Friday Night Music - Scottish Honour Killing I

One of the few things I agree with Andy Newman about is his defence of the average Ibrahim in the mosque, when faced with liberal accusations that Muslim culture is homophobic and sexist to a wholly unprecedented and outrageous extent.

After all, Ibrahim's views on homosexuals ('punish them'), adulterers ('punish them'), a woman's place (in the home raising kids), abortion (murder) and 'loose' women from another culture (use them) would have struck a chord with most Brits, and pretty much all male Brits, in "Elder Days Before the Fall" - the Fall being the 60's Cultural Revolution.

Where I differ with Andy is that, like Dave Osler, he sees Muslim immigrants as instruments to fulfil his political ends rather than rational actors with ideas and ends of their own  - the ostensible end in Andy's case being the strengthening of the British working class to the point where the downfall of capitalism is a realistic prospect. How's that project going, Andy? Are the UK working class stronger or weaker than in pre-diverse days?  And how are the capitalists doing relative to the workers - better or worse? Really? How odd. You'd have thought all that diversity would have strengthened the movement no end, wouldn't you? It must just be a coincidence that Andy and the Institute of Directors are of one mind when it comes to the desirability of mass immigration.  

I digress. And I mustn't push the parallel between Muslim immigrants and antediluvian Brits too far. Slaughtering one's daughter for bringing dishonour on the family was never a part of that lost Brit culture. Even the modern leftie slanders against the family whose daughter "got into trouble" turn out to have been greatly exaggerated.

Save perhaps in the one part of the UK, a couple of hundred years back, where the mores of the Punjab (and even more the NW Frontier) would have been quite understood - the Highlands of Scotland before the Forty-Five. As Thomas Macaulay put it :

"He would have found that life was governed by a code of morality and honour widely different from that which is established in peaceful and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab in the back, or a shot from behind a fragment of rock, were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults. He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or their fathers had wreaked on hereditary enemies in a neighbouring valley such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years' War shudder. He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned ... that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats.

And yet ... it was true that the Highlander had few scruples about shedding the blood of an enemy: but it was not less true that he had high notions of the duty of observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests."

It may just be a coincidence, but the only traditional British song I know where a daughter is killed for damaging the family honour is from Aberdeenshire. It's also beautifully sung here by the late Ray Fisher :


"Oh, father, mother, sisters all,
Why sae cruel to your Annie?
My heart was broken first by love,
Now my brither's broke my body"

Friday Night Music - The Testimony of Patience Kershaw

 Charming though the Unthanks version is, I always feel that Gary and Vera Aspey get closer to the heart of this moving Frank Higgins song. From their 1974 LP Seeing Double, which I believe is no longer available - correct me if I'm wrong.



As the reproletarianisation of Britain continues, and the life-pattern of our children starts to move towards that of their great-grandparents (a low wage, rent all your life, a few years of retirement on a small pension before death - with the added tweak that they'll be surrounded by strangers who owe them no loyalty or solidarity), they'll be learning the lessons all over again - the lessons their great grandparents knew but their parents forgot.  The song was inspired by 17 year old Patience Kershaw's testimony to Lord Ashley's Mines Commission of 1842. The Mines Act of 1842 that resulted prohibited the employment in the mines of all women and of boys under thirteen.         It's good of you to ask me, Sir, to tell you how I spend the day  It's in a coal black tunnel, Sir, I hurry corves to earn my pay.  The corves are full of coal, kind Sir, I push them with my hands and head.  It isn't lady-like, but Sir, you've got to earn your daily bread.   I push them with my hands and head, and so my hair gets worn away.  You see this baldy patch I've got, it shames me like I just can't say.  A lady's hands are lily white, but mine are full of cuts and segs.  And since I'm pushing all the day, I've great big muscles on my legs.  I try to be respectable, but Sir, the shame, God save my soul.  I work with naked, sweating men, who curse and swear and hew the coal.  The sights, the sounds, the smells, kind Sir, not even God could sense my shame.  I say my prayers, but what's the use? Tomorrow will be just the same.   Now, sometimes, Sir, I don't feel well, my stomach's sick, my head it aches.  I've got to hurry best I can. My knees feel weak, my back near breaks  And then I'm slow, and then I'm scared these naked men will batter me.  They can't be blamed, for if I'm slow, their families will starve, you see.  All the boys, they laugh at me, and Sir, the mirror tells me why.  Pale and dirty can't look nice. It doesn't matter how I try.  Great big muscles on my legs, a baldy patch upon my head.  A lady, Sir? Oh, no, not me. I should have been a boy instead.   I praise your good intentions, Sir, I love your kind and gentle heart  But now it's 1842, and you and I, we're miles apart.  A hundred years and more will pass before we're standing side by side  But please accept my grateful thanks. God bless you Sir, at least you tried.

"Over the centuries, laissez-faire argumentation for low wages has shifted from insisting upon the iron necessity of child labor to the wonderfulness of open borders. But the combination of monetary interest driving intellectual arguments remains very similar." - Steve Sailer.

January 1, 1917

Telegraph - "A soldier has been killed in an explosion in Afghanistan in the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand Province."

It was New Year's morning, and I lay thinking of my boy, and wondering what this year would bring him. It was early in the morning before I slept. And it seemed to me that I had scarce been asleep at all when there came a pounding at the door, loud enough to rouse the heaviest sleeper there ever was.

My heart almost stopped. There must be something serious indeed for them to be rousing me so early. I rushed to the door, and there was a porter, holding out a telegram. I took it and tore it open. And I knew why I had felt as I had the day before. I shall never forget what I read :

"Captain John Lauder killed in action, December 28. Official. War Office."

It had gone to Mrs. Lauder at Dunoon first, and she had sent it on to me. That was all it said. I knew nothing of how my boy had died, or where - save that it was for his country. But later I learned that when Sir Thomas Lipton had rung me up the previous night he had intended to condole with me. He had heard on Saturday of my boy's death. But when he spoke to me, and understood at once, from the tone of my voice, that I did not know, he had not been able to go on. His heart was too tender to make it possible for him to be the one to give me that blow - the heaviest that ever befell me.

