Is it right to put Winston on the new 5 pounds note?

It was announced last Friday at Chartwell – W. Churchill former residence – that the new 5 pounds note will bear his effigy, replacing Elisabeth Fry. The new note will be put in circulation on 2016.

The Churchillian myth will thus survive well into the next century.

The portrait used will be the great 1941’s shot by Yousuf Karsh (1908 – 2002). He took this photograph while Churchill was in Canada, speaking at the Canadian Parliament. It became one of the iconic images of the twentieth century. In it he appears like a fighting bulldog, ready to bite off an arm of Adolf Hitler.

Karsh was commissioned to shoot a portrait of the Great Man during a pause of the session at the Parliament, but Churchill was in no mood for it. Finally he sat down facing the camera and lit a cigar. He kept puffing at it, not caring for the photographer. Here are Karsh’s recollections:

“Churchill’s cigar was ever present. I held out an ashtray, but he would not dispose of it. I went back to my camera and made sure that everything was all right technically. I waited; he continued to chomp vigorously at his cigar. I waited. Then I stepped toward him and, without premeditation, but ever so respectfully, I said, “Forgive me, sir,” and plucked the cigar out of his mouth. By the time I got back to my camera, he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me. It was at that instant that I took the photograph.”

In a few words he was mad at Karsh, not at the Nazi.

On the back of the picture there will be his Nobel prize medal. Churchill was hoping in the Nobel prize for Peace but in 1953 he got the one for Literature, for which he could’t care less. As a matter of fact this Nobel prize was awarded to him because of his hugely successful 6 volumes ‘History of the Second World War’ which made him rich.
Fact is that he did not write it, as professor David Raynolds has clearly proved in his ‘In Command of History. Churchill fighting and writing the Second World War’ London, 2004. They were written by a team of historians, Deakin at their head, under his supervision. They did agree to remain silent and were paid a pittance but had access to secret documents that Churchill, without permission, had taken away from the War Office.

Winston Churchill had been a great speaker, but also a man of monumental mistakes that caused disasters during WW1 and WW2. I am not sure if he deserves to be offered as an example to the next generations of Britons and Europeans. It is true that he defeated Nazi Germany, but he was also one of those politicians who scattered the seeds of Nazism before, during and after WW1. Is it not time for Britain to stop dreaming about her imperial past, close those bloody pages and look forward to a better and common future?

Read more at http://petapixel.com/2013/03/08/in-his-iconic-portrait-winston-churchill-is-scowling-over-a-lost-cigar/#6F3KQMkeiLiDyFfC.99

A funny note to close:

The main Italian daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, on 27/04/2013 announces that Churchill will replace Queen Elisabeth on the 5 pounds banknote. Not Elisabeth Fry, and here is the link:

http://www.corriere.it/esteri/13_aprile_26/churchill-banconota-cinque-sterline_175d3abe-ae73-11e2-b304-d44855913916.shtml

James Bond & Benito Mussolini

 I am reposting here an article by Alex Lo columnist of the South China Morning Post, it was printed on 19 July, 2012

 

Well, that was a year ago.

Now my book is being offered to an America publisher and I hope it will be taken and translated. My dream remains that an agreement with the Estate of Ian Fleming could be arranged so that the name of the main character – alongside that of Benito Mussolini, British secret agent John Macbeth – could revert back to his real name, that had always been in my mind, James Bond. Indeed a young and still amateurish James Bond.

I though that the Italian edition of this book had been forgotten, but looking in google I stumbled into a very positive review posted online on a website selling books and records (I swear I did not write it!) with lots of positive comments by mostly young people.

I am posting the link here for those who can read Italian, and I could not refrain from register myself and leave a few words of thanks to all of them.

http://www.dooyoo.it/romanzi/ben-angelo-paratico/713210/

Did Churchill order Mussolini’s death, HK novelist asks

By Alex Lo.

Who killed Mussolini? That question has inspired one of the most enduring conspiracy theories to have emerged out of the second world war. Now, a Hong Kong-based author has helped reignite  the old controversy.

Most students of history know that Italian communist partisans killed Il Duce and his mistress, Clara Petacci. There is, however, another version that has always lingered on the fringes like the illegitimate offspring of proper history. In this theory, agents from the British Special Operations Executive, working with the partisans, killed Mussolini – on the orders of Winston Churchill.This conspiracy theory has now been resurrected, thanks to two new books. One is called Les Derniers Jours de Mussolini (The last days of Mussolini) by Pierre Milza, a French historian and specialist in Fascist Italy. The other is titled Ben – a historical novel written by Hong Kong-based Italian novelist and journalist Angelo Paratico – which was published this summer in Milan.  Both titles have the Italian and British press up in arms.The Italian press is, by and large, sceptical about the books’ thesis. However, Paratico says many Italians believe the story, including the late Renzo De Felice, the dean of studies of Italian Fascism and Mussolini.Writing in The Daily Telegraph in Britain, author and historian Guy Walters  angrily dismissed the theory. ‘No! No! No! Churchill did not order the assassination of Mussolini,’ he wrote. ‘Milza’s claims should go straight in the big dustbin along with claims about Josef Mengele’s secret tribe of twins and Hitler surviving the war.’Of the two titles, Paratico’s book is the less historically upsetting, because he merely uses the British-inspired assassination plot as the setting for the exploits of his hero, an SOE operative dispatched by Churchill to do his dirty deed. Milza, however, wrote about the plot as history. Churchill, Milza believes, wanted Mussolini killed to hide the existence of secret correspondence, the most compromising part of which was his alleged attempt to entice Il Duce into a separate peace. This would have violated his prior agreement with US president Franklin D. Roosevelt.Even though he  had written a fictional novel rather than a historical account, Paratico believes this conspiracy theory to be true, or at least close to what really happened. ‘Before I started on my book, around three years ago, I thought this story was just crap, but now I believe it is close to the truth,’ he says.

Milza argues that Churchill spent holidays in Italy in 1945 and 1951 not to rest by the shores of beautiful Lake Como, but to retrieve the secret letters and related documents. ‘Perhaps he went there just to paint,’ Milza writes. ‘It is credible, however, that he was there for other reasons, as one now knows a certain number of trunks were thrown into the lake with documents and booty and perhaps the services had a look for them. We cannot completely eliminate this theory.’Walters believes the whole fantastic story originates from Otto Skorzeny, the famed Nazi SS officer and commando who rescued Mussolini in 1943 on Hitler’s orders after Italian general Pietro Badoglio put the Fascist dictator under arrest and signed an Italian armistice with the Allies. Skorzeny survived the war and claimed he had the secret Churchill-Mussolini correspondence. But when the letters saw the light of day, most competent authorities judged them to be amateurish fakes.However, the Hong Kong author thinks the whole conspiracy theory has another, Italian source. There was an Italian partisan called Bruno Giovanni Lonati, who claimed he actually shot Mussolini on April 28, 1945.’Lonati is still alive, close to 90 years old,’ Paratico says. ‘He went public with his story about 30 years ago. Nobody believed him until he found a publisher in 1994. Lonati had his 10 minutes of glory and was called to a popular TV show where he agreed to take a lie detector test. He failed.

‘Paratico’s novel is dedicated to Luciano Garibaldi, probably the most prominent Italian proponent of the Churchill-killed-Mussolini theory. Garibaldi, according to Paratico, thought bits of Lonati’s story had elements of truth but his whole story was not reliable. Indeed, according to an account by former SOE operative Manfred Czernin, SOE had about 100 agents – of whom 60 were British – embedded with Italian partisan fighters in northern Italy at the time. SOE’s American counterpart, the OSS, had no one there.’They were there for something, I do believe,’ Paratico says. ‘If Mussolini had trusted the Americans instead of the British he would have been made prisoner and then could have been put on trial. He made a fatal mistake.

‘What Paratico, Garibaldi, Milza and other more serious conspiracy-minded writers have in common is their apparent belief in circumstantial evidence. Paratico went so far as to say Churchill admired Mussolini, and that was why he was interested in pursuing a separate peace.

‘Mussolini and Churchill respected each other,’ he says. ‘It is well known that as chancellor of the Exchequer in 1927, after a visit to Rome he said that if he were an Italian he would have been a Fascist. Contacts were kept and even after Mussolini’s death, Churchill respected him.’

But despite the latest dust-up, Walters probably deserves the last word on  Il Duce’s death. ‘Italy is a nation of conspiracy theorists, and the death of Mussolini is especially popular fodder for their imaginations. Granted, the precise details of Mussolini’s demise are a little opaque, but what’s more likely – Mussolini was killed by communist partisans, or by a beyond-top-secret British agent acting on the orders of Winston Churchill? I suppose those who believe in the junk version also subscribe to the ‘Churchill was a war criminal as well, you know’.’

But here, his last sentence hints at something else. Conspiracy theories are abortive attempts to get at a larger truth. Trying to prove Churchill ordered an execution to hide a dark secret may be a historically or factually inaccurate attempt to get at the Janus-faced career of Britain’s greatest prime minister of the last century.

The young Churchill, after all, was an enthusiastic advocate of the Boer war, in which British troops carried out a ‘scorched earth’ policy and set up the 20th century’s first concentration camps. Early on, he subscribed to an extremist ideology of white supremacy and ruthless imperialism which, as historian Richard Toye has shown in a new work, was way out in the fringes of mainstream public opinion in Britain even in his own time. Behind the great man who used immortal rhetoric in the defence of liberty and Western civilisation, there is a far darker Churchill who believed such Western values were the exclusive prerogatives of white men, and perhaps a few exceptional natives. There is a danger of projecting today’s values back to a wartime leader who may not have shared them. Conspiracy theories, for all their flaws, are merely attempts to get at much darker truths.

 

 

The History of the Necktie in pills.

An informal presentation on the History of the Necktie at Dante Alighieri Hong Kong on 18.IV.2013 made me think deeply about this particular subject.

Here are some snippets:

In Spanish it is called corbata, kravate in German, cravate in French, Cravatta in Italian and nekutai in Japanese.

Bandana is Sanskrit, focale-focalis or sudarium in Latin. Necktie is American but if you talk of a cravat with a British he may think of something like a scarf, if he is well acquainted with the past, or an ‘Ascot’ if he is not.

The modern tie was created around 1850 in England. Macclefied – Surrey. That place had the largest number of weaving, dyeing and printing mills for silk  in the world, 71 by 1821.

With a tie on a man looks better, slimmer, taller, due to the verticality of the line.

Uniform is everything, and yes, most women love them. If you dress like a general, people will think you are a general until the contrary will be demonstrated.

To pull a man by the tie was a capital offence, it is called peanuting.

Women often make the mistake with men to give them a tie they like, not what men like. When a girl gives a tie to a man a mistake may be more serious than she may imagine, a form of disrespect for the man.

The bowtie is still out of fashion, it received a lot of bad press in the 1970-1980.

In the book “Dress for Success” a sort of bible in the seventies for men we read and I quote: “You will not be taken seriously if you wear a bowtie. Most people will not trust you with anything important. In general, I have found that people believe that a man wearing a bowtie will steal.”

Stone age. Look at the picture below, the tie or something like this could be around since many thousand years. As the mark of a chieftain.

During the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648)  Croatian mercenaries in the French Army sported a sort of cravate. But the link between Croats and the cravate or the tie is not real. Simply not true even if necktie day is celebrated in Croatia, on October 18th, but they did not invent it.

Eustache Dechamp, a contemporary of Petrarch in the XIV century wrote in a ballad ‘Faite restraindre sa cravate’ ‘tighten his cravat’.

Venetian Cesare Vecellio used the word ‘Cravatta’ in the year 1590 in his book about the clothing used in different part of the World.

STEINKIRK battle of, fought in 1692.

Legend has that while  in Holland, some British soldiers launched a surprise attack on the French army. In order to hurry to battle the French had no time to tie properly their cravats so they twisted it and passed the extremities in their buttonhole’s lapel. This became very popular and remained so for over 100 years. Look at the picture of Gemelli Careri below.

Somebody says that Europe esperienced a small glacial period from 1645 until 1715, due to solar activities, and this according to some explain the explosion in the use of cravats and bandannas during that particular period.

Venetian Lace. Gross Point of Point de Venise was indeed very popular at that time  and reached a mania status all over the world, in England and France and the America.  Huge money was spent on it. Louis XIV was a great fan of Venetian lace.

