The Final Pandemic

Posted on January 18, 2025 by leslie

Brno, Lužanky Park, statue, the Personification of Tolerance, credit Wikipedia

The Final Pandemic: An Antidote to Medical Tyranny (2024), written and published by Dr Mark Bailey & Dr Samantha Bailey, foreword by Professor Tim Noakes, a book review and discussion by Dr A. R. Kneen

The official narrative of ‘the pandemic’ could be summarised thus:

There is a novel ‘virus’ (sars-cov 2) that is very dangerous to health and is highly contagious; it is transmissible from person to person through the air and also by other means of transmission, such as via cross-contamination from objects. This alleged ‘virus’ is claimed to cause a disease (‘covid-19’) that can cause severe problems to health, and can kill. A person can have this dangerous ‘virus’ with no symptoms, and can still infect others (‘asymptomatic transmission/carrier’). The means by which a person is diagnosed as having the ‘sars-cov 2 virus’ is by a ‘PCR test’ (or RAT test[1]). The government claims that to protect its people from this terribly dangerous ‘virus’ it was necessary to impose the extreme measures that it did, including lockdowns.

In The Final Pandemic (‘TFP’), the Baileys dismantle this narrative. The basis of the official narrative is that there was a contagious ‘virus’ (sars-cov 2). However, this claim has never been proven. The so-called ‘science’ used to evidence the existence of sars-cov 2 is inadequate. Furthermore, no other ‘virus’ has actually been demonstrated to exist either. Neither has any alleged resultant contagion. When scientific experiments have been properly conducted, the evidence refutes the hypotheses of both: viral existence; and of contagion. The Baileys refer to pandemics as ‘manufactured crises’ based on shaky science.

We were all told to ‘follow the science’ and to ‘trust the science’. Dr Fauci claimed to ‘represent science’[2]. ‘Science’ was a term frequently used during the past few years in the context of the alleged pandemic. Science rests upon observation of the world. A typical definition of science would be one such as:

The careful study of the structure and behaviour of the real world, conducted by watching, measuring, and doing experiments, and the development and testing of theories to describe the results of these activities. The term ‘science’; is also used to refer to knowledge obtained from such systematic observation of the world – knowledge obtained by using the scientific method. The scientific method is a dynamic process that involves objectively investigating questions through observation and experimentation. Hypotheses are tested through logical procedures which observe the results in the real world, observations that might, or might not, refute a hypothesis (e.g. see Popper[3]).

Hence, science rests upon observation of reality: it is ‘real-world’ based. Without empirical data obtained by observation of the real world, there is no science. To properly test a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method must be followed. A scientific hypothesis should be falsifiable, and if falsified by the properly obtained empirical evidence, discarded.

In the foreword to The Final Pandemic, Professor Tim Noakes explains that this book presents evidence that the ‘Covid 19 pandemic’ was based on a ‘fictional science’ (TFP page xxi)[4] – listing 4 major errors. The first error listed by Professor Noakes is that the method virologists use to detect the presence of a virus is unscientific, significantly because the method used lacks experimental controls[5]. It rests upon circular logic[6]. It is assumed that a sample (e.g. of bodily fluid) from a sick person contains the ‘virus’. This sample is then mixed with a whole variety of substances, such as: African Green Monkey kidney cells (‘viro’); fetal bovine serum; antibiotics; and antimycotics[7] (a process that ‘poisons and starves’ the viro[8]). The theory is that if, after a few days, the monkey kidney cells die and deteriorate (i.e. show ‘cytopathic effects’ known as ‘CPE’[9]), then this proves that the ‘virus’ was present. However, to follow the scientific method, a control should be used[10]. If the kidney cells show the same CPE without the body fluids from a sick person being added, then this process has not proven that there was a ‘virus’ in the body fluid sample that caused the effect: it would have happened anyway. Dr Stefan Lanka actually conducted the required control experiments and found that the monkey kidney cells, when mixed with the same variety of other substances and subjected to identical treatment, did indeed show the same effects (‘CPE’) whether the bodily fluids from a sick person were added or not[11] (e.g. TFP Chapter 4)[12]. In fact, more dramatic CPE effects were found if yeast was added (instead of bodily fluids from a person). It is circular reasoning to claim that there is a ‘virus’ in a fluid sample, and then to ‘prove’ the existence of this virus by stating that if this fluid is added to the viro (and other materials) and the hence viro deteriorates, then the ‘virus’ caused this. A hypothesis that is unfalsifiable is not science (e.g. see Popper qv).

The second error noted by Noakes is that the genome that is supposedly that of the alleged sars-cov 2 ‘virus’ is not taken from an isolated sample of the ‘virus’. This means that there is not an actual genetic sequence of the ‘virus’. It is possible to sequence the genetic code of something if one has a pure isolate sample of whatever one wishes to sequence. This process has been conducted for many organisms – including the sequencing of various animal cells. Hence, the genetic sequence of a dog is known to differ from that of a cat and one could thus determine whether any given sample was from a dog or a cat[13]. However, the process used by ‘scientists’ to sequence the alleged sars cov 2 ‘virus’ does not actually do so.

To sequence the coding of a sample, one has to have an isolated pure sample of whatever one is sequencing. If a mixed sample is used, then one could never be sure that the sequence actually was that of the species in question. For example, if one were to mix the samples of saliva from both a dog and cat and then sequence the code[14], one would not necessarily actually have a sequence of a dog (nor of a cat). It has been admitted by many governmental bodies around the world (often via Freedom of Information Requests ‘FOI’) that they have no evidence of an isolate of the alleged sars-cov 2 virus, e.g. Christine Massey in Canada has published many of the responses from these bodies on her website[15].

It is likely that many virologists actually believe that they have isolated a ‘virus’, since the method used is ‘protocol/standard procedure’ and it is highly probable that many have never thought about what they are actually doing (or not doing)[16][17]. The famous Fan Wu paper, held by many to be the start of the ‘pandemic’, illustrates this. On the 3rd of February 2020, a Chinese team of Fan Wu published a paper called:’ A New Coronavirus Associated with Human Respiratory Disease in China’[18]. A 41-year-old man had been hospitalised in Wuhan on the 26th December 2019 with pneumonia. He had no unusual nor new symptoms that would distinguish his illness from any usual pneumonia case (TFP chapter 4). A sample was taken from his lungs (‘crude bronchoalveolar lavage fluid’). Obviously, this sample contained many sources of genetic material – including his own genetic material. Any lung sample will contain a myriad of substances such as pollen, bacteria, fungal spores, dust, and all sorts of microorganisms[19]. This mixed sample was then basically ‘chopped up’ and the smaller pieces (‘reads’) were sequenced (base pairs were listed for each piece). At no point could anyone be sure as to the source of any particular read: was it from the man’s own biological material, or bacteria he had inhaled, or otherwise? However, the codes of these millions of reads were then fed into a computer software programme (actually 2 software programmes were used, Trinity and Megahit – both producing different results). The software programmes fitted together reads by searching for overlapping sequences in the codes where the pieces could thus possibly fit together (‘contigs’). The computer produced hundreds of thousands of possible full sequences where it could fit the reads together by matching the ends (contigs). The team then chose the longest sequence (approximately 30,000 bases long[20]) and concluded that this must be the code of ‘the virus’[21]. None of this produced a genetic sequence that was shown to exist in the real world; this sequence was only shown to exist on a computer (‘in silico’).

The third error listed by Professor Noakes is that the pandemic was not a viral pandemic – but instead was a testing pandemic. The usual practices of clinical medicine were not followed. Instead, people were encouraged (and often terrorised and/or otherwise coerced) to take PCR tests (or a rapid antigen test ‘RAT’ – ‘lateral flow’ qv), and if this PCR was positive, then they were deemed to ‘have covid’ (even if asymptomatic). The test was the criterion used for claiming that the sars-cov 2 virus was present in the person. However, the ‘PCR test’ does not, nor could it, determine that sars-cov 2 virus is present in a sample.

The PCR is actually a process and not a test. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a process whereby a prespecified piece of genetic code is multiplied[22]. Each cycle doubles the amount[23], the Baileys referring to this as a ‘biological photocopier’. Eventually, after enough cycles, one can use another method to determine presence[24]. In this context, the short section(s) is supposedly from the sars-cov 2 ‘virus’ – and exclusively so[25]. It is claimed that the PCR process is not reliable after 25 or 30 cycles. Many testing centres were using 45 cycles. This fact alone would render the results unreliable. However, use of the PCR as a test for sars-cov 2 is invalid in a more fundamental manner than running too many cycles. The whole process rests upon one using a short section of genetic code (typically 18 to 24 base pairs) taken from the longer genetic code of the alleged ‘virus’ (allegedly approximately 30,000). Hence, without an isolate of the longer code, this is invalid – and there is no isolate of the alleged sars-cov 2 ‘virus’ qv. There is no scientific evidence that this code is from an alleged sars-cov 2 virus and there could not be so unless an isolate were sequenced – which does require an isolate. Also, any short section of genetic code could be from a number of potential sources; exclusivity would need to be demonstrated[26]. Thus, all the positive case results that were reported by the media every day, causing fear/hysteria[27] amongst many, were meaningless. And, importantly, there is no means of demonstrating presence of the alleged sars-cov 2 nor hence of validly deeming anyone as ‘having covid’.

People with no symptoms of illness were categorised as having ‘covid (asymptomatic)’ because of these invalid tests (and also deemed contagious, but this is possibly refuted too[28]). And people who had symptoms of a cold, of flu, pneumonia, breathing difficulties, coughing, etc. were recategorized as ‘covid’ patients on the basis of these invalid tests. The Baileys note that cold and flu cases disappeared and were reclassified as ‘covid’ cases through a testing pandemic (TFP chapter 4). As Weston notes, it is almost as though all the usual respiratory deaths caused by flu every year were simply re-labelled as covid deaths.

The idea that alleged ‘covid’ was not a highly dangerous disease, but perhaps was more like flu, is suggested in various publications. The UK Health Security Agency removed ‘covid’ from the list of high consequence infectious diseases (‘HCID’) on 19th March 2020, stating it had low overall mortality[29]. Dr Fauci also considered the alleged ‘covid’ to be of a similar case fatality rate to flu (albeit severe flu[30]):

This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively[31]

So not only was what they were classifying as ‘covid’ not considered as highly dangerous (refuting the official narrative in this respect), but this lack of a high mortality rate provides further evidence that perhaps flu (and related diseases such as colds, sniffles, pneumonia, etc.) was merely reclassified as ‘covid’ by means of the PCR ‘test’ (TFP Chapiter 4).

The fourth error noted by Professor Noakes is that of viral contagion: the idea that a ‘virus’ can be passed from one person to another, or from a host animal to Patient Zero, has yet to be properly documented. In fact, not only has it not been properly evidenced, but there is a lot of evidence that refutes this hypothesis. Most people grew up believing that people can pass a ‘virus’ to one another – and why would people doubt or research this idea? Adults told children this was the case, this idea was assumed as a fact in many films, some household cleaning bottles referred to killing ‘viruses’ on the packaging, and doctors sometimes told patients that they ‘had a virus’. But what evidence did people ever actually have that any ‘virus’ even existed, never mind something that caused illnesses by being passed from person to person? Of course, we have all observed that people in the same environment sometimes are found to suffer from the same illness. However, ‘people in the same environment’ could be being affected by the same environmental factors[32] rather than actually passing a ‘virus’ to one another.

