I've Got A New Blog

I've headed it The Most Destructive Single Cause and it's about (now who would have thought so regarding the title?) feminism and a spawn of my two other blogs The Editrix' Roncesvalles and The Evil Style Queen. I am not a Renaissance polymath and I have found that if I try to cover too many topics at once it doesn't become a coherent overview of the woes of our times but an unstructured mess. I have weeded those posts that are germane to the topic of the new blog, even if only peripherally so, from my other blogs and put it there to give the new effort some substance to start with. Roncesvalles will now focus on the Islamisation of the West and its related phenomena,The Evil Style Queen's focus will return to, well, style. Feminism permeates every single aspect of our daily life and thus needs dedicated analysis and not just some blog entries, which are soon drowned by a flood of other information or laments.

Thanks to Blogger, one of the most unfairly badmouthed organisations on earth, for the excellent import- and export functionality without which I couldn't have done this.

When do we know something is wrong with a country?

When the Wikipedia-entry for "Officer's Commission" shows the commission ceremony of a woman, a woman who hasn't bothered to comb her hair.



Cross-posted at Roncesvalles.

What Men Perceive as "Romantic Evil"

I happened to find the following by mere chance, while searching for some information on Piper Bill Millin and Lord Lovat at Flickr and it had me floored. I think it fits brilliantly the ongoing discussion about what makes men and women tick so differently.

La Style Anglais

Bad behaviour is more interesting, more downright entertaining, than goodness and rectitude. This is a great gift to the Devil of course, but there's no getting away from it. Who ever heard of a soap opera about sober, sexually continent people who go to bed early and take their holidays in Redcar?

I think this explains why the generals of the Wehrmacht High Command, with their whiff of arrogance, cruelty and romantic evil, have always received more attention than their equivalents on the "good" Allied side. For every biography or television documentary about Viscount Slim, or Alexander of Tunis, there must be a dozen about Guderian or Von Rundstedt and a hundred about Rommel. Yet there were some eccentric and flamboyant characters among the commanders of the wartime British Army...

Guderian? Rundstedt? And -- of all unlikely people -- ROMMEL as examples for "romantic evil"? For heaven's sake, Rommel looked exactly like what he was, the son of a small-town schoolteacher, Rundstedt looked exactly like what he was as well, namely the scion of a family of generations of dour Prussian career officers and Guderian, the only one of the three who shows a smidgeon of dash, looks basically too like what he was, namely the son of another Prussian officer, albeit from a lesser family. All three of them, whatever they may have in fact been, look like the archetype of sober, sexually continent men who go to bed early and take their holidays maybe not in Redcar, but in Warnemünde.

Rundstedt

Rommel

Guderian

The discussion following the "La Style Anglais" picture at Flickr may serve as a key to such an (I think) obvious misconception:

Well, thats a DSO and bar, OBE, MC, 4 ww2 stars (one with a bar, maybe 8th army?), ww1 pair with an MiD, and probably the silver jubilee medal. Don't think there are too many out there with that combination. He looks like a poof but the medal bar proves he's solid English oak.

Alas, with the red hackle on his bonnet and the sword guard of his claymore poking out of the bottom right this 'solid english oak' is most likely a scotsman :) the red hackle is the regimental distinction of the Blackwatch regiment.

The soldier in question is a Commanding Officer from the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). I believe he is Lt Col Critchley a very distinguished soldier and a gentleman. his son carried on the tradition of serving in the Regiment. Neither of which were in the least bit a poof nor English.

Why couldn't he have been a hero and a poof?

Indeed, and that's what men find so hard to understand. I see neither arrogance, nor cruelty, let alone romantic evil, in the German archetypes, just austereness, sobriety and professionalism, and I'd like to know how other women react to the different archetypes. My money is on the Brits, and not on the Germans in their demonstratively sober uniforms, who shout "straight" in marked difference to the elegant, flamboyant, dashing, bordering on the sexually ambiguous, Brits, who show more than just a whiff of arrogance, as I understand it.

Interestingly, the author of the "La Style Anglais" entry contradicts himself by quoting from Evelyn Waugh's "Men At Arms":

He was the great Halberdier enfant terrible of the First World War; the youngest company commander in the history of the Corps; the slowest to be promoted; often wounded, often decorated, recommended for the Victoria Cross, twice court martialled for disobedience to orders in the field, twice acquitted in recognition of the brilliant success of his independent actions; a legendary wielder of the entrenching tool; where lesser men collected helmets Ritchie-Hook once came back from a raid across no-man's-land with the dripping head of a German sentry in either hand.