The stock appeared in 1715 in Germany. Was a sort of rigid collar for military use, tightened at the back. The Solitaire was a bow made in front when wearing a toupee’ on the head and a stock.

BANDANNA.

They were smuggled into Europe from India and perhaps because they were prohibited under the Calico Act from 1700 – 1720 and this may have aroused the curiosity that caused a lot of smuggling throu France.

GEORGE BRUMMELL (1778 – 1840) Beau Brummell

His best years were 1800-1830. After Oxford he joined the Hussars and became a friend of the ‘Prinny Prince’ George IV (who loved black stocks). He became a kind of new Petronius Arbiter of fashion.

He said of himself: I was a nobody that became somebody and gave the law to dress  to everybody.

He was a gentleman because he looked like one and was better than all the others.

He re-invented fashion for man: Blue jacket, buff color trousers and vests, black boots. Bright white cravat.

No vulgar show, no eccentricity, just being in order. Geometric lines. This is indeed is Brummellian!

KNOTS

Tailors make you suit but you have to tie your cravat. One of the only items where men can express their vanity. Knowing 3 basic knots is enough for a gentleman: the Oriental, half Windsor and Windsor.

Pratt Knot ( also known as Shelby) is the la latest invented, in 1989. Basically it is a half Windsor reversed.

Mr. Le Blanc said that knot a bandana is art but knot a tie is science.

Theoretically speaking the maximum possible number of knots is 85.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Singer Sita Chan is dead. Let’s abolish all private cars. Hong Kong should take the lead.

She was one of the brightest musical talents in Hong Kong. Her career and life were over in a sudden, at 2.30 A.M. when her car slammed into a concrete divider in Yaumatei, Kowloon, yesterday, April 17th. Her neck snapped on impact. The cause of the accident was probably due to lack of sleep.

The author of this blog always advocated of the prohibition of cars for private use. Hundred of thousand of men, women, and children are killed or maimed every year by cars, but no one seem to care much.

The automobile is a Moloch to which everything has to be sacrificed: we inhale pollution and dust particles from the engines of our  cars; we build cities for cars more than for humans (car parks, garages, fly-over, with wider and wider roads) indeed monstrous urban areas, sort of concrete cancers, where men are not feeling happy and secure.

Hong Kong is not producing cars and is rightly proud of its first class public transport system, with courage and determination we should take the lead to abolish them. Just imagine what a beautiful garden-city Hong Kong will then be!

I am no Luddite of sort but I am convinced that we should forbid private cars and force everybody, rich and poor, to use only public transport. When fully automatic cars, running with electricity, will be available then the ban should be lifted.

I believe that future generations will look down at us with horror, as a barbaric civilization that did not value human life. More or less like reading that in the ’20es and ’30es all drivers resisted efforts to bluid more secure cars.

My last though goes to Sita, a beautiful creature that had met her cruel destiny far too soon. A wonderful nightingale, that will sing no more.

 

 

 

 

 

Pompey in Central London

Deep excavations under the headquarters of Bloomberg, in central London, has revealed an incredible amount of archeological finds. The slicing down through different layers of earth, 12 meters deep, has allowed to the 60 archeologists, working alongside contruction workers, to collect more than 10.000 well preserved objects. Shoes, coins, rings, phalli, pottery, writing tables, work of art. There was no volcano in London but a similar preservation work has been performed by the Walbrook Creek – one of the lost rivers of London – creating mud that has somehow protected those articles of daily life from the founding of Londinium around the year 40 AD.

 

An article from the Daily Mail here

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2306443/The-Bloomberg-Place-Construction-Site-Archaeological-dig-London-heralded-capitals-important-excavation.html:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dann ist die Kacke am dampfen! (Then the shit will really hit the fan!)

If you ask to a group of politicians to design a horse you will end up with something like a camel. This is not true only for Italian politicians but for German politicians too, in spite of their fastidious lecturing pose.

