Glyndebourne: preserving the festival's identity

Glyndebourne opera festival is celebrating its 75th birthday with innovations – but the old idyll persists

Watch Glyndebourne - Giulio Cesare on Plushmusic

Glyndebourne is about to hit its 75th birthday with a spring in its step. When the season opens later this month, there will be a new restaurant designed by architecture's oldest enfant terrible, Nigel Coates. A scheme has been introduced to woo the under-thirties by allotting them cheaper tickets.

There's been a clean-out of the notorious 20-year waiting list for admission to the club which sustains the enterprise, and 4,000 of those in the queue have just been fast-tracked into "associate membership".

A head of commercial development has recently been appointed, charged with "pushing the brand", and they're ahead of the game in exploring the potential of new HD technology and web broadcasting. The organisation is also busy reducing its carbon consumption, and plans for a 230ft wind turbine were approved last year – much to the rage of some of its neighbours.

But the old idyll persists – it's still one of the defining images of an English summer, a deeply serious opera festival framed by a faintly dotty country-house fête champêtre, inaugurated by John Christie in 1934 and now executively chaired by his grandson Gus.

A lavish new photographic book, Glyndebourne: A Visual History, with a sharply candid text by Gus's father George records the on- and off-stage glamour of the place, which author Jeanette Winterson has nobly defended from the puritanical sneers of Lefties and opera-loathers: "If life is about heightened moments, and living well when we can," she wrote, "then Glyndebourne is an essential part of life."

Somehow it all has to be paid for. Glyndebourne receives no public subsidy for the festival, and it has to make a profit in order to flourish. Recent successful seasons have allowed the build-up of some reserves, but the box office must hit around 95 per cent of capacity in order to fulfil the budget.

So far, however, the crunch is being faced with equanimity. Corporate sponsorship has been in decline for a decade, so the further inevitable drop this year is not significant, and there has been a simultaneous compensatory rise in donations from individuals (who are giving around £2 million this year).

A gala concert in June had to moderate its ambitions in order to sell out, but with the help of a big advertising campaign, box office for the festival is already running at 90 per cent, ahead of last year. Everyone knows that next year is likely to be the really tough one, but there are no signs of any tendency to make easy or lazy compromises on matters of quality.

David Pickard has been general director of Glyndebourne since 2001. To him falls the delicate task of assembling a menu which both sustains Glyndebourne's reputation at the operatic forefront (in the business, its overall standards are rated among the highest in the world) and satisfies a demanding clientele who feel that they pay good money to hear nice tunes and see pretty costumes and who baulk at horrible modern music.
This year Pickard has ruffled a few feathers by leaving out Mozart, whose operas have been Glyndebourne's bread, butter and jam since the Thirties.

Pickard is unapologetic, pointing out that there will be two Mozart productions in 2010 – a new staging of Don Giovanni (originally scheduled to be directed by Sam Mendes this summer and postponed for reasons of availability: sadly, Mendes has now dropped out of the project altogether) and a revival of Nicholas Hytner's elegant version of Così fan tutte. "We don't want to feel that Mozart must be included simply because he always has been," says Pickard. "There ought to be good artistic reasons for his every appearance."

The other signal he wants to give out is a long-term commitment to explore the Baroque repertory. This year, there will be a new production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen, conducted by William Christie, and another revival of David McVicar's hugely successful camped-up version of Handel's Giulio Cesare, starring Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra.

Mademoiselle de Niese's performance in this role so entranced Gus Christie when the production was new in 2005 that he is now engaged to marry her – one of many romances conjured by Glyndebourne's seductive ambience.

Further ahead, Pickard promises more Handel, and perhaps a crack at the tough nut of Rameau as well. Beyond the Baroque, two major additions to the repertory will be Britten's Billy Budd, directed by Michael Grandage, and Wagner's Die Meistersinger, directed by David McVicar.

Russian opera, a speciality of Glyndebourne's music director Vladimir Jurowski, will also feature strongly, including a revival of The Rake's Progress in David Hockney's immortal designs. Phobics of horrible modern music will be relieved to hear that no new operas are currently commissioned.

Glyndebourne works hard. "We play 120 performances a year," says Pickard, "which is more than most major Italian opera houses." Apart from the summer season, there's also a national tour every autumn, which this year moves from Glyndebourne itself to Stoke-on-Trent, Milton Keynes, Woking, Plymouth and Norwich.

This is an expensive operation: despite some Arts Council subsidy and audiences averaging 85 per cent of capacity, it loses the organisation some £200,000 per year. But commitment to the tour, says Pickard is "absolute", and lower ticket prices give many people who can't get to the festival access to Glyndebourne productions. Musical standards are high, with an emphasis on giving younger performers their head – the tour's recent music directors have included such distinguished conductors as Ivor Bolton, Louis Langrée, Edward Gardner and Robin Ticciati at the beginning of their careers, and singers such as Roberto Alagna, Gerald Finley and Emma Bell have all made important debuts here.

This year's tour, which also includes the new production of Falstaff and a revival of Jenu˚fa, will see chorus member Gillian Ramm take the leading role of Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte for the first time. Such internal promotion is happily typical of Glyndebourne, which prefers to grow its own organically rather than buy in over-priced imported goods.

Innovation, in other words, comes out of tradition – or, as Pickard succinctly puts it, "Continuity is what we value most."

Glyndebourne Festival's 2009 season runs from May 21 to August 30. Returns at short notice are often available for sold-out performances (01273 813813 or www.glyndebourne com )

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/rupertchristiansen/5285235/Glyndebourne-preserving-the-festivals-identity.html

Britain's Mini masterpiece!

By MICHAEL HANLON



I don't share Hanlon's view that the Mini was the best car ever made. I think that of my Toyota Echo. But, like him, I loved my mini when I had it -- JR

Cramped, leaky and ear-splittingly noisy, it's an unlikely icon. But as the Mini turns 50, one devoted owner salutes the best car ever made...

Machines are not meant to be loved. Who ever swooned for a Boeing 737 on their charter flight to Malaga, or fell for the 5.45 from Waterloo to Surbiton?

But some machines transcend practicality: Concorde, for example, or the great steam locomotives of the 1930s. And then there's the Mini - 50 years old this week and, to my mind, not only a machine worthy of devotion, but a work of creative and engineering genius.

I have driven faster cars, more comfortable cars, certainly more expensive cars.

I once spent a day with a 252mph Bugatti Veyron - a fabulous car which costs £1million - yet I cannot honestly say I had more fun in it than in the £300 battered but beloved Mini Mayfair which my wife and I owned in the early Nineties and which could be driven at full throttle almost anywhere on public roads.

Perhaps I was biased, having learned to drive in another Mini - a bright yellow one belonging to my instructor, with a slightly iffy clutch that was the legacy of British Leyland's unique attitude to quality control at the time.

It wasn't the only car I'd ever driven as a learner. I used to practise in my mum's Ford Escort - a far more powerful car. But even as a learner, it was clear that nothing parked more neatly, turned more swiftly or was easier to back around a corner than the Mini.

The story of the Mini, told in two new books celebrating the car's half-century, is quite extraordinary. It was born in the 1950s, a difficult age when Britain was battling post-war debt and reconstruction costs and, thanks to the Suez Crisis, the rising price of oil.

Back then the upper classes drove (or were driven in) Daimlers, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The middle classes had their Rileys, Rovers and Austins and Wolseleys - comfortable but often oldfashioned, unadventurous cars.

Brilliant

Poorer people simply didn't drive at all, or if they did were forced to squeeze into impecunious oddities such as the lethal 'bubble cars' which were briefly fashionable. But in Germany, Volkswagen's Beetle was proving a hit and threatening to take over the world. Britain needed an answer.

That came thanks to one of the country's great engineering geniuses, Alex Issigonis. Of Bavarian-Greek extraction, Issigonis, who had already designed the brilliant Morris Minor, was ordered by the head of the British Motor Corporation, Leonard Lord, to come up with something better than 'these bloody awful bubble cars - we need a proper miniature car'.

The 'Mini' had to be small - fitting in a box 10ft x 4ft x 4ft. Most important, there had to be four seats and the passenger compartment had to occupy 80per cent of the car's volume.

It had to be cheap, light and use as much existing machinery (including one of BMC's engines) as possible, to save costs. Issigonis sketched a design for a little boxy car - literally, on the back of an envelope. He fulfilled the design brief first by making the Mini front-wheel-drive (unlike most other cars at the time) which liberated space.

Then he swivelled the engine around sideways, giving a few more precious inches, and stuck the gearbox in the sump. To save more space (and weight) his friend, Alex Moulton, designed a simple and highly effective rubber suspension system, meaning that the Mini had no need for heavy and bulky springs.

Inside, the Mini was beautifully spartan. The doors had no padding, and because the windows slid open, rather than being wound up and down, there was no need for a bulky mechanism. No door handle inside, either - just a piece of string!

On the dashboard there was no question of glossy walnut or intricate dials - merely one big speedometer and a shelf. Thin seats, and plenty of glass to give excellent visibility.

From an engineering point of view, the Mini was actually quite a complex vehicle, but Issigonis tried to keep it as simple as possible, even having the welding seams on the outside to make construction easier.

No one really knew what to make of the Mini when it was released in May 1959. Costing £500 including tax (about £5,500 in today's money) the Mini was cheap - and it was good.

Motoring writers praised its go-kart handling and sheer turn of speed - a well-driven Mini could easily outrun a Jag on a twisty road and the Mini (officially called the Austin Seven before its nickname took over) made the Beetle look like a lumbering dinosaur.

In fact, the engine had to be detuned because BMC feared that it was simply too fast.

But people were suspicious and initially the Mini didn't sell. Its name, its smallness and its cheapness actually seemed to be counting against it.

Inspired

This may have been the age of austerity, but people didn't like to be reminded of the fact. It was only some years after its launch that the Mini finally took off, when it was embraced by drivers from a social spectrum very different from its intended market.

Issigonis was thinking along the right lines in October 1959 when, in an inspired bit of marketing, he took the Queen for a ride in his new baby around Windsor Great Park. Her Majesty drove the Mini and was impressed. And if a Mini was good enough for the Queen, it was good enough for anyone.

Before long, the Mini was bring driven by celebrities and pop stars, as well as royalty. Twiggy had one. So did fellow model Jean Shrimpton and film star Peter Sellers. Tory Cabinet Minister John Profumo bought one, as did Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. The Mini became (like the Beetle) a truly classless car.

What was so impressive was that the Mini was not originally made to be cute or fashionable (like so many of today's ghastly retro-pastiche cars). It looked the way it did because that was how it needed to look. Form followed function, in the best engineering tradition.

It wasn't perfect, of course. There was little room for safety equipment. Have a bad crash in a Mini and it was probably going to hurt.

And it was not always a comfortable ride - particularly for passengers. I remember a 100-mile drive across Ireland in the back of one. My knees complained for weeks afterwards.

Then there was that tiny boot - big enough only for a couple of overnight bags. Worse was a design flaw which meant that driving through a puddle inevitably meant a wet distributor and consequent misfire. (The solution? Get a rubber washing-up glove, snip the tips off the fingers and fit them around the electric leads.)

Astonishing

Minis rusted, leaked and were noisy (there was no sound insulation), but they were still wonderful.

Several variants were made, from the souped-up rally-winning Coopers (a good original one from the 1960s is worth £20,000 or more today) to the rather dire snub-nosed Clubmans and odd Riley- and Wolseley-badged versions that looked like someone had put a limo in the tumble drier and shrunk it.

When the Mini was finally killed off, in 2000, nearly 5.5million had been sold. And it has never been bettered, or replaced. Rights to the name were retained by BMW when it sold Rover, but BMW's new 'MINI', a much larger car, is like the old one in name only, not in spirit.

Today's 'small' cars are behemoths in comparison - overpowered machines full of luxuries no one truly needs.

How astonishing to consider that back in the 1950s, when the world was broke and everyone worried about the future price of petrol, Britain had the engineering talent to come up with a solution.

We still have the talent but, sadly, no longer an indigenous car industry that might capitalise on our new age of austerity and uncertainty.

As for my own beloved Mini, changing circumstances necessitated a (reluctant) sale. I miss it still. But like tens of thousands of other Mini owners, it's no idle boast to say that for a few joyful years, I once owned the best car ever made.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1177296/MICHAEL-HANLON-Britains-Mini-masterpiece.html

Britain's secret German army

Meet the Second World War veterans who felt compelled to fight against their homeland

There is that wonderful line in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove when the American president admonishes the Soviet ambassador and one of his Air Force generals for wrestling over a spy camera: "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here – this is the War Room."
It was Ken Adam who came up with the design for that simple but unforgettable set: a dark, oppressive, cavernous chamber dominated by a huge, circular conference table and giant, glowing wall maps marking the approach of nuclear Armageddon.

Adam is arguably cinema's greatest production designer – a knighthood, two Oscars and a string of Baftas testifying to his talent. The version of the Sixties we see on celluloid is, to a large extent, the product of his imagination. He gave us the Bond villain lair and the shadowy backdrops to the Harry Palmer films, The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin. Indeed, his is one of the best-known names in the film industry, so it is odd to hear him say that he cannot quite remember when he acquired it. Before Ken Adam was Ken Adam, he was Keith Adam; and before that Klaus Adam. The reason for the changes was survival.

Adam, 88, is the only German to have served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. As a Sergeant Pilot in 609 Squadron, flying Typhoon fighter-bombers on low-level strikes across northern France, he would have been put in front of a firing squad if captured and identified. Jewish-born but still the holder of a German passport, he was to the Nazis a traitor.

Some 10,000 men and women from Germany and Austria, Jews and other opponents of the Nazi regime, fought in British uniform. As "friendly enemy aliens" they could not be compelled to join up. All were volunteers, representing almost one in eight of the 78,000 German and Austrian nationals who fled to Britain before September 1939.
The King's uniform did not confer British nationality. Those who wanted to make Britain their permanent home were granted passports only after the war. Hated and persecuted in their homeland and treated with suspicion in their adopted country, they lived out the war in a kind of limbo, uncertain as to what the future held. What drove them was an absolute detestation of Nazism.

"I felt quite pleased about the outbreak of war," recalls Sir Ken. He sits in the small office of his Knightsbridge home, surrounded by awards and books on art, cinema and war. "I hated the Nazis and was absolutely convinced that I was fortunate to be able to do some damage to that regime."

Sir Ken is one of a handful of veterans featured in Churchill's German Army, a documentary chronicling this most curious of Allied contingents. It is 75 years since he left Germany but he still speaks with a soft German accent.

Born into considerable wealth – his father owned a well-known sports shop in Berlin – his family arrived in Britain with a few pieces of furniture and a Renoir. His father, who had fought for the Kaiser in the First World War, initially refused to leave his homeland but was persuaded to do so after being detained by the Gestapo.

He died a broken man in 1936. When war broke out, Sir Ken was studying architecture and helping to design air-raid shelters. He joined the non-combatant Pioneer Corps in 1940 and the following year transferred from the Army to the RAF.

"I always wanted to be a pilot – I knew I was a natural," he says. "I was honoured to join 609 because it was a top-scoring squadron, very international – Poles, Belgians, everybody. I was renamed Keith but they knew me as Heinie. There was no prejudice, no discrimination. The only thing that happened, which was quite funny, was that, on one or two occasions, I was overheard in a pub or cafe on leave and the police were called. Someone thought they'd caught a spy."

The squadron had a tough war, before and after D-Day – low-level attacks meant high losses. "I would see a friend go straight down into the ground and the first thought was, 'Tough luck, but I'm glad it wasn't me'."

In September 1944, the Daily Sketch ran a story on the RAF's German fighter pilot. "Looking back it was a bloody stupid thing to do. It could have got me shot if I'd had to bail out."

Below Sir Ken, fighting in the fields of Normandy, was another of the men featured in the documentary. Willy Field was born as Willy Hirschfeld in Bonn in 1920.
"I volunteered because I wanted to repay Britain for saving my life," says Mr Field, who lives in north London. A Jew, he fled Germany in May 1939 after spending six months in Dachau concentration camp. During his confinement he had witnessed men dropping dead from exposure after being forced to stand on parade for 60 hours in retaliation for the disappearance of an inmate.

"I knew they would soon come back for me, but if it wasn't for Britain I would have perished in the Holocaust. Some thought I was silly to want to fight but I wanted to do something; I wanted to get back at Hitler and the Nazis."

When the Phony War of 1939-40 turned to disaster in France, attitudes to enemy aliens hardened. Churchill ordered mass internment and Willy Field found himself in the crowded, festering hold of a liner en route to Australia with 2,600 prisoners of war and refugees. Following a period of internment in Australia, he returned to Britain to join the Pioneer Corps, and in 1943 was transferred to the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars. The driver of a Cromwell tank, he saw action in Normandy and the Low Countries. In 1944, as his unit led the British advance into the Netherlands, his tank was struck by an 88mm shell. He was the only survivor from a crew of five.

"I feel absolutely British. I have been back to Germany – it is a totally different country. But I say you should forgive but not forget."

Mr Field, a dedicated Arsenal supporter, meets regularly with his friend Bill Howard, who lives nearby in north London. Mr Howard, 90, arrived in Britain in 1938, shortly before the pogrom of Kristallnacht. He was Horst Herzberg then; again, he was Jewish. On joining the British Army he chose the name of William Ashley Howard – Howard because he liked the actor Leslie Howard and Ashley because that was Howard's part in Gone With The Wind. In 1943, he transferred to the Royal Navy.

"My job was to monitor German radio traffic. The captain called me in and said, 'Now look here, what are your duties?'

"I said: 'Monitoring enemy RT, sir', and he said 'So you're fluent in German then?'

I said I was, and he asked me where I went to school. When I told him it was the Hindenburg Oberrealschule, he said: 'Where's that?'

"I replied: 'Germany, sir.'

"He said: 'But you are British?' I said: 'No sir.'

"He looked bemused and said: "I do hope the Admiralty knows what it's doing.' Dismissed."

Mr Howard is every inch the Englishman now. "We were in the American sector on D-Day and things went pretty smoothly for us, but on the fourth day the Luftwaffe suddenly turned up and started dropping bombs all around us. We were looking at each other and feeling worried when the hatch opened and a Lieutenant-Commander appeared. He was red-faced and I think he was drunk, and he smiled and said: 'I say, chaps, don't worry – I'm here,' and disappeared.

"We roared with laughter. It was wonderful – no other nationality would have been like that. We forget it sometimes but, you know, this is a fantastic country."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/britainatwar/5220598/Britains-secret-German-army.html

How Hitler's 50th birthday party sparked World War II

Adolf Hitler’s birthdays had, since his coming to power in 1933, always been occasions for his sycophants to demonstrate their unswerving adulation, but this, his 50th, on April 20, 1939, was to be a nauseating extravaganza that would surpass any previous such occasions. Chief organiser and master of ceremonies was none other than Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s devoted spin doctor and evil propaganda genius. The celebrations began on the afternoon of April 19 and by evening, Hitler — who was always interested in technology and loved cars — was driven in a cavalcade of 50 limousines along the four-mile East-West axis across Berlin, a newly built boulevard designed by Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, and which was designed to be the central thoroughfare through the capital of the Nazi empire.



