired the bursting shells blandly through his pince-nez. There was in fact no way of getting to him.”
His self-sufficiency was no act. Sports-mad, he skipped lunch with the Kaiser to watch the Eton and Harrow cricket match, and when in Scotland might play two full rounds of golf a day (his handicap of 10 was better than P. G. Wodehouse and about the same as thriller writer Ian Fleming’s).
Balfour sounds from my description so far as if he was something of a playboy, but that is a very partial portrait. He was also known as “Bloody Balfour” for his readiness to endorse police action and his apparent indifference to their cost.
The Irish loathed him. In 1887 he became personal secretary for Ireland under his uncle, Lord Salisbury, just in time to enforce the Coercion Act against the volatile Irish Land League. Indeed, Balfour’s parliamentary critic William O’Brien saw him as a man who harboured a “lust for slaughter with a eunuchized imagination” who took “a strange pleasure in mere purposeless human suffering, which imparted a delicious excitement to his languid life”.
One hopes this accusation of actual sadism is an exaggeration of Balfour’s indubitable detachment. Yet indifference to human life is certainly not an uncommon charge laid against intellectuals for whom ideas loom larger in their claims to attention than the fate of those beyond their particular tribes.
For balance, we have Barbara Tuchman’s assessment:
Balfour had a capacious and philosophical mind. Words to describe him by contemporaries are often “charm” and “cynicism”. He had a profound and philosophic mind, he was lazy, imperturbable in any fracas, shunned detail, left facts to subordinates, played tennis whenever possible, but pursued his principles of statecraft with every art of politics under the command of a superb intelligence.
Fortunately for his temperament, Balfour’s life circumstances had landed him at the centre of a genuinely intellectual circle. His brothers in-law, for example, were Lord Rayleigh, who became head of the Cambridge Laboratory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher who with his wife Elaine Balfour founded Newnham College.
Politically, Balfour enjoyed both dramatic success and dramatic failure. He led the Unionist Party longer than anyone before him since Pitt the Younger. And he was a minister longer than anyone else in the 20th century, including Winston Churchill. Balfour was the only Unionist who was invited to join Asquith’s first war cabinet, and continued as foreign secretary after the coup that brought Lloyd George to power.
As Churchill put it: “He passed from one cabinet to the other, from the prime minister who was his champion to the prime minister who had been his most severe critic, like a powerful, graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a rather muddy street”.
One of Balfour’s teachers at Eton described him as “fearless, resolved and negligently great”. On the other hand, Mount tells us, “indecisiveness” was his bane. He would stand paralyzed in the mezzanine of his London home agonizing over which of the matching staircases to descend by. He could love — the great love of his life died after an unreasonably long engagement — but, allegedly too staggered by the loss of his almost-fiancée, he never married.2 He could not be pinned down politically on many issues, a matter of great frustration to his colleagues, and this cost him dearly. As Mount notes, his charm was indisputable, “but more than charm he would not give” and “in the end, the charm is all that remains.”
Balfour fought three general elections as party leader and lost them all. His premiership lasted less than four years and ended in a Liberal landslide in 2006, a great electoral humiliation in making him the only prime minister in the 20th century to lose his own seat. He did not seem greatly to repine at the rejection, though, and it is thanks to the loss that he had time to further his education on the Zionist movement.
1. Mount, Ferdinand, English Voices (2016), pp 358 ff.
2. One suspects that even if May Lyttleton had lived, Balfour would have avoided marrying her on some pretext or other. There is no evidence that Balfour was a closeted homosexual, but he may have been asexual. He enjoyed an “amitié amoureuse” with (married) Mary Elcho for 30 years involving little or nothing in the way of sex, after which she wrote to him, “I’ll give you this much, tho, for although you have only loved me little, yet I must admit you have loved me long”.
Why the Allies Lost The Battle of France
Real Time History
Published Mar 1, 2024In May 1940, Nazi Germany attacks in the West. The Allied armies of France, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands have more men, guns, and tanks than the Germans do – and the French army is considered the best in the world. But in just six weeks, German forces shock the world and smash the Allies. So how did Germany win so convincingly, so fast?