Look for instance at the Willy Brandt International Airport in Berlin, after 4 target dates for the opening which were missed – the latest one is October 2013 – now the people in charge of this mess are even refusing to set a new date. There are several examples of German inefficiency to quote here. For instance it appears that officials could not figure out how to switch off the lights in the main building after switching them on. This seems to be due to a computer control system too complicated for any man to handle. So thousand of bulbs are lighting the place, day and night. There is a train connecting the city to the airport that must run every day, empty, to avoid the eight kilometers track getting rusted. Then several escalators need to be replaced because they were ordered too short or too long. Last but not least aviation experts warn that when this airport will be completed it will be too small to handle the traffic. It was designed to handle 27 million passengers a year, but last year the two city airports handled already 25 million passengers. It was estimated to cost around 2 billion euro, now after so many delays the cost  has soared to about 5 billion euro. This is not a problem for a country which can borrow money at zero interest rate and with banks always ready to help politicians, especially when general elections get close. The German banking system is not only murky and messy but also State controlled. Yes, by politicians! There is a widespread misconception in Europe about German banks, believed to be very efficient and profitable. But the contrary may be true, and this could turn up to be the greatest Ponzi’s scheme in human history.

I remember talking to an Italian manager of Unicredit, after their taking over of Germany’s Hvb. He told me that it was impossible to describe the level of stupidity going on at the top managerial level of that bank. Not difficult to believe his words as was well known that Hvb was a wrack of a bank. This esplain why  they sold it to Italians. If it was a good institution, Germany would have never agree to sell it. Germany has about 2000 banks, 1.100 are cooperative banks, 450 are cooperative city banks and 10 are State owned. Basically the German banking system is public, meaning owned and controlled by the Government. There are only two big private banks. Deutsche Bank, which is under investigation in the US for not having disclosed 12 billion derivative losses and in a clear breach of Basel III agreements on other matters which we’ll not discuss here. The other is Commerz Bank, which is also partially controlled by the Government after it nearly went belly up a few years ago. The German government injected 35 billion euro in it. Since then Germany has set up the Soffin Fund to bail out banks, a found that controls 450 billion euro and which is constantly very busy forking out money.

 

German politicians, German bankers, seem to be in control of the EC. An explosive mix indeed that should worry everybody in Europe, including German citizens. After having financed the reunification of East Germany with money drained by raising interest rates to attract fresh capital from the rest of Europe, they are now taking the high moral ground with countries like Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Italy. There is nothing to laugh about this situation, because it could trigger a financial tsunami that will push us back to the Stone Age.

 

Why Italian Foreign Affairs Minister Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata Should Resign

Two Italian marines were arrested last year in Kerala, India, accused of manslaughter. Massimiliano La Torre and Salvatore Girone face an Indian law court for having shot two Indian fishermen (an accusation they vehemently deny) confusing them for pirates. The shooting took place in international waters and they should not have been tried in India. India is thus breaking international regulations. In fact the government in New Delhi had agree to appoint special Court of law to decide if they should be handed over to Italian authorities for trial.

That the Indian government considers this story a hot potato is evident. This explain why they took the unprecedented step of issuing, not one, but two licenses for them to get back to Italy, under written assurance (and a pecuniary deposit as guarantee)  that they will return to India. This is not the treatment normally reserved to men suspected of murderer.

At the end of their last licence, Italian Foreign Affair Minister Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata stepped in, declaring that they will not be handed back to India. Indian citizens, as expected, reacted with shock and dismay for having been cheated in such a lowly manner by Italy. We exchanged the high moral ground, that was our, giving it back to India. After some wrangling our Foreign Office backtracked and now the two marines are back to India, handed over by undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Steffan de Mistura. This is a total loss of face and dignity for Italy! They did claim that assurances were given that the death penalty for the pair will be excluded. This is clearly another canard. India cannot alter its penal code to please a foreign state or one of its minister.

In a normal country Minister Terzi di Sant’Agata would have presented his resignation. This move would help to reduce the tension between Italy and India and lead to a quick resolution of this murky case. Considering that Terzi di Sant’Agata will have anyway to pack and leave in a few weeks (or a few months) with the swearing in of a new government, he could make an exit with a bang. It is highly  unlikely that this former Ambassador will be reconfirmed to his ministerial post. Terzi di Sant’Agata has achieved the near impossible goal of being the worst Foreign Affair Minister since the end of WWII ,even worst than Gianfranco Fini.