A year to remember: Hitler is presented with a painting of his hero, Frederick the Great, by Heinrich Himmler (centre), the head of the SS

All along it, crowds thronged and cheered, thousands of flaming torches and Nazi banners lining the way. Waiting for him at the Brandenburg Gate was Speer. ‘From the distance came cheers,’ noted Speer, ‘swelling as Hitler’s motorcade approached and becoming a steady roar.’ As Hitler eventually stepped out beside him, the overawed architect took a deep breath, then said: ‘Mein Fuhrer, I herewith report the completion of the East-West Axis. May the work speak for itself!’

Inviting Speer to join him in his car for the last stretch of the journey, Hitler then moved on to the Reich Chancellery, his residence in Berlin. From the balcony, he watched a torch-lit marchpast, while beyond, a dense and near-hysterical crowd in the Wilhelmsplatz screamed joyously. As midnight chimed, Hitler withdrew into one of the vast, imposing halls in the Reich Chancellery, where first Speer then others of his entourage presented him with early birthday presents. From Speer himself there was a 12ft-high model of a huge triumphal arch that he planned to build in the city. Elsewhere, laid out on tables around the room, were hundreds more gifts: marble statues, paintings, porcelain, silver, antique weapons, tapestries, rare artefacts, even a Titian. ‘Pretty much a collection of kitsch,’ noted Speer, revealing the contempt most of Hitler’s acolytes held for one another.

Hitler gave most only a cursory glance, admiring some, mocking others. This, however, had been merely a warm-up for the main event, which took place on the birthday itself. The centrepiece was a huge military display of soldiers, tanks, half-tracks and other military vehicles all along the East-West Axis, a show of force designed to make any nation that dared to cross the path of the new Germany cower. Overhead, waves of aircraft from Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe flew across the city. Later there were more presents, not least a painting of Hitler’s own hero, the 18th-century Prussian leader Frederick the Great, given to him by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. A photograph survives of this moment. In it, Hitler glances at the painting with a strange lack of expression on his face.



Frenzy: Hitler in front of a huge crowd at his birthday parade in Berlin in April 1939

Shaking his hand is Himmler, bedecked in his black SS Nazi finery and grinning fawningly at his master. ‘The Fuhrer is feted like no other mortal has ever been,’ gushed Goebbels to his diary the following day. Goebbels was hardly the most objective of judges, but despite the brutality that the Nazis had shown in the Night Of The Long Knives (when Hitler executed leading members of the party) or in the violence of Crystal Night (when Jewish businesses were attacked) and despite the SS, Gestapo, concentration camps and grotesque anti-Semitism, Hitler was the most popular head of state in Europe, if not the entire world. The difference from the dark days of defeat and depression after World War I were astounding. Unemployment was non-existent, Germany was crossed by autobahns and airliners, the country seemed to be prospering and, every bit as importantly, the wrongs of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 were being righted.

The Rhineland had been reoccupied, Austria had peacefully joined the Reich; so, too, had the German-speaking Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. A month before, the remainder of Czechoslovakia had been morphed into the Greater Reich.

Germany had regained her lost pride. She had emerged from the ruins of the Great War and was becoming great again. And all without a shot being fired. As his 50th birthday celebrations had shown, in the six years since his taking power, adulation of the Fuhrer had reached cult-like proportions. Hitler, gushed one 17-year-old German girl, was ‘a great man, a genius, a person sent to us from heaven’. She was far from being alone in thinking such thoughts. There is no question that Hitler’s achievements since coming to power had been considerable, but as one astonishing triumph superseded another, so his belief in his own genius grew.



Hitler decided on his birthday to face war by invading Poland, above

His megalomania now knew no bounds, and surrounded by sycophantic yes-men it was no surprise that he began regularly to compare himself with Napoleon, Bismarck and even Frederick the Great. Increasingly removed from any kind of criticism or checks on his actions, his power was now absolute, his self-belief total. Yet despite the euphoria of his 50th birthday, Hitler had turned a fateful corner that spring of 1939 and was leading Germany on a road to catastrophe. A man willing to listen to advice might have heeded warnings that the Western powers of Britain and France would not continue to sit back and let Germany trample over other European countries. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, had acquiesced to Hitler’s demands over the Sudetenland in October the previous year on the understanding that Germany had no further ambitions with regard to land conquest. Hitler had duly given him such an assurance, then five months later, in March 1939, had invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Contemptuous of Chamberlain and the British and French, the Fuhrer had told his acolytes that the Western powers might protest, but as before would do nothing. In this, he had been woefully wrong. Chamberlain might have been prepared to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt once, but not again. His ministers and, indeed, the whole country fell behind the Prime Minister’s new tough stance. Public opinion in Britain agreed with Chamberlain that Hitler would have to be tackled.

Nonetheless, Hitler noted that still Britain and France had done nothing and with Czechoslovakia now annexed into the Reich, he turned his attention to Poland. In 1919, the new Polish state had been granted a strip of land between the province of East Prussia and the rest of Germany that gave them access to the Baltic Sea. Hitler wanted this largely German-peopled strip of land back and had assumed that Poland could be threatened and bullied into ceding this Danzig ‘corridor’ back to Germany. This done, he believed Poland would then become a virtual German satellite and ally when he eventually launched an attack on the Soviet Union.

The Poles, however, had no intention of being bullied and flatly rejected German proposals to cede the corridor despite threats of military action. Then, on the last day of March, came the news that Britain had agreed a mutual assistance pact with the Polish government should Germany attempt to make any territorial claims on Poland. Hitler flew into a rage, thumping his fist on the marble-topped table in his study. ‘I’ll brew them a devil’s potion,’ he muttered. It was at this moment, 70 years ago, that the die was cast: Poland, he realised, was not going to roll over without a fight.

Speer had been on a visit to Mussolini’s Italy during Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia, but on his return at the beginning of April noticed a mood of general depression. The days of peaceful victories seemed to be over.



Grotesque: Survivors of Auschwitz at the death camp after liberation in 1945

Furthermore, the economic situation in Germany was beginning seriously to falter once more, offset by an increasingly acute labour shortage caused by Hitler’s rapid expansion of the Armed Forces. ‘Apprehensions about the future,’ wrote Speer, ‘filled us all.’ The Fuhrer, however, brushed such matters aside. What did he care of such trifling domestic issues? Of course, there would be economic problems, he reasoned, but these would be solved in due course when the lands of the East would be opened up, creating lebensraum — ‘living space’ — and natural resources.

This belief also ran alongside his increasingly fervent conviction that war was a panacea. Many of the Nazi elite might have secretly voiced concerns, but Hitler was exhilarated by the prospect. ‘If it comes to war,’ he told Speer, ‘the German people are tough enough.’ As Hitler turned 50, he was preparing to announce to the German people his new stance against Poland and Britain. Just as his belief in his greatness had reached new heights, so, too, had he come to accept that his own and Germany’s destinies were inextricably linked. Germany had to expand further, of that he was convinced, and that meant one thing: war. Germany would fight that war and win, or else sink back into the abyss. It was as plain to him as black and white. There could be no middle ground. Allied to this belief was his conviction that time was running out.

He had always been a chronic hypochondriac and now, with this milestone birthday, he had been reminded that he was beginning to age. ‘I’m now 50 years old,’ he told his entourage in August, ‘still in full possession of my strength. The problems must be solved by me, and I can wait no longer. In a few years I will be physically and perhaps mentally no longer up to it.’ His Reichstag speech on April 28, 1939, lasted two hours and 20 minutes and was prompted not only by Britain and Poland’s new stance, but also by President Roosevelt’s demand that Germany give an assurance that they would not attack 30 named countries — Poland included — for 25 years. Incensed, Hitler responded to the American President, contemptuously berating him with heavy sarcasm.



Cult figure: Hilter with the children of Nazi dignitaries on his birthday

He also used the speech to tear up the terms of a naval agreement made with Britain four years earlier. After the applause had died down, he returned to the Reich Chancellery, exhausted and drenched in sweat. Listening to the speech was the Berlin-based American journalist William L Shirer, who was impressed by Hitler’s performance, if not the words he spoke. ‘Still much doubt here among the informed,’ Shirer wrote in his diary, ‘whether Hitler has made up his mind to begin a world war for the sake of Danzig.’

But Hitler had made up his mind. A few weeks later he told a meeting of senior Nazis and military commanders that the time had come to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. ‘We cannot expect a repetition of Czechoslovakia,’ he told them. ‘There will be war.’ However, he did recognise that a showdown with the West, and Britain in particular, was probably no longer avoidable in the long run. ‘Therefore England is our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death,’ he told his lackeys.

It was not an open declaration of war, but it was a declaration of intent. It was also one that made his military commanders gulp nervously, for although the rest of the world was fooled by the newsreels of military parades and Luftwaffe fly-pasts, they knew, as Hitler knew, that the German war machine was nothing like as invincible as had been portrayed. Their navy was small, dwarfed by that of Britain, while neither the army nor air force was as large as those of France. Then, to the relief of those listening, he told them he did not envisage conflict with Britain and France for several years, that is, until 1943-44, and not over Poland despite declarations to the opposite. ‘Hitler spoke a sentence which still echoes in my ears,’ wrote Paul Schmidt, the Fuhrer’s interpreter during his diplomatic wrangling in that fateful spring and summer. ‘I am unshakeably convinced,’ he declared ‘that neither England nor France will embark upon a general war.’

It was a fatal miscalculation. Nonetheless, Hitler did fear a tripartite pact between Britain, France and his other implacable enemy, the Soviet Union, and so in order to achieve his immediate goal and neutralise such a threat, he began feverishly to woo the Russians, recognising that Stalin held the key to the destruction of Poland.



Adoration: German wait to greet Hitler after midnight on April 20, 1939

If Russia could be tempted by a partition of that country, then surely Britain’s and France’s guarantees would be valueless, and Britain — the most dangerous enemy — would be weakened. Not until August 24 was the subsequent German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact signed, an astonishing piece of diplomacy that stunned the world and which Hitler believed had enabled him to march into Poland without fear of yet starting a world war.

How wrong he was. His decision to invade Poland on September 1 must surely be one of the most catastrophic in world history. Chamberlain’s reedy voice announced to the world at 11am on Sunday, September 3, that Britain was at war with Germany. Soon after, so, too, was France. Six years later and with some 50million people dead and much of Europe lying in ruins, the world’s most violent and terrible conflict was over. Yet the fate of the world was laid down 70 years ago this month, when a delusional, ego-maniacal despot turned 50 and made his irreversible decision to wage war on Poland.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1171630/How-Hitlers-50th-birthday-party-sparked-World-War-II.html

When Goering was a pin-up: The German women's magazines that mixed fashion with Fascism

With knitting patterns, recipes and fashion, it seems to offer a diverting read for housewives and mothers. But a clue to the sinister aims of this women's magazine lies in the choice of cover model  -  Hermann Goering, a Hitler henchman and few people's idea of a pin-up. The Nazi publishers had more on their minds than merely entertaining German women while their menfolk were fighting the Allies.



Hermann Goering poses with his daughter Edda for the cover of Frauen Warte in February 1940 just months before as commander of the Luftwaffe he launched the Battle of Britain

Each issue of Frauen Warte ( translated as Women Wait) contained articles full of propaganda designed to brainwash readers into accepting Hitler's tyranny. The cover photograph from February 1940 shows Luftwaffe chief Goering cuddling baby daughter Edda in a warped version of the kind of 'tough but sensitive man' images often seen today.





The military backdrop was ever-present in the magazines





Pastoral themes and emphasis on the family were interspersed with Nazi propaganda. Inside is an article entitled The Expert Housewife of Today, discussing schooling for women in home economics. But there are also two pages devoted to claiming England was responsible for the Second World War because it wanted to take over the world.

It is among 65 issues of the magazine belonging to a private collector, which are to be auctioned.



A two-page article claims England is responsible for the Second World War, before more familiar stories on home economics and fashion news



This article talks about all the ways that women help society from ironing to working in a laboratory

Frauen Warte, the Nazi Party's biweekly magazine for women, ran from 1935 to 1945. In 1939, it had a circulation of 1.9million. Richard Westwood-Brookes, of Mullock's Auctioneers, said: 'As you turn through the pages you get an incredibly creepy feeling.



Hitler salutes the troops on one cover of the women's magazine. The collection is going under the hammer at  Mullock's Auctioneers and is expected to fetch around  £700

'It shows the Nazi propaganda machine was so well-oiled it infiltrated every area of human society. ''You've got magazines very much in the mould of today's glossy women's mags, filled with things you would expect, but then with propaganda inside.' The magazines are expected to fetch at least £700 in total at the Mullock's auction at Ludlow Racecourse in Shropshire on April 23.



The 65 magazines are stuffed with recipes, songs for folk groups and fashion advice




http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1169882/When-Goering-pin-The-German-womens-magazines-mixed-fashion-Fascism.html

Just How Free Is the World’s Freest Economy?

Hong Kong has the freest economy in the whole world, according to both the Index of Economic Freedom published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, and the Economic Freedom of the World report published by the Fraser Institute and the Cato Institute.

There are good reasons for this ranking. The highest tax rate on personal income in the country is only 16 percent, and there are no taxes on interest, dividends, or capital gains. Hong Kong has complete free trade. There is very little special-interest (mercantilistic) interference in most markets. Hong Kong is one of the least corrupt countries in the world. And its legal system is based on British common law.

These undoubtedly are the reasons why this tiny land of 7 million people, with no natural resources to speak of, has a per-capita income ($29,900) that rivals that of the United States. Hong Kong enjoyed meteoric economic success in the space of a few decades — and did so mainly under British rule. Ironically, while the mother country was stifled by socialism and the welfare state (before Margaret Thatcher, at any rate), the colony soared from Third World to First World status by adopting capitalism instead. By the time Hong Kong was turned over to China, its per-capita income exceeded that of Britain.

But just how free is Hong Kong? On a recent visit, I spent an entire week with people in and out of government, and what I learned was surprising and disturbing.

Shocking fact number one: One out of every two residents of Hong Kong lives in government housing. Shocking fact number two: Under Hong Kong’s system of socialized medicine, everyone is entitled to (nearly) free health care (there are only nominal charges, and even those are waived if your income is low). In a sense, Hong Kong is even more socialistic than the Chinese mainland when it comes to housing and health care.

Of course, when things are free, demand exceeds supply. So there is a waiting list for public housing, and the average wait to see a medical specialist is more than seven months. That is why almost one out of every two health-care dollars is spent privately — with people paying market prices to obtain promptly what they are supposed to be getting gratis.

It gets worse. In a country that is often held up as the quintessential alternative to the modern welfare state, it turns out that people can and do apply for . . . well . . . welfare. Shocking fact number three: One out of every seven Hong Kong residents is receiving cash payments from the government, and more than 40 percent of these people are neither old nor disabled.

To begin with, there is a basic cash benefit. Then there is a whole slew of child-related cash allowances, covering such items as day care, pre-school, kindergarten, textbooks, and school lunches. Add to that a transportation allowance, a utilities allowance, and even a burial allowance, and you get a whole new meaning of the idea of “cradle to grave.”

There are no lifetime limits to these benefits, but they are reduced if you earn any income. Start with an average $12,000 annual cash benefit. If the family earns $8,000, the benefit is reduced to $4,000. If the family earns $9,000, the benefit is only $3,000. In economic terms, these families face a 100 percent marginal tax rate on private-sector earnings. One wonders why anyone works at all in Hong Kong. The answer seems to be: There is a strong work ethic that overrides the lure of living off the state.

Shocking fact number four: There is no private property in Hong Kong — at least not real property. All land is owned by the government. Nominal owners are actually leaseholders who have merely acquired the right to use the property they have.

Ah, I know what you’re thinking. At least Hong Kong isn’t infected by political correctness and nanny-state lunacies. Think again. There are laws against age, sex, and race discrimination. Smoking in restaurants and office buildings is illegal. And (would you believe it?) Hong Kong has an indigenous population for whom some people feel a lot of guilt. Thus any male (females don’t count — an indigenous people’s exception to the no-sex-discrimination rule) who can prove he is a lineal descendant of a male who was living in the region in 1898 is entitled to a free plot of land on which to build a “small house.” Since land is so scarce, its value is worth many times the construction costs of a house — allowing many an 18-year-old to enter into a flip arrangement with a real-estate investor and become an overnight millionaire.

I don’t want to be too negative here. I would rank Hong Kong among the best places to live in the whole world. It is a city of glass and steel that is visually stunning. Schoolchildren wear uniforms. The people are unfailingly friendly. And although there are no obese people to speak of, it has some of the best restaurants in all of Asia.

The public-transport system is largely privatized and self-sustaining (no eco-friendly but uneconomical subsidies). There is a measure of school choice. One public school I observed posted ads touting its attributes. If it fails to attract enough students, it will have to close. The constitution requires a balanced budget. And maybe most important of all, government spending is only 20 percent of national income. By contrast, the U.S. government takes about 50 percent more than that; the average European government takes twice as much.

So what does the future hold? When the British turned Hong Kong over to China in 1997, the great fear was that China would try to turn it into a Communist state. As part of an effort to forestall that outcome, the British left the country with institutions that would move in the direction of true democracy with universal suffrage.

In retrospect, the fear was completely misplaced. Capitalism in Hong Kong is in far greater danger from its own citizens than it is from anyone in Beijing.

Ironically, the biggest problem is: The people of Hong Kong are just like us! They don’t understand free enterprise any more than Americans understand it. They are no more dedicated to it than we are. They do not think of free-market capitalism as a moral and ethical ideal any more than Americans or Europeans think of it that way.

True enough, people in Hong Kong are aware that theirs has been named the freest economy in the world, and they are proud of that fact — even though capitalism was handed to them by a colonial government that no one in Hong Kong ever voted for. But from what I can tell, they would be perfectly willing to let it die a death of a thousand cuts — just as the rest of the developed world has done.

All signs point in the wrong direction. The government is about to impose Hong Kong’s first minimum-wage law. It is pushing for expansion of the public sector in health care. And when the welfare cash allowances described above were reduced recently, almost all the members of the elected Legislative Council (which acts in an advisory role) protested the move.

The Chinese government has pledged universal suffrage in Hong Kong by 2020. But is that really such a good idea? Right now, the most important bulwark against the creation of a welfare state in Hong Kong is the fact that the citizens cannot vote for it.

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/2228105/posts

New book lays bare French collaboration with the Nazis

AN unusual history of the Nazis in France has trampled on one of the country’s most painful taboos by focusing on women who slept with the enemy during the occupation.

Flouting a long-running convention of silence on what he calls “horizontal collaboration”, Patrick Buisson, the author, describes the Nazi occupation as the “golden age” of the French brothel, chronicling a dramatic growth in prostitution to satisfy German demand.

The book, 1940-1945, Erotic Years, is the second hefty volume in a wide-ranging sexual history of the occupation that one critic last week described as a “magisterial provocation” because of its assault on the myth that life under the Nazi boot was all resistance, hardship and suffering.

Brothels that had been on the verge of closure before the war, as the abolitionist league gained force, enjoyed a dramatic revival as German soldiers poured into France.

Some of the so-called maisons closes were reserved exclusively for officers, whose good looks and gallantry – they would bring chocolates and flowers – won them admirers in a country whose natives were rather less charming with prostitutes.

“I’m almost ashamed to say it,” Fabienne Jamet, a madame at one of the top addresses, is quoted as saying, referring to debauched, champagne-drenched soirées, “but I’ve never had so much fun in my life. Those nights of the occupation were fantastic.”

Seldom has a book delved as deeply into what is regarded by many as a source of national shame: far from being forced into bed with the invaders through economic hardship (as the official history would have people believe), thousands of French women fell in love with German soldiers and it is estimated that 200,000 children were born to Franco-German couples during the war.

“That the departure of the Germans caused thousands of women deep affliction . . . is one of those facts that political necessity commands us to ignore,” writes Buisson, director of France’s History Channel and a presidential adviser.

Members of the artistic and literary elite were “particularly sensitive to the seductiveness of the enemy”, the author says. He describes a string of romances between German officers and such iconic figures as Coco Chanel, the fashion designer, Mistinguett, the singer, Colette, the writer, and Arletty, the pseudonym under which Léonie Bathiat, the actress and star of Les Enfants du Paradis, was known.

Arletty later justified her affair with a dashing young Luftwaffe captain by saying: “My heart is French but my body is international.”

The aristocracy also showed a fondness for les boches and many of the most famous Parisian hostesses, including Countess Marie-Laure de Noailles, allowed themselves to be “occupied” by the invaders.

“Their [the elite’s] behaviour helped to take away the sense of culpability of women of more humble station who felt the same fascination or attraction [for the enemy],” the author writes.

Many, inevitably, sought favours from the Germans and there were an estimated 100,000 “occasional prostitutes” working in Paris – five to six times more than before the war. Women began dyeing their hair black in the belief that it would make them seem “exotic” because the wives of their Teutonic clients were more likely to be fair-haired.

“In less than an hour,” writes Buisson, “a girl who sells her charms to the occupier can earn up to three times the daily allowance that was given to the wives of French prisoners of war in 1941.”

Brothels, many of which were requisitioned for the exclusive use of the Germans, became a booming industry, upon which the collaborationist Vichy government imposed taxes. The business was tightly monitored by the occupiers, who imposed three stringent weekly medical examinations on women to prevent disease in the ranks.

The 15 doctors in charge of these inspections were obliged to sign a form in which they acknowledged that any negligence on their part would be considered by the Wehrmacht to be “an act of sabotage”.

“Never have the brothels of France been better maintained than in their presence,” said Jamet, who ran a club called One Two Two. The working girls were just as grateful. “Everything indicates that the new clients of the summer of 1940 were given a favourable form of treatment that the seductive power of the [deutsch-mark] alone could not entirely account for,” writes the author.

Officers seemed often to regard the brothel as a home from home: “They were a substitute for the warmth of a distant hearth, convivial places where you would go for a drink, to listen to music, to dance with the women without necessarily going upstairs with one at the end of the evening.”

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a distressing event for Parisian brothel owners, Buisson relates, because so many of their “youngest and most vigorous” clients were redeployed to the eastern front.

Women ended up paying for their betrayal: thousands had their heads shaved to shame them after the liberation – “the revenge of the French male”, Buisson says.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6078341.ece

Uncovering 5,000 years of Malta's history

Older than the pyramids, the island's ancient temples are absurdly uncelebrated



In a striking hilltop position, with views over land and sea, stand the remains of an ancient temple.

Built of yellow limestone, it glows in the sun. Its raised forecourt leads into a central aisle flanked by semicircular apses, altars, carved bowls and faint remembrances of decorative reliefs.

This is thought to be among the oldest buildings in the world - constructed a thousand years before the Pyramids and long before Stonehenge. It is not in Egypt or Greece or anywhere in the Middle East, but in Malta. This little country of sun and package holidays has more to offer than just relaxing by the pool.

The stone in front of me stands 6m (20ft) high and 4m wide and weighs more than 50 tonnes. It is part of the megalithic wall, once up to 16m high, that surrounded the temple complex.

Such massive building blocks earned the temple its name - Ggantija - and the legend that it was built by giants. In reality it was constructed by a society of settled farmers who colonised Malta about 7,000 years ago, beginning to build in stone about 3,500BC.

Substantial remains can still be seen at Ggantija on Gozo, a 20-minute ferry ride from the main island, and on Malta at Mnajda and Hagar Qim - both reopening this summer after the addition of a protective canopy - as well as Tarxien, near the capital, Valletta. All are Unesco World Heritage Sites.

Tarxien is in a rather uninspiring urban setting, but it is worth a visit to put in context some of the best temple carvings that have been moved from here to the National Museum of Archaeology. The museum is in the centre of historic Valletta, a wonderful place to wander under delightful overhanging balconies, with glimpses of the sea popping up at the end of almost every road.

The buildings are mostly of the same warm local limestone used by the temple builders and many date from the time of the Knights of Malta. The museum occupies one of the finest, the Baroque Auberge (grand hostel) of the Knights of Provence, built in 1571. Step inside, though, and you go back much farther than the 16th century.

In the museum's neolithic galleries you can see what Malta's prehistoric temples would have looked like, with lintels and altars decorated with spiral patterns, pitted dots, red ochre and reliefs of plants and animals. A procession of sheep parades along a Tarxien frieze and a Nemo-like fish flounders on a stone block. Of the statues, the most intriguing are the “Fat Ladies of Malta”, generously proportioned female figures with vast bottoms and fringed skirts. A guide pointed out that until 20 years ago it was considered healthy and feminine for a Maltese woman to appear rounded and well-fed.

Behind a door in the middle of a suburban street lies the extraordinary prehistoric site of the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, a 5,000-year-old underground necropolis carved out of solid rock. Recently restored by Unesco, the labyrinth of passageways and chambers is carefully conserved with low lighting, and visitor numbers limited to ten an hour. This adds to the atmosphere, making it easier to imagine the time when funeral parties brought the bones of their compatriots to rest here.

Armed with an audioguide, we descend along metal walkways into the subterranean darkness. In a couple of chambers red ochre spirals and honeycomb patterns still decorate the walls. When we reach the “Holy of Holies” there is a sharp intake of breath. It is almost like time travel, staring at an ancient temple 10m underground. This is unique. Lying by the pool can wait.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/holiday_type/history_and_travel/article6067375.ece

How Handel became England's national treasure

So you want to be a legendary composer? As Handel fever hits the country, our correspondent reveals the secrets of success



Go freelance

It was Handel’s biggest gamble, but it would pay off spectacularly. Yes, a lot of his masterpieces were commissioned by the Hanoverian monarchs, who wanted the greatest composer in England explicitly to harness his talents to Britain’s triumphs, and, by proxy, theirs. “But Handel didn’t have a patron as such,” says Christopher Hogwood, who has curated Handel Reveal’d, the new exhibition at the Handel House in London marking 250 years since the composer’s death. “He was a free spirit: he took himself where he wanted, while every other composer was an employee.”

Indeed, if we think of Handel now as the epitome of the Establishment composer, his conditions were much more precarious. Fashion and opportunity took the jobbing German to London and, although he stayed put once he got there, it would take decades of hard work before his public status ensured him any permanent security.Know how to brown-nose

Of course, being a free-floating man of the market had its downside when the market went kaput. It was the establishment of a new Italian opera company that drew Handel to England in 1710, and he profited from the initiative with the triumphant premiere of his opera Rinaldo. But seven years later a huge spat between King George I and the Prince of Wales eroded the aristocratic support base of this speculative venture and Handel had to fall back on his own devices. The result was two years spent cosying up to the Duke of Chandos, Acis and Galatea the sublime result.

When the opera season restarted, Handel had an insurance policy, taking up pensioned court appointments as the Composer to the Chapel Royal and music master to the royal princesses. “That was enormously canny,” says Edward Blakeman, Handel biographer and the editor of the Radio 3 Handel celebrations next week, “because it placed him within royal circles without forcing him to kowtow to royalty.”

Have a party trick

Growing up in Lutheran Germany, Handel’s first instrument was the organ: he was appointed organist at Halle Cathedral while still in his teens. In fact, it was only because Handel objected to the condition of succeeding Lübeck’s master organist, Buxtehude — that he marry Buxtehude’s horse-faced daughter — that he didn’t take up the post and live out the rest of his days in north Germany.

But he never forgot the training. First, it was the springboard to Handel’s lifelong process of recasting or adapting old tunes in new forms (be they his own or those of other composers). “It’s the basis of organ schooling,” Hogwood says, “taking an old chorale melody and making it your own thing, so it’s hardly surprising he used that for the rest of his life, particularly when he discovered that he could borrow more than just chorales.”

More than that, though, his lightning skill at the keyboard also allowed Handel to add razzmatazz in performance. In his early years in Italy, his PR campaign went into overdrive when he bested the venerable Domenico Scarlatti in a harpsichord duel (“Uncommon brilliance,” huffed the Italian afterward). Many years later in England, when Handel’s rivals were slowly cottoning on to the new vogue for oratorio, Handel gave the punters added value: himself. “He had to make his own oratorios even more attractive,” Hogwood says, “so he devised the organ concerto, where he could still show off when he was quite elderly. Even when he was blind he extemporised, and there was no report of Handel ever playing a wrong note.”

