John Laughland | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

Confusion, snobbery and Pegida – a letter from Dresden

Sachsenschweine — Saxon pigs — said the graffiti as my train moved out of Berlin on its way to Dresden. Germany is not as monolithic as it can seem: not only do some of its ancient kingdoms continue a ghostly existence as states of the Federal Republic, but also their populations nurture historic rivalries, at least on the football pitches. But the new popular movement in Dresden — Pegida, or ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West’, no less — has thrown into relief keener intra-German divisions: not only those between immigrants and ethnic Germans but also those between many German voters and the country’s mortally politically correct establishment. The French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève was right to predict that, in a post-modern globalised world devoid of traditional values, the only remaining factor structuring society would be snobbery.

John Laughland

Ukraine: It’s not about Europe vs Russia

John Laughland

Ukraine: It’s not about Europe vs Russia

To discuss the Ukrainian crisis in terms of a choice between Europe and Russia is misleading for several reasons. First, the European issue has been ruthlessly exploited by the Ukrainian opposition and its Western backers as an excuse for overthrowing the government illegally and by force. Opposition leaders have never distanced themselves from the most radical elements on the streets of Kiev, even though these include neo-Nazis. On the contrary, they have done everything to use their violence as a bargaining chip in their battle with the government. Let us never forget that the majority of the 25 deaths on the night of 18 - 19 February were murders committed by the protesters: 9 policemen were shot dead or stabbed to death, while 3 members of the governing party and a journalist were also killed.

John Laughland

Paris: Parc life

John Laughland

Paris: Parc life

Autumn in Paris has been immortalised in one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most poignant poems. Having left his wife in Berlin, Rilke moved to Paris in 1902 where he wrote ‘Herbsttag’ (Autumn Day). ‘Whoever is alone now, will remain so for long. He will stay up late, write long letters and wander restlessly in the avenues as the leaves drift.’ If you have ever taken a solitary walk in the gardens of Versailles as the sun glints coldly on the bright autumn colours, you will know that feeling. For four months of the year, from December to March, living in Paris is like being trapped inside Tupperware. The grey skies are more immovable even than in London. So if you are planning a trip, go in October or November when an Indian summer can produce wonderful effects.

John Laughland

Why France’s gay marriage debate has started to look like a revolution

John Laughland

Why France’s gay marriage debate has started to look like a revolution

Paris: Revolutions are often sparked by an unexpected shock to an already weakened regime. As commentators in France remark not only on the crisis engulfing François Hollande’s government but also on the apparent death-rattle of the country’s entire political system, it could be that his flagship policy of legalising gay marriage — or rather, the gigantic public reaction against it, unique in Europe — will be the last straw that breaks the Fifth -Republic’s back. Opposition to the bill has electrified the middle classes, the young and much of provincial France. On Sunday 24 March, in the freezing cold, the 4km stretch from the Arche de la Défense to the Arc de Triomphe was full of people protesting against the bill.

John Laughland

A master of tactical retreat

John Laughland

A master of tactical retreat

A fanciful and doubtless risky parallel between Charles de Gaulle and the Russian emperor Alexander I suggested itself while I read Marie-Pierre Rey’s superb new biography of the latter. Both men came to power through an act of political parricide: Alexander because he was tacitly complicit in the plot to overthrow his father, a plot which ended in Paul’s sordid murder in 1801, strangled with a scarf by the conspirator-courtiers after they discovered him cowering behind a screen in his bedroom; de Gaulle because he rebelled against his former mentor and the undisputed national hero from the Great War, Marshal Pétain, both on military strategy before the second world war and on the political choice to be made once it broke out.