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June 25, 2024
The ebbing tide of Corbynism
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill finds the humour in the staggering collapse of the Corbynist wing of the British Labour Party, from being tantalizingly close to forming a government to today’s political knife-fight for a single seat in North London:
Jeremy Corbyn, then-leader of the Labour Party speaking at a rally in Hayfield, Peak District, in 2018.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.
Schadenfreude is an unbecoming emotion, I know. But if you think I am not going to derive at least fleeting pleasure from the fact that the Corbynista movement went from being on the cusp of government to fighting tooth and nail to hold on to one poxy constituency in north London, then you are off your rocker. We must all find mirth wherever we can in this drabbest of elections. And I find mine in the staggering contraction of Corbynism, the almost total collapse of this cause that was once so beloved of every trustafarian Trot, Glasto wanker and they / them fruitloop.
It’s nearly too funny for words. Five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn and his crew were eyeing up Downing Street. They were in the running to run the country. Now they’re entirely concentrated in Islington North. Corbyn once commanded vast crowds of affluent youths at Glastonbury, basking in their posh chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!”. He had whole armies of time-rich tweeters who put their expensive education to good use by barking at us “gammon” about how “Jez” was “the absolute boy”. Now he can just about rustle up a few score political anoraks to go canvassing for him in a little bit of north London. It would require a heart of stone not to laugh.
Much has changed for “Jez” in the past five years. He was leader of the Labour Party back then. Now he isn’t even a member of the Labour Party. He was suspended in 2020 after he said the scale of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem under his leadership from 2015 to 2020 had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons“. Then he was officially expelled this year after he announced his intention to stand as an independent in Islington North, the constituency he represented for Labour since 1983. The man who wanted to be PM is now fighting for his life to remain an MP. We’ve gone from “socialism in one country” to “socialism in one constituency”.
Die-hard Corbynistas are flocking to Islington North as if it were the Paris Commune under attack from Versailles. They’re beating the streets to plead with constituents to return the absolute boy to parliament in order that socialism might yet live. The list of starry names Corbyn has dragooned to his door-knocking cause reads like a Sky News producer’s rolodex of wankers. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, anyone? Yes, I’m sure her post-truth bollocks about “all white people [having] white privilege” will go down a treat among the white working classes on the council estates of Archway.
There’s Grace Blakeley, too, a privately educated flapper-girl socialist who thinks flouncing out of a book festival is “collective action“. That’s how she described her decision to withdraw from the Hay Festival over its receipt of funds from the investment management firm, Baillie Gifford. Tweeting “I’ve decided not to go to Hay” is the well-heeled millennial’s Battle of Orgreave. Perhaps Ms Blakeley will compare her class-war wounds with those of some old Irish fella she meets in a pub in Holloway when she’s out electioneering for the boy.
“Nigel Farage’s sin […] was to tell the truth which our rulers and their bought, sycophantic media are desperate to hide from us”
As the British general election rumbles into its final days, most media outlets reacted very strongly to Nigel Farage’s willingness to break with the narrative over the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war:
Nigel Farage has really got the elites and their prostitute mainstream media panicking, this time by being the only politician who dares tell the truth about the origins of the Russia-Ukraine war.
First let me stress that I am not condoning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But Putin has made it very clear for at least the last 15 years that he saw Ukraine and Georgia, which both have long borders with Russia, joining Nato as an existential threat to his country and warned “not an inch eastwards”.
The West arrogantly ignored Putin’s warnings. That was dumb.
At a conference in April 2008, where Putin was invited to address Nato leaders, he warned that inviting Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato, and thus parking Nato troops and missiles directly on Russia’s borders, would be seen as an existential threat to Russia’s security. This was even reported in the BBC’s in-house rag, the Guardian, on April 4 2008: “The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, today repeated his warning that Moscow would view any attempt to expand Nato to its borders as a ‘direct threat'”.
In December 2021, Putin yet again warned the West that allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato would be unacceptable, in the first minute of this three-minute video. In this video Putin (sensibly in my opinion) asks whether the US would allow Russian troops and missiles to be positioned along its borders with Canada or Mexico and reiterates his “not an inch eastwards” threat.
Yet in January 2022, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining Nato and on Nato troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue Nato membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.
The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.
Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened “retaliatory measures” if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.
“Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of Nato’s open door”, Blinken said, adding: “There is no change. There will be no change.”
QotD: Progress and decline
The past has always interested me more than the future. This backward-looking tendency has only been reinforced by reaching, somewhat unexpectedly, the age of 70. I can’t say that I don’t feel my age because I don’t know what feeling any particular age is like — but one repeatedly hears that 60 is the new 40, 70 is the new 50, and so on; certainly, the human aging process has slowed since I was born. When I look at photos of people who were 50 in the year of my birth, 1949, they look much older and more worn-out than do 50-year-olds now; and if I had lived only to my life expectancy at birth, I would be dead these last four years.
So progress must have occurred in the intervening time, despite the pessimism that infects those who, like me, are of retrospective temperament and hypersensitive to deterioration. It is not hard to enumerate many things that have improved. They relate principally, but not only, to material conditions. My best friend when I was very young was one of the last children in Britain to suffer from polio, which paralyzed him from the waist down. The quickest form of written communication was then the telegram, and anything other than local telephone calls had to go through an operator. To call across the Atlantic required a reservation and was ferociously expensive; the resultant conversation always seemed to take place during a violent storm. In England, the food was generally disgusting, and meals were to be endured as a regrettable necessity instead of enjoyed (it puzzles me still how people could have cooked so badly). Cars broke down frequently, and every November, pollution produced fogs so thick that you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face (I loved them). Rationing continued for eight years after the war, and disused bomb shelters, present in every park, were where illicit sexual fumbles and smoking took place. Incidentally, for an adult male not to smoke was unusual (75 percent did so); we must have lived in a perpetual fog of foul-smelling tobacco, to judge by the distaste caused by even a single lit cigarette in these virtuous times. Poverty, as raw necessity, still existed. Murderers were sometimes hanged — as well as, more rarely, the innocent. Overt racial prejudice was, if not quite the norm, certainly prevalent.
Yet not everything has improved, though the deterioration has been less tangible than the progress. To give one example: by age 11, I was free to roam London, or at least its better areas, by myself or with a friend of the same age. The sight of an 11-year-old child wandering the city on his own did not suggest to anyone that he was neglected or abused. I remember, too, the evening papers piled up at newsstands; people would throw coins on top of the pile and take their copy. It never occurred to anyone that the money might get stolen; nowadays, it would never occur to anyone that the money would not be stolen. The crime statistics bear out this sea change in national character.
Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.
June 23, 2024
The amazing range of things Britain’s Ofcom gets its tentacles into
Earlier this week, Mark Steyn discussed the British government’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) and the way it rigs regulates who can say what during British election campaigns:
Why do I think the UK state censor Ofcom should be put out of business? Because there are very few areas of British life that this strange, secretive body does not “regulate”. Take, for example, this current UK election campaign, which the media are keen to keep as a torpid Potemkin struggle between TweedleLeft and TweedleRight. So, on Thursday night, BBC bigshot Fiona Bruce will host a debate between the four party leaders – that’s to say, the head honchos of the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
Wait a minute: what about Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform party? Since the beginning of the year, Reform has been third-placed in the polls, ahead of the LibDems and Greens, and last week they rose to second place ahead of the unlovely Tories.
So why wouldn’t the second-place party get a spot in the leaders’ telly debate?
Ah, well, you’re looking at it all wrong, you hick. Here’s how the Beeb explain it:
The Ofcom guidance gives “greater weight on the actual performance of a political party in elections over opinion poll data” taking into account the “greater uncertainty associated with support in opinion polls”.
The “actual performance of a political party” refers to their results in the two previous elections — 2019 and 2015 — when Reform didn’t exist. A lot of other things didn’t exist in 2015: Brexit, Covid, lockdown, the Ukraine war, legions of vaccine victims, the massed ranks of Albanian males occupying English country-house hotels …
But, per “Ofcom guidance”, Campaign 2024 has to be conducted on the basis of how things stood a decade ago.