Work from home

Visit the Handel House at 25 Brook Street, W1, just off Bond Street, and you learn a lot more than just how near the bewigged maestro was to the shops on Oxford Street. The house was handily situated — an easy walk or carriage ride to court, church and the theatres where Handel’s stage and concert works were performed. But it was also his laboratory, shop front, rehearsal studio and marketing hub. Pop in to buy a Handel score and as a special inducement you’d get a free print of Handel’s own image.

It was also the place where, midway through his rehearsals for his latest operatic blockbusters, an enraged Handel reportedly dangled the great diva Cuzzoni out of his window after she expressed her dissatisfaction with her latest role. “She said there wasn’t enough air in her aria — meaning it wasn’t tuneful enough,” Hogwood says, “so Handel offered her rather more air than she needed.”

The story has more to it than prime diva baiting, though; it’s a reminder that Handel had to cast, rehearse and finesse his new works from his house, constantly brokering deals to make sure that his latest shows got off the ground. “He must have been quite good company for musicians, though quite demanding as well,” suggests the tenor Mark Padmore, “and for specific singers it must have been thrilling to be in that relationship”. Particularly thrilling if they ended up being thrown into the traffic halfway through a rehearsal.

Know your audience

“What the English like is something they can beat time to, something that hits them straight on the drum of the ear.” Was ever a truer word spoken of the tubthumping masses who crowded into performances of Zadok the Priest or Messiah? Handel rarely lost touch with that sort of popular feeling, never more than when he served up the 18th-century equivalent of the Enigma Variations in the 1747 oratorio Judas Maccabeus.

Ostensibly the piece is about the exploits of an Old Testament Jewish warrior; in reality, it fed on and fuelled public euphoria for the supression of the Jacobites (recently biffed at Culloden). The result, according to the Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills, was that the piece “could not be performed in Scotland for 150 years”. In London, of course, the snooty Sassenachs couldn’t get enough of it, prompting a whole series of further oratorios making thinly veiled comparisons between God’s chosen people — the Israelites — and the new kids on the geopolitical block, the English.

Few composers were as in touch with different compositional styles across Europe as Handel. According to Padmore, the crucial stage was early exposure to the Baroque liveliness of the Italian style, so different to Handel’s fustier Germanic roots. “Those early pieces have a great exuberance — I think it’s fantastic how pan-European a lot of that music is.” Even once Handel was ensconced in London he still travelled around Europe, mostly in order to find new (and cheaper) singers for his opera seasons, but also to keep in touch with the latest fashions.

You can hear that diversity in a piece such as the Music for the Royal Fireworks, which expertly blends the skill of a master contrapuntalist (his German training), the colourful effects of French instrumental suites and the songlike flow of Italian opera. The slightly pompous military swagger, of course, is all England.

Innovate, don’t imitate

Whether Handel ever went too far in his magpie-like tendencies remains a source of some controversy. “He takes other men’s pebbles and polishes them into diamonds,” said William Boyce, one of Handel’s rather less-well known English rivals, but if you were the writer of said pebble the process might have been rather less inspiring. Perhaps the most infamous example is that wedding favourite Arrival of the Queen of the Sheba, originally written for the oratorio Solomon. The hit tune was actually nicked from an obscure concerto by another German, Georg Telemann. “Borrowing from other composers was relatively commonplace,” Blakeman says, though he concedes that “the difference with Handel is that he did it such a lot.”

So how did he get away with it? “He borrows to transform,” Blakeman insists. “He never just takes something and reproduces it; it isn’t what we now call plagiarism. And actually if you listen to that Telemann concerto it sounds as though he is the one doing a poor imitation of Handel. When you listen to Handel it sounds like the complete piece.”

Have an outrageous public profile . . .

For some he was always Handel the selfimportant, Handel the bad-tempered, and — most parody-rich of all sterotypes — Handel the glutton. Ordering dinner for three at a tavern, he apparently demanded to know from the innkeeper where the food was. After the hapless man explained that they would serve the meal when the company arrived, Handel replied: “I am the company”.

. . . and a really private private one

Pity all this was probably all dreamt up by satirists. The real surprise, in fact, was how little gossip did circulate about London’s leading composer, not least the total silence on any romantic attachment. In fact, it’s most likely that the rotund German was probably something of a front. “He constructs an image which immediately gets him noticed,” Blakeman observes, “but it’s a mask behind which he can pursue whatever he wants to.”

Start myth-building

It certainly helped Handel’s reputation that the Victorians couldn’t find any skeletons in his cupboard. But so did the sheer efficiency of Handel HQ. “By the time of his death he was already an industry,” Hogwood says, “because the copyists and secretaries carried on producing works, for example oratorios made from material he had written, rejigged and with new words.”

It might sound trivial, but Handel also wrote on premium-quality manuscript paper, allowing him to build up an ordered, tidy and near-comprehensive volume of complete works. As the national obsession with giant choral spectaculars grew, Handel’s operas may have gone into the deep freeze, but the scores for his oratorios were a ready-made resource to feed Britain’s addiction to choral singing. Little surprise, then, that the very first recording of classical music — captured by Edison’s phonograph in 1888 — was of 4,000 voices tackling Handel’s Israel in Egypt at the Crystal Palace. Handel fashions have changed a fair bit since then, but his chosen people have never lost faith with their prophet.

SOURCE

Baby Boris: all blond hair and dipped in ink

Stanley Johnson, the father of the London mayor, recalls the magical rural home where he grew up, how he left his new bride undressed in a hotel corridor and mistook his newborn son for an African-American

My mother was by nature an optimist. I remember being woken by her one night when I was about four years old. My father was a pilot in the RAF during the war and we were living in a little cottage near the runway at Chivenor in north Devon.

“Look, darling! Come quickly!” She hustled me to the window. “There is a wonderful bonfire on the runway! A plane has crashed and, quite soon, the depth charges will explode!” I can’t remember whether the depth charges did explode that night, but I recall the knock on the door the next morning. It was the RAF padre. He took off his hat. “Mrs Johnson? I’m afraid I’ve some bad news. Your husband . . .”

The spectacular plane crash we had witnessed had involved my father, returning home from trying to spot enemy U-boats. His Wellington bomber had clipped a telegraph pole and crashed on the runway. He had been severely burnt.

“The good news,” the padre continued, “is that your husband is still alive.” My mother thrust her chin out. “I didn’t doubt it for a moment.”

“Daddy’s crash” was one of the milestones of my childhood. He received extensive plastic surgery (and a DFC for extricating his crew from the burning plane) and spent the rest of his life with one leg 2in shorter than the other.

My parents bought a smallholding near Horsell in Surrey after the war. We kept livestock, including pigs and poultry. For a time, my father resumed his prewar life as a timber broker in the City, while trying to keep an eye on the animals at the same time. Each evening, on returning from London to Surrey, he would drive an old open Lancia Lambda around various restaurants in the Woking area collecting vegetable and other waste, which he would then boil in an iron vat and serve as swill to the pigs.

It frequently fell to us children to keep the fire going under the vat, by feeding it with logs and brushwood. Failure to do so, my father explained, meant the swill would not be properly cooked and the pigs would suffer. I remember one spectacular eruption when my father, returning home from the pub for Sunday lunch, discovered we had let the fire go out. He was an immensely strong man and for a moment it seemed as though he was going to pick up the entire dining-room table, laden as it was with crockery, cutlery and the Sunday roast, and hurl it across the room. In the event, he brought the carving knife hard down on the table, causing splinters to fly.

My mother had a fine sense of drama. Far from being disconcerted, she applauded. “Bravo, Johnny!” she exclaimed.

She later explained to us that my father had been in a bad mood not so much because of our lapses but because he couldn’t stand working in London. “He simply hates it,” she said.

While my father grew increasingly frustrated with a suburban existence, my brother and I went off to prep school in deepest Devon. It is entirely thanks to this that he was at last able to escape the life he loathed in London and, at the age of 40, take up an existence he had always longed for. The purchase in 1951 of West Nethercote, a 250-acre hill farm in west Somerset, has probably been the single most important determinant of my life and of the kind of person I am.

The White Horse, Bampton, was a pub where my parents would stay on their annual visit to see my brother and me at school. My father became friendly with the landlord, Mr Collacott. In the summer of 1951, soon after the parental appearance at sports day, Mr Collacott telephoned to say that an old boy called Stanley Blake had walked into the pub from his farm (10 miles as the crow flies, more by road) and in the course of a long evening had intimated that he was thinking of selling up.

Next day, my father took the day off from the unloved timber brokers, hopped on his Norton motorcycle and drove 200 miles to find out what Mr Blake’s intentions were. It turned out there was not just one Mr Blake. Stanley had a brother, Ernest, with whom he was not on speaking terms, though they not only shared the old partly medieval farmhouse, and worked the farm together; they even shared the same bed. There was also a Miss Blake, their sister, who did the housekeeping and who acted as an intermediary in the event that Stanley had, absolutely, to communicate with Ernest or vice versa.

My father always maintained that he knew from the first moment he turned off the Winsford–Exford road to follow the River Exe for two miles up the bumpy, potholed track to Nethercote that this was the place for him. I know how he must have felt. Even though I have now lived there for 57 years, I can still sense the magic every time I drive across the little bridge over the river to enter what for me is the most special valley in England, if not the world.