John Laughland

Travel: Shop like a Roman

John Laughland

Travel: Shop like a Roman

When I am in Rome, I do as the Romans — I engage in rampant materialism. The eternal city may be — via the Church which has its headquarters there — the way to heaven; its population, however, is more interested in this world than the next. The city is full of superb shops, as the Italians’ gift for manufacture, and their seemingly effortless creation of beauty, remain undimmed by the advance of modernity. Rome is therefore a perfect destination for Christmas shopping because by visiting it, you can combine limitless consumerism with a warm glow of spiritual self-satisfaction. Isn’t that what Christmas is all about? Taxis and buses are plentiful in Rome but most tourists walk. Let us start, therefore — after you have perhaps heard Mass in the crypt of St Peter’s at 7a.

John Laughland

Travel: The charms of le barroux

John Laughland

Travel: The charms of le barroux

If you are looking for an undiscovered part of Provence, then you can forget about Le Barroux. Apart from the fact that both Petrarch and Pope Clement V spent their summers nearby in the 14th century, the pretty hilltop village topped by its disproportionately large castle has been the holiday destination of members of the British social stratosphere for generations. The Anglo-French descendants of Axel Munthe, the Swedish author of the spectacularly successful Story of San Michele — perhaps the first example of escapist travel literature — have a very beautiful house in the village, as did Prince Charles’s godmother. The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury is just down the hill.It is not difficult to see why.

John Laughland

Deeply perplexing

John Laughland

Deeply perplexing

This book is about the fate of 230 French women sent to the German concentration camps in January 1943. Arrested as members of the Resistance, they first went to Auschwitz before being transferred to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen as the Allies advanced. In Auschwitz they witnessed some of the most terrible scenes in human history. Only 49 returned to France.The book’s whimsical but ultimately uninformative title belies a book which contains a wealth of historical information as well as some brilliant if horrific storytelling. The first 150 pages deal with the women’s Resistance activities — attending secret meetings, arranging safe passage to the free zone, running clandestine printing presses. The second part is about their experiences in the camps.

John Laughland

Vive les vacances!

John Laughland

Vive les vacances!

‘Vous partez?’ ‘Vous partez un petit peu?’ ‘Quand est-ce que vous partez?’ Since early June, Parisians have been asking and answering these questions remorselessly, their minds fixed on holidays and nothing else. Since early July, the capital has been emptying out dramatically: the markets are deserted, shops are boarded up, food supplies even run down. Children vanish as mothers take them to the country or send them on Scout camp, leaving the fathers to join the family when the office permits. The city will slow down even further in August, so much so that it does not even charge for street parking during that languid month. Given that September is defined by the bustle required to catch up after a two-month break, it is safe to say that the pre-, post- and holiday period in France lasts for one third of the year.

John Laughland

Liberty, equality, fecundity

John Laughland

Liberty, equality, fecundity

At a wedding in the Loire last weekend, in the grounds of the groom’s parents’ small château, an acquaintance from work unexpectedly materialised out of the crowd. In his early thirties, he introduced me to his blonde, gangling wife, maybe a year younger than he. The conversation turned to children: they have four, including a five-month-old baby — ‘and a fifth is on the way’. ‘Where are they?’ I asked. They were staying with his wife’s siblings, of which there are ten.The phenomenon of young parents and large families is widespread in France, and unique among Europe’s native populations with the exception of gypsy families in Slovakia or Albanians in Kosovo. But to quote these categories in the same breath is to underline the key difference: the French people running the demographic marathon against the Muslims are not white trash.

John Laughland

A right mess

John Laughland

A right mess

Observing French politics in the run-up to next spring’s presidential elections is like watching one of those slow-motion films of controlled car crashes in which a dummy and its vehicle are rammed into a wall. Nicolas Sarkozy is the dummy, who will make one last ungainly gesticulation as he lurches into catastrophe, and the coalition of liberals, centrists, free-marketeers, pro-Americans and careerists that carried him to power in 2007 is splintering as the laws of political aerodynamics wrench it apart. Two words explain this outcome: Le Pen. In 2002, the now governing party, the UMP, was created between the two rounds of the presidential election to support Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen. Ten years later, the UMP (same acronym, different name) will collapse because of the appointment in January of Marine Le Pen as her father’s successor.