It was on Monday morning, January the first, 1917, that I learned of my boy's death. And he had been killed the Thursday before ! He had been dead four days before I knew it ! And yet I had known. Let no one ever again tell me that there is nothing in presentiment. Why else had I been so sad and uneasy in my mind ? Why else, all through that Sunday, had it been so impossible for me to take comfort in what was said to cheer me ? Some warning had come to me, some sense that all was not well.

Realization came to me slowly. I sat and stared at that slip of paper, that had come to me like the breath of doom. Dead! Dead these four days ! I was never to see the light of his eyes again. I was never to hear that laugh of his. I had looked on my boy for the last time. Could it be true ? Ah, I knew it was. And it was for this moment that I had been waiting, that we had all been waiting, ever since we had sent John away to fight for his country and do his part. I think we had all felt that it must come. We had all known that it was too much to hope that he should be one of those to be spared.

The black despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed down now and enveloped all my senses. Everything was unreal. For a time I was quite numb. But then, as I began to realize and to visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead, there came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word of that curt telegram upon my heart. I said it to myself, over and over again. And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over and over, the one terrible word : " Dead ! '. I felt that for me everything had come to an end with the reading of that dire message. It seemed to me that for me the board of life was black and blank. For me there was no past and there could be no future. Everything had been swept away, erased, by one sweep of the hand of a cruel fate.

Oh, there was a past, though ! And it was in that past that I began to delve. It was made up of every memory I had of my boy. I fell at once to remembering him. I clutched at every memory, as if I must grasp them and make sure of them; lest they be taken from me as well as the hope of seeing him again that the telegram had for ever snatched away. I would have been destitute indeed in that event. It was as if I must fix in my mind the way he had been wont to look, and recall to my ears every tone of his voice, every trick of his speech. There was something left of him that I must keep, I realized, even then, at all costs, if I was to be able to bear his loss at all. There was a vision of him before my eyes. My bonnie Highland laddie, brave and strong, in his kilt and the uniform of his country, going out to his death with a smile on his face.

And there was another vision that came up now, unbidden. It was a vision of him lying stark and cold upon the battlefield, the mud on his uniform. And when I saw that vision I was like a man gone mad and possessed of devils who had stolen away his faculties. I cursed war as I saw that vision, and the men who caused war. And when I thought of the Germans who had killed my boy, a terrible and savage hatred swept me, and I longed to go out there and kill with my bare hands, until I had avenged him or they had killed me too.

But then I was a little softened. I thought of his mother back in our wee hoose at Dunoon. And the thought of her, bereft even as I was, sorrowing, even as I was, and lost in her frightful loneliness, was pitiful, so that I had but the one desire and wish-to go to her, and join my tears with hers, that we who were left alone to bear our grief, might bear it together and give one to the other such comfort as there might be in life for us. And so I fell upon my knees and prayed, there in my lonely room in the hotel. I prayed to God that He might give us both, John's mother and myself, strength to bear the blow that had been dealt us, and to endure the sacrifice that He and our country had demanded of us.

Sir Harry Lauder, "A Minstrel In France". Captain John Lauder was their only son.

R.I.P. Richard Mannington Bowes

When Richard Mannington Bowes was born in 1943, the ethnic minority population of Britain was a few thousand people.

When he was eight years old, in 1951, Churchill's cabinet debated immigration into the UK.

David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of "coloured people" in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits.

It's almost impossible for anyone growing up today to imagine what a peaceful and orderly (and staid) place post-war Britain was. The American anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1955 "Exploring English Character", compared the post-war English with their early Victorian forebears of 120 years previously* :

"One of the most lawless populations in the world has turned into one of the most law-abiding; ...a fiercely and ruthlessly acquisitive society has turned into a mildly distributive society; general corruption in government has been replaced by an extraordinarily high level of honesty... in public life today the English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilized world has ever seen. ... you hardly ever see a fight in a bar (a not uncommon spectacle in most of the rest of Europe or in the U.S.A.)... football crowds are as orderly as church meetings.."

If you had told Mr Mannington-Bowes' parents that, sixty years later, their child would be beaten to death, in Ealing, by a mob of strangers bent on looting and arson, they would have thought you were mad.

They'd have thought you were mad if you predicted that he'd be fined in the local magistrates court - "for confronting youths for urinating outside his home".

This was England. The law was on the side of the law-abiding, and people were killed in riots in far-away countries, not here.

UPDATE - I would be interested to see a report of his trial and conviction, and who the magistrate was. I trust it wasn't this one. I don't want to come over all Polly Toynbee, and the people who beat him to death ARE savages, but the wholesale criminality (mixed with plenty of assaults just for the fun of it) is a product of an assault on the principles of criminal justice that's been going on for fifty years. Fifty years of mass immigration may arguably have been a necessary condition for his murder, but certainly not a sufficient one - and as I've said many a time and oft, there are plenty of native youth who'll beat a man to death for being a good citizen.

As I argued here and here, something in the water of post-Cultural Revolution UK seems to turn the children and grandchildren of previously law-abiding people into bad boys and girls. What could it be ? This Polly Toynbee column - or a read of the Magistrate's blog - may hold an answer.

* to be fair, the peacefulness of the English puzzled him greatly, John Bull being traditionally a pugnacious sort of chap, always ready to scrap when offended by a foreigner of any description.

Attock Fort

The gateway to the Khyber road, the fort at Attock on the Indus. Formerly spanned by a bridge of boats, the river is now crossed by the Peshawar-Kabul road.


View Larger Map

It's an impressive structure, in an impressive setting.