Our valley has become a treasure house of wildlife. Apart from the butterflies, we have loads of dormice, barn owls, heron, kingfishers, woodpeckers, buzzards and kestrels galore, not to speak of red deer, foxes, badgers and bats. Sometimes, our au pairs would complain about bats flying around in their bedrooms at night and even being tangled in their hair. Once I sought my mother’s advice. “Tell them to put a saucepan on their head when they go to bed!”

In 1959 I went up to Oxford. By the beginning of my third year, I had a fair number of undergraduate women friends. We tended to meet at the Cadena in the Cornmarket for tea, went to the cinema in Walton Street or concerts in the Sheldonian.

This was all very satisfactory. I was an innocent boy from Exmoor. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that some of my contemporaries at Exeter College had regular girlfriends with whom they were seen around college or in town. Bill Gissane on Staircase 5 had a devastatingly beautiful blonde ladyfriend called Zena, who would stretch herself languorously like a cat in the front quad after breakfast in his rooms.

Then there was an American called Brad Hosmer, who had rooms on Staircase 2. A serving member of the United States Air Force, he parked a Studebaker in the Turl and at weekends drove out to the USAF base at Brize Norton to keep up his flying hours. I would sometimes pass his latest comely squeeze on the stairs.

“What’s the secret, Brad?” I asked him. “Dead simple, Stan. Just find something you have in common.”

“What kind of thing are we talking about here, Brad?”

“Well, take apples,” Brad explained. “You meet a girl. First thing you do is ask her if she likes apples. Nine times out of 10, she’ll say, ‘Yes, I like apples’.”

“Then what?” I asked. “Then you say, ‘Hell! That’s amazing! I like apples too. Let’s go to bed!’ ” Soon after this conversation, I had to go to London for the day. On the train, on my way back, I found myself sitting opposite a very attractive young woman called Sarah, who was at Lady Margaret Hall (LMH). I had seen Sarah around the college, being squired by Chris, a lawyer in my year.

“How’s Chris, then?” I asked. “Fine, thanks.” The ice broken, we chatted away. Soon after the train had left Reading, I remembered Brad’s advice. Find some point of common interest. “Pretty awful place, Reading?” I nodded in the direction of the passing Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory. “Paris is much nicer, isn’t it? Do you like Paris?”

“Yes, I do like Paris!” “Hell!” I exclaimed. “I like Paris too! Why don’t we meet at Heathrow airport next Friday morning, catch a plane to Paris and spend the weekend there?”

In those days, the bus from Orly airport brought you to the terminus at Les Invalides. Sarah and I made our way along the Left Bank towards the Pont Saint-Michel. I left her sitting with her bag in a cafe on one of the little winding side streets. “You stay here,” I said. “I’ll go and find a place for us to stay.”

I probably sounded more confident than I actually felt. Sarah and I hadn’t discussed the “modalities” of our little expedition before setting off. When I found a suitable hotel, was I going to ask for two separate rooms? Or was I going to ask for one room, with two beds? Or one with a double bed?

When I found a sweet little hotel off the rue de l’Université, I decided to go for broke. “Une chambre double, s’il vous plait.” I handed over my passport.

“Et le passeport de madame?” “Madame a toujours son passeport.” “Il faut la chercher, monsieur.” I went back, feeling nervous, to fetch Sarah and her passport. What would happen, I wondered, when we returned and they realised we weren’t man and wife?

As it happened, my anxieties on this score proved wholly superfluous. I tried to retrace my steps to the Pont Saint-Michel, only to find myself hopelessly lost.

Fifteen years later, quite by chance, I met Sarah at a reception in Brussels. She still looked tremendously pretty. When she saw me, she gave a start, then smiled frostily: “Oh, hello! Whatever happened to you that day in Paris? I waited for ages but you never showed up!”

Soon after the disastrous trip to Paris, I met another student from LMH, Charlotte Fawcett. She wore a waistcoat made of rabbit fur and, in general, had a bohemian air about her. I managed not to make a mess of this relationship and we were married about eight months later.

We went potato-picking in Kent for our honeymoon. (It seemed a good idea at the time.) But we had a second honeymoon a few weeks later on the Queen Mary, bound for New York. I had been awarded a Harkness fellowship to travel and study in the United States.

On our first evening in New York, Charlotte and I celebrated our arrival in America by ordering room-service dinner at our hotel: jumbo prawns and giant T-bone steaks. When we had finished, I rang down to reception to tell them to pick up the trolley outside our room.

The trolley was so large and there was so much debris on it that Charlotte, who had undressed for bed, had to help me to manoeuvre it into the corridor. As she did so, the door to our room shut behind us.

“I’ll get another key from reception,” I said.

“Be quick! I’ve got no clothes on,” Charlotte urged.

I was quick but not quick enough. The man came for the trolley while Charlotte was still crouching behind it.

One of the requirements of my fellowship was that I should travel around the United States for at least three or four months. A few weeks after our arrival Charlotte realised she was pregnant. It seemed sensible to get some of the travelling done before the baby was born.

“Let’s head for Mexico!” I said. “Olé!” Charlotte replied. The Harkness rules said we weren’t allowed to take the car across the border, so we left it in Laredo, Texas, and caught the Greyhound bus south.

It took 20 hours to reach Mexico City. Charlotte was suffering from morning sickness and the altitude didn’t help. She didn’t welcome the prospect of the long ride back on the bus to the United States.

One night, a man called Boris Litwin and his wife invited us to their beautiful home in San Angel. Boris was a Russian who, like Trotsky, had come to live in Mexico. Trotsky had been murdered with an ice pick, but Boris was still going strong. His daughter, Barbara, was the girlfriend of one of my Exeter College friends.

At that first lunch, I mentioned to the Litwins that Charlotte and I were planning to return to the United States the way we had come. By Greyhound bus. All 20 hours of it, barring floods, earthquake, ambush or mechanical breakdowns. Boris didn’t say anything, but he looked accusingly at me. I knew what he was thinking.

Two days later the Litwins invited us again, this time for dinner. They showered us with presents. I remember a shawl, a wicker basket, a poncho for Charlotte and some silver ornaments.

Just as we were saying goodbye, overwhelmed by their generosity, Boris thrust two Mexico City–Laredo air tickets into our hands. “You can forget about the Greyhound bus now!” he told us.

It was Charlotte who, on the spur of the moment, came up with an idea for repaying his kindness. “If our baby is a boy,” she told him, as we gratefully accepted the tickets, “we’ll call him Boris!”

Our home in New York was a spacious loft in West 23rd Street. It contained a bath on stilts and a yellow out-of-tune piano with the motto “Vive La Fun!” painted glaringly on its lid. The lavatory, with a marble hand basin, was concealed from the rest of the room by some large abstract canvases.

Birdcages hung from the ceiling and soot crept in through the windows.

There was a terrace at the back populated by metallic sculptures. It was easy enough to climb up from street level. Once I woke to find a large black man standing over the bed. “I say,” I protested, “we’re trying to sleep. You wouldn’t mind leaving us alone, would you?”

Happily the man took the point and climbed back through the window onto the terrace. It was often too hot to sleep with the windows shut. Having the occasional unwanted visitor was a small price to pay.

On June 19, 1964, five months after we moved in, Charlotte gave birth to the long-anticipated baby in New York hospital, situated by the river around East 70th Street.

In those days there wasn’t so much pressure on expectant fathers to be present at the birth of their offspring. I had no objection in principle. Unfortunately, however, I missed the birth because I had stepped outside for a moment to get a pizza.

When I got back, I was told that the new baby was already safely wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the nursery in a cot, along with half a dozen other new arrivals. As I peered through the glass, I found it difficult to determine which our child was. The babies were lined up so that all I could see was the soles of their feet, which were uniformly black. Just for a moment I thought there had been a mix-up and somehow Charlotte had given birth to an African–American or Puerto Rican child. I asked a passing nurse for guidance.

“We dip the feet in ink to take their footprints as soon as they are born,” she explained. “We want to avoid mix-ups. You can’t use the babies’ fingerprints. Not when they’re newborn. They’re too soft.”

A few minutes later, another nurse entered the crèche, picked up one of the bundles and carried it along to a tearful but joyful Charlotte. I realised with relief, as she cradled the child, that all was in order. Even then the blond hair was unmistakable. We registered the baby with the US authorities, as well as with the British consulate, thus ensuring future dual citizenship. Next day, I wrote to Boris Litwin to tell him that the new arrival had weighed in at over 9lb and was doing well.

“We have named him Boris as we promised,” I wrote, “as a small gesture of recognition for your kindness to us in Mexico. The full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.”

Mr and Mrs Litwin have died, but I am still in touch with their daughter, Barbara, who lives not far from us in London. The last time we met, she told me that every time she sees Boris Johnson on television or reads one of his articles (or presumably now hears a London mayoral pronouncement), she is reminded of her father.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article5907448.ece

Britain's first WMD: An Elizabethan cannon that could punch a hole in solid oak

It may appear primitive, but this cannon marks the point when Britannia began to rule the waves. Britain's 'first weapon of mass destruction' was discovered on a warship that sank in the Channel in 1592. It could fire a cannonball at close to the speed of sound - fast enough to punch through the solid oak planks of an enemy galleon 100 yards away.

The extraordinary power of the 7ft 'Elizabethan supergun' was revealed when a replica was test-fired in a disused quarry.

Mensun Bound, a marine archaeologist at Oxford University, said: 'No gun of this type and period had ever been tested before and the results were surprising. 'Muzzle velocities were achieved that were almost the speed of sound and the shot that was fired was able to punch through 4in of oak with ease.

'The weapon was also remarkably accurate and was able to hit the target every time.
'In addition to round shot, different types of long shot were also found on the wreck, which were used for ripping through rigging, rending sails and killing and maiming people.'

