Hungary for success

 

Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orban

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a thorn in the flesh of the European Union. Here, in TakiMag, I explain why.

Political theatre

Sir Robert Walpole, Great Britain's

first Prime Minister, in the 17th century.

Those of us who pay close attention to politics are well aware that there is a large element of theatre involved. Parts are played, speeches are made, and the actors walk the stage. It's like Shakespeare but without the genius, and certainly without any pleasure for the people at large, which the Bard certainly provided.

The latest act in Great Britain's tragi-comedy is the vote of no confidence in Conservative leader yesterday and, therefore, Prime Minister, Alexander Johnson, better known by his middle name of 'Boris'. (Actually, it's only one of his middle names. The other one is Pfeffel, which sounds like a French cake).

Under the rules of Britain's Conservative Party, the leadership can be challenged if a sufficient number of the Party's MPs (Members of Parliament, the representatives of their respective regions) write to a body called the 1922 Committee, who I suppose should be celebrating some kind of anniversary, although they don't look like the partying type). 

Johnson clung on, although not convincingly, with 41% of the 359 Conservative MPs voting against him. The rules of the party mean that there can be no further challenge to his leadership for a year. I doubt he will last that long, not because he will be deposed, but because he will get bored. Politics - once memorably described as 'pop music for ugly people', although I forget by whom - is a game which only entertains busy minds for so long. Also, politicians thrive on adoration, and increasingly they are getting less and less as ordinary people (despised and yet needed by the political class) are starting to cotton on that this whole scam is a cross between a gravy train and a Ponzi scheme.

The famous British comedy series, Blackadder, had one series set in the British Regency era. In one scene, Prince George explains to Blackadder that he is popular. 'Why', he says, 'only the other day I was in my carriage, and the people were shouting, "We hail Prince George! We hail Prince George!"' Blackadder (played by the comic genius Rowan Atkinson) replies, 'Sir, I think you will find they were shouting, "We hate Prince George".

Johnson and his wife arrived at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II (mentioned in the last episode) and was booed by sections of the crowd. He is not a man who takes well to criticism. Most politicians don't. And I think he will tire of the gig before long.

Johnson is, shall we say, a rather randy old ram, and has either seven or eight children. The newspapers won't confirm. See my piece here at Taki's Magazine a year or so ago for more information.

https://www.takimag.com/article/out-damned-symonds/

God save our gracious Queen

 

Queen Elizabeth II as a land-girl

during the Second World War

This last weekend has seen the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, who ascended to the throne of England 70 years ago on the death of her father, King George VI.

Monarchy is something of a mystery to Americans, their country having always been a Republic (albeit seized back from the monarchist English). As the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his noted mid-19th-century book, Democracy in America, the USA was always intended as an experiment in democracy and, until quite recently, was a very successful one.

But the Queen of England is, I believe, the world's longest reigning monarch. Long to reign over us, as the lyrics to the National Anthem say. She has served with an enthusiasm, a devotion, and a quintessential sense of what it is to be English, that is moving to every true-born Englishman. To be born an Englishman, said Sir Cecil Rhodes, is to win first prize in God's lottery. I am not sure that is still the case, but Elizabeth Windsor sometimes makes me believe that we were once an Empire on which the sun never set, and that this was a good thing. The world now is doing without the British Empire. Good luck with that.

Of course, there are voices in the UK who despise the Queen, the Royal Family, and all that goes with the concept of monarchy. Not least is the BBC, who manage to suck all the glory and pageantry out of the weekend celebrations by noting that Her Majesty is looking fragile and has mobility problems. She is 96 years old, you fucking mutts. Let me know how you are walking when you are four years shy of 100 years old.

But the people of England adore the Queen, which is why the Left instinctively despise her and everything she stands for. Admittedly, she is the matriarch of one of the world's most dysfunctional families, one which makes The Simpsons look like The Waltons, but that is hardly her fault.

So, God save our gracious Queen.

Long live our noble Queen.

That's entertainment!

Sheet music from a jazz version

of Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer',

written in 1902

Mark Dice is an American YouTube content provider, and a good one. He is on the money with the stories, and his videos rarely run over six or seven minutes. Note to YouTubers, by the way, some of us don't have time to watch your 37-minute video. We have lives and work to do. Keep 'em short and punchy.

