The Spectre of Spengler

                             

Twilight in the Catskill, Sanford Robinson Gifford, credit wikipedia

The Spectre of Spengler

David Ashton on Der Untergang des Abendlandes

A death-sentence concentrates the mind wonderfully, to paraphrase a famous Tory lexicographer. People are born, flourish, weaken, and pass away, but so do nations and empires. Although the comparison is metaphorical, the phenomenon is real.

Surely the gradual crumbling of Great Britain from Lord Salisbury’s imperial zenith to Ed Miliband’s imbecile zero is undeniable. It fits into a general Euro-American deterioration, exacerbated by welfare-dependence, industrial unrest and defence-alliance disarray. Consequently, a revival of interest has arisen over questions of historical change, and in its successive commentators, from Plato and Polybius, through Ibn Khaldun and Giambattista Vico, to Paul Kennedy and Paul Cooper.

Overshadowing them all is Oswald Spengler, who died 89 years ago. The historian Niall Ferguson, thinking he was influenced by Wagner (actually Goethe), once asserted that his “turgid” prose was nowadays seldom read. But his giant ghost has again reappeared – to haunt the current geostrategic gloom of international trade turmoil and knife-edge security risks.

Many references to Spengler have lately appeared in print journalism, scholarly monographs, timely podcasts and specialist websites, from Professor David Engels to Professor Stephen R. L. Clark. His early historical studies and family photos have been publicised. The glib dismissal of his magisterial oeuvre as a “gargantuan horror-scope” ceases to amuse in the world he so accurately predicted.

Recent books include a richly researched, indispensable work by the Marxist scholar Dr Ben Lewis on his principled “Prussian” activism and mutual incompatibility with Hitler, who specifically denounced him in a public address on May Day 1935. The Decline & Fall of Civilisations is a considerable survey from the prolific and idiosyncratic “far right” Dr Kerry Bolton, who endorses Spengler’s suggestion of the next major Culture emerging from the Russian landscape. Especially noteworthy is his important place among Dr Neema Parvini’s Prophets of Doom, alongside Gobineau, Carlyle, Brooks Adams, Glubb Pasha, Evola, Sorokin, Toynbee, Turchin and Tainter. Ulrik Rasmussen’s Fall of Western Civilization: The Cycle of Supremacy also deserves close attention

Spengler began life near the Harz mountains and his heart finally failed in Munich when only 55. His masterwork on the downslide of occidental civilisation was conceived before and partly written during the first world war.  Its so-called “cyclic” theme was preceded by the Slavophile Nikolai Danilevsky and was echoed, less substantially, by the Anglo-Saxons Flinders Petrie and Correa Moylan Walsh, but it made a dramatic impact and engendered serious debate in his defeated Fatherland.

The sinking-sun imagery powerfully evoked by its “Teutonic Title” was attenuated as Decline of the West in an excellent translation for English-speakers, whose more subdued response, admirably documented by John Carter Wood, in some cases recalls a notorious lordly dismissal of Gibbon’s narrative about the fall of Rome as just another scribbled tome. A contemporary classicist E. H. Goddard nonetheless ably supported its fundamental cross-cultural alignments with corresponding pull-out civilisation timetables.

I first encountered this book in the library of my 430-year-old grammar-school, which no longer exists. Its thick black spine made a welcome contrast to its Left Book Club amber-cover shelf-companions; and its fascinating contents likewise. My adolescent appetite was promptly reinforced by corroborative material in Geoffrey Barraclough’s History in a Changing World, Eric Bentley’s Cult of the Superman, Amaury de Riencourt’s Coming Caesars and Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd.

By an odd coincidence, the late Roger Scruton had a similar schoolboy epiphany, but factual errors restricte this brilliant conservative intellectual’s approval of Spengler’s “grim” prognosis. Given the arduous circumstances of its original composition, and the information then available for revision, however, occasional faults are forgivable; and several disputed aspects have since found defenders.

After initially greeting his magnum opus, the anti-Nazi novelist Thomas Mann afterwards recoiled as if handed a demonic grimoire. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg complained that its “morphological view” of destiny denied “race and personality”. Irving Babbitt described the singularly erudite and earnest polymath as a “charlatan of genius”.  Martin Heidegger and Wyndham Lewis attacked him more thoughtfully, along with established historians. Aurel Kolnai ridiculed his “harsh Olympic coldness”, whereas Theodor Adorno granted the “destructive soothsayer” a nuanced appreciation.

Nevertheless, the book impressed the poets W. B. Yeats, David Jones and Robinson Jeffers, authors as different as D. H. Lawrence, Whittaker Chambers, Colin Wilson and Camille Paglia, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the systems-theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and surprisingly even the razor-witted Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Spengler wrote with the eye of an artist and the pen of a poet, producing beautiful passages of keen sensibility, exemplified by his account of infant Christianity:

“Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis and Osiris must have seemed [compared] to the still recent story of Jesus [whose utterances resembled] those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world…. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesaret, while all around them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined western society, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy…. The one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation”.

This delicate passage appears within a mammoth text, whose martial attitude elsewhere was ironically condemned by communists as brutal advocacy for the Junker aristocrats they sought to eradicate; “bloody struggle or extinction” (as Marx put it).

Spengler depicted the West as one of eight self-contained Hochkulturen, in addition to the Babylonian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Indian, Chinese, Magian, and Classical. Each possesses a distinctive ethos characterised by its cosmology, symbolism and architecture, yet all pass through comparable stages, like the inevitable transition from spring to winter, though without recurrence.  We need not discuss pertinent definitions of “civilisation”, as previously covered by Samuel Huntington, Pitirim Sorokin and Naohiko Tonomura, except that Arnold Toynbee responded to the challenge with over 20 “mortal” examples, historians Philip Bagby and Caroll Quigley choosing fewer, and Nicholas Hagger listing 25.

Setting aside Spengler’s own “collective-soul determinism”, complex macro-societies often proceed through almost parallel patterns, such as solely waning average intelligence. The empirical examination of the multiple causes of their growth, decay and collapse is a legitimate and rewarding pursuit.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s “environmental features”, Claire & Bill Russell’s “population cycles”, Jim Penman’s “behaviour biodynamics”, David Hackett Fischer’s “price revolutions”, and Heiner Rindermann’s “cognitive capital”, are among numerous contributions towards a fresh and fruitful development in objective social science, aided by comprehensive data-led websites like Peter Turchin’s valuable Cliodynamica and Seshat.

Several terminal phases have been linked to urban sprawl and congestion, and failing competence and character among the rulers of a largely hedonistic populace. Cluttered with material sewage, the “megalopolis” becomes vulnerable to farmland depletion, infections and addictions, depravity and disability, sectarian discord and organised crime, plus susceptibility to alien invasion. In 1927 the pacifist Aldous Huxley voiced the fear that industrialisation of numerically greater races could put us at their military mercy.  By 1951, Shephard Clough expected envious outsiders to eventually attack Europe.

