December 27th, 2009

Burke, the soundest reference from an English perspective and, arguably, ceteris paribus, from most others also, would have had this to say about the Swiss practice of referenda: … It ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with [...]

October 16th, 2009

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and [...]

June 21st, 2009

The only thing that worries Western governments is the prospect of an Islamic bomb. These hyprocrites are oblivious of the fact that they deliberately toppled a friendly Iranian ruler who had repeatedly ruled out acquiring nuclear weapons because he foresaw the huge risk it would represent for the world’s most unstable region. And yet my fear is that, depite Twitter, YouTube and, especially, despite Le Monde, Mr Obama and his kind will have their way: just like previous protest movements by urban youth whose lives and prospects are being ruined by the oppressive theocracy ruling iran, Khameini, Amadinejad and their associated thugs will survive, secure in the knowledge that by manipulating the peasants whom they have rendered totally docile by reversing the Shah’s campaign against illiteracy and indoctrinating them, for thirty years, with nothing but Coranic propaganda will support them, that the population, like that of Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, will be cowered into docility by the unspeakable brutality of the regime, that they will be able to continue to rig elections and, above all, that the West, still reeling from the damage it inflicted on itself in its inopportune attack on Iran’s historic enemy Irak, will do nothing. The media-greedy liberal lefties will move on to the next subject that Twitter makes fashionable, listen to what Mr Obama has to say on the subject, and the abominable sufferings of one of the world’s most civilised peoples will continue.

June 19th, 2009

It looks like I was the first person to have activated a newly-acquired iPhone 3G S. The people at Orange called me yesterday to ask whether I wanted to collect mine at midnight, as they were opening their Champs-Elysées store specially for the occasion, making them the first retail outlet in the world to sell the new phones as Paris is six hours ahead of Standard Eastern Time.

June 12th, 2009

Ultimately, the cause of the fiasco surrounding the French-government’s ill-fated attempt to enact a three-strikes-and-you’re out law known as HADOPIis not a legal issue, despite the gravity of the infringement of civil liberties that it would have instituted, but the unwillingness, or perhaps the inability, of the French political elite to take a serious interest in cultural policy. And behind the economic reality that the model HADOPI seeks to prop up is dead, is the hard fact that youth, creativity, talent and fashion have moved on and that the French political establishment has been left behind and has clearly still not understood what is happening to it.

March 7th, 2009

Je ne vous ai pas rendu heureux, et je vous laisse malheureux, et moi je meurs; cependant je ne puis me résoudre à souhaiter de ne vous avoir pas connu.

Isabelle de Charrière, Caliste ou suite des lettres écrites de Lausanne (1786)

From Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse to Malraux’s Conquérants, French letters since the eighteenth century are strongly coloured by death and, more particularly, by death wishes. In the last couple of weeks, I have been looking with considerable interest at this subject that most will regard as unnecessarily stern in an age where happiness has been erected into a moral imperative.

What such people overlook, of course, is that happiness is sometimes impossible to achieve. Neither Rousseau, nor Goethe, nor Balzac, nor Wilde, nor Malraux can provide their heroes with the truly disinterested death that, in certain circumstances, can be the only palliative to their suffering.

Isabelle de Charrière’s sensibilité sevrée, to me, when applied by her to her heroine’s death wish, provides a more honest, more modest yet ultimately more modern approach than that of her more famous disciple. She cuts out the pathos and does not pretend to drape an artificial meaning over a gesture dictated by nothing more than reality.

February 13th, 2009

With the change in my lifestyle, interests and job that occurred last year, and also the decision to switch to English after three years of blogging in French, the time has come to draw the process to a logical conclusion and make donaldjenkins.com my only home on the web.

February 6th, 2009

Mr Obama’s position on capital punishment has shifted, from opposition in 1996 to support in limited circumstances. Yet he will, I believe, push for criminal justice reform. He can also indirectly influence death penalty decisions through his nominations to the Supreme Court, where Justices Stevens—a liberal on the death penalty despite being a Republican appointee—and Ginsburg may well need to be replaced. I can only hope that the debate on the issue will continue to result in “standards of decency”, which have already shifted sufficiently to provoke debate on the constitutionality of lethal injection and put an end to the practice of executing minors, evolving further in the direction of complete abolition.

February 2nd, 2009

It is pretty standard, nowadays, to denigrate Nancy Mitford as frivolous and out of touch, but I’ve always had a sneaking liking for someone who was easily the loveliest of the Mitford sisters. Conventional modern Britain has obviously lost sight of a lot of the values that underly her books and are no longer valued in a country where Mr. Blair and the late Princess of Wales are held up as role-models. A lot of these contemporary prejudices have to do, of course, with her choice of vocabulary, well-illustrated, I think, in the above sentence that manages to refer to both loos and writing-paper. But there is more to Nancy Mitford than that. Two factors stand out in my own personal experience: her fondness for France—despite remaining British to the core—and the genuine detachment with which she viewed the social structures in which she grew up. She understood them perfectly, yet was aware of their absurdities. And, on balance, she probably believed they were best left untouched.

January 25th, 2009

I have been reading comments from all kinds of people about the Congregation for Bishops’ announcement yesterday that the decree of July 1 1988 that had recorded the excommunication, latæ sententiæ, of the four bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) consecrated by Mgr Marcel Lefebvre three days earlier had been remitted. People’s reactions, not surprisingly, reflect their own deep-seated opinions and prejudices about a range of issues, some connected with that of the excommunication, some not.

WIthout expressing any personal opinions, I wish to point out some frequently overlooked material about the 1988 excommunication issue, especially the fact that excommunication was pronounced pursuant to a provision in canon that had only existed since 1951 and had been instituted to deal with a very different situation: the Chinese Patriotic Church set up in mainland China after the Communist takeover. Because the legal circumstances defined in 1951 with regard to the Chinese situation were not necessarily relevant in 1988, it is actually a moot point whether the traditionalist bishops were ever actually excommunicated at all in 1988.