A marble slab inscription set above the inner north gateway of Attock Fort bears the completion date 991 AH (1583 AD). The work was supervised by Shamsuddin Khawafi. The fort is purely a military post designed to hold the river crossing and guard the bridge of boats. The fortifications are built mostly of local shady rock set in thick lime mortar. For arches, vaulting, domes, and the external string-course, small lakhauri brick has been used. The original gateways are of sandstone resembling that found at Taraki in Jhelum District. An interesting feature of the fortifications is a narrow gallery contrived high up in the wall to give the defenders head and back cover. The greater part of the gallery has a vaulted roof, but in one stretch, thick, flat roofing slabs replace the brick vaulting. The battlements, loop-holes and machicolations bear evidence of changes to meet new needs arising from changing armaments.


Akbar not only built the fort, but also established a ferry and a mint and settled a colony of boatsmen from Hindustan, the descendants of whom still live in Mallahitola. The place soon became important for transit trade. To meet the needs of the traders, a serai (inn) was also built. On the road side and up on the hill near a spring there developed several places for ziarat (pilgrimage). Mosques and temples were established up to meet the religious demands of the people. All these buildings have deteriorated.

Picture and info via the excellent and informative urbanpk.com.

A Forgotten Episode

Harpymarx was describing Srebrenica as the "worst massacre post-ww2" the other day, and Laban linked to a host of worse massacres, including "10,000 Arabs massacred by black Africans in Zanzibar in 1964".

The highly religious Okello was convinced he had been given orders in his dreams by God to break the powerful position of the Arabs and to found the revolutionary state on Zanzibar and Pemba. On the night before the “revolution”, Okello gave his men the order to kill all Arabs between 18 and 25 years of age, to spare pregnant and elderly women, and not to rape virgins.

The coup led to the poorly-known massacre of between 5,000 and 20,000 Arabs, whose families had been living in Zanzibar for centuries, between January 18 and 20. Footage of the massacre can be seen in Gualtiero Jacopetti's film Africa Addio.

Now of course the Arabs were descendents of slave traders, while the black Africans were descendants of their victims. But isn't there a word for killing people on the grounds of their descent? They can't be blamed for the sins of their forebears.

I'd forgotten that I'd read an eye-witness account of the massacre, in Ranulph Fiennes' excellent "Where Soldiers Fear To Tread".

Fiennes is recruiting in Ziki, Oman, for his 'Recce Patrol' - part of the Sultan's anti-guerilla forces staffed by Brit officers on secondment :

A six-foot Zanzibari with a handshake that crushed my fingers and a head of fine black fuzz wished to join for original reasons. Recce Platoon had more machine guns per man than the Companies. And Mubarreq Obeid - for that was the big negro's name - had been unable to have a machine gun in his Company. With such a weapon, he said, his thick lips compressed in a snarl, he could kill many Chinese shooyooen (communists) in Dhofar and that was his desire. I protested that there were no Chinese communists in Arabia let alone Dhofar, but he was adamant.

"You are wrong, Sahb. They are behind all the troubles everywhere. Soon there will be many like locusts in Dhofar. In Zanzibar they talked to the African how he must throw out the Arab. Then, seven years ago, they rose and murdered all they could catch; slitting their throats by night as they slept. Some of us escaped to the dhows but my parents were chased along the beach by a crowd - although my mother was African. They ran into the sea to swim to the boats but some of the crowd followed, caught them by the hair, and drowned them.

So I, Mubarreq, have no parents because of the Chinese rats."

When he had gone I looked at the others. All nodded their assent.

The book's interesting as showing the 180 degree inversion of the Left in relation to Islam since those early 70s days. The Chinese Maoist and Soviet Communist trainers of the Dhofari guerillas told them that Islam was an invention of the British, a device cooked up between the Brits and their corrupt rulers to confuse their minds and keep them subservient. The guerillas were taught to kill and torture those who put their religion before the needs of the revolution. I'll dig a few other quotes out when time permits.

Friday Night Music - Ivan Koslovsky

A year or so back I found a video (which I can no longer find !) of Paul Robeson singing in Moscow in the Fifties alongside the Ukranian tenor Ivan Koslovsky. I thought he sang beautifully, and it was a shame that he could never perform in the West :

Kozlovsky was never allowed to perform in the West because his brother Fedor Kozlovsky, who was also a singer, had left Ukraine to tour Europe with Oleksander Koshetz in 1919. Upon hearing of the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine he refused to return.

Here he is, singing in Moscow aged 79 singing the Neapolitan 'Fenesta che lucive' - and still ripping the floorboards off the stage - not to mention the scarf off his (much younger) accompanist.

400 Glorious Years

Since the first edition of surely the greatest work ever produced by a Government committee, the King James Bible.

(Three BBC progs about the production thereof here)

Unbelievable Fact Of The Day

I noted in the post on Kate Middleton's family tree that the English are pretty much all related to each other. And of course the colonies which became the USA were English projects.

Every single US President bar one (Martin Van Buren) is a descendant of King John I of England.

Including Obama (who's also descended from (inter alia) King Edward I (Longshanks) of England, King Henry III of England, King Henry II of England, King Henry I of England, King William I (the Bastard) of England, Count Baldwin of Flanders and his daughter Matilda, King Robert Capet I of France, King Louis I of France, and Charlemagne). Obama also shares a common descent through Richard Eltonhead with Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain.

Not to mention apparently being descended, along with George Washington, from Halfdan The Old and through him from the Norse god Odin.

Lament For The Makars

Wiiliam Dunbar's great ode to the Bards of medieval Scotland and England, freely adapted from the original by Laban the other night when feeling a tad deflated after the Baggies lost to Wolves.

Dunbar's also noted as being the first writer to get his four letter words printed. It's interesting to see that his great English contemporaries rank so high - no "effete ****holes" in the Dunbar bestiary - not English ones, anyway - and it's sad that many of the Scots he praises leave no surviving work. There's a worthy task for antiquaries and researchers - to find the verses of Stobo, Herriot, Blind Harry and the rest.

