Walter Perrie > Quotes

“As the nineteenth century progressed, Austria-Hungary took refuge in reaction at home and adventurism abroad in an effort to contain the centrifugal forces which eventually blew it, and much of Europe, apart. Austria, and Vienna in particular, was the real home of Central-European anti-semitism. Jews wew bottom of the pile. No matter how low you sank, the Jews were still below you, along with the gypsies. At the tail-end of the nineteenth century, the Viennese politician Karl Lueger founded his power base on an anti-semitic platform. Stories of ritual murder by Jewish cabals featured regularly in the Viennese gutter press. It is no accident that Schickelgruber, the faied artist who became Hitler, should have neen the son of a petty official and have spent his ambitions at the butt end of Viennese snobbery.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

“My father had one special hero: William III, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Prince of Orange. To my father the Dutchman, by smashing the forces of James II at the Boyne and, more decisively, at Aughrim on 12 July 1691, saved the country from an Irish-Catholic tyranny of popish servitude, idolatry and nameless superstition. Those battles were not events of long ago which no longer mattered. Rather, they were of decisive moment in how we lived from day to day and deserved the commemoration of daily objects, so that William's figure, seated on his prancing white charger, sword-arm raised in a gesture of advance, decorated tea-towels and plates.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

“We say 'everyone is entitled to his beliefs', recognising the nastiness of a world which will not tolerate alternative beliefs, but over-looking the fact that some beliefs are nonsense and deserve to be called prejudice, bigotry or superstition rather than merely belief. But as Pascal knew, our prejudices do not respond to reason alone. It is as though all the proofs and evidence of philosophy had mistaken their rationality for how people actually think.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

“This Magyar-Vlach hostility is shared to some extent by both peoples. The Hungarians feel themselves to be surrounded by a sea of Slavs and other races with which they have no affinity. It is certainly true that their language has no affinity with the Indo-European languages by which they are surrounded. The Romanians, or some of them, feel that they are an outpost of Latin civilisation set in a hostile sea of Asiatic Magyars and Slavs. The truth is that both peoples inhabit a part of the world which has been overrun, depopulated, repopulated and overrun again so many times through their histories, that any notion of racial integrity is merely absurd. Huns, Avars, Magyars, Turks, Cumans, Pechenegs, Bulgars, Vachs, Ruthenians, Saxons, Austrians, Greeks and just about every other European and Asian people have contributed to the stew. What provides a national integrity, where it can be said to exist at all, is language, and an acknowledgement of a common history. But the fierce hatreds, alas, are unlikely to vanish. Communism kept then below the surface, as it suppressed all forms of dissent and much individuality. Now that the cork has been taken from the bottle, it may be that all sorts of evil spirits will roam abroad and none more dangerous than that romantic nationalism which defines itself by the hostile exclusion of others from the community of what counts as human.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

“Springtime flatters this part of the Somme countryside, undramatic with its flat fields and scattered villages. The largest object for miles, dominating the shallow depression of the Ancre, is the Thriepval Memorial. You approach the park down a long avenue, past lawns carefully tended and set in a girdle of trees. The massive triple arch of dark-red brick, each leg of the arch four piers deep, each pier with its four high panels of dun-coloured marble on which the names of the dead are engraves, is, for all its height, a squat, graceless thing.

There is not another soul in sight, and no sound. From the plinth you look down long rows of white crosses and plain headstones on the far side of the memorial; some say inconnu, others 'A Sodier of the Great War'. Beyond them, beyond this enclosure, the lush countryside meanders to its low horizon.

The dead are listed by regiment, then by rank and then alphabetically - nothing disordered here. This dismal monumentalism, a confirmation rather than a denial of the mindset which led to such slaughter in the first place, though the architect intended no irony. The monument was raised by the power of the state as a piece of political theatre extravagant enough to be seen from miles and years away, as it was by my father when he passed on the Bapaume Road in the summer of 1944.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

“...the problem of Kosovo has simmered until Slobodan Milošević, Serbia's nationalistic prime minister, brought it back to the boil by his efforts to incorporate Kosovo into his fiefdom by depriving the great bulk of the population, the Albanians of Kosovo, of their political, civil and, in some instances, human rights. Serbia's communist party is the only one in Eastern Europe to have retained popular support; a trick pulled off by Milošević by his astute identification of the party with the most aggressive elements of Serbian chauvenism, encouraging the Serbs in Croatia to agitate for incorporation into a greater Serbia. Milošević seems to be reckoning that by pushing Serbian claims, even to the extent of breaking up Yugoslavia, he will be able to dominate a larger and more coherent Serbia, which can in turn pick off its less populous neighbours. However, since Croatia and Slovenia will not submit to Serbian hegenomy, and since Albanians hugely outnumber Serbs in Kosovo, he is setting the stage not just for the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, but for a civil war of potentially crippling savagery.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

“Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Russia began a period of rapid expansion with the aim of making the Black Sea a Russsian lake and, ultimately, gaining access to the Mediterranean. Moldavia and Wallachia were importantly situated pawns in that game, while the Western Powers manoeuvred among themselves to exlude Russia from the Balkans. They thereby found themselves propping up a decadent Ottoman Empire while at the same time espousing the values of liberalism or, more often, romantic nationalism. Ideology, usually, but not always, took second place to realpolitik. At the same time, Austria-Hungary hoped to expand south-east into the Balkans.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe

“The paprika was in fact brought to Europe by the Spaniards, probably from Southern Mexico or Peru. The first shipment was apparently sent by a colleague of Columbus in 1494. It seems to have arrived in Hungary sometime in the sixteenth century, brought by people fleeing from the Turks, for the plant had found its way from Spain to the Balkans and was known in Hungary as 'heathen' or 'Turkish' pepper. Since then it has become the characteristic spice of Hungarian cuisine.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe