Britain

On the Anglosphere

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The Indian Question dominated a fascinating conference on the Anglosphere in Winchester yesterday, co-hosted by two of the greatest conservative editors on the planet: Daniel Johnson of Prospect, and Roger Kimball of The New Criterion. Some of the cleverest and most contrarian men in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India were present.

And

James Bennett, who more or less invented the Anglosphere, saw India as the key. While it might be awkward to talk of a nation of 1.3 billion people “joining” a club of 400 million, the orientation of India would determine the relative power of the English-speaking democracies for the rest of the century.

– Daniel Hannan, Telegraph blogs

There has been a fair amount of negative press recently for Team India because of the Commonwealth Games. Kashmir is everywhere in the news, too. We shall see.

Update: I am using “Team India” in the way that the press often refers to the “Team India versus Team China” rivalry. Personally, I’m a little more worried about Team America’s recent play. I’m sure we’ll right it eventually. I firmly believe that.

The Heart of a Continent: A Narrative of Travels in Manchuria, 
Across the Gobi Desert, through the Himalayas, 
the Pamirs, and Chitral, 
1884-1894 by Captain Francis Younghusband, C.I.E., Indian Staff Corps, 
Gold Medallist, Royal Geographical Society (1896)

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I have been reading Victorian war and travel memoirs lately. Google Books has everything full text for free that is out of copyright. I send these books to my Kindle, which makes it easy to read them.

Younghusband’s book does not have a single bad page in it. Here is one good passage. Younghusband and his small party have brassed their way into the hilltop fort of the chief of the Kanjuti bandits, to express the displeasure of the Queen at the perpetual raiding upon her subjects.

We stood together for a long time round the fire, a curious group—rough, hard, determined-looking Kanjutis, in long loose woollen robes, round cloth caps, long curls hanging down their ears, matchlocks slung over their backs, and swords bound to their sides; the timid, red-faced Kirghiz ; the Tartar-featured Ladakis; the patient, long-suffering Baltis; the sturdy, jovial little Gurkhas; the grave Pathan, and a solitary Englishman, met together here, in the very heart of the Himalayas, in the robbers’ stronghold. It is on thinking over occasions like this that one realizes the extraordinary influence of the European in Asia, and marvel at his power of rolling on one race upon another to serve his purpose. An Asiatic and a European fight, the former is beaten, and he immediately joins the European to subdue some other Asiatic. The Gurkhas and the Pathans had both in former days fought desperately against the British; they were now ready to fight equally desperately for the British against these raiders around us, and their presence had inspired so much confidence in the nervous Kirghiz that these even had summoned up enough courage to enter a place which they had before never thought of without a shudder.

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Cardinal John Henry Newman

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My friend Fr. C.J. McCloskey had a good piece on Newman. Newman’s vision of the laity at the center of a revival of religion may yet prove to be prophetic.

The Economist notes that the Pope’s visit to Britain is possible only because of the “amnesia” of the people there. The beatification of Newman on English soil, even a generation ago, would have been “intensely provocative.” Britain is now a post-Christian society. The conflicts that agitated people in the past simply make no sense to their grandchildren. Watching the magnates of the Anglican Church greeting Benedict and intoning solemn-sounding phrases in ancient cathedrals was odd, the regalia and pomp completely out of step with the emptiness of their churches on any given Sunday, by all reliable accounts. The Anglicans do sing nicely, though.

The recognition of Newman’s greatness in his own country is only possible because the people there no longer care about religion one way or the other, except, decreasingly, as a matter of custom and tradition. Newman’s message will take root in foreign locales, where the church is growing, not in the dead soil of Europe, the browning husk of Christendom.

Sir Keith Park

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Tomorrow, on Battle of Britain day, a statue of Air Vice Marshal Keith Park will be unveiled in London’s Waterloo Gardens. Military historian Stephen Bungay:

The Battle of Britain was the most important campaign in the history of the RAF. That it was fought and won was down to three men. The first was Winston Churchill. He decided to fight it. The second was Hugh Dowding. He built the system that made victory possible. The third was Keith Park. He wielded the weapon that Dowding had forged and Churchill decided to use.

One of the top Allied air aces of the war, Johnnie Johnson, said of Park “He was the only man who could have lost the war in a day or even an afternoon.” And as Churchill said, “The odds were great, our margins small, the stakes infinite.”

More about Park here.

Via Mrs Moneypenny at Financial Times

Regulation for Fun and Profit

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The National Association of Broadcasters and the Recording Industry Association of America are lobbying Congress to have the government require that FM receivers be built into cell phones and other portable electronics devices.

The squandering of resources that would required by this proposal, should it become law, would not be as visually striking as 20 miles of railroad track filled with unused lumber cars, but would be real nonetheless.

How much of America’s economic output and growth potential is being wasted on politically-driven but economically-irrational subsidies of one kind or another? The number would be hard to calculate, but it is surely large, and certainly growing very rapidly.

Related: Apparently, more than half of Britain’s wind-power farms have been built in places where there is not enough wind. Anyone want to bet that there is nothing similar happening here?

FM-receiver link via Code Monkey, lumber-car link via Instapundit, wind-farm link via Maggie’s Farm.