Dice mentioned some of the mainstream Left-wing American media heavyweights the other day - Carlson, Gutfeld, Watters et al - and I felt he was rather unfair in dismissing them as 'entertainers'.

When the British Broadcasting Corporation (more usually known by its acronym, the BBC) was set up in 1922 under the auspices of rather a stern man, Scottish calvinist Lord Reith, its mission statement (or 'remit' as it was called in those quainter days) was 'to inform, educate, and entertain'. Today, the BBC is a sorry affair, and fulfils none of the three elements of its original purpose.

Entertainment is a very good delivery system. It is why Aesop wrote his fables. We all know of the story of the ant and the grasshopper, the former working when the weather was fine to store food for him and his ant family when the weather turned cold, the latter fooling around and playing music. Then, when winter descends, the ant has his food all laid up while the grasshopper has nothing. (What a metaphor that is for current times. I recommend Aesop's Fables, for your kids as much as for yourselves). We take the moral message because we enjoy the story.

But my point is this. We live in a hedonistic era, whether we like it or not. We would probably not take to the type of dry, joyless Calvinistic lectures Lord Reith would have had to endure (much less fun than Aesop). We like a bit of pazazz and ring-a-ding-ding with our moral instruction. Which is why we watch Fox News, various YouTubers, and The Simpsons (when it was good) instead of reading The New York Times, which is about as enjoyable as a lecture from a nun.

The BBC is so joyless now that during the celebrations for Queen Elizebeth II's platinum jubilee - which means she has been on the throne for 70 years, longer, I believe, than any other monarch in history - they chose to ignore the street parties and cheering crowds and flypasts of Spitfire aeroplanes, and instead concentrated on how frail Her Majesty was looking. She's 96 years old, you fucking bastards. How do you think you will look when you are four years off a century?

I believe fundamentally that in a world becoming increasingly dark, lightness and humour and entertainment are essential components if we are to keep what Juvenal, the Roman poet, called mens sana in corpore sano. For those of you who were too busy fooling around at the back of the classroom during your Latin classes, that means 'a healthy mind in a healthy body'. I believe you will find it in the 10th Satire.

So, why should out information and education come wrapped in the tomb-shrouds of seriousness? The news is not good, I grant you, and we are whistling past the graveyard, but at least we are whistling. It is better to be informed than ignorant, but being entertained at the same time is the cherry on the cake.

The galloping engine

 

A Zimbabwean bank note, earlier today

Janet Yellen is the Secretary to the Unites States Treasury, and has stated publicly (or at least on CNN) that she was wrong about inflation. In November of 2021 she was of the opinion that this financial event was the equivalent of a bad cold or perhaps a touch of COVID-19. Transitory, was the key word used at the time. It now appears that it is much worse than that.

I have to say that economics has always fazed me. I simply don't have a mind that deals well with mathematics and the kinetics of figures, being a thinker who works better in the atmosphere of the abstract. I wish that I could find the provenance of the greatest description I have ever read of economics, which is as follows.

"Alchemy became chemistry. Astrology became astronomy. I wonder what economics will become".

It has been suggested that the great scholar of the history of Islam, Bernard Lewis, came up with this stroke of genius, but I can find no proof, and it seems somewhat off-piste given Mr. Lewis's area of expertise. But I digress.

What we do know is that quantitative easing (aka printing money) leads to inflation. More money is worth less. The end of this process is hyper-inflation, where ridiculous denominations of currency leads to a bucket load of coin and note for a loaf of bread.  Now, when this happens in countries such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe, it is a tragedy for all concerned, but it is not a global threat. However, when it happened in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, there was a rather more serious chain of events, usually referred to as the Second World War.

So, what happens if America succumbs to hyper-inflation? Perhaps a possible scenario might be best illustrated by the metaphor of the galloping engine.

Twenty or so years ago, I owned and lived on a canal boat in England. It was powered by a low-revving diesel engine made in the 1970s by the famous British engine makers, Lister. This engine is well known to boat owners, and Listers can be found in strange places. A London acquaintance of mine went to India on business in the 1980s. There, he saw a Lister engine at the head of a mine-shaft and there to pump out rain-water. The engineer proudly told my friend that the engine had been running continuously for 25 years. Any necessary repairs were made by taking the revs down as low as possible and then making the necessary changes while the engine was still running.