John Laughland

Revenge tragedy

John Laughland

Revenge tragedy

As a hardened opponent of military interventionism and international war crimes tribunals, I find I am often floored when Rwanda is invoked. ‘How can you possibly advocate standing idly by when hundreds of thousands of people are being massacred?’ is a difficult question to answer. The events in Rwanda in 1994 have become the supreme moral reference point for interventionists, long after other similar causes célèbres have vanished from memory, because to contemplate the scale and method of killing there is to stare into the very heart of darkness.William Hague last year expressed the prevailing sense of certainty when he said casually, ‘We are all agreed that we would intervene if another Rwanda were predicted.’ Returning to the theme of intervention last month, Mr Hague also cited Congo as an example of a country ravaged by war which Britain, committed as it is to human rights, ought to do something to stop.

John Laughland

The end of the rainbow: a guide to the colour revolutions

John Laughland

The end of the rainbow: a guide to the colour revolutions

In contrast to the storming of the Bastille, the spate of revolutions which have flickered across our television screens in the last two decades have tended to adopt brand images connected with colours or plants. Most of them have wilted as quickly as they flowered. Whether Burma in 2007, Armenia in 2008, Tehran in 2009, any pro-Western demonstration is now immediately given a brand. And ‘revolution’ is proclaimed even if everything stays the same as before. The ‘rose revolution’, Georgia, 22 November 2003The ‘rose revolution’ in Georgia turned on a disputed election. Street protests were organised by a group called ‘Kmara’. The opposition leader, Mikheil Saakashvili and his supporters started their march on Tbilisi from under Stalin’s statue in Gori and forced their way into the parliament clutching roses, thus overthrowing the incumbent president.

John Laughland

Meet Italy’s answer to Boris

John Laughland

Meet Italy’s answer to Boris

Gianni Alemanno, Rome’s new right-wing mayor, tells John Laughland that it’s time for the Eternal City to adopt a ‘zero tolerance’ approachThere are few people, I imagine, who could make Boris Johnson jealous, but Gianni Alemanno is probably one of them. Two days before Boris’s election as Mayor of London, the conservative Alemanno conquered Rome after the Italian Left had held the city for a decade and a half. His victory was part of a dramatic overall national victory for the Italian Right, whose no-nonsense political discourse may now set the tone for European politics as a whole. While Boris governs London from a hideous blob of glass and steel, Alemanno reigns over the Eternal City from an exquisite palace on the Capitoline hill.

John Laughland

Fish fries in Half Moon Fort

John Laughland

Fish fries in Half Moon Fort

When you think of Barbados, you think of celebrities. Tony Blair’s annual holidays in Sir Cliff Richard’s villa; high-profile Hello! weddings on the beach or the golf course, like that of Tiger Woods or Jemma Kidd and the future Duke of Wellington; the absorbing sight of an enormous Luciano Pavarotti being gently decanted into the sea at Sandy Lane — whenever he stays at that most luxurious of hotels, he has an oven specially installed in his room so that he can cook pasta for all the family — all these combine to produce an image of a holiday island which is the exclusive preserve of the terminally rich.This image is largely true. There are a lot of vast fortunes on Barbados. The Irish racing mafia which bought Sandy Lane some years ago have constructed enormous mansions with pilasters on the beach next to the hotel.

John Laughland

There’s no place like home

John Laughland

There’s no place like home

When we said we were thinking of moving to Urbino, our friends ooh-ed and aah-ed with envy. Urbino is a perfectly preserved mediaeval and Renaissance fortified town which sits on a hill in the Italian Marches commanding spectacular views over the surrounding fields and valleys. Its layout has hardly changed since the day when Duke Federico of Montefeltro posed for his portrait by Piero della Francesca, as there is no urban sprawl outside the old city walls. The etching studio where my wife once worked is housed in the magnificent cloister of a former convent, from which you can see the charming village church of San Bernardino nestling in the green hills beyond. Church bells ring all day long; the city’s pinkish brick glows in the sunlight; the air is fresh; and as you climb the city’s steep alleyways you have a strange sense of living on the top of the world.