I, that hearty was and hale,

Am troubled, sick and like to fail,

Enfeebled by infirmity;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Our pleasure here is all vainglory,

This false world is but transitory,

The flesh is bruckle, the Fiend is sly;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The state of man does change and vary,

Now sound, now sick, now blithe, now sorry,

Now dancing merry, now like to die;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Nought of this earth here stands securely;

As the wind shakes the growing barley,

So trembles worldly vanity.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

On unto Death go all estates,

Of Court, of Church, all potentates,

Both rich and poor of all degree;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He cuts the knights down in the field,

Full armoured under helm and shield;

Victor he is at all melees;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

That warlord merciless and wild

Tears from the mother's breast the child,
And sorrowing he leavès she;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He takes the warrior in his power,

The captain in the strongest tower,

The bowered beauty, all takes he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He spares no lord for elegance,

Nor clerk for his intelligence;

His deadly stroke may no man flee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Magicians and astrologers,

Logicians or theologers,

Their wits help them no more than me;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

In medicine the best practicians,
The leeches, surgeons, and physicians,
Find Death to have no remedy;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Poets and playwrights of our day

Play out their pageant, then away;

Spared not for their great faculty;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has impetuously devoured,

The noble Chaucer, of poets the flower,

The Monk of Bury, and Gower, all three;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The good Sir Hew of Eglintoun,

Also Herriot, and Wyntoun,

All taken out of this country;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

His sting has left the world bereft
Of Master Clerk, and James Affleck,

Of ballad-making and tragedy;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Of Holland, Barbour we're bereaved;

Alas ! He would not even leave

Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

The Clerk of Tranent's also gone,

That wrote Adventures of Gawain;

Sir Gilbert Hay - ended is he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill

Slain with his shower of mortal hail,

Can Patrick Johnstone from it flee ?

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He's given Mercer his goodnight,

That did of love so lively write,

So short, so quick, of sentence he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He has ta'en Roull of Aberdeene,

And gentle Roull of Corstorphine;

Two better men you'll never see;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

In Dumfermline the race is run

Of Master Robert Henryson;

And Sir John Ross embraced has he;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

And he's now ta'en, last of all,

Good, gentle Stobo and Quentin Shaw,

All men might wish he'd left them be:

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Good Master Walter Kennedy

At point of death lies verily,

Great pity that such thing should be;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Since he has all my brethren ta'en,

He will not let me live alone,

And I shall be his next, you'll see;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

For death there is no remedy,

So for our death, prepare must we,

That after death, new life may be;

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Kate Middleton and Social Mobility

There's been a lot of comment about the coal miner's great-great-granddaughter marrying a prince. This provisional and incomplete family tree illustrates a few points :

a) Kate Middleton is very English. Not a Welshman or Irishman to be seen, one Scottish great-great-grandfather. And you have to go back 10 generations to find Gaston Martineau, a surgeon who fled France in 1685 (presumably a Protestant threatened by the Edict of Fontainebleau), and his wife Marie Pierre. The Goldsmith connections don't appear to be Jewish (5 generations married in church, apparently) - in the 1700s they're Kentish carpenters.

b) social mobility

The background of each of Kate Middleton's great-great-grandparents, as far as is currently known, can be summarized as follows:

• Middleton - Tradesmen in Yorkshire rising to professionals (attorneys)
• Asquith - Tradesmen in Yorkshire
• Lupton - Background of his grandparents:
  • Lupton - Tradesmen in Leeds
  • Darnton - Tradesmen in Leeds
  • Greenhow - Professionals from Yorkshire
  • Martineau - Clergymen and professionals from Norfolk and Northumberland
• Davis - Clergymen and professionals from Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and elsewhere in western England
• Glassborow - Tradesmen from Surrey
• Elliott - Tradesmen from Surrey
• Robison - Clerks from Scotland
• Gee - "Gentlemen" descending to tradesmen
• Goldsmith - Labourers from Kent and Hertfordshire
• Dorsett - Labourers in London
• Chandler - Labourers from Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, rising to tradesmen
• White - Tradesmen from Somersetshire and Buckinghamshire
• Harrison - Miners in Northumberland and Durham
• Hill - Mariners in Durham, later tradesmen
• Temple - Miners in Yorkshire and Norfolk
• Myers - Agricultural labourers in Yorkshire

Around 50% middling men and women (the Luptons were a well-known Leeds family - there's a university hall of residence named after one of them), 50% working people. One jailbird, Edward Glassborough, an insurance company messenger - wonder what he was in for ?

c) the seeming total absence of bastardy. Everyone has two parents, and they are married to each other. So much for the historical revisionists.

d) I see one of the Harrison miners married a Jane Liddle. Hopefully there's a Rod Liddle link. What has apparently been established are links to Guy Ritchie, to her husband Prince William, and to various other aristocrats*. The native population of these islands being a partially inbred extended family**, there are bound to be links. Go back 10 generations and you have 2 to the power 10 i.e. 1024 ancestors, which takes you back to the 1600s. Go back another 10 generations, to the 1300s, and you have over a million forebears. There are around 50 million native Brits in the UK, each with getting on for a million forebears in the 1300s - but there were less than 10 million Brits around in the fourteenth century. Obviously we*** have an awful lot of ancestry in common.



* as you go back and records are scarcer, those for whom records ARE available tend to be the great and the good, so a tree gets biased towards higher classes as you go back.

** the inbreeding being generally inside the distinct populations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, at least until the greater mobility of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

*** those who are not, like myself, the son of an immigrant father. That's most of the native Brits.

One Big Cheer

US forces "took custody" of Bin Laden's body, Obama said.

Huzzah ! And fair play to Obama.

The US stressed Islamic practices would be respected.

If my memory serves the Brits were less sensitive to the religious needs of a killer, back in the days when James Abbott restored to the Muslim population of Hazara the religious freedoms which were suppressed under Sikh rule. The 1853 assassin of Colonel Frederick Mackeson in Peshawar was hanged before being sewn into a pigskin ('most abhorrent to Muhammedans' said John Lawrence, who gave the order) and cremated in the Hindu fashion before the ashes were thrown in a river.

