Poor Theresa May, I really feel for her. She’s buried neck-deep under an avalanche of deals, and only her carefully coiffed head is sticking out.
No one else has to handle so many of those bloody things at the same time. A casino croupier is also busy with deals, but never more than one at a time.
Perhaps a manic asset stripper may be involved in two or three simultaneously, but not more than that – even if he takes an appropriate amount of cocaine, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
English folklore talks about hitting two birds with one stone, but that proverb came into existence before Mrs May did. She’s trying to hit not two but five birds, and she doesn’t even have a stone.
Deal No. 1, with the EU, is the hardest of all for the simple reason that neither party really wants to make it. Moreover, this deal is contingent on the other four, none of which has been made yet.
Deal No. 2, with Corbyn, is one of the culprits in holding back Deal No. 1. Lacking even a semblance of parliamentary majority, Mrs May has to come to an agreement with Corbyn, but he’s dealing from the bottom of the pack.
As a price
of his support, Comrade Corbyn demands that the Queen abdicate, Britain be
declared a soviet socialist republic (BSSR), the ownership of all factories be
transferred to the workers, all the wealth of the top five per cent of the population
be repossessed, and the deal with the EU stipulate that we remain a member, but
one without a vote. Also, he wants to nationalise everything, including Mr and Mrs
May.
She may be
inclined to accept those terms, or at least to bargain for a compromise, such
as being allowed to keep Mr May privately owned. But first she must conclude the
remaining deals, and none seems to be on the cards.
Deal No. 3 is with Jacob Rees-Mogg and other spoilsports in Parliament. This agreement is theoretically easier to conclude than Deal No. 1 because one party, namely Mrs May, desperately wants to do so.
Yet in
practice it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference because the kind of
MPs John Major used to call ‘bastards’ simply won’t deal – certainly not on Corbyn’s
terms and not even on Mrs May’s proposed compromise wherein Mr May remains privatised.
Mrs May’s
partner in Deal No. 4 is the entire Tory parliamentary party that wants to
negotiate the date of Mrs May’s departure from 10 Downing Street. Since her
starting position is “when hell freezes over” and theirs is “before sundown”,
no common ground has so far been established.
Deal No. 5
is with the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, who’re hinting they’ll fly
the coop the moment Deal No. 1 is done. Their recalcitrance jeopardises the
other four deals, even though Mrs May is ready to offer generous terms.
She’s
prepared to move the Queen into Edinburgh Castle, all government departments to
Cardiff and all law enforcement services to Belfast. She also undertakes to
make Mr May switch from gin to Scotch – and to stop making unfunny jokes about
the method by which Nicola Sturgeon managed to produce a baby.
But they,
especially Scotland, are demanding full independence, with all their laws
coming from Brussels. It’s safe to say that Deal No. 5 has also hit a snag.
All things
considered, Mrs May finds herself in quite a pickle. Normally I’m quite
generous with advice, but in this case I’m at a loss.
Perhaps
Mrs May ought to try a little visual trick: have a portrait of Margaret
Thatcher silkscreened on a brown paper bag and wear it over her head next time
she tries to deal. She may be pleasantly surprised how pliant and respectful
her opponents will become.
What are the tell-tale signs of a great pianist? Or especially one of genius?
Artur Schopenhauer, one of only two
German philosophers who could write intelligible prose (Nietzsche is the
other), produced the best explanation of the difference between talent and
genius:
“Talent hits a target no one else
can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Applying this adage to pianists, I’ve
heard quite a few extremely talented ones. Why, I’m even married to one of
them.
But, in about 60 years of listening
to music, I’ve heard only one pianist – actually only one instrumentalist – who
always hit targets no one could see: Glenn Gould.
Some sublime pianists (one could
think of Schnabel, Gieseking, Yudina, Richter, Gilels and a few others) could occasionally
approach that level at their best.
However, Gould lived on that level
and never descended from it. His playing was never short of genius – even on
those rare occasions when he played badly, which all serious musicians do from
time to time. However, as another great pianist, Sofronitsky, once said: “You
can play badly by accident, but you can’t play well by accident.”
In other words, playing well – and Sofronitsky’s
‘well’ meant near-genius – involves more than just a flash of inspiration. That
alone wouldn’t raise a mediocrity into the rarefied atmosphere of genius or
even sublime talent.
Obviously there are many physical and physiological skills that go into playing well, this goes without saying. Playing the piano to any reasonable standard is perhaps one of the most physiologically taxing tasks.
Watching my wife practice, she has to coordinate at the same time both arms and hands, all ten fingers and both feet, while her eyes follow the score and the keyboard, and her mind races several bars ahead of the notes she’s playing.
Her mind also has to make sure that structural integrity is observed with minute accuracy, while her ears and fingers combine to make the piano sing, delivering cantabile that all concert pianists could produce in the past, and so few can at present.
Yet real talent, never mind genius,
goes well beyond just those devilishly difficult things. For music is the
highest manifestation of Western culture – a statement that can’t be credibly
made about any other culture.
Unless a pianist, no matter how lavishly gifted in physical and physiological skills, lives his life immersed in that culture, he’ll always remain nothing but an epigonic Peeping Tom, spying on serious musicians and then trying to reproduce what they do.
He won’t be able to. Playing to the
standard of the pianists I’ve mentioned requires permanent residence in Western
culture. Any Peeping Tom or even a short leaseholder will forever remain an
interloper.
Is it possible to play Western music well without being on intimate terms with the culture that alone could have produced that music? But of course – provided we define ‘well’ in a different way from Sofronitsky’s aphorism.
Apparently, however devilishly difficult the physical and physiological aspects of piano playing seem to me, millions of people take those things in their stride. China alone has a million professionally trained pianists at present, and they can all get around the keyboard with reasonable competence.
They can play well in the sense of hitting all the right notes in the right sequence, displaying virtuosic digital fleetness whether it’s required or not. Then again, a computer can be programmed to do just that, and even better.
If that’s all that today’s public requires, then suddenly pianists like Yuja Wang, who in my day would have struggled to gain admission to Moscow Conservatory, never mind having a successful career, can become international stars. Especially if they, like Yuja, are pretty girls performing semi-nude.
When music is played that way, it’s no longer the apex of our culture. It’s soulless entertainment activating the same mechanisms of appeal as pop or rap.
That’s why I’m always incensed when some modern barbarian says he likes both classical and pop. “If you can listen to pop at all,” I once said to a lovely young girl, “you simply can’t understand real music.” She was upset, and I had to offer profuse apologies for my rudeness. But I meant what I said.
This brings us to the undisputed
leader of the Sino pack, Lang Lang, whose parents loved him so much they named
him twice.
I’ve had the misfortune of hearing
some of his robotic, mindless, deracinated performances, and each time I
thought he could have a brilliant career as a circus performer. But he doesn’t
need to: he rakes in millions playing non-music to gaping audiences of non-listeners.
Every audience gets the kind of performances it deserves, and modern audiences weaned on pop excretions don’t deserve any better.
It’s in that spirit that I read a recent Lang Lang interview, which started the emetic impulse that could have been brought to gushing fruition had he also played, not just talked.
Here are some choice bits:
The instrument I wish I’d learned. The guitar… You can take the guitar everywhere. It would be
amazing to play guitar like a rock star. [Why, Lang Lang? You already play the
piano like one.]
My favourite author is Shakespeare.
His works are basically screenplays. [Why not TV adverts?]
The music that cheers me up is my friend Pharrell Williams’s
song Happy… Listening to it makes you just want to be together and have
a good time. [And what else can one expect from music? A couple of pints would
go down nicely too, to make the time even better.]
The book I wish I had written is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. [Not The Divine Comedy? The Iliad? War and Peace?
Well, at least he didn’t say Fifty Shades
of Grey.]
The place I feel happiest is on stage. If you play music by yourself it’s OK but when you share it that’s when it becomes really powerful. By yourself, you’re just a computer. With other people you become the internet. You’re connected. [Yes, with internet listeners. But I appreciate his honesty in admitting his playing is computer-like.]
I’m having a fantasy dinner party, I’ll invite these artists and authors…Mozart, Pavarotti, Lady Gaga and Michael Jordan. These are my favourite musicians and my favourite sports star. I would love to see how Mozart plays the piano. [Yes, but he wouldn’t have played in this company. Pearls before swine and all that.]
A composer who is
underrated… Carl Czerny… and there’s another incredible
composer I love called Clementi. [Both of these men wrote mostly technical
exercises for budding pianists – not much cultural attainment is required for
playing their music.]
Overrated… If you are a famous classical composer then you’ve earned it. [Penetrating insight, that.] Even really popular composers like Chopin and Rachmaninov are not overrated. Their music has stood the test of time. [Really? And there I was, thinking Chopin only wrote funeral music for marching bands.]
I don’t mean to be nasty to Lang Lang or other Oriental musicians. Granted, they are all without a single exception cultural barbarians who understand the music they play at the level of an average rave-goer. But at least they have the excuse of having been raised outside our culture.
Alas, many Western pianists flash the signs of barbarism with equal gusto. What’s their excuse? What’s ours, for launching them to stardom at the box office? Well, don’t blame me: I voted Glenn Gould.
Back in the 1930s, the Bolsheviks and the Nazis had their admirers in the West. However, not many people this side of George Bernard Shaw admired both at the same time.
Putin is
in that sense a unique figure because swarms of his fans can be found at either
extreme of the political spectrum. Assorted ‘right-wing populists’ love the Russian
chieftain, but then so do such undeniably left-wing figures as Corbyn.
Even people called conservatives in America, Pat Buchanan to name one, adore Putin, as do their British counterparts, such as Peter Hitchens and Christopher Booker. It’s as if some present-day Paul proclaimed “there is neither Right nor Left for you are all one in Vlad.”
Why do most people outside the political mainstream, and even some within it, fall over themselves to extol Putin’s non-existent virtues?
Some of it may be ignorance, although that’s often too simplistic an explanation. Sometimes it isn’t: I’ve talked to Putin admirers who knew shockingly little about Russia.
But surely the gentlemen I’ve mentioned know enough about the crimes committed by Putin’s regime, inside and outside Russia. They may be aware that the Russian economy is criminalised from top to bottom, that money laundering is the only growth industry there, that elementary civil liberties have been suppressed, that Russia is waging hybrid war against the West and so forth.
One suspects that even many on either political extreme know such facts, and yet their panegyrics for Putin lose none of their volume. Why?
The simple
answer is that both the Right and the Left admire Putin because the former
believe his propaganda and the latter don’t.
The propaganda is balm to a Right-leaning soul. Putin’s Goebbelses position Russia’s kleptofascist junta as a champion of conservative values, strong government, the vital importance of the Church and all those lovely things.
The music is
so beautiful that it’s impossible to turn the radio off, and who cares about
the false notes – it’s the intent that counts. The listeners either don’t
realise or refuse to accept that false notes are all there is.
Traditional values are only as good as the tradition. Putin’s Russia packages Stalinism with the worst features of tsarism and calls it conservatism. So it is, but this isn’t the conservatism of Burke or Chateaubriand, nor even of Pat Buchanan.
The same goes for strong government: it all depends on how it uses its strength. Margaret Thatcher’s government was strong, so was Fidel Castro’s – can we agree that strength isn’t good ipso facto? As to Putin’s religiosity, this is indeed Pauline.
Overnight KGB officers and Party secretaries treating faith as a criminal offence became pious Christians who cross themselves before government meetings.
When I see videos of that travesty, I strain to find somewhere in the background the horse they fell off when they heard the voice of God. Taking that obscene spectacle seriously takes not just suspension but elimination of disbelief.
Forgetting Putin’s gang for a second, it’s useful to remember that when a Russian talks about the Church, he means something different from what the word connotes to a Westerner.
I’m not going to talk about filioque and other doctrinal differences between Eastern and Western Christianity, crucially important though they are. What’s relevant here is the existential difference between the civilisations the two Churches have produced, and what place they occupy in each.
If Christendom
appeared at the confluence of Jerusalem and Athens, for the Russian Church
these are only two of the feeding tributaries. The others, more relevant to my
theme, are Byzantium and the Golden Horde.
The Byzantine Church was an aspect of absolutist government, and its important function was to sacralise the power of the Caesar. Political power, religion and wealth were so organically fused together as to become one.
Had Russia got her Christianity from the proselytising Catholic orders, her history might have taken a different course. As it was, her religion came courtesy of Byzantine theocaesarism, and her politics came from the same source, with a later admixture of Mongol absolutism.
Hence
every attempt by the Russian Church to get out of the state’s clutches led to
savage suppression, reaching its height under Tsar Alexis and his son Peter
(the Great). Under the latter, the Church was placed under the auspices of a
secular government department, the Holy Synod.
Still, under the tsars the Church was able to attend to its main business and even produce outstanding thinkers: though its supervisors were laymen, they were still Christians who had to pay spiritual fealty to the Church.
In their impetuous youth, the Bolsheviks set out to wipe out the Church altogether. Some 40,000 priests were murdered in all sorts of imaginative ways on Lenin’s watch, and that was before Stalin got going.
However,
destroying the Church proved easier than destroying the religious yearning that
has been with man since before he learned to build houses. As Stalin’s empire
was being overrun by Nazi panzers, Lenin’s heir realised that his power could
do with some sacralisation too.
The Church
was brought back into the fold: it agreed to be used lest it might be abused.
It then suffered the indignity of being placed not just under the government,
but specifically under its secret police, which was responsible for bolstering
Russian patriotism.
This fine tradition perseveres. The current patriarch Kirill (ne Vladimir Gundiaev, aka ‘Agent Mikhailov’) is a career KGB operative – as were his only two rivals for the office.
Rather than having undergone a spiritual catharsis, Putin and his jolly friends have prostituted the Church to make it serve their propaganda ends, both at home and abroad.
The propaganda sways the Western Right, who accept as real the lies peddled by Russian media. They’re so starved of Christian or any other virtues in their own governments that they are willing to believe in the Emperor’s clothes.
The left-wingers’ eyesight is better: they see that all this talk about tradition is just propaganda. Realising that Putin’s regime is a direct heir to Stalin’s, its reincarnation in different clothes at a different time, they’re prepared to overlook all that conservative camouflage woven out of a tissue of lies.
The old
truism about extremes converging seems to be vindicated. But a truism is different
from truth. In this case the underlying supposition is that the two extremes
set out to be different and then somehow drift together.
But that’s
not true: if they drift together, they weren’t that different in the first
place. It’s just that their similarity lies deeper than any superficial
divergences in policies and pronouncements.
Both extreme worship power as such, which is pointed out often enough. But underneath this is the same religious yearning I mentioned earlier, a craving for an ideal kingdom not of this world.
Except that modernity has trained people to accept the purely physical boundaries of this world, with nothing beyond it any longer imaginable. Hence that ideal kingdom has to be found not in heaven but elsewhere in earth.
Looking at our politics, Westerners of all political hues despair. Those on the Right and on the Left may hate their governments for different reasons, but hate them they do. Yet, as Cicero put it, dum spiro spero.
No longer capable of investing
their hope in God, people are ready to invest it into any fraudulent pyramid
scheme, including what Nietzsche called “brotherhoods with the aim of the
robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.”
Both the Right and the Left, bereft of any realistic hope of bliss at home, look at Putin’s criminal regime and see brothers where only enemies exist. They want to believe so much that they’ll believe anything.
Mr – or, to use the honorific he doubtless prefers – Comrade Corbyn has snubbed the Queen’s invitation to attend the state dinner in honour of President Trump.
Perhaps it’s worth pointing out to Corbyn that a state occasion at Buckingham Palace is different from dinner at a friend’s house. Thus in my private capacity (which is the only capacity in which I can act), I’ve been known to decline dinner invitations if I didn’t like the company.
For example, I’d probably not attend a dinner where another guest would be Corbyn, whom I find sufficiently revolting to put me off my food. However, in the unlikely, nay impossible, event that such an invitation was issued by Her Majesty, I’d feel duty-bound to attend – whatever the guest list.
Being rude to one’s friends is par for the course: that’s what friends are for, though not all they are for. However, being rude to the Queen means disrespecting her realm, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Such rudeness goes beyond bad manners even if manifested by an ordinary
subject. But when the Queen’s invitation is thrown in her face by a high
official, it shows instantly and undeniably that such a person isn’t fit to be
a high official.
Admittedly, Mr Trump isn’t the kind of man I’d welcome at my own dinner table. We’re all God’s children and all that but, if a particular God’s child is a narcissistic, functionally illiterate vulgarian, I, my wife and our other likely guests wouldn’t enjoy his company, and neither would he enjoy ours.
But this is neither here nor there. For when Trump is on a state visit to Britain, it doesn’t matter how narcissistic, illiterate or vulgar he is. What matters is that he is the head of state in a country friendly to ours, and allied with it for some 200 years.
In any case, since Corbyn is every bit as narcissistic, illiterate and vulgar as Trump, this can’t be the reason for his boorishness. And I do hope he didn’t turn down the Queen’s invitation because he didn’t expect to have a good time.
Apparently, the last time he attended such an event he described it as “one
of the most boring nights I have ever had”. That may well be, but state
occasions aren’t attended for their entertainment value. They are among those
things that come with the territory for leaders of Her Majesty’s Loyal (in
Corbyn’s case glaringly disloyal) Opposition. You do it not because you want
to, but because you have to.
Perhaps, rather than trying to second-guess Corbyn’s reasons, we should
listen to the man himself. So here are his own words: “Theresa May should not
be rolling out the red carpet for a state visit to honour a president who rips
up vital international treaties, backs climate change denial and uses racist
and misogynist rhetoric.”
Now “racist and misogynist rhetoric” doesn’t belong here at all, for if Trump ever indulges in such affronts to Corbyn’s sensibilities, he does so in private. I’m not aware of a single racist or misogynist word Trump has uttered ex cathedra in his capacity of US president – and it’s in that capacity that he’s visiting Britain.
As to ripping up “vital international treaties”, which ones would they be? The only treaties Trump has ripped up are one that was guaranteed to turn Iran into a nuclear power, with deadly consequences for America’s and Britain’s allies; and also the Luddite Paris Accords, penalising the West for the environmental damage largely perpetrated by the Third World.
This dovetails neatly with “climate change denial”, which is among the most
serious crimes against New Age pieties. Corbyn is obviously unhappy that Trump
refuses to let his knee jerk whenever yet another fad makes a claim, especially
if both the fad and the claim are bogus and anti-Western.
All this means is that Trump’s politics differ from Corbyn’s, as if we didn’t
know that already. Hence Corbyn refuses to break bread with a leader whose
political convictions clash with his own.
Splendid, glad we’ve established that. But logically the opposite must also
be true: Corbyn has to see nothing wrong with the politics of those leaders
with whom he has happily sat down to dinner.
Hence a quick scan of such kindred souls will provide an optically perfect insight into the convictions, and personality, of our likely next PM. So here goes, in no particular order:
Corbyn has attended a state dinner with Xi Jinping, president of a communist country running what effectively is a slave economy, suppressing free speech and murdering or imprisoning dissidents.
Comrade Jeremy has described as his friends members of Hamas and Hezbollah, murderous terrorist organisations that mysteriously fail to activate Corbyn’s revulsion at racism and misogyny. As he put it: “It will be my pleasure and honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking.”
Clearly, he doesn’t regard as racist a heartfelt commitment to murdering Jews, accompanied by regrets that Hitler didn’t quite finish the job – even though the Holocaust never happened, and if it did, it was the Jews’ own fault. As to the Muslims’ treatment of women, if that’s not misogyny, I don’t know what is.