I used to be able to get my engine down to 60 RPM, and it would still push me along the canal. Mind you, the speed limit on these British waterways is 4 MPH, so the propellor doesn't have to turn that fast, but it is testament to an engine manufacturer that it can produce an engine that seems almost not to be working at all, but still does what it was installed to do.

Then there is the other end of the RPM scale. Diesel engines can 'run away'. or 'gallop', and they become uncontrollable and one boat engineer told me he had run away from a galloping engine because they will blow and bits of cast iron will start flying in all directions. So best make yourself scarce.

What if the US economy becomes a galloping engine? As noted, with Venezuela and Zimbabwe there are local effects - Zimbabwe was often described as 'the bread-basket of Africa'. because of its maize production, and Venezuela has oil - but the ripples are not going to reach the banks of the mill-pond. But the USA, in terms of the Western economies, G7 etc., pretty much is the mill-pond. They used to say that when America sneezed, the world caught a cold. In this age of the pandemic, this image may be more pertinent than ever.

As we are all well aware, governments manipulate statistics. Crime rates, immigration levels, unemployment, all of these stats are air-brushed to give cosmetics to the current regime, which seems to change but remains the same. As English rock band The Who sang, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But inflation is a tricky genii to keep stoppered up in the bottle. If you use an aggregate, you soon realise that no one gives a damn about the rise in prices of rivets unless you run a business that needs some rivetting done. And when there isn't much rivetting being done because demand is down, rivets stay the same price because demand is low, even I can see that.

But housewives - if they still exist in this modern Gomorrah - don't go to the store for rivets, they go to the store for food, on the whole. When that starts to leap in price, there will be hoarding and, effectively, runs on shops the same way there are runs on banks. Americans are paying record prices for gasoline - or 'petrol', as we Brits call it - but the thing about gasoline is you can't hoard it like like you can rice or tinned fruit. If hyper-inflation hits food, there will be food riots and armed guards at supermarkets.

I hate to be what the great English journalist Julie Burchill called an 'amockalyptic', a sort of prophet of doom just trying to get attention, but mathematics has a way of getting away from the mathematician, just like the falcon cannot hear the falconer in the poem by Irish poet W B Yeats and which is so famous I have forgotten its name. We must hope that the engine doesn't gallop.

A tale of two Luthers

 

Both of these men had a dream.

Only one came true.

In 1517, German pastor Martin Luther famously nailed a list of 95 propositions onto a cathedral door in Wittenberg. These theses, as they were known, were critical of the Catholic Church, particularly the practice of plenary indulgences, which simple people believed would help you buy your way out of hell. This action - at great personal risk to Luther, who stood trial in Rome - gave birth to the Protestant Reformation, exposing the corruption of the Catholic Church and allowing Protestant nations such as Holland and Great Britain to begin free trade free of the hypocrisy of religion, quite apart from more metaphysical concerns.

Four and a half centuries later, the black pastor Martin Luther King gave one of history's most famous speeches, in which he gave his opinion that people should be judged on the content of their character and not the colour of their skin. There are tremendous similarities between these two moments in history, not least the exposure of hypocrisy and prejudice. How sad that only one of the dreams has come true.

Protestantism was of course a necessary corrective to the corrupt Catholic Church. And it is corrupt. 30 years ago I visited a cathedral 50 km outside of Budapest in Hungary, still then a relatively poor country after its occupation by the Communists of Soviet Russia. I have never seen so much gold. And the church is supposed to be a friend to the poor. Also, Protestantism is by far the more reasonable branch of the schism in the Church, adopting a measured mix of Platonism and Aristotelianism (which is what St. Thomas Aquinas strived for) instead of the wilder shores of metaphysics the Catholic Church had long set sail for.

With Martin Luther King's thesis, things were much simpler. His dream was that human beings - that's us, homo erectus and, for the most part, homo sapiens - would one day be judged by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin.

It is difficult to fault either Martin Luther, so why did the first succeed in his reformation and the second so lamentably fail?

Partly, the answer lies in will and knowledge. The Catholic Church was so obviously corrupt at the turn of the 16th century that even the ordinary folk were starting to scent it. It may be that Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press 50 or so years before (essentially as important as the internet, and the Church hated it) played a part in exposing the Catholic operation. It has to be remembered that people were largely illiterate at that time. Those old Catholic churches you have been into, those pictures on the wall, the stations of the cross and so on. They weren't art, they were there to teach the poor people who couldn't read the story of the crucifixion. But I digress.