A/c/t this Google Maps link* at Steve Sailer's, Bin Laden's compound was just up the road from the Pakistan Military Academy. Make of that what you will - he certainly has.

Pakistan had to know. This location can't possibly be a coincidence. Pakistani government insiders put him right in their pocket so they could protect him. They hugged him to their bosom.

On the other hand, it's not as if the Pakistan Military Academy seem to have turned out to protect the compound - although there are conflicting reports about what happened to one helicopter. Did it just malfunction/suffer small arms damage, or was it shot down by a missile? And was it a US helicopter?

UPDATE - Christopher Hitchens seems to agree with Sailer:

If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It’s the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.

UPDATE - a/c/t Wikileaks Pakistani intelligence are allegedly heavily involved with the Taleban and Al Qaeda :

American diplomats were told that one of the key reasons why they had failed to find bin Laden was that Pakistan’s security services tipped him off whenever US troops approached. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) also allegedly smuggled al-Qaeda terrorists through airport security to help them avoid capture and sent a unit into Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban.

UPDATE - via commenter Mark, this 2002 Seymour Hersh story alleges that thousands of Pakistani intelligence and military operatives, Taleban and Al Qaeda fighters and their hangers-on were airlifted by Pakistan out of the city of Kunduz, just before it fell to the Northern Alliance in November 2001. The Americans co-operated, setting up an air corridor to allow the flights safe passage.

According to RAW’s senior analyst for Pakistani and Afghan issues, the most extensive rescue efforts took place on three nights at the time of the fall of Kunduz. Indian intelligence had concluded that eight thousand or more men were trapped inside the city in the last days of the siege, roughly half of whom were Pakistanis. (Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens, and various Arab mercenaries accounted for the rest.) At least five flights were specifically “confirmed” by India’s informants, the RAW analyst told me, and many more were believed to have taken place.

In the Indian assessment, thirty-three hundred prisoners surrendered to a Northern Alliance tribal faction headed by General Abdul Rashid Dostum. A few hundred Taliban were also turned over to other tribal leaders. That left between four and five thousand men unaccounted for. “Where are the balance?” the intelligence officer asked. According to him, two Pakistani Army generals were on the flights.

Now due allowance must be made for the fact that India and Pakistan hate each other's guts. But unnamed US officials seem to have confirmed the story, off the record, to Hersh.


* Google allows reviews. Best one - "Aside from the complimentary dialysis machine use, easy underground access to Pakistan's beautiful vast cave system, and free toaster waffles, it's a pretty big dump. The food wasn't organic, the wifi was spotty at best, absolutely no cell coverage, (yelp reviews were so wrong on that one) and no one spoke English. To make it worse, the country's best basketball player, some 6'7" dude with a turban, gets shot our first night there. And the coffee was cold. We're so not coming back. "

Happy Birthday !

You've always done your duty (with the possible exception of a failure to send Heath and Blair to the Tower ... admittedly it would have been controversial at the time, but a monarch's place is to think of the survival of the nation, not just the institution. I guess you could respond that we voted for them, after all).

"Is this going to be used to kill the English?"

I admit to finding this story hard to believe. But a lot of hard to believe things happen in Israeli politics, as anyone taking even a cursory glance at the subject will notice.

Telegraph :

Israel secretly supplied arms and equipment to Argentina during the Falklands War due to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's personal hatred of the British, a new book discloses. Interviews conducted by the author of the book, the Argentine journalist Hernan Dobry, reveal that Begin saw the deals as a form of revenge for the hanging of a personal friend, Dov Gruner, by the British Mandatory Authorities in Palestine in 1947.

After the Argentine Air Force contacted Isrex, the Israeli defence company, a meeting was arranged between representatives of the company and Begin. Israel Lotersztain, a salesman for Isrex Argentina, said Begin interrupted the Isrex officials as they tried to explain the situation, saying: "You've come to talk badly about the British. Is this going to be used to kill the English? Kadima (go ahead). Dov [Gruner] up there is going to be happy with the decision. Obviously, it must be all done perfectly."

Gruner was sentenced to death for his part in an attack on a police station by Irgun, the Zionist underground paramilitary movement which Begin commanded before the state of Israel was established. As he awaited hanging, he wrote a letter to Begin, thanking him for his support and emphasising his belief in Irgun.

"He [Begin] hated the English above all; everyone had forgotten the British occupation, but not him" according to Lotersztain. His colleague Jaime Weinstein agreed, saying: "He did all that was possible to help Argentina, selling her weapons during the Malvinas [the Argentine name for the Falklands] conflict."

Well, if this is true, the dirty dog. Since when was any country's foreign policy the vehicle of its leader's personal prejudice, outside of a dictatorship ? No wonder Ben Gurion looked upon Begin as an extremist, and denounced his terror group Irgun as the “enemy of the Jewish People”. No wonder Einstein and Hannah Arendt described his immediate post-war party as "a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties".

There were five flights in total from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires via Lima, loaded with equipment such as gas masks, radar warning systems to prevent fire from enemy missiles, air to air missiles, duvet jackets and spare parts. Additional fuel tanks for fighter bombers supplied by Israel were particularly important for Argentina's war effort as they enabled pilots to fly to the Falklands and return to the Argentine mainland without stopping. Dobry discovered that Israel sent 1,500-litre tanks rather than the standard 1,300-litre models and writes that this meant the British Task Force had to move its fleet further east to prevent further bombings.

They did indeed move the Task Force east, after the loss of HMS Coventry and Atlantic Conveyor. But a/c/t Max Hastings' book on the conflict, the Super Etendards which sank the Conveyor were refuelled in mid-air by other Etendards, and the Argentinians were 'chronically short' of drop-tanks. The Israeli intervention probably killed far fewer people than were killed in the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic bombings of the next decade in Argentina. But it's the thought that counts.

What's even stranger is that apparently the Brits were aware of Begin's dastardly deeds, and kept schtum AFAIK.