You know who would also be ineligible to participate under Ofcom’s rules? Everyone’s favourite Lana Turner sweater-girl in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelenskyyyyy. He only formed his Servant of the People party in late 2017, so no election debates for you, sweater-girl. And don’t try blaming it on Putin, because it’s “Ofcom guidance” so we all know it’s on the up-and-up.Because, as their barrister assured the High Court, Ofcom are “expert regulators”. Lord Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes probably did a module in regulation at Rotherham Polytechnic or whatever.
I can see why the likes of Naomi Wolf’s creepy stalker-boy Matthew Sweet like this system: it’s a club and they get to decide who’s admitted. It’s less obvious why the generality of the citizenry put up with it. At any rate, get set for another thrilling BBC election debate in which all four “opponents” agree on Covid, climate, Ukraine, the joys of mass Muslim immigration and the inviolability of the NHS … but ever more furiously denounce each other for not tossing enough money that doesn’t exist into the sinkhole.
Don’t get me wrong, I quite like that pixie Green leader who describes herself as a “pansexual vegan”, and I certainly don’t have the personal baggage with her that I have with Nige. But under what rational conception of media “regulation” does the six per cent basement-dweller get guaranteed a seat at the table but not Reform?
And you wonder why nothing changes?
June 22, 2024
“We can learn a lot about our betters from looking at each exception to their rules”
Julie Burchill isn’t a soccer fan, but she points out that the “exceptions” to the usual “rules” that the kakistocrats allow during international soccer tournaments tell us a lot about them:
Patriotism is not the only “bad” thing we’re suddenly “allowed” to do in the weeks when the national team plays on the world stage. The BBC in particular reminds men that they can disregard the finger-wagging for a few brief weeks. In EastEnders, male characters cringingly ask their mates to “get the beers in for the game”. Alcohol would generally be condemned as a public-health menace by Auntie, but during “The Game”, one more “cheeky” tipple apparently won’t hurt you.
We can learn a lot about our betters from looking at each exception to their rules. Don’t be racist – except against Jews. Believe all women about sexual assault – unless they’re Israeli. Oh, and be careful not to “culturally appropriate” the slightest thing from any other nationality, even to the point of never wearing a sombrero in a Mexican restaurant – but it’s fine to be a cross-dressing man culturally appropriating my sex. Meanwhile, if you’re a woman, be a good little Transmaid and stand by smiling, even if you call yourself a feminist.
Like most other places in the West in these dog days of civilisation, England feels like a nation devoid of hope and pride. Even so, being allowed to take pride in some overpaid ball-kickers, but not in the fact that this country contributed massively to ending slavery – lest we be called out as White Saviours – is a somewhat surreal situation to find ourselves in, after all those centuries of blood, sweat and struggle.
Flying the flag for the duration of the Euros is like being a eunuch who’s permitted to have his nuts back for a couple of weeks – for old times’ sake – and wear them as earrings. But those who indulge must be sure to tear their St George’s down sharpish once the festivities are over, lest they be fingered as a fascist for liking their own flag more than others. Remember, the only flag that can be flown constantly now is the Pride flag. This must be saluted respectfully wherever it pops up – failure to do so may identify you as an unworthy citizen of Soft Play Pit Nation.
June 21, 2024
From “invention” to “tradition”
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander considers some “traditions” which were clearly invented much more recently than participants might believe:
Two NYC synagogues, one in Moorish Revival style and the other is some form of modernism (you can tell it’s not Brutalism because it’s not all decaying concrete). Like Scott, I vastly prefer the one on the left even if it isn’t totally faithful to the Moroccan original design.
A: I like Indian food.
B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws – do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies?
A: I just like paneer tikka.
This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things.
But “of the past” is just meant to be a pointer! “Indian food” is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it’s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems!
In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!
But there’s another anti-tradition argument which goes deeper than this. It’s something like “ah, but you’re a hypocrite, because the people of the past weren’t trying to return to some idealized history. They just did what made sense in their present environment.”