The validity of Spengler’s century-old foresight is easily overlooked precisely because of its present familiarity.  The literary critic Northrop Frye said fifty years ago that what had been foretold was happening in detail “all around us”. Does not parliamentary democracy, for instance, operate by deception, bribery and “shameless flattery”, so that “election affairs” become “games staged as popular self-determination” to suit obscured wealthy interests? “People want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.”  Ideological convictions are dissolving into disposable fashions, except for an emergent “second religiousness”, possibly indicated by GenZ’s revival of Bible study, and potentially focused on the Holy City.

Entering the epoch of unheavenly inner-cities and global skyscraper competition, we find, exactly as he said, “primitive instincts” let loose in sexual relations, the “reappearance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds”,  “incomprehension of tradition”, the “extinction of great art” and of “courtesy”, “betting and competitions” for excitement, “alcohol and vegetarianism” as prominent issues, and crucially the “childlessness and ‘race suicide’ of the rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed – and of course not remedied – in Imperial Rome and Imperial China”.

The 1939-45 titanic “war of contending states”, which bypassed Spengler’s fateful warning to Germanic nationalists against “biological antisemitism” and a “Napoleonic adventure in Russia”, shifted the “imperium” from Berlin to Washington, thereby disarranging his anticipated sequence for conclusive contests between “blood” and “money”. Caesarism today is manifested not in fascist legions, but in the formlessness of American politics, despite ambiguity over machine-technics, financial-flux and armed-force deployment; Musk rather than Mussolini.

His phrase “the world as spoil” neatly applies to impending rare-earth search and supply-lane safety from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and beyond. The invention of “weapons yet unforeseen” has alarmingly accelerated, with continental territories “staked – India, China, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counter-played”.  We can match his futurology against reflections by present-day writers like Thomas Frey, Bruno Macaes and Ian Morris, regarding particularly the tumultuous interactions of Putin, Trump, Xi and “great cosmopolitan foci of power”.

Shortly before his death, Spengler further envisaged a devastatingly concurrent underclass and colour conflict against what is labelled today as “embedded whiteness”; it would make no difference, he explained, if Bolshevism “ceased to dictate”, for “the work goes forward of itself”.

This danger arrived, a mere three decades later, from the US New Left “race, gender, class revolution”, subsequently exported as “critical theory” for a “long march”, or (more accurately) incremental infiltration, through western institutions, culminating, for example, in both DEI regulations and BLM rioting? Paris 1968, Brixton 1981, Madrid 2004 and Munich 2025 are pointers.  The Network Contagion Research Institute reports a surge in approval of political violence, mainly among left-wing networkers. Effective protection against foreign-community intrusions and ethnic occupation-zones remains morally paralysed as uncharitable “racism”, despite an unabated mass-exodus of the multi-million “wretched of the earth”, aided by profiteering traffickers, in a “nomad century”.

Number-philosopher Philip J. Davis thought his fellow-mathematician from the Kaiserreich classrooms was correct to discern the advent of “theories of everything” in science, and possibly, in the outcome of mass-media and telecommunications, the control “like that of Faust” of human minds by a self-operating computer-system “wrapping the earth with an endless web of delicate forces, currents and tensions”.

Spengler’s refutation of universally inevitable linear “progress” has anyhow been largely vindicated by the evils of vacuous postmodernism, compulsory multiculturalism and suicidal wokeism.

Was he too imaginatively attached, however, to ancient and classical models to follow through his insight into the heroic exploration, energetic curiosity and infinite striving that typify our exceptional “Faustian” ethos? Maybe our railways will lie ultimately forgotten “as dead as the Roman wall” and monuments “ruined like Memphis”, but the last prolonged turn of the western wheel must entail extensive fulfilment as well as senescent exhaustion.

“Only the future,” observed his admirer Professor John Farrenkopf, “and not Spengler’s innumerable detractors, is in a position to authoritatively answer the question if mankind is nearing in apocalyptic fashion, whether through nuclear Armageddon, the synergistic interaction of international economic collapse and the explosive North-South conflict, or the intensification of the global ecological crisis, the much-discussed end of history.”

Nevertheless, could western science, which has split the atom and spliced the gene, reached the outer planets and penetrated the brain itself, under sagacious guidance, yet modify our caducity with robotics, ecological management and biological enhancement?

Meantime, we should respect the venerable advice of der Weissager to face up to facts, with fortitude and fidelity to our noblest values.

Oswald Spengler, credit Wikipedia

David Ashton is a frequent contributor to QR

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Cakes, Quizzes, Corpses

  

President Dina Boluarte, y su reloj de lujo, credit Wikipedia

Cakes, Quizzes, Corpses, by Bill Hartley

The current Peruvian Minister of the Interior Juan Jose Santinavanez Antunez was appointed in November of last year. He is the sixth Interior Minister in the current government; that’s an average of one every three months. So far it hasn’t been a good term of office for Senor Antunez. Rather in the manner of cricket averages the local press has been comparing his performance to those of his immediate predecessors. At the last count the murder rate on his watch was averaging six a day, more than any of the five ministers who preceded him.

Peru has around ten daily newspapers ranging from the sedate and serious El Comercio, with a heavy emphasis on politics, through the more popular such as La Republica and Peru 21, to the cheerfully downmarket El Chino. The latter appears in a format about two thirds the size of a British tabloid and as with most Peruvian newspapers they cram an awful lot into just a few pages. There’s usually a central spread of quizzes taking up more space even than sports reports and they also seem fond of cake recipes.

The mainstay of these papers, though, and indeed local media in general, is crime and corruption. Of this they have a great deal to choose from. Crime impacts on the daily lives of Peruvians in ways that would be unthinkable in Europe. A feature in El Republica referred to it as ‘the normalisation of the unacceptable’.

In January of this year El Chino reported that in the first twelve days of the month there had been 79 murders. A week later this had risen to 101. With some understatement the interior minister admitted that Peru is in the midst of a crime wave ‘the like of which we have never experienced before’.

Anyone who spends some time in Peru soon becomes aware that the victims are often ordinary working people. Extortion is big criminal business here and sending a message, say to the owner of a bus company, may be done by picking out a conductor for execution. Working in public transport can be a hazardous business. El Chino recently reported a murder on the Lima metro. Here a ticket collector was shot dead. The killer made his escape on the back of a motorcycle, the quickest way of weaving through the capital’s often grid locked traffic. The story was illustrated by a picture of the victim lying by his place of work at a station entrance, as commuters passed by. Over familiarity has desensitised the public who simply walk round a crime scene.