The 90ft ship sank half a mile off Alderney while on its way to resupply English troops fighting in Brittany. Its wreck was discovered after a fisherman found a musket caught in his lines in 1977, but it took until last year for the three cannon on board to be retrieved.

Most interestingly to historians, all were built to an identical design. The shot recovered also had a uniform size to within a millimetre. This standardisation allowed the guns to fire at the same time, in a devastating manoeuvre that was key to the Royal Navy becoming the most powerful in the world.

Just four years earlier, the vessels fighting the Spanish Armada were still being armed with weaponry of different sizes, making loading and reloading slow and complicated.

Ships used gunfire merely to get close enough to the enemy for the crew to board and fight in hand-to-hand combat. By contrast, cannon with the same specifications could be loaded quickly and fired in unison, creating a deadly barrage that could pierce enemy hulls.

Mr Bound called the cannon the British military's first 'weapon of mass destruction'. He said: 'These guns represent the beginning of broadside warfare, in which fighting ships - as gun platforms - arranged themselves in line-ahead formation and delivered an entire battery of shot at the same time.

'England's navy made a giant leap forward in the way men fought at sea, years ahead of her enemies, one which was still being used to devastating effect by Nelson 200 years later.'





SOURCE

FRANK FIELD: I was sickened that some of Margaret Thatcher's own MPs hated her

A marvellous story from a very decent man. Field is an old-fashioned Labour man



Like most MPs, when I was first elected to Parliament in 1979 I was determined to do the best for my constituents. My arrival in Westminster coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power.

So when I needed to get something done for my Birkenhead constituency, it seemed obvious that the best way to do it was to lobby the most powerful person in the country on their behalf.

For some reason, Mrs Thatcher usually agreed to see me. We met frequently during her 11 years in Downing Street and our meetings were usually very formal. Quickly I would know if Mrs T, as I often called her, would agree to any of my requests. But I shall never forget our last two meetings in her final days in No 10.

On the first occasion, I had asked to see her to request more funding for the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead. This time, our meeting was not the usual formal affair. When she invited me in to her study I had never seen her so animated.
She had flown back that day from meeting President George Bush Snr in the US to discuss what to do about Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Mrs Thatcher was adamant that the Allies must go to war with Saddam but Mr Bush was agonising over the decision.

Pacing around the room, she told me how she had urged him that military action was absolutely vital. Her whole being was consumed with energy as I pleaded with her to come and sit down and talk about Cammell Laird.

Eventually she said to me: ‘What is it that you want, Frank?’ I told her how important her overseas tours were in attracting inward investment. On her next trip would she please secure crucial investment for jobs in Birkenhead and provide a little more from the regional assistance fund?

‘Everybody depends on me,’ she said.

‘I know, but will you please make this commitment?’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll scoop the fund,’ she said.

Less than 48 hours later, I bumped into one of her Cabinet Ministers, David Hunt, who at the time was MP for the Wirral, next to my Birkenhead seat, who said: ‘I see you have been to see the Prime Minister.’

A Prime Ministerial minute had been written straight after her meeting with me and sent to the relevant secretaries of state and their permanent secretaries, instructing them to grant the additional funds. ‘What was the phrase Frank, “scooped”?’ he said.

There wasn’t much in her record as Education Secretary in Edward Heath’s Government to suggest she would be a great Prime Minister.

But when she entered No10 she understood she had to get control of the Whitehall machine – and not be bypassed by it, as had occurred with so many of her predecessors.

A few weeks after we discussed Cammell Laird, I saw her again at No. 10 and the atmosphere could not have been more different. It was the day she had to decide whether to resign. I recalled all the times she had delivered for me. When I saw how some of her own Conservative MPs hated her and called her ‘that woman’ it sickened me.

I had phoned No. 10 and asked for Peter Morrison, the Tory MP who was her Parliamentary Private Secretary and responsible for keeping in contact with her backbenchers. The voice on the switchboard said Sir Peter had gone home. Startled, I repeated: ‘Gone home?’ The switchboard lady was clearly as shocked as I was. ‘Yes, that was my reaction too,’ she said.

‘Is the Prime Minister there?’ I asked. The switchboard lady said: ‘I am not supposed to tell you, but yes, the Prime Minister has come home.’

‘I will come over to see her,’ I said. The voice said: ‘I think that would be a very good idea.’ The next time I heard that voice was seven years later when she put through a phone call from Tony Blair asking me to become a Minister in his Government.

That fateful day for Mrs Thatcher, I went to Downing Street and was shown into the waiting room, despite protests from staff who told me the Prime Minister was too busy to see me. I had taken some work with me and sat down making a few phone calls when in walked Norman Tebbit.

Norman asked: ‘Why have you come?’

‘I have come to tell her that she is finished,’ I said.

Norman told me I would see her shortly. A few minutes later, in came Mrs T. I guided her to her chair and sat beside her. The energy, so evident the last time we met, had ebbed away.

‘Why have you come?’ she asked.

‘I believe you are finished, Prime Minister.’

‘It is so unfair.’

‘I have not come to discuss fairness, Prime Minister. You cannot now go out on a top note, but you can go out on a high note. You must resign before you face the Commons again. Otherwise those Tory creeps will tear you apart in public.’

‘But it is so unfair. I have never lost them an election.’

Eventually, she agreed that she too thought she had no choice but to resign – but others were not saying it to her face. ‘Why have you come, Frank?’ she asked again.
‘Whenever I have asked you for help for Birkenhead you’ve tried to help. And I feel I owe it you.’

Only then did I notice that the door was still ajar and in a moment Norman was back in the room. He too was protecting her and I think he wanted to repeat what I had said.

‘When is Denis coming home?’ I enquired.

‘Oh, after 11.30,’ replied Mrs T.

‘Will you talk to him about what you are to do?’

‘Oh yes.’

She was briefly back to her old self as she explained how I would be smuggled out of the building so no one knew I had been there. ‘I have arranged for you to go out another way. You will be taken out into Whitehall, not through Downing Street.’

I saw her only once more as Prime Minister: her last appearance at the Dispatch Box she had dominated for a decade. Her voice was different – I guess it was because she was fighting back the tears.

Then Dennis Skinner threw her a lifeline by heckling her. ‘I am enjoying this,’ she said – and the temper of the speech changed. It was a parliamentary triumph.

The ranks of Tory MPs behind her cheered as if to cover their murderous intent. I watched her as I stood at the end of the Chamber and, when I caught her attention, I nodded my approval.

But I couldn’t help wondering whether I would ever see a Prime Minister who was more able in pushing through radical reforms. Two decades on, I am still waiting and wondering.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1151829/FRANK-FIELD-I-sickened-Margaret-Thatchers-MPs-hated-her.html

Russian attitudes among Russian Jews

Brooklyn's Russian-speaking, largely Jewish outpost -- provides an answer to many political problems facing Russia and the Middle East.

Jews from the former Soviet Union are probably the most successful immigrant community in the United States. Highly educated and urban, we came here in the 1970s and 1980s, when the number of foreign-born Americans was near an all-time low and the country still welcomed newcomers. We had the support of the U.S. Jewish community. No less important, we were given refugee status, which gave us access to additional benefits not available to other immigrants.

In the Soviet Union, we suffered the usual oppression of the totalitarian state, but this was exacerbated in our case by anti-Semitism -- both from the government and citizens at large. You'd expect us to love freedom and treasure democracy, protection for minority rights and other such niceties.

Not in the least. The fact that former Soviet Jews cast almost 85 percent of their votes for former President George W. Bush in 2004 and supported Senator John McCain by a substantial plurality last year is not the real issue, of course. More troubling, our community has begun to lean toward more racist, intolerant attitudes. It tends to dislike all dissidents and troublemakers, admires force and supports military solutions. And what I find most amazing, the Russian Jewish community is showing increasing intolerance and hatred toward immigrants who they fear are turning the civilized, white United States into a Third World country.

Does this sound familiar? It's those same post-Soviet attitudes that have infected Russia.

Even though Jews have been targets of anti-Semitic forgeries like the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," I received countless e-mails from Russian Jews alleging that U.S. President Barack Obama is anything from a Muslim to the antichrist. Only a bit more than 10 percent of Russian speakers supported him.

In the United States, the Russian-speaking community is too small to matter, but in Israel former Soviets comprise almost 20 percent of the population. In Israel, they initially had a problem. Their far-right proclivities are rooted in the fear and loathing of the Arabs, love for the grandeur of Great Israel and predilection for extreme or military solutions. These views were shared by groups the Russian Israelis disliked, like the Sephardim and religious zealots.

Now, however, Russian Israelis have found their spokesman in Avigdor Lieberman. A marginal entity in 2003, his Israel Our Home party is now the third largest in the Knesset and the kingmaker of the next government.

This year's Israeli election -- and the attack on Gaza that preceded it -- was pivotal. Israel is feeling pressure to rein in its far right, even as the country as a whole moves further rightward.

A small state in a hostile region, Israel needs powerful patrons to survive. It came into existence when Stalin's Soviet Union voted for it in the United Nations, even as the West was ambivalent about the new Jewish state. Israel's next patron was France, and only around the 1967 Six-Day War did a close alliance with Washington develop.

Now, Israel is ideologically ripe to complete the circle. Lieberman has cited tactics employed by then-President Vladimir Putin against Chechnya as an example for handling Gaza. Why not? Russia's ideology and actions dovetail perfectly with the attitudes of Lieberman's voters. Lieberman once asserted that when democracy and Jewish values conflict, Jewish values must prevail.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/1016/42/374565.htm