Scurvy was a disease that often used to afflict sailors out at sea. After one sailor became ill, others would follow. However, it is now known that this was not due to a ‘virus’ being passed from sailor to sailor, but instead was caused by a lack of vitamin C, due to the unavailability of any fresh foods on long voyages. Giving the seamen citrus fruits (e.g. limes) provided them with vitamin C and scurvy disappeared.

In Chapter 3, ‘The History of Misplaced Beliefs’, the Baileys discuss how many other diseases were likewise blamed on contagion, but were in fact later shown to be caused by other factors. Beriberi was blamed on microbes, but then later found to be caused by a nutritional deficiency (of thiamine, vitamin B₁); and pellagra was found to be caused by lack of vitamin B₃ (niacin). In other cases, environmental toxins caused diseases that were blamed on viruses. For example, polio can be traced back to the use of pesticides (especially DDT). The cases of polio dropped in America as the use of these toxins was reduced, with DDT being almost completely banned by 1972. By the time polio vaccines were introduced in 1955, polio had already dramatically declined with the reduction in DDT usage[33]. Also, reclassification of symptoms as other diseases can also manipulate statistics, e.g. cases that would previously have been classified as polio can be reclassified as other diseases such as multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and Guillain-Barré syndrome. Hence, people who share an environment may also share exposure to the same toxins, the same poor foods, etc. and thus they are at risk of suffering from the same diseases – this can be explained without the need to postulate a ‘virus’[34]. A properly conducted scientific study of such cases would, amongst other things, require the variable of environment to be separated from that of proximity to sick people for any valid conclusion. Merely noting epidemiological data is not valid scientifically to conclude contagion nor ‘viruses’.

However, it could be useful for various industries to blame a ‘virus’, e.g. if a product were causing illness (say a pesticide), then this could avoid liability. And of course, the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, amongst others, benefit from the belief in ‘viruses’ and contagion. Increasing the consumption of citrus fruits does not enrich the medical profession or virus/contagion-related industries in the manner that belief in viruses and contagion does. Many have gained power and/or money from the virus/contagion theory. Without ‘viruses’, there would, inter alia, be no vaccines[35] – an industry that increased profits massively due to the ‘pandemic’ (TFP chapter 6).

So, if there was no evidence of any sars-cov 2 ‘virus’, then how was there a pandemic? Perhaps a better question would be whether there was a pandemic at all. As stated by Weston[36] ‘there was no lethal pandemic in 2020’: approximately 1.1% of the UK population died between 2000 and 2019, as is normal, and 1% in 2020.There were no excess deaths[37][38]. Any argument that lockdown measures, standing on yellow dots in shops, wearing masks, etc. prevented excess deaths is unproven. In fact, many people continued to associate with friends and family, many continued to work outside their homes, thousands were held in prisons, and many marched on protests throughout 2020[39]. Anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were held across the UK during 2020. These protests also occurred in many other countries and consisted of thousands of people being shoulder-to-shoulder for many hours – this all without mass death/illness from ‘covid’. Some countries, and even some areas/states withing the same country, did not follow ‘covid’ measures[40] and did not experience worse outcomes than those that did (some actually fared better).  Furthermore, it has since been reported that there was not scientific evidence that measures such as masks, staying 6 feet away from others, etc. prevented illness[41].

Also, and relevant to refutation of the ‘novel’ claim in the official narrative, various samples of bodily materials (and sewerage[42]) collected and stored prior to 2020 have tested positive for sars-cov 2[43]. If the tests were evidence of the presence of a deadly contagious ‘virus’, then there would have been mass deaths/illness at the point in time that these samples were stored (or shortly afterwards).

If there was no pandemic, then why did so many people believe that there was? Perhaps the main reason for this widespread belief was because people watched their digital screens – and trusted what ‘the experts/authorities’ said on their digital devices. Many people trust media personalities (such as Huw Edwards). Former US President Nixon is reported to have stated that: ‘The American people don’t believe anything until they see it on television’. The Baileys discuss (TFP Chapter 1) how early in 2020 the internet was awash with videos of people in China lying dead or collapsing, etc. Most of us remember the video of the man with his shopping bags just falling face down on the street[44]. Other popularised videos were of people in China convulsing uncontrollably. However, seizure-type shakes and dropping suddenly while out shopping were not the consequences that were found in other countries of what was allegedly the same ‘virus’. All of this was present in the digital world and not in the real world[45]. In the real world, those categorised as having ‘covid’ might have had flu-like symptoms or suchlike (or no symptoms at all).

The media propagated the official narrative and ‘flooded the zone’[46] with hysteria and terrifying news about the alleged pandemic. Questioning of the official narrative was largely censored[47]. This censorship included evidence about the hospitals not being ‘over-flowing’[48] during early 2020[49]. The narrative was sold to people by a ‘compliant and incentivised media aided by a subservient and well-rewarded medical profession’ (TFP page xiii). And ironically, presentation of data that might contradict the narrative was, if not censored, labelled with the new buzzword ‘misinformation’ (TFP Chapter 6). But science should always be tested – that is the essence of science[50] . Using the term ‘science’ in its methodological sense, it is not something to ‘be followed’; quite the contrary qv. The whole ‘virus’ paradigm is not universal across the world, nor has it been historically. Science can move in revolutions as the paradigm shifts[51]. And if using the term ‘science’ in the sense of a body of knowledge obtained by observation of the real-world in a scientific manner: such a body of scientific knowledge did not exist in relation to the claims made by the official narrative of the pandemic.

The Baileys also note that many fell for the ‘lab-leak’ decoy narrative. This narrative was the ‘worst kept secret’ and to date is still publicised by many. This holds that a ‘deadly virus’ escaped from a laboratory in China; either it escaped accidently or was released deliberately (depending which version one is given). This ‘lab-leak’ narrative does not refute the official narrative, rather it supports it. However, it is not supported by any scientific evidence.

Not only is sars-cov 2 (nor ‘covid’) not evidenced to exist, but the Baileys also discuss how there is not scientific evidence of any viruses existing. Dr Stefan Lanka offered a reward of €100,000.00 to anyone who could prove the size and existence of the measles virus by means of a single publication. The prize remains unclaimed. Someone did try to claim the prize, but the claim ultimately failed[52].

The Baileys go further and discuss the lack of evidence of contagion. Many diseases that were held to be contagious have, when tested scientifically, been shown not to be so. This includes the Spanish Flu (1918-1920) – a disease that frequently was mentioned by the media in early 2020. In 1918 Dr Milton Rosenau ran a series of experiments[53] conducted by the Public Health Service and the U.S. Navy. During these experiments natural everyday interactions were simulated whereby people who were sick with Spanish Flu coughed on the subjects, shook hands with them, chatted with them face-to-face, etc. More extreme attempts to infect the volunteers were also undertaken. These included: taking mucous from the sick and this being placed into the nostrils of the volunteers; blood was taken from the sick and injected into volunteers; and lung fluid was taken from the sick and sprayed into the eyes, nose, throat and lungs of the volunteers. None of the subjects became sick with Spanish Flu[54]. This failure to transmit allegedly highly contagious diseases has also been documented much earlier in history[55] with Napoleon carrying plague victims demonstrating that it was safe[56]. Numerous other similar experiments, recent and historical, likewise have failed to demonstrate human-to-human transmission of allegedly contagious diseases (including the flu and colds, measles, polio, scarlet fever, diphtheria, chicken pox, small pox, tuberculosis, etc[57]). Florence Nightingale also expressed scepticism of the ‘doctrine of contagion’[58].

Hence, the Baileys demonstrate that there is not scientific evidence that supports the official narrative. In fact, the evidence available tends to refute each aspect of it. The belief in the official narrative was based on the digital-world ‘evidence’, not real-world evidence – and, despite what they said on the digital screens, this was not science. Many will reject the thesis presented in TFP – ‘it is easier to fool someone than to convince them that they have been fooled’. Many people will be too embarrassed to accept what the Baileys say, do not wish to be perceived as a ‘conspiracy theorist’[59] and cannot face the idea that the Government could be so corrupt and/or incompetent, etc. However, if enough people were to believe what the Baileys present, then this would be the final pandemic.