John Laughland

Public places and private faces

John Laughland

Public places and private faces

‘Kings, who are the sovereign arbiters of the fortune and the conduct of men, are always themselves the most severely judged and the most curiously observed.’ Louis XIV complained in his memoirs (addressed to his son) about the public gaze in which monarchs lived, and the malicious gossip to which they were always therefore subject: The slightest suspicion conceived of them passes immediately from one ear to another as a piece of news which it is fun to gabble about: the one who talks always wants to show that he knows more than everyone else, and he therefore exaggerates matters instead of playing them down, while the one who listens, taking a malignant pleasure in seeing a man demeaned whose superior position he resents, does all he can to persuade himself that what he is being told is true.

John Laughland

Giants in petty strife

John Laughland

Giants in petty strife

Listing page content here‘In London, if a man have the misfortune to attach himself to letters, I know not with whom he is to live, nor how he is to pass his time in suitable society.’ David Hume was notorious for preferring Edinburgh’s intellectual life to London’s, but the city where the philosopher was most successful, at least socially, was Paris. He was sent there in 1763 as secretary to the ambassador, the Earl of Hertford, and was feted as ‘le bon David’. ‘In Paris,’ Hume wrote, ‘a man that distinguishes himself in letters meets immediately with regard and attention.’ Hume’s remark about the anti-intellectualism of the English remains true to this day, but he was to some extent the cause of it. A resolute atheist, Hume advocated burning all books which contained neither mathematics nor experimental science, saying they contained nothing but ‘sophistry and illusion’.

John Laughland

A chat with Milosevic

John Laughland

A chat with Milosevic

John Laughland on a memorable encounter with the butcher of the Balkans at the UN detention centre in The Hague — and his claims of innocence to the lastI was one of the last Western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic. It was early last year. A fierce wind was whipping the cold rain straight off the sea and through the ugly streets of Scheveningen as I unbundled from my pockets the various secret cameras and recording devices which I had in vain hidden there, and made my way through the security checks at the United Nations Detention Unit. A series of doors clanged open and shut and there was a friendly hubbub and a fug of cigarette smoke as stubbly men lounged, chatting in their long flat vowels as if it were an ordinary weekday morning in a Belgrade café.

John Laughland

Full Marx for George Bush

John Laughland

Full Marx for George Bush

Ever since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there has been a seemingly endless flow of self-congratulatory comment in the West about how former communist countries — and even some which have remained communist — are gradually westernising and learning the ropes in the capitalist jungle. Very often, these countries’ so-called progress is in fact cultural decline: the advent of bars for transsexuals in Havana, for instance, has been adduced as evidence of Cuba’s ‘liberalisation’. But the equal and opposite movement nearly always goes unnoticed — the way in which the West has itself adopted many of the old nostrums of communism, and especially the twin doctrines of revolution and internationalism. Revolution has now become a completely positive word in the Western political lexicon.

John Laughland

The devils’ advocate

John Laughland

The devils’ advocate

For most people, to defend a blood-stained tyrant is perverse and shocking; to defend two seems like recklessness. Yet the causes of both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are what occupy Ramsey Clark, 78, as he crowns a political career that started with his appointment to the US government on the first day of the Kennedy administration in 1961. Promoted to the post of US attorney general by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Clark’s left-liberal political trajectory has taken him so far from the political mainstream that he is now campaigning for the rights of the two most hated men in the world. Is he mad? These men’s very names resound with the thud of the scud and the sear of the flame-thrower’s torch. The shock is all the greater because, in office, Clark pursued a host of politically correct causes such as African-American emancipation and the abolition of the death penalty.