There were hints of this in Sam Kriss’ otherwise-excellent article about a fertility festival in Hastings, England. A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered. Then everyone drank and partied and had a good time.
Most of the people involved assumed it derived from the Druids or something. It was popular not just as a good party, but because it felt like a connection to primeval days of magic and mystery. But actually, the Hastings festival dates from 1983. If you really stretch things, it’s loosely based on similar rituals from the 1790s. There’s no connection to anything older than that.
Kriss wrote:
I don’t think the Jack in the Green is worse because it’s not really an ancient fertility rite, but I do think it’s a little worse because it pretends to be … tradition pretends to be a respect for the past, but it refuses to let the past inhabit its own particular time: it turns the past into eternity. The opposite of tradition is invention.
Tradition is fake, and invention is real. Most of the human activity of the past consists of people just doing stuff … they didn’t need a reason. It didn’t need to be part of anything ancient. They were having fun.
I’ve been thinking a lot about [a seagull float in the Hastings parade] … in the procession, the shape of the seagull became totemic. It had the intensity of a symbol, without needing to symbolise anything in particular. Another word for a symbol that burns through any referent is a god. I wasn’t kidding when I said I felt the faint urge to worship it. I don’t think it would be any more meaningful if someone had dug up some thousand-year-old seagull fetishes from a nearby field. It’s powerful simply because of what it is. Invention, just doing stuff, is the nebula that nurses newborn gods.
I’m nervous to ever disagree with Sam Kriss about ancient history, but this strikes me as totally false.
Modern traditionalists look back fondly on Victorian times. But the Victorians didn’t get their culture by just doing stuff without ever thinking of the past. They were writing pseudo-Arthurian poetry, building neo-Gothic palaces, and painting pre-Raphaelite art hearkening back to the early Renaissance. And the Renaissance itself was based on the idea of a re-naissance of Greco-Roman culture. And the Roman Empire at its peak spent half of its cultural energy obsessing over restoring the virtue of the ancient days of the Roman Republic:
Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the high,
And the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction,
In battle we wax cold:
Wherefore men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.(of course, this isn’t from a real Imperial Roman poem — it’s by a Victorian Brit pretending to be a later Roman yearning for the grand old days of Republican Rome. And it’s still better than any poem of the last fifty years, fight me.)
As for the ancient Roman Republic, they spoke fondly of a Golden Age when they were ruled by the god Saturn. As far as anyone knows, Saturn is a wholly mythical figure. But if he did exist, there are good odds he inspired his people (supposedly the fauns and nymphs) through stories of some even Goldener Age that came before.
June 20, 2024
The birth of para-rescue
At The War Room, Dr. Robert Lyman discusses an air crash in 1943 and the innovative and daring rescue of the survivors using parachutes:
A United States Army Air Force (USAAF) C46 similar to that of Flight 12420.
The birth of para-rescue can be placed in operations across the Hump airlift in 1942 and 1943. The story of the crash of Flight 12420 was a central part of the story.
The story itself is extraordinary. In 1943 a Soviet spy inside the predecessor organization to the CIA and a proud descendant of the famous Southern leader General Robert E Lee, on his way to China to meet General Dai Li, the mysterious and secretive Kuomintang intelligence chief; a celebrated American journalist sent by President Roosevelt to ascertain the “truth about China”; and General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s political adviser; together with eighteen others — American and Chinese — survived a C46 air crash on the mountainous and remote border between India and Burma. It was, and remains, the largest evacuation of an aircraft by parachute, and, given the fact that even the crew had never been trained in the technique, it was a miracle that so many survived. But they fell with their crippled plane from the frying pan into the fire. On disentangling themselves from their parachutes, the twenty shocked survivors soon found that they had arrived in wild country dominated by a tribe that had an especial reason to hate white men. The Nagas of the Patkoi Hills on their remote and unsurveyed land were notorious headhunters, who continued — despite the feeble wrath of distant British imperial authority — to practice both slavery and human sacrifice. Their specialty was the removal of the heads of their enemies — often women and children — achieved with a swipe of ugly, razor-sharp daos. On two occasions in recent years their village, or parts of it, had been burned to the ground and their warriors killed in running battles with sepoys sent to teach the villagers a lesson and to exert the authority of the Raj.