This graphic depiction of a murder is quite usual in the Peruvian media. Both TV and newspapers aided by CCTV downloads are prepared to show not just the aftermath but sometimes the actual commission of a crime. Suspects receive no anonymity and may be pictured as they are led away after a police raid, often wearing a tabard inscribed with the word ‘detendo’. In January, CCTV images shown on the evening news revealed how a message was sent to the owner of some trishaw type taxis. The killer or sicario as they are often described in the press, casually strolled up to a driver whose vehicle was at the head of a line waiting for business and shot him several times then walked round to the other side where his body had fallen, and delivered the coup de grace. Again, the victim was a poor guy in the wrong place. The incident, incidentally, was witnessed be several people who all fled for cover when the shooting started. The killings are often carried out by youngsters working for criminal gangs. They are cheap to employ and utterly ruthless.

Despite this mayhem the minister remains in charge, though in various national polling agencies, his disapproval rating stands at 78%. Much of the crime seems to be driven by protection rackets. Business premises are the most obvious targets and those who refuse to pay may find themselves experiencing what the authorities are now describing as urban terrorism, since there is nothing subtle or discreet about the way organised crime sends a message. A recent phenomenon mentioned in TV news (and captured on CCTV) is the use of hand grenades to bomb businesses. A clue as to where criminals might get hold of such a weapon came with the arrest of two junior army officers, accused of selling ammunition to a criminal gang.

In such a relatively poor country the visitor soon comes to appreciate how far the benchmark for lethal violence has been lowered and it is usually those with the least who suffer most. The press and television simply endorse how accustomed the public has become to this. In 2023 more than 18000 cases of extortion were reported, though the authorities concede that the actual number is probably higher. Nothing much seems to have changed. Indeed criminals have been posting online examples of what happens when someone refuses to pay. Out on the Pan American Highway a couple were travelling by taxi. The killers drew alongside; one filming as the other shot the male front seat passenger in the head, then did the same to the woman sitting in the rear. In 2022, Lima alone experienced 700 murders and more than half of these were believed to be contract killings. Unemployment and lack of opportunity makes crime attractive, particularly to youngsters.

The response of the authorities is little more than window dressing: increased police patrols and random stops of motor cyclists. There seems to be little attempt to focus on the underlying problem. Without a comprehensive programme to deal with poverty and deprivation there are always going to be ready recruits for criminal gangs. President Dina Boularte was at the Davos gathering recently where she talked up Peru as a place where corruption has been on the decrease. She explained that Peru had ‘recovered stability, politically, economically and socially’, though with magnificent understatement she conceded that there was a problem with ‘criminal organisations’. This was greeted with some surprise in the press. Reporting her speech Peru 21, reminded readers about the Rolex question. A press photographer who had often pictured the president happened to take a closer look at some of the images he’d captured and concluded that Dina owns a dozen Rolex watches. This, incidentally, was a president elected on a ‘clean hands’ ticket. She says the watches were given to her.

Peru’s newspapers will frequently illustrate the latest killing with a picture of the corpse lying in the road. One victim who had a lucky escape was featured under the headline ‘17 Bullets’. Here, a taxi driver had been intercepted and the paper reported that the would-be killer had fired shots in the air to scare off onlookers, before shooting his victim in the leg and arm. Not to be outdone in its coverage of crime, Peruvian TV seems to have almost instantaneous access to any CCTV images captured in the vicinity of a shooting.

Trujillo, a coastal city in the north-west of the country, aspires to being a centre for tourism. Among Peruvians, though, it is probably best known for what the papers are calling the ‘Terror of Trujillo’. Even the authorities now admit that the situation has moved from the criminal to what they are describing as urban terrorism. By January of this year the overwhelmed local police were being supported by the military. In Trujillo it’s not unusual for the pictures of gang leaders to be featured on the front page of newspapers. Peru 21 has featured a handy who’s who guide to the various gangs operating in the city. This may be useful when moving about the place, since each gang has its own logo used to mark out territories. For example the gothic style cross of Los Pulpos aka The Octopus of El Porvenir. A total of nine in all are competing for territory and influence in the city. Above the assorted logos the paper carried pictures of Jhonsson Cruz el cabecilla or boss of Los Pulpos and his rival Jimmy Bazan Valderrama capo of Los Compadres. There is no shortage of recruits for these gangs and whilst the political will to deal with them is lacking the public will have to be content with the sight of troops patrolling the streets; a purely cosmetic device which will do nothing to deal with the fundamental underlying problem. As for the police, it’s difficult to have confidence in them when a recent story featured a colonel who had been caught in possession of a suitcase containing 250,000 Peruvian sols (approximately $70,000).

When President Boluarte points to a recent absence of major corruption in government she may be a little premature. There is a scandal brewing at the moment which might have significant ramifications. In December last year Andrea Vidal, a 35 year old lawyer working in congress, was murdered. She was ambushed by three gunmen when leaving work in a taxi. The taxi driver also died. For some time the police maintained that the driver was the intended victim. To an outsider this seemed rather peculiar, though in a sarcastic comment La Republica noted that the police had made a ‘180 degree turn’ and now believe that Ms Vidal was the intended victim. This new theory may have been sustained by the numerous bullets which were fired at her, as opposed to the single shot which killed the driver. It turns out that she may have been the organiser of a prostitution ring inside congress where call girls were being recruited by politicians as ‘advisors’.

In its World Report of 2025, Human Rights Watch called corruption the driving force in Peru behind the deterioration of public services. Whilst there had been some signs of improvement the pandemic appears to have caused things to regress. The World Bank reports that as of May 2024 29% of the population is classified as ‘impoverished’. There seems little to feel confident about, since in the same month the World Bank also noted that 67 of the 130 members of congress were under investigation for corruption and other offences. Ordinary Peruvians are paying a high price for rotten government.

William Hartley is a Social Historian and Globe Trotter                           

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Wily Amphibian; Velasco, between Art and Science

The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, Museo Nacional De Arte

Wily Amphibian; Velasco, between Art and Science

José María Velasco, A View of Mexico, Dexter Dalwood & Daniel Sobrino Ralston, Yale University Press, Catalogue of the Exhibition at the National Gallery, 29 March-17 August 2025, reviewed by Leslie Jones

The 1989 Hayward Gallery exhibition entitled Art in Latin America; The Modern Era, 1820-1980, curated by Dawn Adès, included several landscapes by José Mariá Velasco. This, however, is the UK’s first “in depth exploration of Velasco’s work”, indeed, the “first ever [exhibition] dedicated to a Latin American artist at the National Gallery”.

