Watch This!

On Laodicia link to long but excellent video on Hitler and abortion.

Patriotic Problem

I have a problem, for me a very sad problem, in which I may not be alone. I would love to be a patriot, but find it impossible to be a patriotic Englishman or Britisher. The landscape of Britain is beautiful and still has many of the lovely buildings built by our forefathers, but since 1967 and the abortion act I have not been able to recognise the land of my legal nationality as the country my fathers fought for, and sometimes died for.

Since then, thanks to Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, and their progressively dingy successors, Britain has become a byword for I know not what - certainly little that is good. For me, Gladstone, Churchill, and Macmillan were the last decent Prime Ministers.

Living in patriotic Poland as a very patriotic pseudo-Polak, I greatly enjoy her war films, for example Ogniem i Mieczem (with Fire and the Sword)  directed by Jerzy Hoffman. Here is a short clip, with a magnificent Ukrainian song Hej Sokołe! sung frequently in Poland. And in this clip , you can see the steel wings worn by the Polish cavalrymen, which terrified the Turks at Vienna, who thought they were being attacked by angels.  If you get a chance to see the film, it is full of fantazja ułańska.

Don't Get Taken In!

When I was 16, and studying for 'O' Level, a relative gave me a second-hand copy of T.S.Eliot's early poems, and I fell upon them like a ravening er... jackass. They were hard, or even impossible, to understand. 'The Waste Land' was full of quotations in Greek, Latin, French, German, and even Sanskrit, and was obviously, therefore, so profoundly cultured and intellectual, that my lack of understanding revealed only my own inadequacy. Away with Shakespeare, Miton, Pope, Tennyson, and all the other versifying nobodies! Here was poetry! I had to learn to understand and appreciate it.

And then, about 20 years ago, I read a remark by The Great Man, which I cannot track down, but which went something like this:

Many people have tried to understand 'The Waste Land', and worried about its meaning, but really, it doesn't mean very much. It was just a sort of generalised moan.

The confession of yet another plausible and empty fraud, like so many others - Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Ted Hughes, Louis McNiece, et al who never came clean. At least Eliot confessed.

Once, I had tried to like them, shamelessly bogus as I was. It was an illness.

I think I am healthier now.

A Brilliant Piece from the Heresy Hunter

This from Heresy Hunter, had me in stitches. It is funny, serious, and well-referenced. CELEBRITY RELIGIONISTS, EFFETE INTELLECTUALS AND AN ASSORTMENT OF THE DISILLUSIONED GATHER IN MONTREAL TO PROMOTE SYNCRETIST UTOPIA..

Fantazja Ułańska II

I have mentioned fantazja ułanska before, but without a proper explanation. It translates as "cavalryman's, or hussar's, fantasy". The Poles are a modest people, and not given to fantasize. It is no fantasy, but fact, and not just for cavalrymen.

A friend explained it like this :

The young man, armed with a sabre, gets on his horse and says, "I am a son. I love my mother, my father, Poland, and the Mother of God. I am off to kill Gemans, or Turks, or Swedes, or Communists, or whatever, enemies of Poland. I do not know what will happen, but God knows."

And off he goes.

This is the spirit of Polish Squadron 303, without which the Battle of Britain might have been lost, and Britain occupied by Germany. It lives on. The Pole drives like an ułań, overtakes like one, and eats and drinks like one. The women are not much different.

Remarkable people.

A friend in his thirties, the mayor of the smallest town in Poland, and a husband and father, was two years ago diagnosed with cancer of one kidney. His father and, I think, his grandfather had both died of the same illness. The whole town got together and paid for thirty masses to be said for him at Jasna Góra, the Polish shrine.

I met his wife while he was recovering and asked how he was. One might have expected her to be frantic, but her reply was characteristic.

"We haven't had the results of the tests yet, so no prognosis, but it will be as God gives (będzie jak Pan Bóg da)."

He is now, thank God, fully recovered and still mayor.

God is forever on the lips of the average Pole, not in the unfunny would-be satiric stage-Irish style of "O Begorrah, Bejasus, Bedad! Holy Mother of God!", but born out of the real piety which such idiocies were written to mock.

As I said, remarkable people.