ENDNOTES

[1] Many considered the RAT less reliable than PCR, and sometimes a positive RAT was to be followed up by a PCR to confirm the results.Whereas the PCR process multiplies a specified piece of genetic code, the RAT test detects a protein: allegedly the ‘sars-cov 2 nucleocapsid’ (‘N’ protein). A few drops of bodily fluid are placed onto a membrane which mixes these with what they refer to as ‘anti-sars-cov-2 antibody’. If the reaction occurs, then a visible bar is produced on the strip and the presence of sars-cov 2 virus is declared (‘a positive test’). Dr Bailey notes that there are no published papers proving the existence of a pathogen sars-cov 2 and so there is no scientific proof that this protein is from any ‘virus’. This protein is merely one that is found is some human and mammalian, etc. culture experiments. Again, without an isolate of the alleged sars-cov 2 ‘virus’, no such claims can be made with validity
[2] Dr Fauci on ‘Face the Nation’, CBS News, 28th November 2021
[3] Popper, K. (2002) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge; 2nd edition (2 May 2002)
[4] Some people call this pseudo-science ‘scientism’. Editorial note, a concept discussed extensively by Friedrich Hayek and somewhat akin to the idea of Positivism, as elaborated by Auguste Comte
[5] For more detail on this, and related issues, see: Dr Mark Bailey (2022) A Farewell to Virology
[6] Perhaps one should not claim that ‘viruses’ do not exist, rather that there is not evidence of any ‘virus’ existing. Just as the claim that unicorns do not exist would be better phrased as the claim that nobody has evidenced the existence of unicorns. This is in contrast to bacteria that have been proven to exist; bacteria have been isolated. However, the idea that bacteria cause contagious disease has not been evidenced. In fact, the attempts made to demonstrate this hypothesis have actually refuted it (e.g. see Lester and Parker ibid)
[7] All these other materials are present in the ‘chopped-up’ mixture when these short pieces are sequenced for the in silico genetic code to be sequenced (actually a process of a computer fitting them together in many possible sequences – see below). So the reads could actually be from any of the substances added to the brew
[8] This caused by the substances added to the viro and also passaging methods, e.g. reducing the nutrition levels to the cells, etc.
[9] The cytopathic effects are demonstrated by looking at the monkey kidney cells under a microscope and seeing that the cells have broken up and formed smaller pieces. Some claim that some of the smaller pieces are ‘budding viruses’, but this has not been proven.
[10] Of course, even were a control not to show CPE, this would not prove existence of a ‘virus’ in the bodily fluid sample – other variables would need to be tested for, etc.
[11] Lanka, S. The Virus Misconception, Wissenschafftplus, January 2020
[12] In the original 1954 Enders paper this was effect was also noted. Enders is sometimes known as ‘the father of vaccines’. See F. Enders and T. C. Peebles (1954), ‘Propagation in Tissue Cultures of Cytopathogenic Agents from Patients with Measles’, from the Research Division of Infectious Diseases, Children’s Medical Center, Boston, Mass. And Departments of Bacteriology and Immunology and of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
[13] It is possible that what scientists are calling the ‘genetic sequences’ are not exactly what many believe them to be. However, the fact that whatever it is differs, and can be observed as different, still stands
[14] Which involves ‘chopping up’ the sample into smaller pieces to sequence it.
[15] E.g. see: virus FOIs and court documents – Google Drive, The Disruption Corona Press Conference …the missing virus [SARS-CoV-2]…
[16] There are many other reasons why this procedure seems to go largely unquestioned. Also, the very act of questioning an established procedure within many organisations is something that often is not considered acceptable by those in charge. People who challenge and/or ask too many questions frequently are not the people who are kept for very long by some organisations – nor are such people taken on in the first place if their ‘attitude’ is apparent
[17] There is also the issue that not all that is labelled as science is necessarily correct. Relatedly, see: https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/; https://dailysceptic.org/2021/07/22/how-big-a-problem-is-scientific-fraud/; https://dailysceptic.org/photoshopping-fraud-and-circular-logic-in-research/
[18] Fan Wu ’ A New Coronavirus Associated with Human Respiratory Disease in China’, Nature, 3rd February 2020, A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease in China | Nature
[19] If this mixture of genetic sources is then added to monkey kidney cells (and bovine fluids, etc.) to culture ‘the virus’ – that process then adds more potential sources of genetic material (e.g. from the monkey cells, etc.)
[20] The longest contigs generated by the 2 software programmes used, Megahit and Trinity, were: Megahit (30,474 nt); and Trinity (11,760 nt)
[21] It is unclear why they chose the longest sequence. The statement that this sequence matched a previous sequence that was also obtained in the same inadequate manner by 89.1% is not a valid reason. And also, although 89.1% sounds a high level of matching, humans and chimpanzees share around 96% of their genomes. However, the previous sequence was also merely another in silico model – and never proven to actually exist in the real world either. As the Baileys discuss this: it is the reasoning of tortoises on other tortoises (see Chapter 4)
[22] The short section is used as a primer for the process.
[23] Thus, if one were to start with just 1 molecule of the specified sequence, then after 20 cycles of PCR one would have over a million such molecules
[24] E.g. via agarose gel electrophoresis followed by ethidium bromide staining
[25] Since the alleged sars-cov 2 virus is said to have a genetic code of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and because the PCR process works effectively with DNA, then to conduct PCR the target RNA must first be converted to its complementary DNA (‘eDNA’) by the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). This is conducted using the enzyme reverse transcriptase
[26] Or at least exclusivity from any other substance that might be mixed in the sample (e.g. bacteria, human genes, etc.)
[27] There was an incredible amount of fear during 2020. Relatedly see:Dodsworth, L. (2021) A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic Pinter & Martin; 1st edition (16 May 2021)
[28] Covid-19: Asymptomatic cases may not be infectious, Wuhan study indicates | The BMJ  [29] High consequence infectious diseases (HCID) – GOV.UK  
[30] However, one has to account for the fact that if pneumonia cases are included in statistics, then this would increase the fatality rate for flu
[31]  Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and Robert R. Redfield, M.D. Editorial, March 2020, 382;13 The New England Journal of Medicine Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted | New England Journal of Medicine
[32] There are many theories as to why people in the same environment might suffer from similar symptoms that could explain this without using the idea of a contagious ‘virus’. And ‘environment’ does not necessarily preclude the idea of people having an effect upon one another, e.g. women living in close proximity to one another often synchronise menstrual cycles (and nobody is suggesting a ‘menstrual virus’). Laughing and yawning are often found to spread from person to person without a ‘laughing virus’. Space does not permit a review of this literature here. However, see: Lester and Parker (2019) ibid
[33] Relatedly also see: Humphries, S., Bystrianyk, R., (2013, 2015) Dissolving Illusions. Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History. Engelbrecht T., Köhnlein, C., Bailey S. (2021) Virus Mania: Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio, Spanish Flu. How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense Books On Demand; 3rd edition (22 April 2021)
[34] Toxins and deficiencies are not the only potential causes of disease. For example, stress can cause disease, as can radiation exposure (although some might class those 2 causes under the umbrella of ‘toxicity’). Relatedly see: Fisrtenberg, A. The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life Chelsea Green Publishing Company; Reprint edition (9 April 2020) And for a more comprehensive discussion of what can cause disease see: Lester, D.  and Parker, D. (2019) What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong
[35] Recently there are suggestions to ‘vaccinate’ for illnesses other than those allegedly caused by ‘viruses’, e.g. cancer vaccines have been suggested.
[36] Weston, P. M. L. (2024) Covid-19 All Lies All Crime. Facts and Figures.
[37] Relatedly also see: Chaillot, P. (2024) Covid 19: Decoding Official Data: Mortality, tests, vaccines, hospitals. The truth emerges. L’Artilleur (27 May 2024)
[38] A small spike in the UK after lockdown (peaking around the 12th April 2020) was possibly due to mistreatment of patients. The use of ventilators is stated by many to have unnecessarily killed people, likewise other possible mistreatments such as DNRs, morphine and Midazolam, Remdesivir, neglect, etc. could possibly have killed people. Such accusations need to be investigated. For example, see: Olszewski, E. M., (2020) Undercover Epicenter Nurse: How Fraud, Negligence, and Greed Led to Unnecessary Deaths at Elmhurst Hospital  Hot Books (18 Aug. 2020), https://expose-news.com/2024/09/22/nhs-whistleblower-we-were-instructed-to-euthanize-patients-to-inflate-covid-death-toll-while-hospitals-sat-empty/ [39] 15 protests that defined 2020 | Mashable
[40] Or did not do so strictly
[41] Relatedly see, e.g.: PolitiFact | Did Fauci say he ‘made up’ COVID-19 rules on social distancing, masks? Let’s look at the transcript
[42] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science/coronavirus-traces-found-in-march-2019-sewage-sample-spanish-study-shows-idUSKBN23X2HQ
[43] Researchers find coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019. Researchers say study on COVID-19 in Italy doesn’t dispute virus origins | Reuters
[44] Chinese Covid death vids faked[45] It is possible that these videos were genuine, or perhaps were genuine but were nothing to do with any ‘virus’, and were just used to promote fear and belief if a terrifying ‘virus’, e.g. perhaps the woman under the blanket had epilepsy or suchlike. It is also possible that these videos were staged in order to create fear. Some claim that these videos were staged to create belief in a ‘deadly virus’, others claim they were from previous drills, etc.
[46] See Event 201.
[47] Relatedly also see: Dr Sam White

E.g. Hampshire GP’s Covid social media ban was wrong, court rules – BBC News

Former GP is struck off for spreading conspiracy theories about covid pandemic | The BMJ

Dr Sam White on the Medical Mafia

[48]https://www.hsj.co.uk/acute-care/nhs-hospitals-have-four-times-more-empty-beds-than-normal/7027392.article

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/27/nhs-hospitals-like-mary-celeste-say-surgeons-despite-record/
[49] Many people around the world checked and a trend started of ‘film your hospital’: people went into their hospitals filming the empty corridors, car parks and wards, etc. Some of these people were arrested or chased out by security. E.g. see: Empty Hospitals -ALL HOSPITALS EMPTY in the middle of PLAN-DEMIC! #FilmYourHospital

Hashtag Film Your Hospital Compilation

INTERVIEW DEBBIE HICKS! FILM YOUR HOSPITAL – GLOUCESTER!

[50] E.g. see Popper or Kuhn ibid
[51] Kuhn, T, and Hacking, I. (2012) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition Paperback. University of Chicago Press; Fourth edition (30 April 2012)
[52] As discussed in TFP Chapter 3. Some of the six papers presented by the claimant lacked control experiments, e.g. just showed the breakdown of the cells (CPE) without a control experiment seeing if this breakdown occurred without the addition of bodily fluids from a sick person (assumed to have a ‘virus’). Some papers merely showed electron micrograph images of particles and claimed they were measle ‘viruses’ without characterising them in any other way – nor showing they could cause disease. This is reminiscent of the cartoon (or CGI) images that were ubiquitous during the ‘pandemic’ and purported to show the ‘corona virus’ with the spikes jutting out from the circle. These often were not even microscope images; they were just digital cartoons. One paper showed images of cell cultures and claimed that measles virus was budding from the cells, but failed to differentiate these particles from extracellular vesicles. Another paper claimed to describe the genome of the measles ‘virus’, but actually merely presented a computer-generated hypothetical model assembled on a computer by fitting together fragments from a mixture – it was not established that this code existed in the real-world, nor that the genetic material came from a ‘virus’ (e.g. see above)
[53] Rosenau, M. Experiments to Determine Mode of Spread of Influenza, Journal of American Medical Association 2nd August 1919
[54] People did die and suffer illness during the period labelled as the Spanish Flu pandemic. The question as to exactly what caused this illness would be difficult to answer definitively now since the evidence is not present. However, there are a number of theories as to what caused the Spanish Flu that do not postulate ‘viruses’.  qv
[55] Roytas, D. (2024) Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments
[56] In 1798, Napoleon’s protégé, physician-in-chief of the French Army Renée Desgenettes, took samples from the wounds of plague victims and injected the matter into himself; he also did not catch the plague. In 1835 Antoine-Barthélémy Clot injected himself with pus from a dying plague victim; again, the plague was not found to be transmitted. See Royats (2024) ibid
[57] E.g. see Roytas ibid
[58] Nightingale, F. 1866. National Archives.
[59] Also see:  A Conspiracy to Silence and Control – The Quarterly ReviewThe Quarterly Review (quarterly-review.org)

A.R. Kneen is the author of Multiculturalism –  What Does it Mean? She was awarded a Bye-fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge

Editorial note: concerning articles published in QR the ideas expressed therein are not thereby endorsed by the Editor 

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Endnotes, January-February 2025

Posted on January 4, 2025 by leslie

Presumed portrait of Hélène de Montgeroult, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, January-February 2025

In this edition: piano music from early 19th-century French women composers; 20th-century British chamber music. Reviewed by Stuart Millson

New from the Presences Compositrices label comes a revelatory glimpse into the musical world of the late-18th and early 19th century, courtesy of pianist, Lucie de Saint Vincent — a champion of the classical repertoire, particularly the music of overlooked women composers. Having studied, trained and perfected her art at Perpignan, at the Liszt Academy in Budapest and at The Royal Conservatory, The Hague, Lucie performs at many international festivals and concert-halls, but on this new collection she fully embraces the authentic sound-world of a past age, by using pianofortes from 1802 and 1804; recording her works in such venues as the Kolthoorn House and Gardens in the Netherlands. We have on the programme music which undoubtedly would have been the preserve of fashionable salons: etudes and sonatas by Hélène de Montgeroult (1764-1836) and Marie Bigot de Morogues (1786-1820) — both aristocrats (and aristocrats of the spirit) — Marie, married to Prince Rasumovsky’s librarian, acquainted with Beethoven, and later to teach luminaries such as Fanny Mendelssohn; Hélène (despite the Revolution) named in 1795 as Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire, and the composer of nine sonatas.