Velasco was born in 1840 in San Miguel Temascalcingo but his family moved to Mexico City in 1850, in search of work. He already evinced a penchant for drawing at primary school. Subsequently, having completed a three-year, night-school drawing class at the Academia de San Carlos, he enrolled in January 1858 as a full-time student, specialising in landscape painting (see ‘Master of the Far Horizon’, Catalogue, MEA Piolle). The Academia sought to emulate the European art schools, in particular the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid (vide D S Ralston,‘Velasco Beyond Mexico’). His teacher was the Italian artist Eugenio Landesio, director of the landscape painting department. Velasco was Landesio’s star pupil and in 1873 succeeded him as lecturer in landscape art at the Academia.

Landesio once worked in the Rome studio of landscape artist Károly Markó, an admirer of Poussin and Claude Lorrain. His modus operandi was to make pencil drawings and oil sketches out of doors then elaborate the composition in the studio. His teaching methods exerted a powerful influence on Velasco. A Rustic Bridge in San Angel (1862) echoes Landesio’s Trunk of a Holm Oak (1844). Ralston contends that Landesio imbued Velasco’s work with “a distinctly European sensibility” (Ralston, p26).

Apropos European influences, several of Velasco’s patrons, notably the chemist František Kaska, were former members of the entourage of the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian, executed in 1867. Emperor Maximilian himself reportedly admired both Landesio and his protégé. Kaska eventually owned eight of Velasco’s canvases which he then bequeathed to the Czech National Museum in Prague. Although a self-styled Mexican patriot, Velasco was happy to accept the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph for The Hill of the Bells (1902). It features a chapel built on the site of Maximilian’s execution. Maximilian was the brother of Emperor Franz Joseph 1.

Execution of Maximilian, Edouard Manet (about 1867-8) credit Wikipedia

For Professor Adès, Velasco’s attention to detail brings to mind John Ruskin’s precept of truth to nature. Like Ruskin, he “eschewed picturesque, theatrical and ideal landscape models…” (preface to Catalogue, p10). Before graduating in 1868, he studied natural sciences at the Escuela Nacional de Medecine, thereby giving his depictions of the natural world “a sound scientific underpinning”. In due course, he was a founding member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Naturel.

The Baths at Nezahualcó (1878), Museo Nacional De Arte, Inbal, Mexico City

From 1880-1892, Velasco was the official draughtsman of the Museo Nacional. His brief was to produce illustrations of ancient monuments etc for the museum’s journal Anales. In 1878 he accompanied an expedition to the archaeological site of Texcotzingo. The baths at Nezahualcoyotl were built at the behest of the ruler of Texcoco. In The Baths of Nezahualcóyotl (1878) Velasco highlighted the hydraulic engineering skills of its fifteenth century builders. According to the Catalogue (p82), the painting “showcases Velasco’s ongoing dedication to the intertwining of nature, science and history”. In similar vein, the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon, a monumental temple complex constructed between AD 100 and AD 450 at the city of Teotihuacan, were depicted in two works by Velasco, dated 1878.

Dexter Dalwood characterises the Mexican landscape as a “site of change” (p51). The dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz, from 1876 to 1911, witnessed the “onrush of industrial modernity”. The Porfirian project was technocratic. Economic development was viewed as a panacea for most social ills. Velasco implicitly endorsed the project by highlighting the advent of factories and trains in several of his paintings.

Porfirio Diaz, credit Wikipedia

An in-depth knowledge of geology was displayed in Velasco’s detailed studies of rock outcrops. They were so accurate that the engineer and botanist Mariano de la Bárcena used them in lectures to illustrate the formation of the Valley of Mexico.

Velasco, Rocas, credit Wikipedia

But how did Velasco reconcile his Catholicism with his increasing awareness of the age of the earth? In The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (1875), we see the hill of Tepeyac, with the town Villa de Guadalupe at its base. It was at Tepeyac, in 1851, that the Virgin of Guadalupe, to whom Velasco was devoted, supposedly appeared to a convert to Christianity, one Juan Diego.

According to D S Ralston, The Great Comet of 1882 (painted in 1910, from an on-site sketch made in 1882) bespeaks Velasco’s “astute understanding of contemporary Mexican politics”. Comets were reputed to presage civil strife and 1910 saw the beginnings of the Mexican Revolution. This painting, we are informed, is “a haunting late masterpiece” and has a “portentous even mystical quality”. But then the mystic and the prophetic, like beauty, are mostly in the eye of the beholder.

Velasco was a painstaking and technically accomplished landscape artist. But his oeuvre arguably lacks the timeless and transcendent quality of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review

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Hope, Tempered by Realism

GF Watts, Hope, credit Wikipedia

Hope, Tempered by Realism

Hopeful Pessimism, Mara van der Lugt, Princeton University Press, 2025, Oxford & Princeton, HB, 255pp, reviewed by Leslie Jones

According to Max Weber, the development of religions all over the world was predicated on one pertinent question, to wit, “how is it that a power which is said to be at once omnipotent and kind, could have created such an irrational world of underserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity” (see his Politics as a Vocation). As Mara van der Lugt, lecturer in Philosophy, St Andrews, records in her opening chapter, so-called optimists, notably Leibniz, argued the toss with pessimists such as Hume, Voltaire and Schopenhauer, the “most famous pessimist of all’. The latter’s focus, as the author points out, was not on the issue of whether the world is getting better or worse, i.e. our expectations of the future but on the value of existence itself. Contra the Book of Genesis, Schopenhauer maintained that “the world is very bad, that suffering is at the very heart of things, that the world is something that should not be”. In short, it would have been better not to have been born.

Mara van der Lugt’s analysis of the triad optimism, pessimism and fatalism is discussed throughout in relation to the climate crisis, that “great collective darkness hotly blocking out the sun” (Hopeful Pessimism, p54). The future, especially for young people, has become ‘uncertain territory’, in her estimation. Mankind faces a “truly existential” threat, and in these circumstances unalloyed optimism is otiose. Yet our culture requires the latter “at any cost” and treats pessimism as a vice. The author, for one, dismisses what she terms “the duty of optimism”. Indeed, she contends that “in an age of climate crisis and ecological devastation”, in which numerous species are facing imminent extinction, some measure of pessimism and despair is rational and justified. Indeed, one of her favourite targets is “over-optimism”, the misplaced confidence that technology will somehow solve the problem of global warming. Another is what Naomi Klein, in an implicit attack on Donald Trump, calls “climate barbarism”. The latter is depicted as a “toxic ideology” that recognises that climate change is real, but which endorses the continued exploitation of fossil fuels by “one’s preferred in-group”. It also seeks to keep out supposedly inferior elements whose homes are already beginning to become uninhabitable.