Mission Aborted

Five Polish friends and I months ago planned a trip to Kaliningrad, a formerly German town in the tiny Russian enclave on the Baltic, between Poland and Lithuania.

Through another friend, a soi-disant travel agent and expert on such matters, we got three-month visas to Russia, for which we paid, he said, a reduced rate because he knew the Russian Consul and could get a good deal.

The trip was today.

The journey from where I live to the border takes about thirty minutes, with a fifteen minute wait at the Polish side for documents to be inspected and a rather longer wait at the Russian side for the same reason.

Polish officials are usually friendly, and we got to the Russian control point without problems.

The Rusians officials were neither happy nor quick, and were particularly interested in me and my British passport, and even more so in my visa.

Unlike the others, my visa had expired on 30th August, and I could not enter Russia. Fool that I was, I had not bothered to read it. I explained to the border guard, whose hat would have made a fine helicopter landing pad, that we were on an excursion to the beautiful and historic city of Kalininigrad.

"Your problem, not mine," he replied, without a smile. He looked sad. Being nice got me nowhere.

There followed a wait of about 20 minutes while the officials thought about it. I hoped they could extend the visa with a rubber stamp, or something similar. If not, I had already decided to return to Poland on my own, so as not to make everyone else come back and spoil the outing.

The official returned, beckoned to me to follow, and walked very fast across three lanes of the checkpoint. I walk very fast too, so overtook him, and that made him even sadder. A car was waiting.

The driver of the car was a Pole, was returning from Russia to my town, and so drove me home. My friends went on to Kaliningrad.

I learned a lot from that driver. From where I live you can drive to Russia in half an hour, with an almost empty petrol tank, fill your car and a canister up with low-price Russian petrol or diesel, buy a litre of very cheap but excellent Russian vodka and cigarettes (all quite legally), and return to Poland.

You then syphon out the petrol, which you sell at a good profit, sell the vodka and cigarettes, and earn yourself 100 złoty, a reasonable day's pay.

The driver said he could easily do this three times a day and earn three times the amount, but you can cross the border legally only once every 24 hours. He has a wife (a nurse) and children, but no job, only the daily trip to Russia and plenty of free time for his children, he and hundreds (thousands) of others who live close to a border crossing.

Smart people! As they say, "Polak potrafi." The Pole can do it.

Hah! And he also told me where to buy a much cheaper, regular visa.

The others haven't returned yet, but I hope they've brought me something nice.

Well Worth Reading, if You haven't Already.

The Tenth Crusade has a brilliant parable about reverence for Christ.

A Fine Post from Countercultural Father

Countercultural Father has a fine post today, which I urge you to read, on Our Father's House - A Short Fable.

How Nice to be Nice!

How nice to be nice!
To tolerate vice,
And give honour to every perversion.
To love without boundaries,
Ideological quandaries,
And have Faith, but one's own private version.

My Heart Leaps Up - Oh What the Hell!

Wrote Wordsworth, among his dottier lyrics:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.

I am not sure that he would have been equally uplifted by the gesture of the British Embassy in Warsaw of flying the rainbow flag.

Oh, what the hell!

Mundabor on the Real Jesus

Another forthright and uncompromising post from Mundabor here on the Mythical, sanitised Jesus of recent para-Christianity.

It's not laziness that makes me fill my blog with links, but admiration.

Mundabor on revolting German clerics (intentional stale pun)

Trenchant post by Mundabor on the prostitution of the German Catholic Church.

Help! Searching for Quotations

I am looking for the sources of two quotations, have searched in vain on the internet, and wonder if anyone can please help.

The first, which I heard at a talk by Rhodes Boyson was from an emigre Russian historian living in London, and was to the effect that "the Russian revolution began in  the 1880s, when the aristocracy decided that the system would see them through their lifetime".

The second I read somewhere, attributed I think to Pope Pius XI, goes something like: "The cry of an animal in the slaughterhouse is of no more significance than a door slamming in the wind".

Thank you.

Ideological Deodorant

Can anyone please recommend an ideological deodorant? This blog reeks of anger and I think the general pungency is losing me readers.

Or maybe not. What the hanover!