The collection begins with the Sonate en fa mineur, op.1, no. 3, and the Fantasie en sol mineur, op.7, no. 3 by Hélène de Montgeroult, pieces with both natural lyricism and an underlying, solid, Haydn-like, even Bach-influenced invention. In fact, it is the tone of the great classical composers which reflects like a grand Versailles mirror in the sonata; the work sitting easily between Haydn and indeed Beethoven, but perhaps in his softer moments. The period piano-sound adds magnificently to the sense of being back in time, some 200 years; the instrument ‘lacking’ the upper-register sweetness and pitched sonority of a modern instrument, but somehow giving us a little more, through its deep rumbles and harpsichord-reminiscent trills. And the playing of Lucie de Saint Vincent — stepping up the intensity in the music’s more elemental passages — is a masterclass of delicate delivery, and the careful curation of a style of playing that time-travellers from the era of de Montgeroult and de Morogues would immediately recognise.

Six etudes and a four-movement sonata (Sonate en si bemol majeur, op. 1) have been selected by Lucie as a representative sample of Marie Bigot de Morogues’ works. Each etude — two to three minutes in length — is a fine example of perfectly-compressed musical arguments: the first, sparkling like a crystal glass; the second, step-by-step, as if at a ball, with dancers bowing and nodding to one another. One hopes that many of Lucie’s fellow leading pianists will listen to this album: we can then look forward to programmes from Wigmore Hall and the Radio 3 studios which feature de Morogues.

Next, to rural England in wartime. For some composers, domestic life on the home front: pondering over the news bulletin, walking to the village shop for rations, then settling down in a Devon cottage to brood over the middle section of a new chamber piece — this was to be their war. And so it was for William Busch (1901-45) whose Three Pieces for Violin and Piano (1943-44) and Passacaglia for Violin and Viola (1939) are among the gems of little-known English music on a new disc from Lyrita Records. Busch studied in America and Berlin, but Woolacombe, North Devon, was the landscape and cultural setting of the ‘Three Pieces’ — the final movement Lacrimosa clearly resonating with (although not necessarily inspired by) English music’s famous sense of remote melancholia.

Cellist Ashok Klouda and pianist Simon Callaghan are the soloists in Busch’s 1943 Suite for Cello and Piano, which ends this time with a Tarantella, marked Presto, con ferocita — so it would be wrong to see Busch purely as creator of grey clouds and dark moors and seas. Confirming his reputation as an interpreter of 20th-century English music, pianist Simon Callaghan gives an impressive projection of Busch’s music, which tends to be abstract, rather than excessively English, certainly not folkish or pastoral. In a sense, the spirit of the works could echo the Welsh composer Daniel Jones’s description of himself — an artist who happens to live in Wales, rather than being self-consciously a Welsh artist. Full marks, too, for members of the Piatti Quartet: Michael Trainor, violin; Zahra Benyounes, viola; and Jessie Ann Richardson, cello — all beautifully recorded in the famously rich acoustic of the Wyastone Leys Concert Hall in Monmouthshire.

Finally, to the composer (again, hardly known) Pamela Harrison (1915-90) — a student of the Royal College of Music, but who found obtaining even an interest from the BBC in her works difficult, to say the least. From the Resonus label comes a collection of Harrison’s main works, including the tense, intricate, yet flowing Cello Sonata, Septet, the ghostly, memoried Kindling of the Day and another cycle, The Lonely Landscape — based upon the poems of Emily Brontë — all the works suggesting a ‘land of lost content’ atmosphere. Like William Busch, country locations appealed to Pamela Harrison: first, the North Downs, not far from Limpsfield; then, after the break-up of her marriage at the end of the 1950s, the remote setting of Dartmoor — interspersed with sojourns in Portugal —  finally settling in Sussex, gaining inspiration from the South Downs. Sadly, she ended her days, not in rural peace, but in a car crash, returning from a painting trip, another of her enthusiasms.

The music assembled by Resonus will undoubtedly appeal to all lovers of modern English music, and especially those listeners who enjoy discovering an off-the-beaten-track experience; whether the rare, too-often marginalised music of an (undeservedly) neglected composer, or the fascinating biography and day-to-day life of a creative artist — often suffering the same disappointments and setbacks as the rest of us mortals. Superbly performed by James Gilchrist, tenor; Alice Neary, cello and Jams Coleman, piano — with the Royal Welsh Chamber Players — ‘The Lonely Landscapes’ of Pamela Harrison offers a vivid portrait of the composer.

CD details:

The piano music of Marie Bigot & Héléne de Montgeroult — ‘DES DENTELLES A L’ECHAFAUD’ — Lucie de Saint Vincent, pianoforte. Presence Compositrices, PC004.

Chamber Music of William Busch. Simon Callaghan, piano; Piatti Quartet. Lyrita, SRCD.439.

Lonely Landscape — Chamber Music and Song by Pamela Harrison. James Gilchrist et al, Royal Welsh Chamber Players. resonus, RES10351.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Bradford, a ‘House Divided’

Posted on December 15, 2024 by leslie

Wool Exchange, Market Street Bradford, credit Wikipedia

                    Bradford, a ‘House Divided’, by Bill Hartley

At the ironically named Bradford Transport Interchange, the bus station has been closed since January of this year, because of ‘structural problems’. The railway station doesn’t then perform any interchange function, beyond a traveller finding another platform and there are only four to choose from. They tore down the large Victorian era station in 1976 and this was eventually replaced by the no longer working bus – rail interchange. In July of this year there were no toilet facilities at the station either. Back in 2021 a BBC report noted that Bradford has the worst rail connections of any major British city. To reach Manchester means going to Leeds, and travelling to London usually involves first heading to Sheffield. For anyone approaching the station on foot, access is via one of those grim 70s era underpasses. Emerging from this into a dirty and neglected culvert, pedestrians pass an abandoned shoe store whose window is full of shopping trolleys.

Motorists aren’t better off. Leaving the M62 heading towards the city means joining the M606, a motorway that goes nowhere. It abruptly ends on the outskirts of the city. This is the only section of the proposed Aire Valley Trunk Road which was actually completed.    Bradford is destined to become the UKs ‘City of Culture’ in 2025. A place, incidentally, of more than half a million inhabitants but described in a Guardian article as ‘Britain’s forgotten city’. Of course, Bradford is not unusual in suffering from disastrous town planning decisions. Here though they are juxtaposed with some superb examples of Victorian architecture, such as the Wool Exchange building and the city hall. They show what was accomplished in Bradford’s boom years during the nineteenth century. In the twenty first century the city seems to be going nowhere.

The broader Bradford Metropolitan District reaches out to encompass some attractive parts of West Yorkshire. ‘Bronte Country’, as Haworth has been labelled by the local tourism people, is nearly ten miles away and the World Heritage Centre of Saltaire more than four miles. Neither has any real connection to the city except they lie within the same local government boundary.

There is a sense of lassitude about the place and an overriding nostalgia among older inhabitants who remember what Bradford ‘used to be like’, with its fine department stores and bustling city centre. Bradford of course isn’t the only place with a declining retail sector. What they do have is the Broadway Centre, a shopping and leisure complex. Work on demolition and road diversions began in 2004 then ground to a halt for a decade. The site became known locally as ‘the hole in the ground’. It finally opened in 2015. Making the development fit harmoniously with the surrounding Victorian townscape was always going to be a challenge. The solution appears to have been to not try. As a result this glittering palace of retailing and leisure can be seen as a homage to 70s architecture and serves to emphasise the seediness of the surrounding area. This year unfortunately, both Marks and Spencer and Debenham’s have pulled out of the Broadway Centre.

Bradford has a vibrant neighbour. Only ten miles separates Leeds town hall from Bradford’s. In between lies a near continuous urban sprawl made up of other former textile towns. It may not be the most scientific test of economic activity but there are at present fifteen high angle cranes hovering over Leeds city centre, whilst Bradford has none. Local officials and politicians in Bradford can talk a good game but that seems all.

An interesting contrast would be Sunderland with its neighbour Newcastle only thirteen miles away.  Sunderland has refused to decline in Newcastle’s shadow and up there things are happening. A new city hall is open, as is a 450 seat performing arts centre. Legal and General are set to invest £100m, a four star hotel has opened and a thousand new homes are planned, all as part of the Riverside Sunderland project. In contrast, Bradford has come up with the concept of new homes in a ‘city village’ but so far this hasn’t got beyond the planning and consultation phase. In theory it is a sound idea but given the council’s track record and the fact that they haven’t even fixed the bus station, it would not do to be optimistic. Even City of Culture preparations are showing worrying signs that all is not well. Bradford Live is a building close to the railway station and is intended to be the heart of City of Culture events. The exterior of the former Alhambra cinema has been cleaned up but inside nothing seems to be happening. On September 14th last, the Telegraph and Argus reported in an article dripping with sarcasm, its repeated failure to get answers from city officials about what is happening.

Why is Bradford a byword for inertia compared to Leeds? There is the question of demography. At the last census the city showed a continuing decline in the white population.  Bradford is a young city which has the second largest Asian-Pakistani population in Britain, said to renew itself by marriage partners from ancestral villages in the home country. As long ago as 2001 the late Lord Ousley, former chairman of the Council for Racial Equality, referred to what he delicately called a ‘unique entrenchment’. (Editorial note, on a no less less delicate note, see BBC news, 27 Feb 2019, ‘Bradford grooming: Nine jailed for abusing girls’) It has been described as a community within a community. The council estimates that there are 25,000 people with little or no knowledge of English. How then with a third of the cities’ population isolated culturally and to some extent linguistically, can it pick itself up and regenerate in the same way as neighbouring Leeds has done? Demography is evidently destiny.

Connoisseurs of Action Plans to do with racial equality will find plenty to interest them in Bradford. The council, police, university; every organisation it seems has a similar message. Then there is the Bradford for Everyone Strategy 2018-2023. One of its aims was to build stronger communities. Presumably no-one dares admit that they have at least one very strong and rather exclusive community already built. Arguably this prevents the city operating as a cohesive whole; not that any politician or public servant is likely to suggest as much.

As for Bradford Council, apart from its financial difficulties and the need for a government bail out to prevent it from going bankrupt, the city has been singularly unsuccessful in obtaining ‘levelling up’ money from central government. Four schemes were put forward by the council in 2023 and all were turned down by civil servants who claimed they were not adequate enough to be put before ministers. Predictably the council went into a sulk, became defensive and gave no indication it would learn from, or seek advice as to how best to submit bids in the future. A recent Times article was sceptical about the benefits that the City of Culture might bring. It felt that Bradford’s predictions were overly optimistic. The legacy of the scheme in both Hull and Coventry has not been that significant.

It would seem that a series of problems have combined to leave Bradford moribund. Poor transport facilities, badly led local government and to quote Lord Ousely once more, the unique ‘entrenchment’ of a substantial part of the population. On a more optimistic note, in October the BBC reported that the bus station ‘could’ reopen ‘as soon as’ January 5 2025. Don’t hold your breath.