How to steer a course between the Charybdis of vacuous optimism and the Scylla of defeatism and despair? One of Dr van der Lugt’s guides here is Albert Camus, who proposed what she calls “a fierce philosophy of action stripped from any confidence of victory”. There is only one serious philosophical problem, Camus states in Le Mythe de Sisyphe; essai sur l’absurde (1942), that of suicide. But as Joshua Foa Dienstag notes in Pessimism; Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006), Camus’ pessimism “pointed towards an engagement with, rather than a retreat from, politics”. Active in the French Resistance, he considered opposition to tyranny justified by considerations of justice and solidarity, regardless of the prospects of success. In the journal Combat, September 1945, he dismissed the “puerile” idea that “a pessimistic philosophy is necessarily one of discouragement”. The Warsaw ghetto uprising of Spring 1943, doomed to failure, furnishes an analogous example. For the author, “the great danger to be resisted…[is] resignation and inertia in the face of evil and injustice” (Hopeful Pessimism, p33).

The ancient Greeks and Romans harboured reservations about hope, often characterised as blind. The Stoics considered it a form of desire, and therefore a lure. In Parerga and Paralipomena, in similar vein, Schopenhauer opined that to hope is to confuse the wish for an event with its probability. And in Human, All too Human, Nietzsche, referring to the fable of Pandora’s box, remarked that what ” …Zeus intended was that man, notwithstanding the evils oppressing him, should continue to live and not rid himself of life… For this reason he bestowed hope upon man”. What we need today, all things considered, is hope tempered by realism. We commend Mara van der Lugt’s eloquent and thought provoking book.

Dr Leslie Jones is Editor of Quarterly Review

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Endnotes, March-April 2025

[Bruckner c 1892, credit Wikipedia]

Endnotes, March-April 2025

In this edition: Archive performances of Bruckner from SOMM Records * Rare Holst from EM Records * Coronation Procession, by Ruth Gipps, reviewed by Stuart Millson

A belated, final salute from The Quarterly Review to Anton Bruckner’s 200th anniversary year (last year) in this, our assessment of SOMM’s Volume 5, ‘Bruckner from the Archives’. This two-disc edition contains memorable performances from the late-1950s/early-1960s of the Seventh Symphony – often described as the more radiant of the composer’s great cycle of nine (or is it really eleven symphonies, if you include the early ‘study symphony’ and Number 0?) – plus the more austere, No. 6, and the glorious, forthright Te Deum.

The performance of Bruckner’s Seventh comes from Stuttgart, 1955 – and sound Engineer – or sound magician – Lani Spahr has brought the performers, the South German Philharmonic Orchestra from 70 years ago, into the modern digitised soundscape with stunning effect. Under the baton of, perhaps, a lesser-known conductor, Hans Müller-Kray, who held many important provincial posts throughout Germany in the 1940s and ‘50s, Bruckner’s work from 1884/5 is taken at a brisk pace – a contrast to the seemingly-longer, expansive versions which one often hears today. And yet there is no loss of nobility or magic here: the South German players produce some gorgeous string tremolo effects at the opening, and a fine, deep cello sound as the great theme-tune of the symphony gathers and clarifies, like a great mountain-slope coming into view through the lens of a telescope. The slow movement – which is a commemoration in music of the moment when Bruckner heard the news of the death of Wagner – has delicacy and depth; soaring up, though, to the usual heights of ecstasy, at the burning summit of this adagio.

A tense, scherzo movement follows, taking your breath away in its rushing, relentless power, before Müller-Kray scales the heights of the finale – and just listen at the end to the brass of the South German Orchestra in their fabulous, stately recapitulation of the almost playful final-movement opening bars. We have become accustomed to the perfect studio sound of Bruckner, from Dresden, Amsterdam, Berlin or Vienna, in so many great recordings – Sinopoli, Karajan, Haitink – but SOMM has allowed us to discover the world of the Bruckner broadcast and performing techniques of Germany’s regional orchestras, from a generation ago.

Also in the volume, are the Sixth Symphony – a work that is the polar opposite to No. 7 – a taut orchestral landscape, often displaying severity and melancholia; a perfect pairing with Bruckner’s Ninth – his enigmatic, unfinished symphony. Christoph von Dohnanyi conducts the NDR Symphony Orchestra in No. 6, the conductor and orchestra treating the first movement like a titanic struggle. The ‘filler piece’ in the collection is the 20-minute, choral-orchestral Te Deum performed by Viennese forces under Herbert von Karajan in 1962 at the city’s Musikverein. And the famous tenor, Nicolai Gedda, is among the solo group that does what Bruckner intended them to do: praise God in the highest.

The English composer (of Swedish parentage) Gustav Holst was also much preoccupied with metaphysical, mystical and Christian ideas – as the intensity of his famous, large-scale choral-orchestral Hymn of Jesus clearly shows. But in a new CD from the recording arm of the English Music Festival, EM Records, we find the composer turning to the classical world, in his Seven Choruses from the Alcestis of Euripides, a hitherto unrecorded piece, which dates from 1920. A discovery by the English Music Festival’s founder, Mrs. Em Marshall-Luck, the Euripides piece also shares the new collection with a Playground Song (1911), a two-minute Gavotte (1933 – the same year as the charming, homely BrookGreen Suite, also on this album); and the 25-minute-in-duration The Vision of Dame Christian, from 1909. What unites these pieces is the influence of Holst’s (and Em Marshall-Luck’s) beloved school, St. Paul’s School in the West London area of Hammersmith: the composer taught there, the record producer, a couple of generations later, was a pupil there – and judging by Em’s compelling role as reciter, in the Euripides piece, her time at St. Paul’s engendered a great love of drama and dramatic speaking roles. Listeners to Radio 3 may be familiar with the Words and Music, poetry and music series, in which well-known actors give of their best. Holst’s ‘Euripides’ and Em’s narration would certainly gel effectively in this programme. And, as a flavour of what you can expect:

And the cold grey hand at the helm and oar
Which guideth shadows from shore to Shore,
Shall bear this day o’er the
Tears that Well,
A Queen of Women, a spouse of spouses,
Minstrels many shall praise thy name
With lyre full strung and with voices.

Holst’s style is often difficult to pin down – sometimes we find him in playful mood (as in the Brook Green or St. Paul’s Suites); in The Planets there is jostling joviality, which gives way, in the Neptune movement, to a weird, but not altogether untroubling sense of remoteness – exactly the trance-like loneliness that he conjures up on Dorset’s Egdon Heath. Playfulness and a good tune sit side-by-side with seriousness, austerity and a deep well of drama in Holst. Look no further than this CD for an ample helping of all four characteristics. The players – the St. Paul’s School’s Paulina Singers and BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Leigh O’Hara – do great justice to their composer, and to the motto which guides the hearts and minds of all who pass through those hallowed Hammersmith gates – Fide et Literis, the very title of the album.

Finally, to the music of Ruth Gipps, another of England’s somewhat overlooked 20th-century composers. Chandos – with its typically resonant, lush, detailed and impeccable sound recording – elevates Ruth Gipps’s music into the English mainstream, as for so many decades, the composer had to settle for competent, heartfelt, but ultimately amateur, freelance, or student-ensemble performances. With Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic, we feel that we are in the company of a composer, equal to Bliss, Alwyn, and at the beginning of the Coronation Procession, Vaughan Williams himself.