John Laughland

Diary - 4 December 2004

John Laughland

Diary - 4 December 2004

A charming retired lady doctor of my acquaintance buttonholes me whenever I run into her in London. She knows I write for The Spectator and she is convinced that this Diary page is an irritating spoof. ‘It’s just not possible that those people, like Joan Collins, could ever actually write such rubbish,’ she tells me in a Donegal accent undiluted by a life spent in Goring. I have pleaded with her, insisting that she is confusing this page with the one in Private Eye, but I can tell she does not quite believe me. At last I have my chance, by penning the page myself, to convince her that the rubbish which follows is real. Or maybe she will simply conclude that I have passed on her story as an anecdote for the spoof-writer of this column who, this week, has assumed my identity.

John Laughland

The faulty French connection

John Laughland

The faulty French connection

In his magnificent funeral oration for Charles I’s queen, Henriette-Marie of France, the 17th-century French cleric Bossuet contrasted the stately continuity of French history with the turbulence and violence of English. France — of whose crown Pope St Gregory the Great had proclaimed, already by the end of the sixth century, that it outshone all the others — was ‘the only nation in the universe whose kings have embraced Christianity for nearly 12 centuries’. England, by contrast, was ‘more agitated … than the sea which surrounds her’. Within 150 years, the tables were turned, and the prosperous and stable English became whiggishly dismissive of their unruly and strife-riven neighbours, believing their own political serenity to stretch back to time immemorial.

John Laughland

Western aggression

John Laughland

Western aggression

John Laughland on how the US and Britain are intervening in Ukraine’s electionsA few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, ‘To expel all Jews from our country.’ It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being vigorously promoted by America as the country’s next president: the former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko.

John Laughland

Putin the poodle

John Laughland

Putin the poodle

Under communism, the ‘open letter’ was a device by which political hacks publicly advocated certain policies. The party hierarchy was then usually only too happy to comply, as happened when the 1968 ‘Letter to Brezhnev’ from a group of Czechoslovak commies begged Soviet tanks to crush the counter-revolution in Prague. The historical resonance was therefore piquant, although presumably unintended, when last week a hundred Western politicians and ‘intellectuals’ published just such a missive, addressed to the heads of state and government of the EU and Nato. In it, they attacked the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, saying that his authoritarian behaviour rendered impossible any true partnership between Russia and Western democracies.

John Laughland

Bloody hypocrisy

John Laughland

Bloody hypocrisy

A brutal-looking 17-year-old girl takes a long swig from a bottle of sake and thumps it down on the bar, as an ugly- looking man next to her asks her if she likes Ferraris. ‘Do you want to screw me?’ she replies. ‘Yes,’ he says, his goofy and surprised smile revealing bad teeth. She immediately stabs him in the stomach and, as his blood gurgles out, she says triumphantly, ‘How does that feel? Do you still want to penetrate me now?’ He falls off the bar stool, dead — and the audience laughs. A voiceover from a third character confirms that the scene is indeed supposed to be funny, and the murder cool, because the young man is hideous and stupid while the girl is utterly vicious. This scene is but a few minutes in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume I, a two-hour orgy of violence in which evil is exalted as alternately admirable, erotic or funny.

John Laughland

Santa Klaus

John Laughland

Santa Klaus

John Laughland talks to the Czech President, V

John Laughland

His master’s voice

John Laughland

His master’s voice

It is a measure of the hypermnesia of the Nazi period — and of the concomitant amnesia of the history of communism — that Willi M

John Laughland

My secret garden

John Laughland

My secret garden

It was those trips to the Balkans that started it. As we hard-core Europhobes know, one of the main joys of leaving EU Europe is that the food tastes incomparably better wherever the writ of Brussels does not extend. Although the hard-skinned, white-membraned Dutch tomato has already started to colonise the humble Skopje salad in Bulgaria — agriculture in the bread baskets of Eastern Europe is being comprehensively closed down in preparation for EU membership — there are still pockets of resistance south of the Danube, particularly in the former Yugoslavia, where a cucumber does not taste the same as a carrot. There, I consume vegetables with something bordering on obsessiveness — a craving, indeed, which is equalled only by a concomitant dull rage back in England, where the only green beans on sale in mid-summer come from East Africa, and where all vegetables are stale and tasteless.