                William Hartley is a Social Historian

                               

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

The Question of Unworthy Life

Posted on November 30, 2024 by leslie

Alfred Ploetz, credit Wikipedia

The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century; Dagmar Herzog, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2024, 302pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

According to Dagmar Herzog, the history of racial hygiene (a term coined by biologist Alfred Ploetz) is essentially Manichean. It has its heroes and its villains, and she provides vignettes of both. One of the purposes of her book is to honour those individuals who challenged the de-humanization of the disabled, such as Swiss physician Johann Jakob Guggenbühl (1816-1863). Abendberg, his residential school for “children with cognitive challenges’, was a watchword for “love and kindness”. His guiding principle was the dignity and equality of all God’s creatures endowed with an immortal soul. Then, in stark contrast, we have lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, authors of Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Life (1921), a blueprint for the subsequent Nazi programme of coercive ‘euthanasia’. They highlighted the financial and psychological cost of caring for those whom Hoche called “ballast-existences”. Many people in Germany, subject to a high death rate and food shortages during the war, were receptive to this argument. According to Binding and Hoche, the death of so many of the disabled during the war due to malnutrition had made possible the survival of the fit.

In Permission to Annihilate, Binding criticised the Christian churches for opposing “assisted suicide”, a position which he deemed “contra-selective”. During the 1880’s and beyond, it was Christian authors, including some engaged in Protestant Church welfare work under the auspices of the Inner Mission, who questioned the depiction of the disabled as a “dead weight burdening a struggling society” (Herzog, p51). Heinrich Matthias Sengelmann, the founder of the Alsterdorfer in Hamburg, published a guidebook for disability care tellingly entitled Idiotophilus or Lover of Idiots (1888). Lutheran pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, likewise, the founder in 1867 of the famous Bethel institution, challenged the view that disability sprang from moral turpitude, especially from sexual profligacy. He instructed his staff to “Keep company with those at the bottom; the lowliest path is the safest, the most blessed path”. Von Bodelschwingh believed that serving the most helpless was a privilege and beneficial to the carer. Herzog underlines the “radical theological egalitarianism” inherent in his vision (Herzog p52).

But what the author calls the ‘hierarchizing’ of the disabled into distinct groups, a hierarchy in which capacity to work was the pivotal factor, dated back to the 1880’s and became increasingly prevalent. Those professionals responsible for the disabled, notably Protestant leaders but also, remedial teachers and psychiatrists, “intensified antidisability animus ” (Herzog, p 66). In due course, the views of Guggenbühl and his epigones became passé.

Why was the Protestant church in Germany complicit in the Nazi programmes of sterilisation and “euthanasia”? It transpires that some of Binding and Hoche’ s Christian critics were themselves ambivalent about caring for severely disabled individuals. Witness Pastor Friedrich Lensch, who succeeded Sengelman at the Alsterdorfer. He referred candidly to “those who stand before this abyss of misery… [and] ask…if one cannot, if only for the sake of the ill ones themselves, liberate them from this life…” For Lensch, there were humanitarian objections to keeping the severely disabled alive. And in The Problem of Abbreviating Life ‘Unworthy’ of Life (1925), Evald Meltzer, a doctor and the director of the Katharinenhof in Saxony, compiled the opinions of some Protestant religious leaders who endorsed killing the seriously disabled. One such, a religious educator in Auerbach, opined that “abbreviating” life was moral if done out of “benevolence”. In similar vein, Berlin professor of theology Arthur Titius maintained that killing the severely disabled was compatible with “full love of God and genuine humanitarianism”.

At a meeting in May 1931 of leading figures in the Inner Mission, eugenics and “euthanasia” were on the agenda. The upshot was the “Treysa Resolution”, which proposed “differential care” for those disabled individuals unable to undertake productive labour. In addition, sterilization was accepted in principle to protect “the coming generation” and the Volk. According to the “Treysa Resolution”, 60 percent of “mental infirmities” are attributable to heredity.

Leaders in Protestant welfare work welcomed the coercive Nazi sterilisation law which came into effect in January 1934 and the hospitals and charitable institutions they administered carried out regular sterilisations. But, once again, certain individuals bucked the trend. In a lecture in April 1933, Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus (University of Erlangen) rejected killing the disabled and programmes of mass sterilisation. The hereditary transmission of “feeble-mindedness” was not scientifically established, in his judgement. Contra Binding and Hoche, Althaus distinguished between “worth” and “dignity”, which “has no gradations”. Protestant physician Karl Stoevesandt was another trenchant critic of eugenics. The latter was a world view not a science in his estimation. In 1934, however, Stoevesanndt, under pressure, recanted.

Pastor Ludwig Schlaich, who from 1930 ran the Stetten asylum, was another member of Herzog’s band of righteous individuals. Although he authorised sterilisation, Schlaich drew the line at murder and in Autumn 1940 he strenuously opposed the transportation of his charges to a T4 gas chamber in Grafeneck. In Lebensunwert? Unworthy of Life? (1947), he described the victims of T4 as “persecutees of the Third Reich”. Unhappily it was only later that the German state adopted this position. In 1950-51, physician Walther Schmidt, director of the Eichberg institution, received staunch public support when facing prosecution in 1950-51 for murdering inmates. The West German government refused to compensate the victims of sterilisation on the grounds that eugenics was a science, and that sterilisation was morally acceptable. Psychiatrist Helmut Ehrardt, an expert witness at a meeting of the reparations committee of the Bundestag in 1961, claimed that the heritability of such conditions as “feeble-mindedness” and “schizophrenia” had been established. The Finance Ministry gratefully concurred.

Professor Herzog (Professor of History at the City University, New York) invariably cites the environmental and class factors supposedly driving disability. Her position on this issue, ironically, is close to that of the SED regime in the former German Democratic Republic. Note, however, that she acknowledges that for all their fine words, the treatment of the severely disabled was in practice no better in the GDR than in West Germany. Like the Nazis, communists have a problem with those unable or unwilling to work. Herzog maintains that rather than address the poverty that caused the unfavourable environmental conditions encouraging disability, the goal of racial hygiene was always “the eradication of disability through selective breeding and targeted killing” (Herzog, p38). Thus, in ‘The Reciprocal Relationships Between Mental Inferiority and Social Misery’ (1915), Martin Breitbarth, the rector of a remedial school in Halle, inverted the putative relationship between poverty and disability. Parents, he averred, may make bad choices of living conditions. He concluded that the poverty of many disabled children was attributable, through heredity, to the “mental and moral inferiority of their parents”.

The Federal Reparations Law of 1956 only acknowledged Nazi crimes motivated by “race, religion, or political world view”. Herzog therefore gives immense credit to historian Gisela Bock for demonstrating, in Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus (1986), that Nazi racial hygiene directed against the mentally deficient or unstable (the “deficient insiders” of the Volk) complemented the racism which targeted the “outsiders”, notably Jews, Poles, Roma etc. Both sets of victims were excluded from the so-called master race. In 1966, sociologist Theodor Adorno observed that “The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological [pre] condition for…Auschwitz”. Adorno pointed out bitterly that there was resistance to “euthanasia” in Germany of non-Jewish members of the Volk (as, for example in the famous 1941 sermon of Clemens August Graf von Galen, Cardinal and Bishop of Münster) but not to the extermination of German Jews.

The focus of this review has been on the baneful influence of racial hygiene on the treatment of disabled people. But there is more to The Question of Unworthy Life than this. The author chronicles the long but mainly successful struggle to establish the equality and dignity of the disabled despite the persistence of anti-disability prejudice. There were campaigns to integrate disabled children into mainstream education and to dismantle or reform residential institutions. Some of the physically disabled themselves played an important role in this struggle, as in the Cripple-Movement of the 1980’s. We commend Professor Herzog’s authoritative and at times moving account.

Bishop Clemens August Count von Galen, credit Wikipedia

Dr Leslie Jones is the Editor of Quarterly Review

 

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Romance to Realities

Posted on November 12, 2024 by leslie

William McTaggart, The Storm, credit Wikipedia

Romance to Realities, The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities, an exhibition reviewed by William Hartley

This is the second exhibition held at Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery in 2024. Romance to Realities is a ticketed event which chronicles two hundred years of landscape painting in the north of England and Scotland. It covers town and country, land and sea and how these have changed. The aim is to illustrate the displacement of communities and shifting identities. Done in partnership with the Fleming Collection which holds the largest collection of Scottish art outside a public institution, the exhibition contains work by artists some of whom may be less well known south of the border.

Entering the gallery the Scottish theme is established early on with George Blackie’s magnificent study Tantallon Castle, Caithness, one of the country’s more obscure fortresses.The theme is sustained by John Wilson Carmichael’s Country House in the Highlands, illustrating the move to a less defensive style of living in those parts. A return to the past comes via Walter Hugh Paton’s Craigmillar Castle: another romantic ruin softened by a pastoral scene in the foreground.Viewing these pictures it is easy to understand the Victorian fascination with all things Scottish and how this was to grow throughout the nineteenth century.

The Lake District isn’t overlooked: some works displayed here seem more like the Alps, with sheep on vertiginous crags and climbers who appear to have reached the top of the world. How the Victorians must have loved taking the train north, to experience at first hand what had previously been achievable only by a long and laborious journey.

The older works in the exhibition are not by any means focussed exclusively on the uplands. For instance, there is a water colour on display by Thomas Scott entitled Border Landscape.This depicts an agricultural scene, with not a single peak or crag in sight. Here we see the harvest being laboriously gathered by hand and a reminder that Northumberland and the Borders are rich farming country. Similarly, there is John Richie’s A Border Fair painted in 1865. It is believed to represent the long vanished Stagshaw Bank Fair and is a picture so teeming with life and multiple activities that it probably needs a second viewing to fully appreciate the artist’s achievement.

Then the visitor is brought up to date via a living artist. Peter Howson emerged in the 1980s; his pictures often explore working class lives with themes of violence and inner turmoil. The Brink is a bold, dark, imagined landscape with a female figure in the foreground; a disturbing picture which demands close attention. Howson, a former war artist, painted the picture in 1992 and it shows that this exhibition is not all dreamy landscapes tinged with sentimentalism.

Another picture with the power to disturb is William McTaggart’s Machrihanish Bay. Ostensibly it is a fine seascape but on closer examination possesses an eerie quality. McTaggart was clearly capable of capturing the moods of sea and sky in a style influenced by the Impressionists. However, in this painting the figures in the foreground are superimposed in a semi-transparent way which creates a transient, almost supernatural presence, quite unlike any other people-on-a-beach picture. Amidst so many attractive and rather more standard paintings, this may be the one which stays in the visitor’s mind after they have left the gallery. In a way it anticipates the change from nineteenth century Romanticism and a good example would be William Crozier’s Edinburgh From Castle Street. This is a bold, sharper edged work, definitely lacking any hint of glowing softness. Painted as recently as 2013 and done in the Cubist style, it is every bit as good a piece of townscape as any of the Victorian examples in the exhibition.

The landscape is depicted in a starker, more expressionistic fashion by John Bellamy. The Ettrick Shepherd is an arresting piece of work; the subject standing behind his flock glares warily out of the picture. During the course of his career Bellamy had visited the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was said to have had a profound effect on him. This is a haunting picture: the shepherd and his tiny flock standing on an anonymous Highland hilltop.

The urban scene isn’t neglected. Some of the works on display have captured people caught in the grimness of northern industrial labour. Of particular interest is a painting by an anonymous artist entitled A Pit Backworth. This is a primitive piece of work which actually helps to show the operation of a colliery. It depicts a point just before the use of steam power became widespread in the mining industry. In the foreground horses are at work moving the coal wagons, a reminder that mining is another form of resource exploitation, just like agriculture, with which it remained closely allied, until it expanded and became an industry in its own right.