They called the Coronation time of 1953 the New Elizabethan Age, – and high hopes had already been stirred by the 1951 Festival of Britain – a combination of scientific marvels, English eccentricity and that lost word – fun. Despite post-war austerity, people still found it in themselves to be jolly and optimistic, and from those early, grainy colour films and newsreels of the period, united, and – amid all the crowds and bunting – automatically proud to be British. How different this all seems from today’s (apparent) era of ‘plenty’ (in the materialist sense) yet all tinged with angst and what is so often officialdom’s rejection of the patriotism which guided those 1950s’ New Elizabethans.

A definite feel of Englishness – the use of delicate woodwind, a sense of history suffusing the musical landscape – opens the Coronation work, and we begin to feel that we are, perhaps, wandering along London streets of the past, or leafing through a history book as the work unfolds. Lovers of this era of composition will also relish the Concerto for Horn and Orchestra, Op. 58, of 1968 – a lyrical, big-hearted work, that seems to be in a parallel universe from all the other social trends spilling onto the streets at the time. Twenty years on from the Horn Concerto and Ruth Gipps’s love of tradition and melody still remained undiminished: her Ambervalia of 1988, evoking ancient Roman fertility ceremonies – played beautifully by the BBC forces under Rumon Gamba. Personally, I would pay double the licence-fee for the BBC orchestras, alone. With the exception of Radio 3 and one or two untainted-by-woke programmes, a switch of the dial away on Radio 4, you can more or less keep the rest.

CD details:

Bruckner from the Archives, Volume 5, SOMM ARIADNE, 5033-2.
Holst, Fide et Literis, EMR CD090.
Ruth Gipps, Orchestral Works, Volume 3, CHAN 20284.

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

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First Century Miracle Worker

Parc de Versailles, Rond-Point des Philosophes. Apollonius de Tyane en terme, Barthélémy de Mélo (1685-1687), marbre.

First Century Miracle Worker

Gerard Boter (ed.), Flavius Philostratus: Vita Appolonii Tyanei, 2022. DeGruyter. Pp. I-LXIII, 1-322. $91.99.

Gerard Boter (ed.), Critical Notes on Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. 2023. DeGruyter. Pp. I-VIII, 1-317. $131.99.

Reviewed by Darrell Sutton

Gerard Boter (GB), Professor Emeritus at Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam), devoted decades to studying the Greek texts of Plato and Epictetus. This preparation suited him well. At the present time his research is directed towards the ‘Life’ of Apollonius (c.AD15-100). These two volumes published by GB are the results of his focused investigations. They are required reading for a proper study of the Pythagorean teacher from Cappadocia.

The oral lore surrounding Apollonius appears in many literary shapes and forms. The travelogue of his journeys is of particular interest and is as intriguing as the details in Herodotus’ books. Just as other ancient tales do, these accounts merit close reading and critical examination. People revered him as their master-teacher. His birth and life, reportedly, were superintended by the Egyptian deity, Proteus. Apollonius is described as a first century wonder worker whose induction into varied bodies of philosophical knowledge, and initiation into mysteries, stood him in the forefront of theoretical teachers of his day. Although he imposed upon himself rigors of numerous kinds, his teachings were uncomplicated. He did not drink wine. He opposed animal sacrifices, believed in a transcendent deity, held views on eternal existence that were common; but what made Apollonius atypical at the time was the rumored presence of a daemon through which he made fortuitous predictions of an extraordinary kind, and wrought wonders. Writers tended to associate bodily cures with gifted sages in antiquity. As recorded, Apollonius even raised a young maiden from the dead. The manner of his death is shrouded in conjecture. Presumably he lived to be an old man, some say nearly a hundred years of age. Legends about him abound.

I

The Latin Praefatio of Vita Apollonii Tyanei (VAT) is lucid. GB put forward two preliminary studies that were marked by originality and light: 1) ‘Towards a New Critical Edition of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius: The Affiliation of the Manuscripts’/2) ‘Studies in the Textual Tradition of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana’. Others will agree with him when he says of those pieces, duobus studiis annis 2009 et 2014 in lucem emissi (p.vii). Quite a few mss of the VAT are extant. He says they can be divided into two families: Codices divisi sunt in familias duas (p.viii). An editio princeps appeared in 1501 (p.xv). Several scholars appended notes to the texts, trying to elucidate them (pp.xix-xx). In GB’s estimation the first truly critical edition appeared in 1844 when C.L. Kayser edited the VAT, … primus editionem vere criticam composuit (p.xvi). Kayser issued a smaller edition in 1870. The Greekness of Philostratus’ life appealed to GB. It is foundational to his reasons for editing it (p.xxiv). The trend for some time now has been to construct a negative critical apparatus. As GB says Apparatus quoad fieri poeterat negativus est…, the apparatus is negative in so far as it can be done that way, i.e., the variant readings are noted, but it is not stated from which sources the reading is found in the received text. I do not like this method. It obscures the lines of transmission readers may be looking for. Thereafter is a Conspectus Librorum (pp.xxx-lv). The Conspectus Siglorum (pp.lvi-lxiii) are easy to sort through. Unattributed conjectures in the book were proposed by GB, coniecturae sine nomine auctoris mihi ipsi tribuendae sunt.

II

The Greek font used in this edition is clear and legible. The main sections of VAT are indented with boldfaced numbers. Resolving the connections between text and bottom-of-page notes is somewhat tedious. The format of GB’s Lectiones Variantes Minores will be puzzling to most people with its square bracketed divisions. The critical apparatus is orderly but cluttered with more detail on the opening verses of Book one from the Suda than any reader would need to understand the received text. Whatever is true or false in the Suda is anyone’s guess. GB issued his own cautions and suspicions on page XIV: Ita perraro fit ut Suda solus lectiones magna ponderis vel etiam veras praebeat. Attempts at restoring VAT’s original readings have been made by many scholars. And one must be grateful that their conjectures and variants from various manuscripts, as exhibited, are accessible and not entangled in a network of perplexing sigla.

At 4.13.1 the primary mss E F read ξυμβαινειν; but Laur. CS.155 has ξυνεμβαίνειν. Readers are told in his Critical Notes on Philostratus… (hence CN) that the former ‘cannot mean go together with someone’; although readers are not informed if that reading is idiomatic or if it at some point in ancient times conveyed that sense. However, that verb appears in classical Greek, Herodotus 1.32, and in Greek New Testament passages [Mk. 10.32, Lk.24.14, etc.], where it certainly denotes the sense of people or things ‘gathered together (for the performance of some deed)’.