Nevertheless, and against all the odds, all but one of the twenty-one passengers and crew on the doomed aircraft survived. The story of the extraordinary adventure of those men among the Nagas of Pangsha and of their rescue by the young representative of the distant imperial power, the British deputy commissioner who arrived wearing “Bombay bloomers” and stout leather walking shoes, carrying a bamboo cane, and leading an armed party of “friendly” Nagas, is told in my book Among the Headhunters. In their meeting in some of the world’s most inaccessible and previously unmapped terrain, three very different worlds collided. The young, exuberant apostles of the vast industrial democracy of the United States came face-to-face with members of an ancient mongoloid race, uncomprehending of the extent of modernity that existed beyond the remote hills in which they lived and determined to preserve their local power, based on ancient head-hunting and slaving prerogatives. Both groups met — not for the first time for the Nagas, whose village had been burned twice, in 1936 and 1939, because of persistent head-hunting — the vestiges of British authority in India, disintegrating as the Japanese tsunami washed up at its gate.
One of the reasons for the survival of the men whose aircraft fell to earth that tumultuous day was the quick thinking, rapid action and spontaneous sacrifice of a group of US servicemen at the airbase from whence the aircraft departed that morning, Chabua. One in particular needs calling out, thirty-six-year-old ATC wing surgeon Lieutenant Colonel Don Flickinger. He had been duty medical officer at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941 and in 1943 found himself stationed in the upper reaches of Assam as part of the mammoth Hump airlift to China.
On the day the C46 went down over the rugged Paktoi ranges, the dividing line between astern India and Burma in the first leg of the journey to China, a C47 sent up to see if it could find the wreckage, and found the survivors waving from a remote village high in the hills. Using ground signalling panels the C47 dropped to the survivors they indicated that at least one of the party was badly injured. When the C47 returned to Chabua with the news that survivors were seen in the sprawling village and its location pinpointed on the map, the British deputy commissioner gave the Americans the grave news that the men were likely to be in grave danger. The villagers were, unknown to the survivors, the most practised headhunters of the region, a powerful and unruly tribe who were notorious for their violence. It was unlikely that the men would survive the encounter.
June 16, 2024
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four at 75
Ed West on the attempts by many different parties to claim the legacy of George Orwell for their own purposes:
No writer’s legacy and approval is so fought over as George Orwell, whose final — and most celebrated — work Nineteen-Eighty-Four was published seventy five years ago this month.
The most influential piece of political fiction in history, such is the success of the dystopian novel that its themes have been recited to death by columnists, often by people I imagine he would have loathed (including me).
Orwell’s nightmare became a particular focus of conservative commentators from the 1990s with the rise of “political correctness”, which might be seen as both a form of politeness and at the same time a way of policing opinions by changing the language. As Orwell’s Newspeak was described, it was to ensure that dissent cannot be voiced because “the necessary words were not available”. Newspeak, along with thought police and doublethink, has become a part of our political vocabulary, while even the proles have Big Brother to entertain them. No one can doubt that Orwell has won the final victory, and the struggle for the writer’s soul forms part of Dorian Lynskey’s entertaining and informative The Ministry of Truth, a biography of Nineteen-Eighty-Four which was published at the time of the last significant anniversary.
Lynskey, a hugely gifted writer who specialises in the relationship between arts and politics, is very much on the Left and sees the modern parallels with the Trumpian disdain for truth, although the great man himself is now often more cited by the Right. Indeed the anniversary was recently celebrated by the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs with a new edition and an introduction by my friend Christopher Snowdon.
Orwell was a paradoxical man, contradictory, sometimes hypocritical (aren’t we all?). In the preface to his book, publisher Victor Gollancz wrote that “The truth is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob – still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery.”
As Lynskey writes: “Until the end of his life, Orwell acknowledged that microbes of everything he criticised existed in himself. In fact, it was this awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human perfectibility.”