Perhaps no modern artist had a greater feel for the urban-industrial landscape than LS Lowry. An example of his work also appears in the exhibition, entitled River Scene. Whilst the location is unknown, Lowry did visit the North East. Certainly, the cotton mills that characterise so much of his work are absent from the picture. This is a river where a colliery headframe is present in one corner, suggesting that the inspiration was the Tyne.

Again going forward in time there is Carol Rhodes’ 2001 painting Trees and Woods depicting those forgotten areas, places around the fringes of airports and reservoirs. Elsewhere James Bateman’s picture The Lime Burner reinforces the one time link between the industrial and agricultural. Lime was needed for fertilizer to be spread on the fields. In order to boost productivity it had to be available in quantity and so coal was required for this purpose.

The final section of the exhibition looks at how 20th century landscape painting sees the interplay of traditional ideals and contemporary art. This is an exhibition which has something for everyone. Romance to Realities takes the visitor through the pastoral and then on into the darker realities of industrial life.

William Crozier, Edinburgh From Castle Street, credit Wikimedia Commons

Romance to Realities is at the Laing Gallery Newcastle until 26th April 2025

William Hartley is a Social Historian

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Endnotes, November-December 2024

Posted on November 1, 2024 by leslie

“Gathering Winter Fuel”, Good King Wenceslas, 1904, credit Wikimedia Commons

Endnotes, November-December 2024

In this edition: Walter Braunfels, ‘lost’ Germanic romanticism * Bruckner from SOMM * Symphony No. 4 by Matthew Taylor * Christmas music from Albion, reviewed by Stuart Millson

The Dutton Epoch label is one of those enterprising record companies, unafraid to take a chance on composers who, for whatever reason, have sunk into obscurity — quite undeserved in the case of Walter Braunfels (1882-1954), an admirer of Wagner and early-20th century opera composer who fell foul of the Third Reich’s artistic policy because of partial Jewish ancestry. The ban on Braunfels was the German public’s loss, as in his music we find solace, sentiment, drama, depth and direction: such as in the Sarabande of his Orchester–Suite e–Moll fur grosses Orchester, op. 48 (written between 1933 and 36); and the lyrically ‘fresh-air’ sense of meditation at the opening of his Hebridentanze, op. 70 (a Scottish-influenced divertimento for piano and orchestra, written post-war, and seemingly untainted by conflict or bitterness).

The latter piece sees pianist Piers Lane (who has championed such works as the Delius concerto) working his magic alongside and above the warm strings and fluttering woodwind of the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Austrian maestro, Johannes Wildner. If you are seeking music that is, purely and simply, a pleasure — a tonal, accessible, seemingly unclouded delight, the music of Braunfels could not be a better recommendation. Also on the programme is the intriguing concerto-combination of violin, viola and two French horns in the Sinfonia Concertante, another post-war work by Braunfels, but this time offering tense, gloomier orchestral vistas; the excellent soloists and orchestra alike, sounding deep, dark, heartfelt in the generous, warm acoustic of the Watford Colosseum (the soloists being: Ernst Kovacic, violin; Thomas Selditz, viola; and horn-players, Tim Thorpe and Tom Rumsby).

Walter Braunfels, credit Wikipedia

German romanticism of an earlier period is served up, courtesy of SOMM Records, in the fourth part of their Bruckner retrospective for the composer’s commemorative 200th birthday year. The Fifth Symphony — beautifully austere in its grand, mysterious half-light — is conducted in a vintage performance by Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. ‘Bruckner 5’ shares a similar outlook to the relentless Sixth and Ninth symphonies: the composer seems to have little time for even glimpses of radiance, charting, instead, a long course of nervy exploration through craggy mountains, but at least giving us a touch of the ‘Austrian vernacular’ in an earnest, sometimes gallumphing ländler-type scherzo. In the slow movement, there is a sense of Wagner’s Parsifal or Lohengrin drifting in the background, with a truly sacred pause preceding a moment of intensity just two or three minutes in, as if we are all to bow our heads in reverence. Brass chorales in the last movement — like fanfares from a distant Gormenghast — set us up for a finale of monumental proportions; a great exhaling of the pent-up energy from the earlier sections, with brass thundering out like multiple cathedral organs.

For the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra on the 8th December 1963 (their live, stereo broadcast performance forming the first part of SOMM’s two-disc set), Bruckner was natural repertoire. But the ensemble does more than just take the 1878 symphony in its stride: here we find inspirational playing — measured, even slow, in tempo (especially in the cavernous opening moments) — that transcends any mere studio or routine concert performance. Bravo to Siva Oke and technical recording specialist, Lani Spahr, for tracking down these electrifying performances from radio archives and making them available to us.

Disc two comprises the String Quintet in F major (dated a year after the Fifth Symphony) and the delightful, lighter Intermezzo, both works remastered from old mono records made in 1956. The QR discussed another, more modern performance of the Quintet recently, so we will not go into enormous detail about this performance — apart from saying that it is one of complete Brucknerian authenticity, with beautiful playing (even in mono sound) by the Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet — Ferdinand Stangler playing the second viola. A must for any Bruckner enthusiast and an essential album for those in love with vintage and classic performances.

English composer, Matthew Taylor, born 1964, studied under senior modern British composer, Robin Holloway, at Cambridge in 1983 — also attracting the attention of Leonard Bernstein who invited the budding young musician to participate in the famous Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Thanks to the Nimbus label, supporters of resolutely tonal contemporary music can enjoy Taylor’s impressive orchestral works, especially the outgoing Symphony No. 4, Op. 54 — framed as it is by two Giubiloso passages, reminiscent in their full-flowing power of the music of Carl Nielsen. Played with emphatic, sit-up-and-go energy by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Kenneth Woods, the performance is captured in a wide, full-fathom sound by the Nimbus recording team; bringing out, too, the attractive lower-register tone of the BBC Welsh orchestra in a nearly-12-minute long slow movement, in which structure and direction do not flag. The project forms part of the Nimbus 21st Century Symphony Project — a major rebuttal to those modernists, convinced that the symphonic form is outmoded. The Fifth Symphony also appears on the disc – a darker piece, with sometimes a more ‘chamber’ feel, and tense adagio sections and harsh fanfares. The English Symphony Orchestra gives a deeply-felt performance. And the CD cover artwork, a scene of the South Wales coast, helps to make this an eye-catching release.

Finally, as wintry candlelight and Yuletide thoughts enter our consciousness, what could be finer, more spiritual accompaniments to the season than A Christmas Fantasia and Ralph Vaughan Williams — Carols from Herefordshire, both issued by Albion Records and featuring the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, under William Vann. The Christmas Fantasia disc takes us to an almost imaginary (or in parts of the land, wholly real) traditional English December landscape of frost and snow; of huddled congregations in mediaeval churches, where the ethereal sounds of Holst, Howells, Ireland, Finzi, Maconchy, Vann and Vaughan Williams awake the mind’s-eye to the stable’s ‘Little Door’ (Howells), where farm animals keep watch over The Holy Boy (Ireland). There is a warming Wassail Song from Vaughan Williams reminding us that the fireside of a country inn is part of Christmas, too. The album concludes with the composer’s famous Fantasia on Christmas Carols, with organist Jamie Andrews and Ashley Riches, bass-baritone, weaving their magical qualities into what is a deeply evocative seasonal patchwork of music that could only come from Albion’s own shores.

Carols from Herefordshire offer us a similar atmosphere, with such pieces as God Rest You Merry Gentlemen, Dives and Lazarus and The Angel Gabriel performed not only by William Vann’s Chapel Choir, but in recital-type versions by Derek Welton, bass-baritone, and piano accompanist, Iain Burnside. Delightful and heartwarming in every respect, and a tribute to the work of the Vaughan Williams Society (whose dedication to the music of these islands knows no bounds), surely the two CDs are the perfect Christmas gift.

CD details:

Braunfels, Orchester suite etc., Dutton Epoch, CDLX 7355.
Bruckner from the Archives, Vol. 4, Symphony No. 5, String Quintet, SOMM ARIADNE 5031-2.
Matthew Taylor, Symphony No. 4 etc., NIMBUS ALLIANCE, NI 6406.
A Christmas Fantasia, ALBION RECORDS, ALBCD063.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Carols from Herefordshire, ALBCD064.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review.

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Bloody Gori

Posted on October 12, 2024 by leslie

Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori, credit Wikipedia

 Bloody Gori, by Bill Hartley

There is a museum dedicated to Stalin in his birthplace, the Georgian town of Gori. It doesn’t contain many items which actually belonged to him, since Stalin wasn’t the acquisitive sort, at least in the personal sense. They do have his private railway carriage on display. Of course, in the first half of he twentieth century no self-respecting dictator would have been without one. There is also the log cabin in which the local lad was born and grew up. It resembles one of those garden cabins they advertise in country living magazines, though the carpentry isn’t as good.

Arriving at Tblisi airport a traveller may notice the occasional dog lying around on the concourse. Usually a dog in an airport comes with a handler and is there for security purposes. Not so in this case. Georgia’s capital has a large collection of feral dogs roaming free. These are far from being emaciated specimens. Here it is considered a sort of civic duty to keep them fed. The local authorities play their part too. All the dogs carry a yellow ear tag confirming their vaccination status and they interact quite amicably with the human population. At a café with tables outdoors, it’s not unusual to be sharing space with a sleeping dog.

Georgia is a small country in a state of transition. It was once annexed by the Tsars, briefly regained its independence following the Russian revolution and did so once more in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Subsequently Georgia lost some territory after Russia saw an opportunity to exploit ethnic divisions. First was South Ossetia, where a separatist movement took on central government. Russian ‘peace keepers’ came in and the territory is now an independent republic recognised by Russia, Syria and Venezuela. The rest of the world disagrees. Even so South Ossetia has a president and a prime minister governing a population of 56,000. It is as if Cumbria had seceded from England.

Another piece of territory in the northwest was lost following the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. This became the so-called Republic of Abkhazia and the outcome was the displacement of many thousands of Georgians. It seems unlikely they’ll get it back since the Russians are building a new base for their Black Sea fleet; presumably hoping it is beyond the reach of Ukraine. To the south is the city of Anaklia where the Georgian government has come to an agreement with the Chinese for the construction of a deep-water port. This will be of great strategic significance along a route shipping goods between Europe and Asia.

Approaching the capital Tblisi, it is easy to see why a financial journalist in Moneyweek recently went so far as to describe Georgia as the ‘Switzerland of the Caucasus’. With a Black Sea coast and lying on the old Silk Road, it is a place through which trade has flowed for centuries. Georgia has a young, well-educated population which unlike its seniors prefers English as a second language, rather than Russian. The corruption endemic in other post Soviet republics has been largely eliminated. In part this was achieved when the entire police force was sacked. Modern multi lane roads run into the capital, alongside which new apartment blocks are going up near their grim Soviet era predecessors.