Frankly, that is not exactly a prime example of goodness and rectitude and a scenario in which the boringly sedate mugs of neither, Guderian, nor Rommel, nor Rundstedt seem quite to fit.

At this blog there is an entry about Rex Whistler, another one of the Brit archetype, again one who carries that sexual ambiguity, and again one who was found irresistible by many women (and men), a feeling to which I can relate.


And of course, Lord Lovat, the man who triggered off this entry, makes an excellent romantic hero as well:


There is hardly anything more endearing about the male sex, and I am not cynical or jaundiced here, than the trait, which sees something romantic, even if it is romantic evil, in Guderian, or Rommel, or Rundstedt. The great tragedy is that their women are meanwhile eloping with Evelyn Waugh's Ritchie-Hook.

Cross-posted at Roncesvalles.

What Makes Women Tick?

I am posting the main parts of two entries, Dhimmi Without A Cause and Oversexed, Overpaid and Over There with the Noble Savages from my other blog here, because I think they are, albeit only marginally, topical to The Evil Style Queen as well. I do not want this blog to become an entirely anti-feminist effort, however, the aspect is too important to be missed by a commenter on the current trends and fads. So here it goes:

I admit I hate the Dutch. I hate the way one, being German, used to be treated in that pokey little country (it has become better over the years, though, but I still hate them), I hate that they nevertheless had no compunctions about taking our money, and I hate that sanctimonious post-war attitude specifically because the valiant polder-dwellers had been the only people in WWII that surrendered to Germany without having fired a single shot and who had delivered their Jews gratuitously and free platform edge. I hate their ugly, pink, fat and blonde royals whom even two generations of inordinately goodlooking German husbands weren't able to grade up and I hate, once again, their sanctimoniousness which showed, impressively although not exclusively, when they disinvited the future father-in-law of the future fat, pink and blonde king from the wedding because he had once hold a mediocre office in the Cabinet of a third-rate, long forgotten South American dictator, whereas same future king's German grandfather had only been in the SS.

And BOY! DO I hate that unspeakable slut that made headlines recently because Geert Wilders (whom the Dutch don't deserve and whose only shortcoming is that he is looking irritatingly Dutch) had cited her as a prime example of the moral decline of the elites in his country.

Joanie de Rijke is a Dutch journalist who was kidnapped in Afghanistan last November when all she wanted was to do some serious research on on the deaths of ten French soldiers hacked to pieces by the Taliban for the arse-and-tits magazine she is working for. Joanie looks painfully Dutch and exactly like the simpering silly bitch she is.

When she met the Taliban to 'hear their side of the story', the valiant freedom fighters, who would have thought so, kidnapped and the commander frequently raped her but not nearly enough because she wrote a book about it later and regurgitated it in chat shows (see picture) too. She still thinks (if one can call it that) that she was not taking unnecessary risks.

“This story” Wilders said, “is a perfect illustration of the moral decline of our elites. They are so blinded by their own ideology that they turn a blind eye to the truth. Rape? Well, I would put this into perspective, says the leftist journalist: the Taliban are not monsters. Our elites prefer to deny reality rather than face it. Our elites, whether they are politicians, journalists, judges, subsidy gobblers or civil servants, have dumped common sense in order to deny reality. It is not just this raped journalist who is suffering from Stockholm syndrome, but the entire Dutch elite. The only moral reference they have is: do not irritate the Muslims - that is the one thing they will condemn.”

So what did Joanie say:

"It's not black and white. It was the commander who raped me. I wanted to give vent to my hatred, to chop his head off and kick it off the cliff. He was schizophrenic: the following day, he said he was sorry. In that sort of situation - no matter how awful - you develop a bond with those people. You have to, if you want to survive. You could say the hatred and that bond go side by side."

"Just let me make one thing clear: I hate him for what he did to me. I hate him because he raped me. I was very, very mad and I wanted to kill him right away. But the day after it happened, he more or less asked me to forgive him. That was very confusing for me. It was a very schizophrenic situation because he had mood swings. I just had to cope with that. Normally you can show that you are angry but I couldn't of course. I had to get on with them. I just couldn't say to this commander what I was really thinking because then he would have killed me right away."

Very very mad Joanie said, too, that she was nevertheless shown respect.

Which eerily recalls the old joke, where the lady of the house is one female short for a proper dinner placement and, desperate, puts good clothes on a pretty maid and hopes for the best. When she asks her afterwards whether she's been respected, the girl replies: "Yes ma'am. Once on the balcony and twice in the garden."

And now Joanie is angry - not at her rapist but at Geert Wilders: "Geert Wilders bedrijft politiek over mijn rug." "He makes politics on my back." To make politics on her back is something to which Joanie can rightfully claim exclusive rights.