An apparatus is crucial for defining the boundaries of transmission of Greek classical poetry and prose. Editors feel the need to justify the reasons for their investigations. Why this is so I have no idea. Research should be done because it needs doing. The usual procedure of an editor is to impeach the character of extant mss, pointing out their corrupt features, assigning to them the label ‘untrustworthy’. Marginalia, early and later hands at once are classified. To navigate the maze of variants an editor must make selections, thereby producing a critical text of restored readings that he or she believes is the original text or approximates to an archetype. For VAT and CN, GB’s text-critical philosophy is embodied in a formulaic belief:

‘if A agrees in word order with either E or F (Q) we can assume that the reading in A and in one of the branches of the second family represents the reading of the archetype (p.5).

III

A few points of detail regarding CN. The Introduction essentially provides an English sketch of VAT’s Praefatio. Either of them would have been sufficient for both volumes. There are 250 pages of critical notes. CN’s full title is Critical Notes on Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. In truth, the ‘critical notes’ are of uneven quality, and refer mostly to grammatical and textual matters, i.e. vindication of readings. Patristic writers here and there are cited. The notes in books 5 and 6 exhibit precision and outshine the others.

Historical details are managed with care: e.g. snake teeth at 3.7.2, p.95 and the altars at 5.5.1, p.171, but this entire critical enterprise is devoid of aesthetic analyses of sentence structures. Medieval textual representations should be inspected with caution. In rare cases where paleography is needed to disentangle ligatures or manuscript glyphs, GB does not hold back. On the other hand, when he engages in syntactical discussions,  they are not always worthy of a De Gruyter edition. On the opening page of the comments readers encounter a note that models what is standard all the way to the end. At 1.1.1 (p.1.4) GB writes:

‘In the transmitted text, the infinitive θυσαί depends on καθαρεύοι and thus forms a sequel to the noun βρώσεως. I have not found instances of καθαρεύω followed by an infinitive which is not preceded by τοῦ(the addition of the article τοῦ before θυσαί in the Suda is an obvious conjecture) but the change of construction from βρώσεως to θυσαί fits in with Philostratus’ idiosyncratic syntax; Schmid 4.115-116 illustrates that Philostratus regularly coordinates syntactically different constituents (see also Schmid 4.524-526. The transition is somewhat softened by the intervening clause ὁπόση ἐμψύχων; and the infinitive may also anticipate the immediately following μὴ γὰρ αἱμάττειν τοὺς βωμούς. Kayser¹ suggested θυσίας in his apparatus; Kayser² printed it in his text, probably encouraged by Preller 1846, 466 n. and Scheibe 1847, 428.’

The foregoing comments contain hardly anything that illumine the meaning or background of the Greek words mentioned. Reading a Greek text is much like reading a newspaper in one’s native language. The comprehension of grammar is intuitive; either one understands what is read or does not. His commentary seems to be structured for individuals with small Greek who are attempting to decipher the text. He is acquainted with the relevant facts: he knows of traditions of Pythagoras’ visits to India (2.17.1; p.68) but GB is sparing with such data.

Yet he is capable of good work. His paraphrases are not bad; things are made better when he exploits the English renderings of other editions. He likes to initiate discussions about translations by explaining what a word does not mean (see 7.2.2) or by intimating that a literal rendering of a text is odd (1.14.2). Assertions of that kind merely clutter space. Translators of Greek words know that inflected idioms are capable of several meanings in the same setting, depending on how one rightly or wrongly construes their forms. Some Greek authors were scribal geniuses, other writers were less proficient.

GB identifies interpolations, deletes words and phrases often. He transposes words when he deems it necessary. And he finds it to be a necessity quite often. Nonetheless, his decisions are sensible. His conjectures do not mislead. His familiarity with how scholars had dealt with VAT in past and recent days is superb and he does not inadequately outline any of their thoughts. When Apollonius alludes to other Greek writers like Hesiod ((6.2.2, p.198) or Homer, GB tells us (see 8.5.3; p.256).

Even still, criticisms pile up quickly. For example, at 1.7.2 (p.7.13-14) one finds an astounding feat of scholarly divination when GB writes:

‘Although both the imperfect and aorist are possible here I think that the imperfect, transmitted by Eusebius, is preferable. Apollonius’ getting acquainted with Platonism, Stoicism and Epicureanism form the background to his getting involved with Pythagoreanism. The imperfects therefore suggest that he paid some attention to the other philosophical schools but that he only became deeply and thoroughly involved with Pythagoras’ doctrines, an activity which is referred to by means of the complexive aorist… ‘.

Only an innovative mind could derive so much ‘factual’ detail from an ‘imperfect’ and an ‘aorist’; but an imperfect can denote a ‘fixed idea’ sometimes. His argument is plausible, except those specific tenses do not betray in any time-based form the data he assumes to be present.

In another place, GB amazes. Conybeare’s 1912 Loeb edition has the below words:

[7.6] When moreover the news was brought how notable a purification of the goddess Hestia of the Romans [Vesta.] Domitian had carried out, by putting to death three of the Vestal virgins who had broken their vows and incurred the pollution of marriage, when it was their duty to minister in purity to the Athena of Ilion and to the fire which was worshipped in Rome, he exclaimed: “O Sun, would that thou couldst too be purified of the unjust murders with which the whole world is now filled.”

About this passage he was on the right track when he maintained that

‘The point at issue is that the three Vestal Virgins who were accused of having had sex were no longer pure themselves and one would expect this to be expressed by the adjective and not by the adverb.’

Immediately afterward GB stumbles at the interpretation of ἁγνῶς θεραπεύειν and avers

‘On the other hand, it might be argued that ἁγνῶς θεραπεύειν means that everything is done according to the strict rules of the cult of Vesta.’

Really? Again, he reaches a circumstantial conclusion that, lexically, is improbable. He accounts for the transformation of ἁγνάς into ἁγνῶς by affirming his belief that it stems from echoschreibung/echo-writing. He concludes that the adaptation is inexplicable or ‘difficult to explain’ (p.225).

When treating of Philostratus’ Graecitas, GB alleges that Philostratus tried to imitate the Greek of the classical period (see p.17). GB claims he reproduced Plato’s verbiage at 7.11.1, p.226. The claim is unfounded and incompletely illustrated in CN. Writing at a much later stage of development, Greek dialects had mutated: prefixes, infixes and suffixes differed somewhat by then. Whatever ‘period-resemblances’ may have appeared in VAT’s quotations from other texts also manifested the diverse ways of Greek expression in Philostratus’ day.