With a general election due on 26th October of this year, the political temperature is beginning to rise. On a Saturday afternoon in late September a procession and rally took place in Tblisi, organised by one of the opposition parties. Many of those marching were wrapped in the national colours and at the head of the procession an EU flag was being carried. The ruling Georgian Dream party is seeking a record fourth term in office and unlike the main opposition is reputedly pro Moscow. A few months ago it enacted what is known locally as the ‘Agent’s Law’. This law requires organisations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as ‘agents of foreign influence’ and is seen by many as a way for the government to suppress its opponents. The Kremlin enacted similar legislation back in 2012. It seems unlikely that Georgia’s application to join the EU will make much progress whilst the law remains in force.

Politics also find their way into the pulpit. The deeply conservative Georgian Orthodox church has close ties with the Russian Orthodox, the latter being widely seen as subservient to the Kremlin. Religious observance can be strong. On a Saturday morning at a church close to Tblisi’s old town there was standing room only, with proceedings being broadcast to those outside. Archbishop Jakob of Bodbe recently posted online a sermon he had preached at the Church of the Mother of God. The translation wasn’t very good, making it difficult to determine if he was pro Moscow or pro EU. At times he seemed to be hostile to both. During the sermon he also accused one politician of ‘speaking like a woman’. This seemed insensitive since most of the congregation appeared to be female. It remains to be seen if Georgian Dream gets another term, of if the Western orientated United National Movement prevails.

Perhaps it is the old town district of Tblisi which most reflects Georgia in transition. Architectural styles vary across the country depending on available materials. In the old town there are many brick and timber buildings with characteristic balconies, extending living space over the street below. The old town lies on both sides of the Kura river where it runs through a steep sided valley. House building up the slopes has resulted in a rather dramatic townscape. In addition, every promontory seems to have a church or chapel. These tend to have a conical dome built above a drum shaped tower, with the building below laid out as a cross.  The old town is on a World Monuments Watch list as being endangered. There is a plan dating back to 2010 to make the buildings and cobbled streets more attractive to tourists but progress has been patchy at best. Getting along a pavement can be something of an assault course, avoiding deep potholes and various other trip hazards. Some houses have been beautifully restored and new ones built in the traditional style (the Italian ambassador lives in one). Others are in a dangerous state of near collapse. Sometimes it is only by looking into a courtyard to find clothes drying that one realises that this dangerously unstable dwelling is in fact still inhabited. Out on the pavements street sellers of vegetables and the local wines interact amiably with passers by. There are tiny traditional grocer’s shops interspersed with small supermarkets. Looming over the old town is the golden dome of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, looking as if it has always been there but in fact was only completed in 2004.

Georgia is likely to be in the news in the coming weeks as the election approaches. The result may help determine whether this small republic in the Caucasus will turn westwards or accept the influence of its giant neighbour to the north.

William Hartley is a Social Historian and globetrotter

   

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Our Tailor-Made Parliament

Posted on October 4, 2024 by leslie

Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, dapper diarist &  MP for Southend West, credit Wikipedia

Our Tailor-Made Parliament

Richard Wendorf

There has been much gnashing of teeth about the clothing allowance that has recently been bestowed upon members of the Labour cabinet, but the real outrage is not that Lord Alli and others have quietly (and literally) padded the wardrobes of our leading politicians, but that the recipients of this largess continue to dress as badly as they used to. Who in the world chose the Emperor’s (strike that! the Prime Minister’s) new clothes? Why does he look no better after tens of thousands of pounds sterling have been splashed out on his behalf? Is there no alternative to the uniform that almost all of our male politicians wear?  The answer is yes, as I will suggest below, but that may not strike some as an appealing sartorial alternative.

So first, the uniform. A two-piece suit, almost invariably dark navy except when it occasionally transforms itself into a somewhat lighter, iridescent shade of blue. A white shirt, usually without cufflinks, and with the points of the collar so short that they don’t quite make it to the suit’s lapels. Ignoring the sage advice that a gentleman should button his suit jacket when he stands, most of our Parliamentarians choose to display even more of their shirt front – and often their bulging abdomens. And the ties! Usually dull; sometimes navy or black; rarely colourful; only occasionally striped or patterned. And, the worst part of all, rarely tied so that they actually cover the buckle on an MP’s belt. Ah, yes: those large black belts. Rarely a pair of trousers without them, and rarely a pair of trousers that doesn’t dramatically pool on top of the de rigueur black cap toe shoes. Westminster lies only a few metres from Jermyn Street and Savile Row, and yet these baggy suit jackets and seemingly unhemmed trousers look as if they’ve been pulled off the rack at M&S with nary a thought about suitable alterations.

This is not to say that our politicians dress uniformly, even if they usually wear the same uniform. I suggest that there are at least four variations on our central theme. First, ‘The Ragamuffin,’ an intentional effort to accentuate everything that is already amiss in Parliamentary dress. Think, at the extreme end of the spectrum, of Boris Johnson, unleashed: the knot of the tie hanging in the neighbourhood of (but not close to) the top button of the shirt, the shirt bursting at its seams and with its tails occasionally visible beneath the vents of the jacket, trousers spilling onto scuffed shoes, hair immaculately tousled. I think that the right word for this affront to the tradition of British tailoring is ‘bedraggled.’

Second, and at the other end of the spectrum, ‘The Undertaker.’ And not just he with the double-barreled name, for there is a tendency, especially among the few Tories left on the green benches, to dress as if they have just attended a funeral. Dark suit, sometimes double-breasted; white shirt – or sometimes with a delicate blue or back stripe; sombre tie, largely hidden by a suit jacket that is rarely unbuttoned; black shoes, polished, but still hard to detect under the cascade of trouser fabric. A po-faced countenance to complete the look, unless our Member has decided to show his discontent with the arch of a furry eyebrow.

Third, borrowing from feminine culture, what I would describe as ‘Mutton Dressed as Lamb.’ Forget almost everything I have said so far. The suit is still dark blue but it is worn as tightly as possible – and several inches too short in front and back. The points of the shirt have almost disappeared.  The tie is not only short, it is half the width of a normal tie. The trousers are also worn tight, ending more than a few inches above the obligatory black shoes. (Trousers this short are called ‘floods’ in America.) The overall effect is intended, one supposes, to suggest discipline, tidiness, and even youthfulness. A pair of dazzlingly white Adidas could be substituted outside the corridors of power, although cartoons and headlines will quickly follow.

Finally, what I would call the ‘In Your Face’ wardrobe. It will be interesting to see if it makes its way into the Palace of Westminster, but it is now ubiquitous in the walk-about, on the doorsteps, at the hustings. Think chunky country clothing that has been pushed to the limit: pattern upon pattern, tweed upon suede, heavy cotton tattersalls, ties that take no prisoners.  Reddish-brown brogues and gaudy socks. Add a pint and a fag and you know what (and whom) I mean.

But wait! There is a chameleon-like sea change to this get-up from the Cotswolds (or, more precisely, Essex). Our crusader on behalf of Reform, when city push comes to rural shove, is arguably the best-dressed politician in the country today. Consider his choice of suit, shirt, and tie when he is not rubbing shoulders with his adoring followers. If his political tastes were as sure-footed as his sartorial ones, we would indeed be in good hands.

It has been said, and perhaps with some justice, that the British are supremely good at four things: acting, soldiering, tailoring, and being sick in public. Perhaps we will soon need to strike out one of those encomia, at least in the halls of Westminster.

Professor Richard Wendorf began selling men’s clothing the day he turned sixteen. His most recent book is ‘Chesterfield: The Perils of Politeness’ (forthcoming).

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Deconstruction Time

Posted on September 30, 2024 by leslie

Napoleon 111, by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin, credit wikipedia

Deconstruction Time

Don H Doyle, The Age of Reconstruction; How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World, Don H Doyle, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2024, hb, 369pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

In Garibaldi, Invention of a Hero, Lucy Riall recalls how nuns in a Sicilian convent in 1860 became so excited by Garibaldi’s “resemblance to ‘our Lord’ that they queued up to kiss him on the lips”.[i] As Professor Doyle observes, “secular heroes in the nineteenth century”, especially those who were ‘martyred’, attracted a quasi- religious devotion and sense of obligation from their admirers.[ii] Thus, news of Lincoln’s assassination (quickly spread by telegraph networks, “the internet of its day”) turned him into “a global hero and martyr to the cause of human freedom”.[iii] In due course, messages of condolence poured into US diplomatic outposts from around the world. Secretary of State William H Seward subsequently published a selection of these missives in Tributes of the Nations to Abraham Lincoln (1867), “a handsome large-format leather-bound volume” sent to  members of Congress and various foreign governments. Seward considered this document a useful adjunct of American foreign policy.

One of the letters in the State Department’s Tributes was signed by Parisian journalist Sainte-Suzanne Melvil-Bloncourt and 150 of his fellow Guadeloupeans. Melvil-Bloncourt was of mixed-race and a veteran abolitionist. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the subsequent Union victory in the Civil War revived the anti-slavery movement. The Comité Français d’émancipation was established in early 1865. Its target now was “the remaining bastions of slavery in the empires of Brazil and Spain”. [iv] In Cuba, which had remained loyal to Spain, “white fears of black domination sustained slavery”, [v] the basis of the lucrative sugar plantation system. Enslaved Afro-Cubans looked to Lincoln as a potential liberator. The Emancipation Declaration and the defeat of the Confederacy “cast a heavy shadow”[vi] over slavery in Cuba. Seward’s adhesion in 1862 to Britain’s campaign to suppress the slave trade led inexorably to its extinction.

The American Civil War enabled Napoleon 111 to conquer Mexico and install Maximilian as Emperor as part of his Grand Design (or gran pensée) to promote French military and commercial influence in central America. In an 1864 article ‘The Key of a Continent’, Massachusetts clergyman Joshua Leavitt (author of The Monroe Doctrine) surmised that Napoleon’s ultimate objective was “to make France the master of global commerce by building a canal across Mexico or central America…” Opposing republicanism and upholding the influence of the Catholic Church and of conservative landed interests was central to this policy. But the victory of the North sealed the fate of these ambitious plans.

Napoleon’s ultimately abortive intervention in Mexico was a godsend for the French left. Maximilian, a member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and the brother of Emperor Franz Joseph 1 of Austria, was executed on June 19th,1867. Many of Europe’s reigning princes were related to Maximilian and had gathered in Paris at the Exposition Universelle, intended as a showcase of the revival of Bonapartism. The New York Times reported that the execution of Maximilian “hangs like a black cloud over all these splendours of royalty”.