It may be a measure of the decline of our culture that even the attention whores have no class anymore. Many years ago Oriana Fallaci delivered a piece of memorable journalism and later recalled:

... that she found Khomeini intelligent, and “the most handsome old man I had ever met in my life. He resembled the ‘Moses’ sculpted by Michelangelo.” And, she said, Khomeini was “not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king—a real leader. And it did not take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world. People loved him too much. They saw in him another Prophet. Worse: a God.”

And nobody laughed or expressed embarrassment after it appeared in The New Yorker in 2006. It was, after all, by "La Fallaci".

It was a doubtful thing, anyway, to give Khomeini publicity to begin with, but Fallaci didn't really do research to inform but was collecting scalps and thus couldn't resist.

She, too, cashed in on matters which had better remained private. What does one call a woman who had an, as an uncritically adoring media called it, "tempestuous" affair with a much younger man who then kicked his unborn child out of her womb, a woman who didn't leave that man and rather wrote two books about it?

And exactly like that was her criticism of Islam, shrill and PMS-ing hysterical. She stomped her little foot and wrote not what Islam is, but how "La Fallaci" found it.

But to do her justice, at least Fallaci was seriously attractive, did not write for crappy men's mags AND ABOVE ALL SHE WAS NOT DUTCH.

But what makes a serious journalist and writer like Fallaci and a floozy like Joanie de Rijke tick when putting themselves in harm's way to then write books about it? What made the ageing Fallaci swoon and drool over an old billy goat like Khomeini? Shameless lucre? Yes, but not JUST that. Attention whoredom? Yes, and again not just that. I think it's boredom. Boredom with their lifes, with the "good" men they meet, boredom with the little things in life, with a normal, ordinary life, with ordinary, everyday human decency. An able, clever woman like Fallaci goes and interviews Khomeini and Kissinger and writes well-received books about an unsavoury relationship with an unsuitable man, a silly bitch like de Rijke goes to Afghanistan to be raped by a Taliban, then writes a book about it to be totally overwhelmed by the brouhaha she caused and which to understand she is too pathetic. And at the bottom of the barrel, yes at the absolute bottom of the very same barrel we find those females who go and marry death row inmates. Our only hope remains that they'll never find out how to write books.

To add a conciliatory note, I'd like to say finally something nice about the Dutch. There IS after all, something that is bigger than their dhimmitude and that's their tightfistedness. Which shows that they are not totally without principles. I overlooked that when I first read the article in the Brussels Journal from which I took the Wilders-quote.

As Joanie put it so endearingly:

“The Belgians have done nothing. They said it was a matter for the Dutch. And the Dutch authorities said they never pay ransom. In Afghanistan they know well enough that Western governments pay up after an abduction. Germany, Italy and France have all paid ransoms.”

Which may not be a terrific argument, but it at least reminds of another one of those vacuous, thrill-addicted women, the German archaeologist Susanne Osthoff, who made headlines in Germany some three years ago because the German government did indeed pay a hefty ransom when she was kidnapped in Iraq. She may serve as a case in the point I am trying to make, namely that the main issue about the Joanie de Rijkes of this world is not that they are dhimmis who gladly surrender to the powers out to destroy the West. Most of them do, but that is not the core of the problem. The more intelligent of this type of abandoned woman may as well turn out as an avid Islam-critic, as Fallaci did, but then, intelligence is a rare commodity.

So who is Susanne Osthoff? Early in 2006 her kidnapping in Iraq acquired notoriety. This, this and this entry from my other blog may serve as background information. I suddenly recalled Osthoff, when a commenter at VFR drew a (fatuous) analogy between Joanie de Rijke and Joan of Arc and I remembered that Osthoff, another one of those abandoned woman in need of a thrill, was compared to the French virgin saint as well. I wrote in 2006:

Thanks to Davids Medienkritik for ... the following gem:



Yes, that's right! The (leftwing) Süddeutsche Zeitung shows Ms. "Embarrassment Personified" Osthoff clad as Joan of Arc! A woman with intimate ties to the Saddam "Plasticshredder" Hussein regime, a convert to Islam. As Joan of Arc. A Christian saint.

I wonder what makes people compare undutiful middle-aged crones out for a titillating experience to a teenage virgin out on a sacred mission and can only presume that it's utter lack of ethical and cultural discernment, but that isn't the point here anyway.

