United states

Gstaad Good old Helvetia. I’m quitting her for the rainy but pleasant land of England. The cows are beginning to resemble chorus girls and the village an Alpine Colditz. Too much of a good thing said a wise man to a friend of mine who wanted to live on the French Riviera all year round. That was long ago. The South of France is a shithole these days — and a very expensive one at that. The real Riviera now lies far away from the coast, up in the hills: Saint-Paul-de-Vence and its environs.

New York Who was it that first coined the expression ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady sings’? The great Yogi Berra got credit for it, but what he really said was: ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ Well, I think it is all over, although it’s going to be dragged out by The Donald, who never knows when to stop. But as Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness, the fix was in; that’s why the man who lives in a basement remained in the basement while Trump flew manically all over the country rallying the troops. Apparently the cheating was on an industrial scale.

Gstaad Birthdays at my age are for the birds, but always a good excuse for a party. Messages of good wishes began early on, with loyal Speccie reader Arnold Taylor ringing from South Africa, and Rosemary and Wafic Saïd texting from the English countryside. (They wished me a happy 39th. I accepted.) My great buddy Michael Mailer, staying with the Kennedys at the family compound in Hyannis Port, had hoped to fly over but the you-know-what prevented it, while Charlie Glass rang from London to announce the end of capitalism as well as yours truly. I asked Charlie to answer me truthfully, because it was my birthday, and he swore he would. ‘Do you have as many children out of wedlock as Boris, or more?’ I said. He hung up on me.

I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He writes about how the victims of communism are less commemorated than those of fascism. The death toll under communism was 100 million (see the Black Book of Communism). And as the mass murders continued, your Cambridge Joseph Needhams and his fellow apologists insisted that Maoism represented mankind’s best hope. Maoism never received the moral obloquy that Nazism did. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which documents the horrific enormity of the Nazi project, has had 40 million visitors since 1993; the victims of communism are marked by a ten-foot statue in a tiny park near Union Station, tended by private donations.

Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the Wind is now off limits and Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond is unlikely to remain standing (I give it a week at most). And over here poor old Winnie is also in the you-know-what. Why didn’t anyone tell me Churchill was a Nazi? The Cenotaph also has to go; those guys it honours were racists. Two weeks ago in these here pages Douglas Murray said it all about a US import we can do without. Alas, when Uncle Sam sneezes, the British bulldog gets the flu. The scenes may be less dramatic in the UK, but the hypocrisy is the same, if not greater.

Statistics is the continuation of politics by other means, to misquote Clausewitz. One hundred and fifty years after the crushing of the revolutionary Paris Commune, historians still clash aggressively about the death toll. Was it as high as 40,000 or as low as 10,000? It matters because the Paris Commune is a shibboleth, a great left-wing site of memory and martyrdom, made famous by Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France. He presented the Paris Commune as the first great experiment in communist government. Its crushing by the army of the conservative Adolphe Thiers is depicted in left-wing folk memory as the ‘reactionary, repressive forces of capitalism’ ending an idyllic experiment in socialism.