However, British intelligence services kept track of aircraft landing in Peru and even photographed some of the arrivals. "A newspaper once published a picture showing the loading on to an Aerolineas Argentinas plane and the British ambassador in Israel took the photo to Begin and hell broke out," said Lotersztain. "They were aware of the whole operation to the extent that sometimes when we discussed whether some supplies had arrived we would say, 'let's ask the English'".

Imagine that a British Prime Minister once had a young friend killed in the Falklands. Thirty-five years on he remembers that fact, and starts supplying weapons to Hezbollah via Syria, asking the Syrian purchasers "Is this going to be used to kill the Israelis?". Wouldn't happen. Who was it who said that a nation has no friends, only interests ? But what we see here, if true, is .. well, for once I'm lost for words.

Those Damn Normans

Coming over here, slaughtering our nobles (who in their turn had slaughtered many Romano-British nobles), building their castles on our monastic cemeteries - and hanging onto their ill-gotten gains...

Telegraph :

"People with "Norman" surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress. Drawing on data culled from official records that go back as far as the Domesday Book as well as university admissions and probate archives, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, has tracked what became of people whose surnames indicated their ancestors had come from either the aristocratic or artisanal classes. By studying the probate records of those with “rich” and “poor” surnames every decade since the 1850s, he found that the extreme differences in accumulated wealth narrowed over time. But the value of the estates left by those belonging to the “rich” surname group, immortalised in the character of Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, were above the national average by at least 10 per cent. In addition, today the holders of "rich" surnames live three years longer than average. Life expectancy is a strong indicator of socio-economic status."

But not always :

"Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch the profile of your face better. Yes, that's the d'Urberville nose and chin—a little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of Glamorganshire. Branches of your family held manors over all this part of England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich enough to give a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second's time your forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to attend the great Council there. You declined a little in Oliver Cromwell's time, but to no serious extent, and in Charles the Second's reign you were made Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty. Aye, there have been generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood were hereditary, like a baronetcy, as it practically was in old times, when men were knighted from father to son, you would be Sir John now."

"Ye don't say so!"

"In short," concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with his switch, "there's hardly such another family in England."

"Daze my eyes, and isn't there?" said Durbeyfield. "And here have I been knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if I was no more than the commonest feller in the parish…"

A Few Cowslips From The Curate's Coppice

It's not going too well at Fukushima. I think the words "sawdust and newspapers were also used" are the giveaway - never words you want to hear in the context of a leaking nuclear reactor.

A complete history of radiation incidents - I see that Russian criminals seem to be able to get hold of radioactive sources, while in Taiwan and China people use them to attack their co-workers. Many remote Russian lighthouses are powered by radioactive sources - which foolish crooks try to steal for scrap - a usually fatal decision. But the scariest stories of all are the criticality accidents. You're experimenting with a ball of plutonium and accidentally drop a piece of metal too close to it - a blue flash and a wave of heat - you swipe away the metal, but in those seconds you receive a fatal dose of radiation.

I mentioned flight JAL123 the other day, in the context of the downside to Japanese acceptance of responsibility. What I didn't mention was that the Japanese pilots kept the plane in the air for 32 minutes (passengers wrote farewell letters), despite having lost ALL the main controls - rudder, ailerons, elevators. The only control they could exert was differential thrust on the wing-mounted engines. When pilots attempted similar control on simulators as part of the post-crash analysis, they couldn't match the performance of Captain Tamahaka's crew in terms of keeping the aircraft aloft.

JAL123 lost control near mountains and nearly all the passengers and aircrew died. When United Airlines Flight 232 lost all controls after an engine failure, they were over level country. Using only the engines to steer the plane (they could only turn right, so moved in a series of loops), they found an airport and crash-landed on the runway - the majority of passengers survived though over a hundred died. The cockpit recording transcript is as gripping as any novel, and Captain Haynes lecture at Edwards Air Force Base shows you one impressive character.

I missed this one - Julie Bindel treading carefully on the subject of Charlene Downes.



UPDATE - commenter Brian says : "The story of the radioactive boy scout isn't mentioned (in the radiation log - LT)."

Oh yes it is.

Sunday Sadness

Left, the monstrous East Stand, an Eighties addition to a previously open terrace which ruined the view of the pitch from the landings of Swansea Prison, seen in background. Front, a gaping void in the North Bank, the large terrace which could hold 10,000-plus fans in pre-Taylor Report days.

They're finally demolishing the Vetch Field, former home of Swansea Town, which has been standing empty for six years. The turf trodden by Ivor and Len Allchurch, John and Mel Charles, Terry Medwin, Cliff Jones (not to mention Dave Gwyther and Tony Millington), will become a 'landscaped area'.

Someone's pinched the clock.

There's something awfully sad about an abandoned football ground. I felt the same about Park Avenue, which for years remained empty in Bradford 7, the posts gone and the grass growing a yard high.



















Photo by ronaldaroo on flickr.

"Where now are the coaches and people ? where is the rattle a'rattling?
Where are the shirts and the scarves and the two sides battling?
Where is the roar and the chant, and the toilet roll throwing?
Where is the hand round the pint, and the cigarette glowing?"

The sporting landscape of a Swansea childhood is vanishing - at neighbouring St Helen's, the disappearance of the Mound Stand destroyed one of cricket's great pleasures - the ability to watch the sea and the shipping between deliveries. Then the old East Stand, recipient of a couple of Gary Sobers' six sixes, was demolished and replaced by what looks like an aluminium bus shelter. The stand overhung the Mumbles Road and was supported by pillars on the pavement, giving a cloister effect and shelter from rain. During the early Sixties wave of Welsh nationalism, the letters F R E E W A L E S ! were painted on the pillars. Within weeks some wag had painted out the W, and the pillars advertised free ales until demolition.