Execution of Maximilian, Edouard Manet, credit Wikipedia

The French Empire’s internal critics, such as Adolphe Thiers, attributed Maximilian’s downfall to Napoleon 111’s “personal government”. The introduction of the ‘Liberal Empire’ was a belated attempt to buy time for the dynasty. But the new press law engendered a plethora of often critical new journals like Rappel, Tribune and Réforme. Public meetings were now permitted and at one such meeting, Édouard Laboulaye made invidious comparisons between the American republic and the Second Empire. Américomanie, eulogising Lincoln, was prevalent in French republican circles at this juncture. The radical journalist Edouard Portalis, author of Les États Unis, le self-governement et le césarisme, who had travelled extensively in the US, depicted  democracy as a motor of progress. Georges Clemenceau, likewise, wrote a pseudonymous column entitled Nouvelles des États-Unis for the republican Parisian paper Le Temps. Clemenceau had participated in a demonstration in Paris following Lincoln’s demise. The demonstrators presented an address to John Bigelow, US minister to France, at the US legation. It called for the establishment of a “true democracy”. Clemenceau considered the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, in 1868, as “unimaginable in France at that time” and a model for how to deal with “a tyrannical head of state”. [vii] Historian Jules Michelet, in similar vein, saw America as “…the pride, the hope, the salvation of the world…”. [viii]

If, in death, Lincoln was the “unimpeachable embodiment of government elected by the common people and the prophet of world democracy”,[ix] Pope Pius IX, conversely, was for American Protestant opinion the inveterate enemy of the US republic. He had reportedly sympathised with the South and supported France’s Mexican adventure. Mary Surratt and her son John were devout Catholics and allegedly Lincoln assassination conspirators. When the Pope banned American Protestant Church services in Rome, the New York Times denounced this “corrupt, dying remnant of despotic rulership…’. [x]

Professor Emeritus of History at South Carolina, Doyle contends that Lincoln’s assassination rejuvenated the democratic movement not only in France but also in Great Britain.[xi] Although the author acknowledges that Lincoln’s death “…did not cause the wave of democratic reforms…” [xii] after 1865, the sub-title of his book belies this contention. In an article for the Fortnightly Review in October 1870, entitled ‘England and the War’ , the distinguished Liberal statesman John Morley averred that the North’s victory in the Civil War “was the force that made English liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the workmen”. (In fact, the Conservative Party enfranchised the workers, in 1867). At a mass meeting at St James Hall, in London, in March 1863, leading Liberals, notably John Stuart Mill and John Bright, lambasted the Tories for supporting the slaveocracy. Another speaker, the historian and leading Positivist Edward Beesly, compared the British proletariat to black slaves, a Marxist trope. Professor Doyle makes the dubious claim that “British workers admired Lincoln” not just for winning the war and ending slavery but because, in the words of The Bee-Hive, “he was the first President elected from the working classes…” He also endorses Marx’ assertion that the British workers stopped the “ruling classes” from supporting the Confederacy. Professor Doyle evidently has a stereotypical view of Britain’s governing classes in the 19th century.

On February 12, 1866, Lincoln’s birthday, the distinguished Harvard historian and diplomat George Bancroft addressed Congress. Author of the History of the United States of America (1834-1874), Bancroft had studied at Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin. He approached history, accordingly, from a nationalist perspective à la Treitschke. Bancroft  considered slavery incompatible with the republican tradition and an adjunct of aristocracy. He trenchantly criticised Britain’s ‘aristocratic’ government and Napoleon 111 for granting belligerent rights to the southern states. Ditto the latter’s attempt to install a monarchy in Mexico. For Bancroft, America was “the advance guard of democracy and republicanism”. [xiii]

In 1865, the US had a standing army of one million men. In July of that year, Seward sent a veiled threat of the use of force to Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys unless France withdrew its troops from Mexico. The French duly departed in early 1867. It transpired, however, that Seward’s goal after the Civil war was “national security and peace, not territorial aggrandizement or imperialist conquest”. [xiv] The Union, accordingly, disarmed. The author highlights Seward’s “Pan-American commitment to independent republics in solidarity against European imperialism”.[xv] Yet United States Minister to France John Bigelow put it to Seward that because the population of Mexico were of a different race and religion, they were incapable of self-government. Napoleon 111, in similar vein, regarded republicanism as a unique product of Anglo-Saxon culture. The ‘Latin Race’, in his estimation, required hereditary monarchy and Catholic discipline. Note also that, republican principles notwithstanding, cordial relations with autocratic Russia facilitated Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1867. Unlike France and Britain, Russia posed no threat. Alexander 11’s emancipation of the serfs in February 1861 was naively depicted by the American press as a step towards modern democracy.

The Age of Reconstruction is ambitious and wide-ranging and the author skilfully combines the history of ideas with that of international relations. Dr Doyle is clearly a supporter of democracy and equality. He implicitly criticises President Trump for “…undoing…the civil rights gains accorded blacks and other minorities” and views this as part of “a more ominous international movement against racial equality and democracy”. Unlike such luminaries as Marx, Michels and Mosca, Professor Doyle takes western democracy at face value. This caveat aside, we commend his labours.

William H Seward, 1849, credit Wikipedia

ENDNOTES

[i]  Garibaldi…Yale University Press, 2007, p282
[ii] Doyle,p16
[iii]Ibid., p17, 15
[iv] Doyle,p 233
[v] Doyle, p152
[vi] Doyle, p155
[vii] Doyle, p243
[viii] Ibid., p243
[ix] Doyle, p16
[x] Doyle, p272
[xi] Doyle, chapter 7
[xii] Doyle, p16
[xiii] Doyle, p45
[xiv] Doyle, p61
[xv] Doyle, p98

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of QR

Posted in QR Home | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Endnotes, October 2024

Posted on September 27, 2024 by leslie

St Mary Harrington, Lincolnshire, credit Wikipedia

Endnotes, October 2024

In this edition: more Bruckner from the archives * Dvorak from the Czech homeland * contemporary music from England and America, reviewed by Stuart Millson

SOMM Records continues to open its vast treasury of vintage Bruckner recordings, in this, the 200th anniversary year of the great Austrian composer’s birth. And our thanks must go to SOMM, not just for championing Bruckner, but for bringing into the limelight almost-forgotten (or, at least, neglected) conductors, such as Hans Schmidt- Isserstedt, a supreme interpreter of Beethoven, as those who know his Decca cycle of the nine symphonies will testify. For Beethoven, Schmidt-Isserstedt had the Vienna Philharmonic under his baton, but here in SOMM’s Bruckner (the Third Symphony in the 1878 Oeser Edition) we are treated to the equally magnificent playing of German Radio’s NDR Symphony Orchestra.

Originally recorded at the Musikhalle Hamburg in the December of 1966, the NDR players give us a version of a Bruckner symphony that many view as the first of the truly mature part of his cycle (which, like Beethoven, consisted of nine symphonies). The misterioso atmosphere of the opening movement — underpinned by a tense, Wagnerian forest-murmur feel in the NDR strings — sets the stage for the great panorama of struggle, action and nostalgia that is to come. And what must already have been a clear, ahead-of-its-time radio archive recording has now transferred to CD (thanks to sound restoration and remastering by recording specialist, Lani Spahr) to give dazzling, full-blooded Brucknerian sound.

The scherzo movement of the Third brings us out of the mainly gentle reflection of the Adagio, gripping the listener with a torrent of agitation, often verging on terror, as an intense, attacking volley of sound from the strings and battering brass cascades onward. Again, the NDR players capture the authentic Teutonic tread of Bruckner, bringing the symphony to a glorious conclusion with a radiant, unstoppable affirmation of earlier themes from the work.

Also on Somm’s CD is a 1958 Bavarian Radio ‘tape’ of the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Volkmar Andreae in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, ‘Romantic’ — possibly the most often played of the cycle, due, no doubt, to its more simple pastoral atmosphere and fairytale hunting-horn scherzo. A fine, bracing performance of the work awaits the listener, especially in the stormy, fiery interpretation of the first movement; and in a dreamy approach to the gentle heartbeats of the second — ending, with pizzicato and delicate timpani, as if a distant country procession has just disappeared out of view.

Still in the glades of Middle Europe, Pentatone has just issued a stunning set of the last three Dvorak symphonies, the partnership of Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic proving itself as among the greatest in the world today. The seventh, eighth and ninth symphonies (again — nine — that hallowed number for composers) are performed with a sense of utter conviction: a love for every note, a passion for every great tune, as if the Czech players are carefully setting down on record for posterity their personal family history. This recording is a testament to Bohemian romanticism; and to the patriot, Antonin Dvorak, the architect of that soulful, yet ebullient style, the musical magus of the Czech people.

The folkish, dance-like romp of colour that is the Eighth Symphony works well on this recording — almost like a 40-minute-long Slavonic dance. The more famous Ninth, subtitled ‘From the New World’, is a glorious fusion of the Czech homeland and the wide-open spaces of North America (surely the composer expresses a home-sickness in this work?) a land where Dvorak found himself feted at the end of the 19th century. But what is particularly interesting is the performance of the Symphony No. 7 (arguably the best, and the more enigmatic of the three) — a work that echoes Bruckner in its sense of struggle, of venturing forth into a dark landscape; allusions and feelings that are suggested in the mighty monoliths, ‘clenched-fist’ brass and grand gestures of the first movement, the rushing third-movement scherzo and the noble, brass-dominated, chorale-like ending. A real affirmation in music, but somehow not glorious, but firm, serious, stoical. Whatever your own personal response to Dvorak’s music, you probably won’t find a better-recorded set than by Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic.

Contemporary British composer, Peter Seabourne — a musician who rejected the extreme atonalism of many of his peers and immersed himself in a personal quest for artistic individuality and integrity — has issued an eighth volume of his Steps piano pieces. Subtitled, ‘Nineteen Album Leaves Caught by the Wind’, this latest chapter in Seabourne’s odyssey takes the listener into an almost freeze-framed autumnal sequence — a meditation of memories and impressions, sometimes hazy and valedictory, at other times with an intensity brewing just beneath the surface.

With titles such as: Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud — and After Autumn, Winter — the composer has created a new landscape of English pastoral music; but not an England of Edwardian twilight, instead the slanting light and chilly winds blowing across his own Lincolnshire horizon, interwoven with the deepest personal responses to the seasons of his own life.

Anyone seeking something of our own time, distilled into sound and made immediately relevant to life today, should listen to Peter Seabourne’s surprising and atmospheric music. Another recommendation for the CD is the quality of the piano-playing and recording: Michael Bell gives a masterclass for the instrument, while the Sheva contemporary label captures the piano at a perfect autumnal ‘temperature’ — always just a little less in the foreground, the piano never stark or clanging. The remainder of the album is given over to Seabourne’s settings of Emily Dickinson, with soprano, Karen Radcliffe, joining Michael Bell in a wonderfully woven cycle that, again, brings the listener into that lonely fenland.

Finally, to the work of two United States composers, not well known in Britain, but whose compositions deserve the attention of all who seek concert programmes enlivened by music that has something to say. Randall Svane continues to carve a reputation in the churches of the East Coast with a religious fervour not usually found in our nihilistic times. Although not yet appearing on CD, Quarterly Review has been fortunate to hear his Gloria — a setting that could easily be used as an alternative to similar works by Walton, Britten or Rutter — and which record producers, church music directors or those planning concert programmes should consider.

Likewise, New York composer Stanley Grill, offers music that continues where Britten’s War Requiem and other pacifist works left off. The composer writes of his own youthful anti-war zeal, and how with the onset of the years the radical tends to become the mellower sage, looking with the eye of a seasoned outsider on the vicissitudes of our turbulent times. Nonetheless, Grill remains loyal (as Walt Whitman would have put it) — ‘to thee, old cause…’ and informs us that his work may be found on the following platform:

https://stanleygrill.bandcamp.com/album/against-war

CD details: Bruckner from the Archives, Vol. 3. SOMM ARIADNE 5029-2.
Dvorak, Symphonies 7, 8, 9. PENTATONE, PTC 5187 216.
Peter Seabourne, Steps, vol. 8, Sheeva contemporary SH 326.

Stuart Millson is Classical Music Editor of Quarterly Review

 

Posted in QR Home | 1 Comment