The critical apparatus in CN is clean and sleek, much better than VAT’s. The latter would be a good intermediate Greek text for students of classical Greek. Its stimulating content is no less interesting than that neglected classic with that other famed Apollonius (the Argonautica). Ignore any common attic descriptions scholars have applied previously to VAT’s idiom. Its Greek certainly reflects the wording of a polished Athenian who hardly resorted to an ancient Greek lexicon to standardize his spelling. None existed. Of extant collections of wordlists in other languages, there are no signs they were within reach of him. He went to distant lands of the east. But it is doubtful Philostratus made use of any bi-lingual clay tablets whose wordlists were in Akkadian and Sumerian, including 1st century BC – 1st AD interlinear cuneiform ones with Greek glosses. Grammatical divergences of that epoch are best examined restrictively, as exclusive to an author.

Professors concentrating on the Greek New Testament, a rather circumscribed field of study, could benefit themselves privately and publicly by using GB’s text and commentary as a supplement to their forms of instruction. When GB issues a reliable translation of VAT, an authoritative trifecta of scholarship will be brought to a proper conclusion. As a base translation, it is suggested that he utilize C.P. Jones’ English version and update it throughout. High standards of scholarship are built upon higher standards of criticism. And his edition clears up difficulties and deficiencies.  As things now stand, these two volumes, VAT and CN, are evidence of the fruit derived from studies within the ‘Amsterdam School’. Taken together they make strong demands upon readers’ intellects and are indispensable for historians and other academics whose Roman imperial Greek pursuits are both avocational and specialized.

Classicist Darrell Sutton contributes reviews and papers to QR

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Shooting Turkeys

 The Wild Bunch, still, opening scene, credit Wikipedia

Shooting Turkeys, by Bill Hartley

Kris Kristofferson, who died last year aged 88, never wanted to be an actor. Indeed, his legacy rests chiefly on his song writing compositions which have been performed by more than 500 artists. Besides being a singer-songwriter, he had a varied and interesting career: Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, boxing blue, a useful rugby player, he went on to become a soldier and helicopter pilot. His forays into film saw him star in Westerns made by two of Hollywood’s more eccentric directors, Sam Peckinpah and Michael Cimino. Both can be described as political Westerns and the second of these destroyed the career of its director and bankrupted the studio United Artists. Critical and commercial failures on release, both have since undergone a reappraisal.

Following the release of The Wild Bunch in 1969, Pekinpah began to be viewed by some critics as the heir to John Ford. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, with Kristofferson as the eponymous hero, came four years later. The end of an era feel to the film is personified by the casting of many ageing Western stalwarts such as Jack Elam, Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado.

Kristofferson portrays The Kid in an engaging style. Times are changing but he refuses to accept this. Garrett, played in laconic fashion by James Coburn, recognises that the old ways are now coming to an end and has entered the employ of a group of corrupt businessmen. Their dominance of local politics became known as Santa Fe Ring Law, something which actually persisted in New Mexico until 1912. Garrett, The Kid’s former friend and compatriot in outlawry, is there to tell him that he must leave or else.

Pekinpah was a troubled individual with drug and alcohol problems. He quarrelled with the studio, causing MGM to take the picture away from him. Subsequently they released a significantly reedited and truncated version which was disowned by the director and many of those involved. It took until 1988 before the original was released on video, which lead to a re-evaluation and overdue critical acclaim. This is a film about sorrow and regret. The audience know what is going to happen and so do the characters. Only one man is going to be left standing. Kristofferson gives a swaggering performance as the young man who likes the freewheeling life and won’t change his ways. The photography adds to the sense of melancholy with shots of desert sunsets and silhouetted riders moving towards their destination. Bob Dylan (who had a minor role in the film) created the soundtrack and it is the origin of his famous song Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. This dovetails perfectly with one of the most tragic and poignant scenes in the film.

As the story moves towards the inevitable climax, Garrett, the weary realist, seems to be almost dragging his feet. The ending comes on a New Mexico night, rather than via the more familiar frantic shootout. People watch from cover saying nothing as Garrett moves in on The Kid’s hideout. He emerges and Garrett shoots him then symbolically fires at his own image in a large mirror. In killing The Kid it is as if he has destroyed something of himself. Pekinpah, a firearms enthusiast, was prone to doing the same thing.  In contrast to the bloodiness of the director’s previous Western, Kristofferson lies stripped to the waist on the ground, completely intact. Unrealistic perhaps but in death he is forever frozen in youth. For Kristofferson, then a relative newcomer to screen acting, the film is an accomplished piece of work.

In contrast Heaven’s Gate, made in1980, might be seen as a film which was beyond Kristofferson. But this was hardly his fault; the obsessive attention to detail brought to the picture by director Michael Cimino saw it run wildly over budget. It was the last gasp of an era in which the director had complete control and the film ran four times over budget. Previously as maker of the hugely successful The Deer Hunter, Cimino was seen as a man on the rise and this appears to have caused the studio to grant him considerable latitude. The picture was subsequently described as ‘an unqualified disaster’ by one critic. Vanity Fair included it in their list of the worst films ever made.

Ostensibly it wasn’t a picture that could go so far wrong. Set in 1890s Wyoming, the story carries an echo of Kristofferson’s previous Western. The Wyoming Stock Grower’s Association had become a political force described by one historian as the ‘de facto territorial government’. They plan to kill homesteaders who have encroached into the territory. Kristofferson plays Averill an idealistic Harvard educated federal marshal, who breaks away from his privileged east coast background to protect the settlers. There is a lengthy introduction in which we see the young Averill as he graduates.  Apparently the university refused to allow their premises to be used for shooting due to Cimino’s excessive demands. Because of this he decamped to Oxford. Little wonder that his approach to film making was costing the studio $200,000 per day. He was capable of delaying filming until a cloud he liked came into view and once ordered the dismantling of an entire street set so it could be made a few feet wider.

Kristofferson went on be nominated for the Golden Raspberry award for worst actor in 1982, which seems a little unfair. Even the young Paul Newman would have struggled with the task of carrying a picture of such sprawling magnitude. The film consists of some highly detailed set pieces with what has been described as pretentious dialogue: a case perhaps of ambience over plot. It is one of those pictures worth watching to try and decide why it failed. Certainly it is hampered by the leisurely pace, which leaves the viewer frustrated, waiting for the next scene to come along and take the story forwards.

Typically it has in recent years undergone something of a revision and is now seen as the last epic Western. The New York Times reversed its earlier decision calling the director’s version a ‘modern masterpiece’ and the 1980 cut one of the ‘greatest injustices in cinema history’. Even with the new version expectations are not met: this picture drags. Kristofferson does his best, but the task seems overwhelming. Despite this he continued as a quiet and effective screen presence, who, as they used to say, looked good in the saddle. Kristofferson had the questionable distinction of working with two of the most idiosyncratic directors in the history of Hollywood.

Kris Kristofferson, 1978, credit Wikipedia

William Hartley is a social historian and film buff 

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The Final Pandemic

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 

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Endnotes, January-February 2025

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

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Bradford, a ‘House Divided’

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

                               

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