The King's Speech

About a third of the way into Tony Hooper's The King's Speech, I had a feeling I'd seen the plot before. Stuffy, hidebound, repressed type meets irreverent, vital colonial and is charmed/seduced despite themselves? Ah yes - Titanic, where it was toffee-nosed Kate Winslet who (despite the lack of a formal introduction) needed to find charming chancer Leonardo di Caprio (and the entire cast of Riverdance, travelling steerage to show her what life could really be - Catholics have natural rhythm, dontcha know) before she could unloosen her stays and do some bouncing over the bounding waves with him. I'm not a cinema buff, but I guess that theme goes back a long way.

This time it's Colin Firth's Duke of York (fated to become George VI after his elder brother's abdication), unable to string a sentence together in less than ten minutes due to his stammer, who needs the help of Geoffrey Rush's speech therapist Lionel Logue ("me Lionel, you Bertie") to unbutton his buttons - after which he can bounce about a room shouting swear-words as well as any Brit monarch in history. Rush plays Logue somewhat in the style of Professor Laurie Taylor - a kind of smug mixture of matiness and superiority, a man with a fiver each way on himself. In fact Logue's grandchildren described him as a 'very Victorian' character, not over-familiar - pretty much the opposite of what Rush gives us. "I don't think he ever swore in front of the king and he certainly never called him Bertie.*"

Writer David Seidler takes the usual pop at Christianity, Rush's Logue (in reality a Christian Scientist) dismissing the religious element of the Coronation Oath as 'this rubbish'**, and he absolutely murders British history. Baldwin didn't resign with the words 'Churchill was right' - far from it, he laid down his office confident that Churchill was well and truly sidelined and out of the way. Nor was the Duke of York a strong anti-Nazi - nor a Churchill fan, any more than Churchill, who supported Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, was a fan of his (although he later became one). And if the King couldn't speak by the outbreak of war in 1939 he really did have problems - Logue had been helping him for thirteen years by then.

That said, the direction is excellent, as are the performances. Two hours fly by, and you find, as war breaks out and the BBC mike lights come on, that you really want the big speech to go well. It's not an easy job to make gripping drama out of a man reading three typed pages - but it works. The camerawork is fantastic - London has never looked more gloomily beautiful, a fog-bound sepia fantasy - although again you have to wonder if Logue, whose practice was in Harley Street, really lived in a neighbourhood straight out of Oliver Twist. The cinema audience applauded at the end.


But I fear that a generation*** will grow up knowing that the King was helped by an ur-hippie teaching him to loosen up by jumping about while shouting obscenities. The dramatic core of the film is also its biggest lie.




* as a naval officer who served at Jutland, the Duke almost certainly had been exposed to an extensive armoury of swear-words, but off his ship would not have used them, nor tolerated others using them in his presence.

** oh, and Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang wasn't the idiot presented here, either.

*** unless the sell-out audience where I saw it is typical. They were MUCH older than a typical cinema audience.

Shoah

The Brits managed without a memorial day for the Shoah for 55 years after WWII - the first was in 2001. My views - that killing people is bad, and that the Germans did it - remain unchanged.

I know several people who lost relatives (as I know people who lost relatives in the 1947 Punjab massacres). One friend's aunts actually went back to live in Germany after the war - not sure I'd have wanted to without being heavily armed.

Sometimes an anecdote illuminates better than bare stats. From a profile of Martin Peretz, former editor of liberal US mag 'The New Republic' :

In the late fifties, when his father, Julius, was just about the age Peretz is now, the elder Peretz had an apartment in Tel Aviv. “He used to walk a lot,” Peretz says. One day, while sitting in a park, he found himself in conversation with another old man who also spoke Yiddish. The man invited Julius Peretz back to his apartment. His wife, he said, would make tei und lekach — cake and tea. So he went.

Julius Peretz had eight siblings, but all of them had died in Poland. He had emigrated to New York in 1922. On this stranger’s piano, he saw a class photo. “So there’s a picture on the piano of a group of girls,” says Peretz. “And he recognizes someone—second row, third from the left. It looks like his sister. But it couldn’t be, because the generation is a generation of younger people.” The stranger’s daughter is in the class photo, too, and they phone her. The name of the girl Marty’s father thought he recognized is Anja, and she lives—the daughter says—in a kibbutz on Israel’s edge, right up against the Jordan River.

Julius Peretz takes a taxi there—three hours, winding roads—and asks the guard to summon Anja. He does; she looks nothing like his sister. “She says, ‘There’s another Anja,’” says Peretz. “He brings Anja who looks like his sister, and there is the one survivor of his family.” She was Julius’s niece.

One survivor. We've been very fortunate in the UK over the last few hundred years. Not so elsewhere. The danger is that, secure and peaceful as we've been in this island, we're forgetting our own and other people's history - and are looking for potential danger and slaughter within ourselves - rather than outside.

China - Genius Genes, Gentlemen and State Power

As I said a while back, if China can set up a eugenic policy for a few Olympic basketball medals, what might they not do for a few more Nobel-winning scientists ?

Some of the world's fastest supercomputers are being set up in Hong Kong to address the age-old mystery of human intelligence.

The study of intelligence quotient (IQ) is being conducted by BGI Hong Kong, [formerly] known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. It will survey DNA samples from 1,000 child prodigies from China's best high schools, comparing them with samples from 1,000 children of average intelligence, searching for genetic variations.

The study will examine protein coding genes of the extremely smart children, many of whom are expected to enroll at Harvard, Yale or Cambridge. The results will be correlated with each youngster's school test scores, in hopes of learning how specific genetic variations affect intelligence.

The study, which started in 2009 in Shenzhen, is moving to a new facility in Tai Po. By the end of this month, 115 of the world's fastest sequencers - the HiSeq 2000 - will have relocated to the city. They will be able to sequence the equivalent of 1,000 human genomes a day, and soon surpass the entire sequencing output of the United States to become the world's largest sequencing centre.

The study by BGI, which receives strong financial backing from the Shenzhen and mainland governments, will be the largest-scale examination of its kind. Ethical and privacy concerns have hindered such work in America and Europe.