The point is, to me, that it is not dhimmitude, but the typical female self-centeredness, vanity and irresponsibility that often, not always, leads to dhimmitude and which is, in every single one of its manifestations, so destructive to society. In Susanne Osthoff it becomes particularly obvious, or is it just me who sees a woman who just adores posing in sexually ambiguous clothes, "protected" by noble savages, putting herself in harm's way by being at places where she had no business to be. Osthoff, who dumped her child at a boarding school when she ought to have looked after it herself, Osthoff who married an Arab (albeit not for long), Osthoff, who could have worked in a field of archaeology more appropriate for a woman, say, in Sweden, and if I were a cynic I'd say now that even there is a fair probability of being raped by a Muslim. Osthoff, who could have refrained from embarking on such a non-career at all, but searched for the stability of family life she so pooh-poohed.

But this woman is, of course, only interesting because she is such an obvious paragon of deliquency and because there are countless others like her, happily undermining the core values of our culture.

At the high end it's Princess Diana strutting around in dungarees against landmines because even being married to the heir to the throne of England couldn't satisfy her craving for attention, and at the low end it's those perverts who marry death row inmates, with the Fallacis, Osthoffs and de Rijkes somewhere in between. A "cause", however ill-fated, lost and destructive (or even good), has none of them. Unfair to dhimmis!

Idealism Kills

Or: The Voluntary Re-GDR-fication

I am currently tackling the problem of our garden, a biggish affair. While the entire property covers 1,500 m², the lawn covers "only" 1,000 m² because there is the house, a garden shed, several big trees, various flower beds and vegetable patches. We have decided to do most of the gardening ourselves (or rather: I will do it myself) instead of paying somebody to do it, and I had no idea how much there is to learn about lawn mowers and how expensive the powerful ones are. I had no idea either how quickly a garden turns into a weedy mess without care.





The garden, although it used to be well tended until we took over and, strictly speaking, not ugly, is uninspired. It's the garden of somebody who had little money to spend, didn't care and had no sense for beauty (but for order) and plenty of use for some additional self-grown grub. (It just occurs to me that this is a fair description for the former GDR.) Yes, I am slowly coming to the point now: I haven't the faintest about and I am not keen on gardening so I did an Internet search (in German), first for plants that are pretty to look at, uncomplicated to grow and in need of little care, and second how to turn a vegetable patch into a flower- (or other ornamental) bed. The result let me immediately rummage for my beta-blockers: While there are countless hits on how to turn a flower- (or other ornamental) bed into a vegetable patch, the reverse is almost non-existent. Why? I soon found out why. At the website of one of the public radio stations, under the header "Tips for Hobby Gardeners" we are informed that:

Michelle Obama, the wife of the American president, shows us how to do it: Instead of growing flowers she turns the flower beds around the White House into vegetable patches. Thus, the ornamental beds are put to their best use and the vitamin-supply is ensured.

This let me not just rummage for my beta-blockers but curse the fact that I had no emetic available or at least a stiff drink.

Frankly, that couple in the White House disgusts me so much that I always try to skip the ubiquitous information about it, so I had no idea whether that is true. Another Internet search later, I know it is only partly true. Not THE flower beds around the White House are turned into vegetable patches, but a sizeable bit of the South Lawn. (Which proves once again that if anything ought to convince even the last American that his current president is deeply and convincingly anti-American, it ought to be this totally extracerebral, bowel-located adulation by the Germans. How many times did I say already that the German main identification staple as a people is, sad as it may be, hatred of America?)

But let's forget blissfully about the charade in the White House and focus on all those many little Germans who do not grow vegetables in their garden as an opportunist PR-gag, but as a lifestyle choice. Why would people want to turn a perfectly nice patch of grass or flowers into an ugly pile of dirt and manure to harvest some deformed, bug-infested lumps of vegetable DNS? This is, mind you, one of the most densely populated countries in the world and gardening has not, like in England, any "snob value". I am not talking about people with REALLY big gardens, time and knowledge how to grow useful plants effectively, either. Also, this is a country, where staple foods and fruit/vegetables in season are cheap. So again: Why?

Although hardly anybody of those wannabe self-sufficients is a militant "Green" with a capital "G" they are following an ideology, just as the housewife, who stridently demands that her breadwinning husband is taking down the dustbin after a long day at the office does not see herself as a feminist. Still, behind their activities are the claims of a political movement that rejects modernity. The list of statement-making labels that further the view of a set of relative moral worths behind different sorts of food is ever-growing. Fair Trade, "Bio", organic, non-gm are only some of them and what they all share is the rejection and vilification of modern farming practices without which millions in the third world would starve to death. Idealism kills people.

An old joke exemplifies quite well the "green" image of men:
Meet two planets:
"You are not looking well. Are you ill?"
"Yes, I've caught Homo Sapiens."
"Don't worry, that's just a nuisance and will pass."