Incidentally,
Trump is perhaps the best friend Israel has ever had among US presidents, which
alone would suffice to make Corbyn detest him – hatred of Israel, ideally as an
expression of virulent anti-Semitism, seems to be an ironclad criterion for
membership in his Labour party.
Who
else? Oh yes, Comrade Jeremy never had any compunction against sharing a meal
with IRA murderers, including Gerry Adams himself. In fact, he timed such
friendly get-togethers to coincide with IRA atrocities.
He met Adams in the 1980s, when the IRA was waging a war of terror against Britain. A fortnight after the IRA blew up the Tory conference, killing five people, Corbyn had tea at Westminster with two convicted murderers. And he did the same in 1996, the year of the bombings in Manchester and the Docklands.
Corbyn
also went to Syria to meet Assad, with his trip funded by the Palestinian
lobbyists who also organised an event at which Jews were blamed for the
Holocaust. I wonder if afterwards Jeremy described Assad as a gas.
And of course he’s a self-proclaimed friend and admirer of Maduro, a communist who is equally good at bankrupting a previously rich Venezuela and driving armoured cars over those who object.
Clarity is
beginning to emerge. Corbyn’s criteria for selecting his dinner companions
include a propensity for mass murder, anti-Semitism, hatred of Britain and her
allies, communist ideology and general criminality.
President
Trump should be proud he doesn’t qualify.
Dear me, ever so sorry. Is that what they call a Freudian slip? Yes, I suppose it is. I mean hands of course.
And I do
mean it: I think Penny Mordaunt may well make a damn good Defence Secretary,
better than just about any of her parliamentary colleagues I can think of.
It was
five years ago that Miss Mordaunt appeared in a swimsuit on Splash!. Until then I hadn’t heard of
her, but then I don’t follow Westminster politics as closely as I should.
However, the photographs of the semi-clad Undersecretary of State for Something or Other impressed me, and not only because of her shapely thighs. It’s just that I couldn’t think of any other female Tory politician who would have posed that way, at least while in office.
Margaret
Thatcher? Be serious. Anne Widdecombe? Please. Esther McVey? Well, I suppose
she might, but hasn’t yet.
Anyway, my
curiosity piqued, I looked beyond Miss Mordaunt’s thighs, meaning at her
record, and what did you think I meant? Amazingly, the more I looked, the more
I liked – and I thought I’d never say that about a politician.
In fact,
although my own thighs are unlikely to excite anybody’s imagination, I feel we
have much in common.
Miss
Mordaunt is a Royal Navy reservist, who once actually served as an acting sub-lieutenant,
which roughly corresponds to my reserve rank in the Soviet army (all university
graduates got that after some perfunctory training).
She studied philosophy at university, which happens to be my favourite subject. She was in PR; I was in advertising. She likes off-colour jokes – so do I. As shown by her appearance on Splash!, she doesn’t seem to take herself too seriously – neither do I. She has a taste for pranks, as do I.
In fact, on a dare from her fellow naval officers, Miss Mordaunt once repeatedly worked a rude word for penis into her parliamentary speech.
I’ve never
been in a position to do so, but probably would if I could. In fact, my public speeches
have at times featured the kind of jokes that elicited Oh-my-God gasps from the
audience (one of them was based on a foreign leader misspelling “can’t”).
On a more serious note, Miss Mordaunt detests the EU as much as I do and has voted on her principles when opposing Mrs May’s deal, or rather double deal. In spite of that she has managed to stay on the right side of the Remainer PM, and that’s where our similarity ends: I wouldn’t have the requisite diplomatic skills.
Add to
this Miss Mordaunt’s Christian name, which is the same as my wife’s (although
she hates the diminutive form of it), and she’s my kind of girl. Moreover, she
may well turn out to be my kind of politician, although, modern politics being
what it is, I’m not holding my breath.
I’m sure
that feminists around the world are throwing their hats (or perhaps other items
of their apparel) up in the air. They must be rejoicing at seeing a woman
ascend to one of the top positions in the government of a major Western
country.
Just kidding. I know they aren’t rejoicing, as they never did when Margaret Thatcher became PM or Jeane Kirkpatrick US Ambassador to the United Nations. You see, neither Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) nor Mrs Kirkpatrick, both conservative after a fashion, qualified as women in the eyes of feminist activists. Neither, for all her feminine allure, does Miss Mordaunt.
Ever since sex got to be described by the grammatical category of gender, it stopped being sex, hitherto understood as a simple function of a chromosome mix. Sex stopped being biological, physiological, chromosomal, hormonal or what have you.
It became
a form of political expression, and the politics it expressed were – and remain
– uncompromisingly left-wing. As such, they rise above, or rather drop below,
nature, logic and even sanity.
Women who
refuse to claim a victimhood status as a way of cocking a snook at every
traditional certitude thereby forfeit their womanhood. Womanhood means
victimhood or it means nothing.
Race has
become like that too. Every pejorative term white racists use to describe
blacks has its counterpart in the abusive slurs ideological blacks hurl at
those who refuse to reduce their whole personalities to a chromatic incidental.
‘Uncle Tom’, ‘Bounty’, ‘Coconut’ are heard whenever a black person achieves a prominent status. For example, though I’ve never heard the eminent philosopher Thomas Sewell complain about that, I’m sure he has heard such invective many times.
When I just
moved from the US to Britain (31 years ago – has it really been so long?), I
once talked to an impeccable, Telegraph-reading
gentleman. The subject was American blacks, who I said tended to be left-wing.
“They are
left-wing,” opined my interlocutor, “because they are black.” “It’s actually
the other way around,” I said. “They are black because they are left-wing.”
In the
same sense, Penny Mordaunt isn’t really a woman. She may yet become one by
taking a wide step to the left and starting to pronounce on the plight of her
sisters. But somehow I doubt she will. Then again, I’m idealistic enough to
think she’s my kind of girl.
One of the comments on my yesterday’s piece raised some serious questions that deserve a serious answer.
Here is how a reader responded to my statement that I oppose Catalan secessionism: “…it is strange that someone who believes in conservative localism would be against the regionalism of, for instance, the Catalans. Franco sought to subsume all of the geographical region of Spain under one identity. Such plans are still being attempted by the EU, as well as our Muslim friends. Whatever the source, it must be resisted.”
Franco thereby finds himself in a
posthumous company I doubt he would have welcomed in his lifetime. This shows
the inherent dangers of allowing superficial similarities to overshadow profound
differences.
The EU seeks a unity based on politics. “Our Muslim friends”, on the other hand, wish to unite the world under the aegis of their religion. That’s a fundamental difference, as great in its way as the one between the EU and the Holy Roman Empire.
The latter loosely united
European states on an ecclesiastical basis, while leaving plenty of room for
them to keep and nurture their national cultures, economic arrangements and
politics. This is the kind of European Union I’d welcome today, should the
remotest possibility of such a settlement exist.
On the other hand, I’m opposed to
both the EU and especially to the threat of a pan-European caliphate because I
see both as tyrannical and mortally dangerous to everything I hold sacred. Thus
it’s possible to welcome some types of unity while dreading others.
As to Franco, it wasn’t he who “sought
to subsume all of the geographical region of Spain under one identity”. It was dynastic
marriages that did that, and long before little Francisco was even a twinkle in
his Daddy’s eye.
The one in the twelfth century incorporated Catalonia into the Kingdom of Aragon; the one in the fifteenth century integrated Aragon (and therefore Catalonia) with Castile. So do let’s blame Ferdinand and Isabella for a united Spain, not the late Caudillo who, as a traditionalist conservative, fought to preserve Spain as she had been for half a millennium.
But the question remains: Is there an inherent contradiction between championing traditional localism while at the same time opposing Catalan separatism – or, extending the argument, that of Scotland and other constituent parts of the United Kingdom?
That puts into focus the title
above. ‘The great larceny of modernity’ is the term I use to describe the
transition from Christendom to another, modern, civilisation that was largely
inspired by its violent rebellion against Christianity and the civilisation it
had created.
However, discarding one
civilisation to usher in a successor isn’t the same as a scientist abandoning
one theory in favour of another. The old civilisation may be knocked off its
perch outwardly, but it can’t be fully uprooted from the consciousness and
instincts of the people weaned on it.
That’s why successful revolutionaries always strive to destroy the house of the old civilisation, while looting its furnishings and moving them, appropriately vandalised, to the lodging of a new civilisation.
For example, if you look at the
revolutionary slogans of post-Christian modernity, you’ll notice their
tripartite form regardless of where and when they were concocted.
Starting from the French “liberté, egalité, fraternité”, one could
site the American “life,
liberty and pursuit of happiness”, the Russian “vsia vlast sovetam” (all power to the Soviets) or the German “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (one
people, one nation, one leader). And even a somewhat less significant twentieth
century revolution had to chip in with a vapid ‘Work harder, produce more, build Grenada!’
What we are witnessing here is the first stage of larceny: the revolutionaries sensed that the world around them was alive with Trinitarian music. Since people’s ears were attuned to it, they were predisposed to respond to similar sounds even if they conveyed a different meaning.
In a
similarly devious way the linear, teleological nature of Christian eschatology
was transformed into the secular doctrine of progress.
Unlike the Eastern mind trained to respond to circular, static philosophies, the Western mind had been conditioned by its philosophy to expect a dynamic linear movement.
With an enviable sleight of hand, modernity replaced the kingdom of God as the final destination of linear development with the eudemonic idea of happiness as the ultimate goal of life – which, courtesy of St Anselm, had been known since the eleventh century as a sure recipe for amorality.
In the
same vein, the Christian concept of equality before omnipotent, merciful God
was vulgarised into a worldly equality before an omnipotent if less than
merciful state; Christian inviolable value of every person became ‘human rights’;
ennobling Christian charity was turned into the corrupting welfare state; reason
as a tool for understanding the creation of rational God was turned into soulless
secular rationality.
And of
course the sublime idea of Christianity (and its civilisation) bringing all
peoples together into a single commonwealth was eventually perverted into
producing such an obviously wicked contrivance as the EU.
The
important thing to remember is that the anti-Christian rebellion was inspired not
so much by a desire to create as by an urge to destroy.
It’s no
coincidence that the first wholly atheist century, the twentieth, brought about
the destruction of every traditional empire. Whatever we may think of, say, the
Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns or Romanovs, it’s hard to deny that their empires were
infinitely preferable to their immediate secular successors.
But the chaps wielding the battering rams of modernity hadn’t considered the pros and cons before wreaking their mayhem. They were driven by a destructive animus above all, however totally it was camouflaged by demagoguery about progress, liberation, equality or whatever.
All this applies in spades to the perversion of traditional Christian localism as the bedrock of any political dispensation. This developed as a revolution against the statist collectivism of the Greco-Roman world with its overall conception of man, nature and reality.
For
Christianity was indeed a revolution, the only truly successful one in history.
It stressed the autonomous value of the individual and built its political
dispensation from there up. Hence the family became the most essential building
block of society (you’ll notice how systematically and passionately the ensuing
modernity has been destroying the family).
Familial local institutions, such as parish, guild, township, village commune formed a cocoon protecting the family from the central political power of the princes. Thus even that most absolute of monarchs, Louis XIV, had more power over his glamorous courtiers than over the lowliest of peasants.
That familial localism was destroyed by all modern states, regardless of their ostensible ideology. The family and institutions based on it got to be seen as competitors to the burgeoning power of the central state. That’s why they had to be destroyed – but with an element of larceny thrown in yet again.
The local
self-government of small communities has been replaced by the post-Christian
notion of national self-determination as a natural entitlement of every ethnic
group, no matter how lacking in size or self-sufficiency.
That cause has been faithfully served by every enemy of traditional European institutions because it was seen as a powerful weapon against them. The First World War, the final violent assault on traditional Europe, is a great example of that underlying impulse.
Thus Woodrow
Wilson, a politician whose sinister influence tends to be underestimated, was at the same time a fanatic of a single world government and a great champion
of national self-determination.
There
was no contradiction there at all, at least not to a modern mind. The first was
the end; the second, the means. National self-determination fanatically pursued
is bound to tear asunder Europe’s traditional commonwealths – QED.
However,
the ensuing independence is as bogus as most things about modern politics. For,
having left the organic, historical arrangement in existence for centuries,
those newly independent countries seamlessly pass into real bondage to the
Johnny-come-lately contrivance of the EU.
What do you think will happen to Catalonia or, more relevant, Scotland when they leave the yoke of their traditional association? They’ll become EU members within months, possibly weeks, losing in the process the not inconsiderable autonomy they enjoyed before.
Thus Catalan – or for that matter any other European – separatism will only increase the size of a political setup about which my correspondent clearly feels as I do.
To
conclude, political issues are much more nuanced and complex than they appear
on the surface. They aren’t easily reducible to catchy, simple slogans. Simple
tends to be simplistic and eventually destructive. Just look at the slogans
sited above.
Most people suffer from a touch of solipsism when observing political events in other countries, especially those close to their own.
We look at the riots in France, the influx of
millions of Muslims into Germany or – more to my today’s point – the elections
in Spain and take a daring mental leap from those countries to Britain, looking
for parallels.
However, besides the common civilisational thread
tying all Western countries together, each has its own particular history,
culture and political idiosyncrasies.
Alas, few of us possess enough experience, knowledge
and sensitivity to appreciate fully such subtle differences. Instead we look
for obvious similarities, trying on foreign clothes to see if they fit our own
body politic.
Other countries become a prism through which we
look at our own, and it’s in that spirit that I followed the elections in
Spain.
Briefly, although Spain’s governing Socialists won the snap election, they didn’t win a majority and will have to seek coalition partners, probably in parties to their left.
One would think that although the conservative Popular Party lost half of its seats, it would still be a better partner. But PP is at odds with the Socialists on the issue of Catalan independence, which it opposes.
Yet the most interesting result is the success of Vox, a party that’s variously described as populist, extreme right-wing or Francoist. Since Franco’s death in 1975, the party has only once gained a parliamentary seat. This time it won 24 of them.
This may be a reflection of a growing trend.
Parties similar to Vox are gaining a greater share of voice, and increasingly of
vote, throughout Europe.
I manfully accept the charge of ignorance when
it comes to the ins and outs of Spain’s politics. This even though I once had
too much Rioja Alta at lunch in Madrid and joined a massive demonstration
against the Socialist government that had just set some ETA terrorists free.
However, my fellow demonstrators detected a note of mockery in my heavily accented shouts of “¡No mas concesiones a ETA!” and “¡Viva España!”. They began to look peeved, and Penelope had to drag me away to safety before my drunken enthusiasm got us killed.
In a similarly lubricated outburst I also once screamed “¡Viva Generalissimo Franco!” when driving through a largely communist crowd in Barcelona, but there I was sober enough to floor the accelerator pedal in good time.
However, this experience doesn’t qualify me to attempt a scholarly analysis of Spain’s politics. Hence I look at Vox and wonder whether I’d vote for a similar party in Britain.
All I have to go by are newspaper reports listing the key planks of Vox’s programme. Scanning them I mentally tick those with which I agree.
From what I can glean, Vox opposes: multiculturalism [tick], unrestricted migration [tick], radical feminism [tick], abortion [tick],
homomarriage [tick], laws against gender violence [tick, whatever that means], any
concessions to the Catalan and Basque secessionists [tick, a more tentative one].
So, seeing
that I endorse Vox’s programme, would I have voted for it if I were Spanish? More
important, would I vote for a similar party in Britain if one existed? The
answer to that question is a resolute “that depends”.
I’m wary of politicians, parties or groups that define themselves negatively, in terms of things they hate, rather than things they love. And if the thing they love is blood and soil nationalism, I’m even more wary.
Judging by
Vox’s opposition to homomarriage and especially abortion, it combines some Christian
inputs with its neoliberal economic ideas and a traditional liberal support for
a powerful central state.
That suggests some intellectual muddle for there’s more to Christian politics than just opposition to abortion and homomarriage. One constituent is a preference for localism over centralism and a lukewarm attitude to neoliberal economics, particularly when it’s raised to the status of a social and moral panacea.
At least a
Christian element is present there, whereas none exists in similar British
groups. These are crystal clear on things they hate, typically the EU and
Muslim immigration, and disconcertingly hazy on things they love.
That’s hardly surprising because such causes bring under their banners not only conservatives like my friends and me, who see them in a broad cultural, social and political context, but also fascisoid thugs like Tommy Robinson who simply detest foreigners, especially chromatically different ones.
I’d love to see, say, UKIP become a real conservative party, supplanting the one that bears this sobriquet though it’s no longer entitled to it. But that’s impossible even in theory, for UKIP draws its support from groups across the whole spectrum that otherwise have nothing in common.
History shows that, when conservative gentlemen and fascisoid thugs form a single party, eventually the latter oust the former. Thus, if either UKIP or the Brexit party ever gains an electoral victory, it’ll be taken over by the Tommy Robinson types, not someone like Gerard Batten or even that friend of Putin Nigel Farage.
Such a
prospect terrifies me almost as much as the more likely victory of Corbyn’s
Labour. Almost but not quite. I’m a firm believer in the ad hoc political
principle of ABC: Anyone But Corbyn.
Hence I’d
vote against Corbyn regardless of whom he were up against. For the same reason,
I wouldn’t vote for any marginal party just to register my contempt for the
Tories: the contempt is strong, but such a vote could let Corbyn in. So I’d
pinch my nostrils and vote Tory.
Similarly,
I’d vote for the Tories if they were opposed by any party led by the likes of
Tommy Robinson. And if I were Spanish… well, in all honesty I don’t know enough
about Spain’s politics to have a strong view.
I like Vox’s
programme more than any other on offer, but countries aren’t governed by
programmes. They are governed by people who most of them use political
programmes to gain power. How they’ll act when they’ve gained it is anybody’s
guess.
It all
comes down to the situation common to all mature, or rather senescent,
democracies: people vote not for but against. They support what they see as the
lesser of two evils because they are faced with the evil of two lessers.
It’s useful to remember that, while not all populist parties are fascist, all fascist parties are populist, and it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference when they’re out of power. And when they are in power, it’s sometimes too late.
On historical evidence, we must also beware of single-issue politicians – even if we agree with the single issue. Thus I’m deeply concerned about the Islamisation of Europe, but I hope this cause may be championed by conservatives, not fascisoid thugs.
If you
detect a note of relativism in all this, you’re right. But the relativism isn’t
mine – it’s the effluvia exuded by modern politics. Much as we’d like to
breathe a cleaner political air, it doesn’t exist.
When a Duma delegation recently visited North Korea, one of its members jubilantly announced: “We are kindred souls!”
He meant that the kinship is based on both countries suffering under the yoke of sanctions, all completely undeserved. But the meeting between Vlad and Kim in Vladivostok the other day established other reasons for the two rogue regimes to feel close affinity.
They are fused together by their shared reliance on nuclear threats as a way of staying in power. That scarecrow adorns their field in which nothing grows, other than the weeds of a pampered nomenklatura blowing billions on assorted monuments to bad taste around the world.
Other than that, North Koreans are starving, as are the Russians, albeit so far on a smaller scale. Things like indoor plumbing are beyond the reach of some 20 per cent of them, and I bet that proportion is much higher in Kim’s bailiwick.
In any normal country such leaders would be ousted, and in any subnormal country probably also Ceaușescued, Saddamed or, if you’d rather, Gaddafied. Obviously, no such normal or subnormal outcomes appeal to Vlad and Kim.
Both are casting envious glances at China, a country occupying a position between North Korea and Russia on the dictatorship scale. China is marginally less oppressive than the former and marginally more so than the latter, but with one crucial difference.
China took
to heart the old saw “if you can’t beat them, join them – and beat them at
their own game”. Her murderous dictators are relying on the West’s own
institutions to gain respectability first and dominance second – and not a
particularly distant second at that.
Using China’s
traditional business acumen and her unlimited supply of cheap, practically
slave, labour, the Peking tyrants flood the West with goods and finance,
gradually moving in to colonise parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America – and threatening
to do the same to Europe.
In the
past 10 years, China has invested $318 billion in European assets, including
some strategic industries. But that’s only on the surface. Underneath the surface are 355 mergers and joint
ventures for which no terms were disclosed.
A nation counting 1,000-year eggs
among its culinary delights isn’t short of patience. The Chinese will continue
to buy Europe bit by bit until they find themselves in a position to dictate
terms.
Their nuclear weapons are there mainly to discourage any rash countermeasures, and also possibly to make it easier to conquer Taiwan when the time comes. For the time being China doesn’t need to threaten anyone directly – she’s doing fine as it is.
The Chinese option is off limits even for Russia, never mind North Korea, which has no money to buy foreign industries. Conversely, Vlad and his gang are awash with purloined cash, and they’ve probably laundered more of it in the West than the Chinese have invested.
But therein lies the key
difference: the Chinese invest; the Russians launder. Once it’s scrubbed clean,
the money is used to create a philistine paradise complete with yachts, palaces
and expensive whores (not just those of the sexual variety – some politicians
and hacks also reach out for Vlad’s rouble).
Yet one thing Vlad and his gang can’t buy with their loot is respect. They do however know that fear is a reasonable substitute. Kim knows it too, and the two evil regimes overlap on the common denominator of hysterical nuclear threats.
Vlad rattles his big bombs to
persuade Western leaders that no serious problem anywhere in the world can be
solved without his participation. That strategy succeeded in Syria, with Trump’s
acquiescence. In fact, his eagerness to give Putin a foothold in the Middle
East adds fuel to the burning questions that the Mueller report has failed to
answer.
Since other Western countries are
sometimes more recalcitrant, it never hurts to remind them – as Putin’s
Goebbelses do round the clock – that they could be turned to radioactive dust
at the push of a button.
North Korea can’t have such
global ambitions; hers are strictly regional. The countries Kim wants to keep
in perpetual fear are Japan and especially South Korea, which has had the
audacity to use the same people and geographic conditions to create a thriving
economy, while Koreans north of the border are undernourished if they are lucky
or starved to death if they are not.
China, which accounts for 90 per
cent of North Korea’s trade, could put an end to Kim and all his nuclear games
in one fell swoop. But she doesn’t want to: Kim can be used as the bad cop to
keep China’s Asian competitors on the straight and narrow.
Vlad is using Kim for the same
purpose, with the added benefit of keeping America nervous. And nervous America
is, as any person would be facing a madman brandishing a razor. That’s why
Trump keeps making overtures to Kim, trying to sweet-talk him into abandoning
his nuclear arsenal.
Kim won’t, however; and Vlad
certainly doesn’t want him to. “Denuclearisation can only happen gradually,” he
explained. However, Vlad failed to define gradually in any temporal terms. How
gradually are we talking, Vlad? A year? A hundred? When hell freezes over?
Actually, added Vlad, for it to
happen even on such a nebulous time scale, “North Korea needs guarantees.” Of
what exactly?
That no Western country is
planning an attack on North Korea? Fine. Though I’m not authorised to speak on
any Western government’s behalf, I’m prepared to issue this ironclad guarantee now:
Neither the US nor Britain nor France is going to launch a nuclear strike on
North Korea if Kim gets rid of his nukes.
Western countries can only ever
attack North Korea or, for that matter, Russia in the same sense in which back
in 1939 Poland attacked Nazi Germany, and Finland the USSR.
On 31 August, Germans wearing Polish uniforms attacked the radio station at the border town of Gleiwitz. When the next day Germany launched a massive offensive against Poland, it was portrayed as a defensive response to Polish aggression.
On 26 November, the Soviets
shelled their own outpost at Mainila on the border with Finland. The shelling
was used as a pretext to start an aggressive war against that tiny country –
the Soviet Union had to defend itself against the dastardly Finns.
Neither Put-in nor Jong-un will
stay in power unless they whip up a state of paranoia at home and fear abroad.
Like a thief shouting “Stop thief!” louder than the pursuing crowd, both
criminal regimes keep whining about the threat of an imminent attack from the
West, hoping that way to stay in power and perhaps even to win some
concessions.
Yes, Vlad and Kim are indeed close friends – with both desperately short of any other. In fact, when the UN introduced a resolution condemning Russia’s theft of the Crimea, North Korea was one of only ten countries (other than Russia herself) that voted against.
The others were Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Well, tell me who your friends are…
P.S. Happy Easter to all my
Orthodox readers! Христос воскрес!
In these days of Brexit chaos, things to make us proud are hard to come by. So much more precious then are the recent data showing that we can at least be proud of our leadership in an area not normally associated with Britain: romance.
Continentals,
especially those in the bottom half of Europe, always brag about their
passionate virility, while mocking the British for their cold, calculating
rationalism devoid of any romantic impulse.
Napoleon
even went so far as to describe the British as “a nation of shopkeepers”. A
nation of shoplifters would be closer to the mark nowadays, but that’s not the
point.
The point
is that it’s time to abandon the stale, false image of Britain and her people.
For it’s precisely in the area of romance that Blighty comfortably leads the
way.
Our pupils
may lag behind continentals in literacy and numeracy exams, but British
youngsters outperform them by a wide margin in pregnancy tests. And, as we’ve
just found out, Britain accounts for 55 per cent of all gonorrhoea cases in
Europe. So who says romance is dead in perfidious Albion?
Actually, the technical term ‘gonorrhoea’
rather takes the romance out of it, making the condition sound undesirable,
perhaps even shameful. However, as Dr Mark Lawton, a sexual health consultant in
Liverpool, correctly states, “Shame is not a word that should ever be
associated with sexually transmitted infections.”
Hear,
hear. In fact, rather than stigmatising gonorrhoea,
we should applaud it – hence the nice, warm colloquial name for it, the clap.
For that survey shows that Britons
are more capable of love, broadly defined, than anyone else in Europe. It’s people
refusing to describe as love a quick tumble in the dark alley behind the pub
who should be ashamed of themselves. What matters isn’t the duration of a romance,
but it’s sincerity and intensity.
Even more despicable is an attempt
to ascribe our record-breaking incidence of the clap to an underuse of condoms
during romantic entanglements. Well, at least there aren’t many spoilsports
about who blame sexual promiscuity and the general decline in moral standards.
Thank God, who everybody knows doesn’t exist, for small favours.