You can say that again. When a decent and humane sort like Charles Murray gets called a Nazi and a racist for writing about IQ, the likelihood of a Western government sponsoring a massive IQ/genetics research program ain't terribly high.

BTW, I'm no expert, but mightn't it be more productive to compare exceptional children with their less brilliant siblings ? I'm sure Professor Hsu knows what he's doing.

Ever since Nazi Germany misused science to support its murderous racist and anti-Semitic theories, Western societies have been extremely sensitive about linking genetics to IQ.

Yup. Even though we ain't German and we ain't Nazis, no one wants to be branded by association - which is what UK lefties will do the moment the subject's raised. But China doesn't seem to have a great deal of liberal guilt about such things - they're more into 'what works'.

Be interesting (as in the apocryphal Chinese curse) to see what comes out of this. East Asians are already among the cleverest people in the world as measured by IQ. If they could find some way of turbocharging that ... on the other hand the simplest thing would be to drop the one-child policy for clever girls.

(In the UK the cleverest girls have the fewest children - dysgenics rather than eugenics).



UPDATE - a vision of the future ? via Professor Hsu, Mark Lilla at New Republic on the two Westerners influencing bright young Chinese - Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt.

I had heard that Strauss was popular there, as was, to my surprise, Carl Schmitt, the Weimar anti-liberal (and Nazi - LT) legal theorist... Strauss and Schmitt are at the center of intellectual debate, but they are being read by everyone, whatever their partisan leanings; as a liberal journalist in Shanghai told me as we took a stroll one day, “no one will take you seriously if you have nothing to say about these two men and their ideas.” And the interest has little to do with nationalism in the nineteenth-century sense of the term. It is a response to crisis—a widely shared belief that the millennia-long continuity of Chinese history has been broken and that everything, politically and intellectually, is now up for grabs.

... Liberal thought, the young ones now feel, just doesn’t help them understand the dynamics of Chinese life today or offer a model for the future. For example, everyone I spoke with, across the political spectrum, agrees that China needs a stronger state, not a weaker one—a state that follows the rule of law, is less capricious, can control local corruption, and can perform and carry out long-term planning. Their disagreements all seem to be about how a strong state should exercise its power over the economy and how its newfound power should be exercised in international affairs. Similarly, there was complete consensus about China’s right to defend its national interests, just differences over what those interests are. When my turn to talk about American politics came, and I tried to explain the Tea Party movement’s goal of “getting government off our backs,” I was met with blank stares and ironic smiles.

That makes sense to me. Chinese national interest demands better governance, not less government. The national interest is expressed by Schmitt :

Classical liberalism sees society as having multiple, semi-autonomous spheres; Schmitt asserted the priority of the social whole (his ideal was the medieval Catholic Church) and considered the autonomy of the economy, say, or culture or religion, as a dangerous fiction. Classical liberalism treats sovereignty as a kind of coin that individuals are given by nature and which they cash in as they build legitimate political institutions for themselves; Schmitt saw sovereignty as the result of an arbitrary self-founding act by a leader, a party, a class, or a nation that simply declares “thus it shall be.”

... The Chinese tradition of political thought that begins with Confucius, though in a way statist, is altogether different: Its aim is to build a just social hierarchy where every person has a station and is bound to others by clear obligations, including the ruler, who is there to serve. Central to the functioning of such a state are the “gentlemen” (or “gentry” in some Confucius translations), men of character and conscience trained to serve the ruler by making him a better one—more rational and concerned with the people’s good. Though the Chinese students I met clearly wanted to épater their teachers and me by constantly referring to Schmitt, the truth is that they want a good society, not just a strong one.

And the better governance comes from Strauss's gentlemen :

Taking a cue from Aristotle, Strauss distinguished between philosophers, on the one hand, and practical men who embody civic virtue and are devoted to the public good, on the other: While knowing what constitutes the good society requires philosophy, he taught, bringing it about and maintaining it requires gentlemen. Aristocracies recognize this need, democracies don’t ... But for the young Chinese I met, the distinction between sages and statesmen and the idea of an elite class educated to serve the public good make perfect sense because they are already rooted in the Chinese political tradition. What makes Strauss additionally appealing to them, apart from the grand tapestry of Western political theory he lays before them, is that he makes this ideal philosophically respectable without reference to Confucius or religion or Chinese history. He provides a bridge between their ancient tradition and our own. No one I met talked about a post-Communist China, for obvious reasons. But students did speak openly about the need for a new gentry class to direct China’s affairs, to strengthen the state by making it wiser and more just.

Now this is all fascinating stuff, implying a future China a little like Victorian Britain, with an elite class of gentlemen born (or bred) to rule in the national interest. But the British were always sceptical of ideology, let alone an ideology like Schmitt's, with its theory of 'the enemy' or 'the other', not to mention a love of dictatorship and 'decisive action'. Schmitt considered the Night of the Long Knives to be "the highest form of administrative law" - not a guy you'd want to be up in front of in court.

When I see people like Andy Newman worshipping at the People's Shrine, I do wonder - is he just making his obeisances to whatever rising power isn't British (hedging his bets by also backing Islam), or is he genuinely confusing some idealised Socialist Republic in his skull with the reality of the PRC ? What I see in these young Chinese patriots is a desire for something more like the "ancient virtues of courage, patriotism and devotion to duty" which Glubb Pasha describes in a rising empire.

“Chinese tradition has many good things, but we’ve ditched them,” Wan told me. “I feel there have to be people to carry them on.” She came from a middle-class home, and Tang’s humble roots and old-fashioned values impressed her. “Most of my generation has a smooth, happy life, including me,” she said. “I feel like our character lacks something. For example, love for the country or the perseverance you get from conquering hardships. Those virtues, I don’t see them in myself and many people my age.”

Those who came into conflict with Victorian Britannia usually came off worse - she was pretty robust about defending her interests. How robust will a 'Schmitt-powered' Chinese elite be?