Such awareness is surprisingly rare among intelligent journalists and commentators, especially when ideology takes a grip — and Orwell was introduced to this reality in quite brutal form.
The background to both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm was Orwell’s disillusionment during the Spanish Civil War. The conflict between Nationalists and Republican galvanised western intellectuals and marked the turning point when the intelligentsia became firmly wedded to the Left. Over a thousand writers went to fight in Spain, and while few entirely understood the political situation they did grasp, as Malcolm Muggeridge said, that “it seemed certain that in Spain Good and Evil were at last joined in bloody combat”.
In reality it was a conflict in which both sides committed appalling atrocities, although Franco’s forces certainly outdid their enemies in murderous scale. That ruthlessness partly explains their victory, but the Republicans were not helped by the seemingly endless factionalism that saw various squabbling leftist acronyms fight each other, and which makes the war hard to follow. There was the socialist UGT, the Russian-backed PSUC, the anarchist FAI and anarcho-syndicalist CNT, and also the POUM, Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, which rather belied its name by falling out with both Stalin and Trotsky.
Spain was an education for Orwell. Witnessing in Barcelona a Russian known only as “Charlie Chan”, allegedly an agent of NKVD, he wrote: “I watched him with some interest for it was the first time I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists”.
He recorded how, with the honourable exception of the Manchester Guardian, “One of the dreariest effects of this has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right”. Welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web, George Orwell.
June 15, 2024
W.H.O. the hell do they think they are?
Christopher Snowden on what he calls a “new low” for the World Health Organization (WHO) in a report issued earlier this week that sounds like Karl Marx was one of the writers:
The WHO European Region published a new report today, written mostly by British ‘public health’ academics. It is quite revealing. For example …
This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs [“health-harming industries”] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist. Instead, they must regulate other HHIs [“health-harming industries”], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.
That’s just one paragraph, but there’s a lot it in.
Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to “health-harming industries” but to private industry and the free market in general.
Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry.
Thirdly, they want to regulate all “health-harming industries” in the same way as they regulate tobacco. These industries include alcohol, food and fossil fuels, but the report also mentions pharmaceuticals, infant formula, gambling, firearms, healthcare (!) and sugary drinks. As the quote above makes clear, they think that all private industry damages health in some way.
This is all there in black and white and there is much more of the same in the report. This is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is in an official WHO document.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
I have written about this for The Critic …
If this sounds to you like Bolshie talk, you might be onto something. It is further confirmation that the modern “public health” movement is an arm of the hard left presented as an arm of medicine. It would be tempting to tell the authors to stay in their lane, but anti-capitalist nanny statism is their lane. For over a decade, such academics, mostly from Britain and Australia, have been pumping out studies about the “commercial determinants of health” and the “corporate political activity” of “unhealthy commodity industries”. The new WHO report is a sort of greatest hits collection. Last year they published a whole series of articles in the Lancet in which they claimed that there is “growing evidence that neoliberalism has been damaging to health” and called for “a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems”.
Half-baked Marxist rhetoric has been rife in the social sciences for decades, but these people have a vaguely coherent point to make and are pursuing a serious, if terrifying, agenda. Since they do not believe in human agency, they assume that people only make “unhealthy choices”, such as eating processed ham, because the system that controls them has been rigged by big corporations. They say in today’s report that “consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice”. Fortunately, public health academics know what the right choice is and could impose it on a grateful population if it were not for the pesky free market. Hence their rage against capitalism, which extends to suspicion of intellectual property, international trade, share buybacks, impact assessments (because they allow businesses to engage with policy-makers) and even the EU single market.
Further to what I say in the article, I’d add that it is to the UK’s shame that so many of the authors of this report are British. They include quackademics that I have been making fun of for years, such as Anna Gilmore, Mark Petticrew and May van Schalkwyk. Between them, they constitute a small clique of talentless, fanatics and/or grifting social scientists who have constructed a world of unreality for themselves by publishing endless low quality journal articles which they and their colleagues then reference and self-reference. It is profoundly depressing that they are now dangling the corpse of the WHO — which was once a great institution — on pieces of string.