W. H. Auden missed his vocation - writing TV jingles

A long-forgotten Keats scholar, H. W. Garrod, writing nearly sixty years ago on the appointment, to the Oxford Chair of Poetry, of W. H. Ordure, (alias W. H. Auden, author of some dingy and mildly emetic  poetastery - Night Mail and other even less distinguished verses) thus admonished that drab nonentity:

What Matthew Arnold would have said,
Seeing you sitting where he sat,
We do not know. But I suspect
That learned poet would have spat.

Yup!

Shipwreck Ahead! Insecure? Angry?

Lawrence England of That The Bones You Have Crushed May Thrill has posted here about what a certain Fr Brennan sees as the anger and insecurity of some Catholic bloggers and why they should not be read.

I am usually angry, and sometimes insecure.

So go ahead and don't read me.

In Lawrence's combox I have given my reasons, and I guess those of others, for my own anger, and I urge anyone who still sometimes reads this blog to do the same.

Imagine you are one of the crew of a ship at night. The ship's officers are in dispute as to how to read the compass, the charts are unclear, some members of the crew are mutinous, and there's a storm brewing.

Scared and angry?

I am.

01.09.1941 Further Thoughts, Perhaps Better Unread by Nice People

In my last post, I wrote of German wartime behaviour only in Poland, but as most people who have even lightly read up on the subject know, the whole of occupied Europe was subjected to a vileness and vindictiveness not seen since the Balkan atrocities of the XIX century.

Belgrade, for example, was bombed until nothing stood. There was the routine murder of hostages (men and boys over 16, and often women and girls too), fifty for every invader wounded by a patriot, and a hundred for every one killed.

Above: German soldiers and their handiwork, murdered Polish farmers.

Above: Poles taken hostage wait to be driven away to be murdered

There was Lidice in Czekoslovakia, inhabitants massacred and the village ploughed under, following the killing of heydrich.

In Oradour-Sur-Glane, France 642 people, as old as 90, and as young as a few weeks were shot in the legs so they could not flee, and then deliberately burned alive in German reprisals.

In Poland, the vindictiveness could be petty as well. The Germans dynamited the Grunwald memorial which commemorated the Polish victory in 1410 over the Teutonic knights. They destroyed the monument to Adam Mickiewicz in Kraków (below).

When von dem bach, was asked by a Pole how the nation of Bach and Hegel could behave so barbarically, he replied, "Because this is war."

Unfortunately he escaped execution.

And why am I recounting all this which happened over seventy years ago?

Because it did not just happen, it was deliberate.

Because the lives that were unjustly taken impinged and still impinge on other lives, of people still living. I grew up without my Father. My Stepfather saw his brother killed in Sicily. At the outbreak of war, all five brothers had agreed that, if any of them died in the war, the others would lake care of his wife and children. They never found the dead brother's wife and children, presumambly killed in the Blitz. Nothing special about it - these stories are just two out of millions throughout Europe.

Because, while West Germany went on to prosper, there was no chance of that for the counties abandoned to Stalin in the Western Betrayal.

And, lest I be accused of racism, my attitude is the same towards the evil English or British people who ran and profited from the slave trade.

Be damned to all of them.

Never Forget - 72 Years Ago Today

The barbaric German Invasion of Poland by an army ordered by hitler to kill every Pole, man, woman, or child, to ensure living space for germany in the East, took place on September the first 1939. The picture above shows members of the soi-disant "herrenvolk" grinning as they demolish a Gdańsk road-block. The second from the left is holding the Polish Coat of Arms.

Europe was wrecked. Germans murdered 20% of the Polish population, half of them Jews. I know people who saw members of their family, including children, casually shot by passing german soldiers, who just felt like it. A friend's uncle, an eighteen-year-old  Polish boxing champion, was denounced by a volkdeutsche neighbour for possessing a radio (untrue). He was taken to the woods with other Poles, and shot. They have no known grave, but are commemmorated on a monument in Brodnica.

To me, the mercy of the victorious Western allies was remarkable, even though prompted by the need of a buffer state between the Warsaw Pact countries and the West. Henry Morgenthau, adviser to the feeble Roosevelt, had other ideas and a different plan.

Poland has still not completely recovered economically, ale jeszcze nie zgineła!

Bid to Ban Abortion in Poland Fails by Narrow Margin

As reported by Laodicia the Bill to make Abortion completely illegal in Poland has failed, by ten votes.

Next election, I know who will get my vote.