Such archaic notions were rightly jettisoned long ago – people my age remember them sailing out of the window back in the ‘60s. In fact, we were the ones who pushed them that way. And as to using condoms, that’s like smelling a rose through a gas mask.
It’s not as if young Britons aren’t
aware of condoms and their use. Why, even kindergarten pupils are taught how to
pull a johnny on their pee-pee, when the pee-pee is big enough to be thus
enveloped. By the time they reach secondary school, those pupils know all there’s
to know about condoms – and reject them for being cold, antiseptic killers of
romantic spontaneity.
Moreover, since clap isn’t exclusively transmitted by the conventional amorous method, many women may balk at having to chew on a bit of impersonal, disembodied latex. No, the clap is caused by romance itself, not by any shortage of its paraphernalia. It’s a tax on love, and as unavoidable as any other taxation.
One must admit – and rejoice! – that
modern electronic media make it easier to find the love of one’s life (or
perhaps just of an hour in one’s life) than ever before. Things like online
dating, chat websites and e-mails put love, and therefore the clap, within easy
reach.
The pattern is repeated over and over again. Boy finds girl’s photo on the net. Boy likes what he sees. Boy makes contact. Girl responds favourably. Boy meets girl, say, in the dark alley behind the King’s Head. Boy and girl instantly fall in love. Boy and girl consummate their love with a quick roll in the dirt. Boy and girl introduce themselves (this last step is strictly optional and in fact may be infrequent). After a few days, boy and girl discover they have the clap.
Sweet romance, as they say. In that spirit, I propose the old song “I gave my love a rose…” should be changed to “I gave my love the clap.”
Having written this, I realise how hopelessly behind the times I am by suggesting that it’s the boy who initiates the infectious contact. These days, the girl is just as likely to make the first approach leading to contagion, which is what women’s liberation is all about.
As a lifelong champion of modernity, I hope you’ll join me in a round of
clapping applause for our young compatriots who are showing those continentals
what’s what.
It’s the British who are the nation of lovers; it’s the British who joyously indulge in public copulation in places like Ibiza – while the locals look on with admiration and envy. Long may it continue.
Pasted all over my Burgundian village are posters demanding Frexit as a way of re-establishing France’s democracy. Another poster claims that a return to the franc would create 1.2 million jobs.
I’m not
sure how they put an exact number on this, but there’s no doubt that the euro
hurts France economically.
By adopting a currency that’s the Deutschmark in all but name, the French lost the ability to devalue their own currency and therefore compete with German manufacturers on unit price. That means they lost the ability to compete tout court because German cars and fridges are of higher quality.
The
posters confirm what I’ve been noticing for quite some time now: the French have
problems not just with Manny Macron, but also with the EU – and they correctly
detect the umbilical link between the two.
By ‘the French’, I don’t mean my friends educated at the kind of top schools Manny wants to abolish as a sop to the mob: they all worship the EU the way they no longer worship God. The French who detest the EU are mostly regular folk: shop owners, barbers, plumbers, electricians, nurses.
This is
where France is different from Britain: we don’t have such a clear-cut class
divide between the Leavers and the Remainers.
Our watershed isn’t social but political. Right-leaning people are Leavers almost to a man, whereas the lefties, with some exceptions, tend to be Remainers. Age could also play a role, with a propensity to support Brexit more noticeable among the older, and therefore wiser, people.
But
neither class nor education seems to have a big role to play. For example, my
educated British friends are almost all Leavers – but then they neither work
for the BBC nor frequent fashionable parties.
Perhaps a
wider polling sweep than my own observation would show a certain Brexit bias among
the B-, C social groups, but, if so, I’m sure the watershed would be nowhere
near as wide as in France.
The reason is simple: though all modern states seek to make themselves more centralised and consequently less accountable, they do so to varying degrees in different countries. Thus Anglophone countries retain vestiges of their ancient traditions of localism, with some of the power exerted from bottom to top.
France has never had such traditions, or certainly not since her absolute monarchy came in to suppress feudal liberties. Both her quasi-monarchic state and her positive law tend to operate from top to bottom, which widens the distance between the state and its subjects.
Even local government exists mainly to convey and enforce central diktats, not to enable small communities to govern themselves as they see fit. That makes local government unwieldy and therefore big.
One can see this simply by looking at the size of the mairies in French towns and villages relative to their population. For example, the mairie of my local village in the picture below could probably accommodate all its 1,500 inhabitants.
All this promotes ‘us vs. them’ sentiments, which are more prevalent than in Britain and especially the US.
When things are going swimmingly, the French don’t resent that state of affairs very much, with their latent resentment seething without bursting out. But when the economy is stagnant, as it is now, the situation changes.
France
being France, people take to the streets. That explains the increased
popularity of that new fashion accessory, the yellow vest. It also explains the
growing resentment of the EU that removes government even farther away from the
people. More and more Macron and his jolly friends are seen as little more than
EU quislings, out of touch with the French.
Yesterday Manny tried to diffuse the situation by tossing some bones off his royal table towards the masses hungry for his demise. He’s going to reverse, he declared, France’s inherent dirigisme, with much of life directed from central Paris.
Manny
clearly felt like saying he’d do so by personal edict, but then became aware of
the inherent paradox and checked himself just in time. Instead he promised to
make it easier to hold referendums, which promise, if acted upon, is guaranteed
to make mob rule irreversible.
There has never existed a major country successfully governed by direct democracy. People elect their representatives and then trust them to govern on their behalf through institutions.
It’s only when the institutions fail to govern wisely and equitably that referendums are waved before the people. A referendum is a government’s tacit admission of its own ineptitude.
A bit of histrionic
demagoguery followed, as it always does when modern politicians talk. Help me,
pleaded Manny, to “rebuild the art of being French”.
But that art has never been lost, which is precisely the problem here. The art has been pushed underground by France’s rampant statism and its extreme manifestation in EU membership.
The whole
point of the EU is to toss dozens of diverse cultures into a cauldron and boil
them into a homogeneous mass devoid of any particular flavour and texture. The
French don’t need lessons in being French. Many of them simply realise that it’s
difficult under the EU aegis.
Sensing
that his presidency is hanging by a thread, Manny then tried to mollify the
restless populace with a few mea culpas.
“In a way,” he said, “I imposed on the French the impatience and the demands
that I have for myself and members of the government… I regret it. First of all
because that is not who I deeply am and because I think that that did not help
my cause.”
But that’s exactly what he deeply is, precisely the type of apparatchik produced by modern politics, especially in France. A small group of supposedly clever people imposing their demands on everybody else is the essence of French politics, which just might work after a fashion if those people are indeed genuinely clever – not when they are Manny.
“I must be more human,” added Manny, implicitly admitting that so far he has been rather less than human. For once, I agree.