Also, the world was ready for Protestantism economically, which tends to trump everything else. So where did Martin Luther King miss out?

To begin with, the contemporary political - and metapolitical - elites thrive on division, mutual animosity between tribes, and the seeding of the idea that the races should naturally be at war with one another. It is a horrible concept.

But it is being pumped into the ideological water supply by the American media, who will soon doubtless be followed by the slavish European press.

Who wins from the promotion of racial division? Certainly not the ethnic minorities the Left claim to care so much about. Giving more black people Oscars will not bring down the black-on-black kill count in Chicago next weekend.

And even blacks who are Conservative - Candace Owens, Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, for example - are called Uncle Tom and worse by a media phalanx which is rabid with animosity as well as being - ironically - largely white.

If a race war ever takes place it will be the fault of no race but the political one, a breed unto themselves, and one we could well do without.

Enemies of the people

 

Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen's play

An Enemy of the People,

was written in 1882.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the last two years, during the COVID-19 pandemic, was not necessarily the way in which the political class commandeered the opportunity to chip away at the freedoms of tax-payers in the West by not allowing a good crisis to go to waste, but the sheer contempt they showed for them while doing so.

The political class has for some time been showing all the symptoms of a strange hybrid of psychological afflictions, seeming to be both quasi-autistic and psychopathic at the same time. The Venn diagram between these two conditions nests of course with one common element - empathy.

It is not difficult to imagine the majority of Western politicians quite happily pulling the wings off flies. Their feigned empathy is not convincing, particularly when you examine their ruinous policies. Ruinous, that is, for the peons, the serfs, the little people, not for their own cabals and fraternities.

Probably the most-quoted book over the past few years is George Orwell's 1984, which is becoming as central to dissident thinking as the Qu'ran is to the Islamic world. So we will leave it be, and turn our attention to Orwell's 1945 political essay about England, The Lion and the Unicorn. In that piece, Orwell writes that 'England is a family with the wrong members in control'. This maxim can now be extended to the world as a whole.

In passing, it is a great example of what the English 19th-century novelist Thomas Hardy called 'cosmic jokes' that the most malevolent British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, shares a surname with George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair. That may seem extraneous information, but by the same token it might win you a bar-room quiz one day, that fact. Every day is a schoolday.

And it certainly is if your chosen subject happens to be the political class. A combination of punitive and ever-increasing taxation, the increase in ideological control of what people can and cannot say, the neutering of Western police forces, quantitative easing (aka printing money) which will lead to inflation as surely as night follows day (see Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and the Weimar Republic), allied with a ruinously liberal approach to immigration both legal and illegal, and you will witness an attitude displayed by the political class to the rest of us which verges on hatred.

And of course it doesn't help to say that you can vote them out. There are two major parties in most civilized countries in the West, but they generally differ about as much as one brand of soap powder does from the one next to it on the supermarket shelf. Henry Ford famously said you could buy his cars in any colour as long as it's black, and now you can have your politics in any ideology as long as it is globalist, neo-socialist, high-tax-and-spend oligarchism.

What the West has now is a sort of hybrid between what Samuel T. Francis described as 'anarcho-tyranny' and the four-stages of the internal destruction of states described by the brilliant Russian defector Yuri Bezmenov in the 1980s. These men are absolutely worth your time, as chilling as their conclusions might be.

What is it that drives human beings to be so morally profligate with the people they are supposed, constitutionally and electorally, to represent and give a voice to? I will give you one instance of something happening in England which is so disturbing I wonder if the country of my birth is not trying deliberately to start a civil war.

A pretty village called Linton-on-Ouse (meaning that it sits on the river Ouse) has a population of 700 people. Until next week, when an RAF base (Britain's Royal Air Force, slowly being dismantled along with the rest of the Queen's armed forces) will be filled with 1,700 mostly young male Muslim immigrants awaiting the results of their asylum applications. They will be allowed to go into the town. This is so clearly a recipe for disaster that it is impossible that the British government cannot see what is coming.

When a government becomes the enemy of its own people, one of two things happen. You either have utterly repressive regimes, such as North Korea, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, or you have civil war.

Pick one card. You can't have both.