Men as bugs.

In the Sixties, people here in Germany started to turn their vegetable patches into gardens because they could now afford beauty and enjoyed it together with their freedom. That was when the old-fashioned farmers' cooperation trading posts, soon to be turned into "garden centers", ceased to sell horse feed to sell bulbs and lawn seed instead. Now we are going the opposite way. People are prepared to victimize pleasure and beauty for a totalitarian world view. In the former GDR because they hadn't much of a choice, now they do it voluntarily. Idealism kills pleasure too.

Cross-posted without pictures at Roncesvalles.

More on "Period" and Very Real Bathrooms

When I put up my first "bathroom entries" any realisation was a matter of a far-ish future and a different house. The fact that the house where I am living now can firmly be identified as being from a post-wooden-bathtub period makes things infinitely more easy. Once I saw the pictures I have published in this entry (see one below), I knew how my future bathroom was going to look and that the period feeling could be acquired by relatively simple means. Because of a limited budget I bid a fond farewell to any gadgets like a high level cistern and "nostalgic" suite and fittings. An embedded cistern (I am not at all sure whether that is the correct term), a standard white sanitary suite and standard, though not aggressively modern, fittings had to do.


I am very pleased with the overall-impression created by stark white tiles and a black and white border made from standard black-and-white mosaic tiles. Considering how the bathroom looked when we bought the house, it's probably the most stunning improvement. Cheap and horrible PVC-flooring was coupled with horrible and cheap wooden panelling and plastic-sheet "tiles". The solid-fuel-heated hot-water boiler was cute, though, and, I presume, still in working order. But convenience is a great eye-opener when it comes to period features. However, the modern, electricity-heated boiler is placed in the basement and thus doesn't at least interfere with the period feeling.

To prevent the bathroom to look like a cold store or -- worse -- like a mortuary, I am right now toying with the idea of a chandelier with two matching wall lamps framing the mirror and a black and white toile Roman blind.

Richloom Confection Charcoal or...

...Golding Cantata Onxy would come very close to what I'd like.

In an older entry, The Peak of Chic showed, in the context of Georgian style, those absolutely gorgeous bathrooms. Granted for arguments sake that I could afford anything like that: I am asking myself how it is kept clean. What does one do about soapy and oily splatters or -- heavens forbid! -- splatters of haircolour? Do those lucky people have a simple, usable, easy-to-clean bathroom hidden behind those museum pieces?



I admit, I am a lousy "housewife". I don't like dusting and my kitchen was never up to gastronomic standards, cleanlinesswise. But I draw the line at the bathroom. Those curry-yellow tiles and sanitary suites so popular here in the Seventies or -- worse -- that English fluffy bathroom carpetry give me the creeps. With my white tiles and stuff I can at least SEE what is there and WOW, DOES the shedding from the almost black German Short Hair Pointer show up there!

Symmetry

In April, The Peak of Chic discussed at her blog the concept of symmetry in interior decoration, which made me acutely aware of my biggest problem (well, my biggest DECORATING problem) at the new place, namely the difficulty to achieve symmetry.

A truly formal room DOES require a high degree of symmetry. For about 15 years now I am living with an electric fireplace [frightfully unsmart, I know, but where I am is the top anyway ;-) ] that has moved with me to the fourth place in the meantime and it always served as a pleasant focal point and "symmetry-achiever". My last place was blessed with a living room of generous proportions (5 x 8 m I'd say) and one door in just the right place. Dark brown walls, heavy dark sofas and dark velvet curtains looked great, as did the oils in their gilded frames. It was the first of my living rooms that could almost claim drawing room status. Symmetry was ruling, and the challenge was to relieve it now and then, not to give the place an un-lived-in or boring feeling. Now I have a living room of maybe half of that space, with two doors at awkward positions and, although it is the first one with a working chimney, this very chimney is in an incredibly awkward place as well and thus totally unsuitable to host a fireplace as a focal point. I will get a tiled stove once I am over my cash-flow problem and try to acquire some symmetry and formality in a different way. But how?

Dark brown walls, heavy dark sofas and dark velvet curtains are a no no here as well. I had the walls painted in a bright yellow and, already living in the shell, am contemplating an alternative solution with entirely different fabrics different furniture and different pictures. It is a big challenge and I wish I always had no bigger problems, but the loss of symmetry truly hurts.


Every cloud has a silver lining and living in the empty shell has saved me from making considerable decorating mistakes already.

I wonder where that craving for symmertry comes from. The human body is symmetric. I am sure there is a certain craving for symmetry deeply ingrained in the human mind, quite independent from "good" or "bad" taste.