Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 192

Who does what to Whom in Syria? Some Revelations

This is really just to recommend a terrific article in the London Review of Books by Hugh Roberts , Professor of North African and Middle East Studies at Tufts University. It is so good that I read it in one exhilarating and mentally refreshing burst in a favourite caf�� on Sunday afternoon. It is a review of several books on the rise of the Islamic State and the events that preceded it.  Some of it will be reasonably well-known to readers here who have followed my comments on this, and my recommendations of Patrick Cockburn���s consistently clear-headed analysis and reporting on the ISIS problem (his recent book is one of those reviewed in the article) .  The article can currently be read here on the web as a free sample http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n14/hugh-roberts/the-hijackers . I strongly urge you to find the time to do so. It is analysis of a high order, and profoundly well-informed.

 

 

In any case, the thing about it is its undeceived understanding of the real origins of ISIS, and in particular the things it reveals, or suggests, about the origins of the Syrian crisis (in which our current Prime Minister once sought to intervene on one side, and now seeks to intervene on the opposite side, showing no sign that there is anything absurd about this).  There is a fascinating summary of the history of Syria, explaining how it came to be as it was on the eve of the events which led to the destruction of its order and stability, and the transformation of millions of reasonably contented people into destitute refugees, maimed casualties or decomposing corpses. 

 

I cannot myself think of any method of calculation which would make this worthwhile. I pray and hope that nobody ever decides to unleash upon my own homeland (however bad things get here) the sort of well-intentioned scheming that was directed towards Syria.

 

He  launches with a caustic review of an attempt by a French academic to blame Syria���s deep state for the disaster. Deep State indeed.

 

I was particularly struck by this passage : ���There is of course truth in all this. But states ��� at any rate, all states that endure ��� have their hidden depths and, for very cogent reasons, make a point of veiling what they get up to ��� let���s speak French here ��� by means of ���le secret d�����tat���. In the Ben Barka affair of 1965-66, the leader of the Moroccan left was abducted and murdered during a visit to France as the result of a conspiracy involving a large cast of characters including French police and intelligence agents, Moroccan agents, the Moroccan interior minister and French gangsters. A few of those involved ��� mainly the gangsters ��� eventually stood trial and went to jail. Paris���s prefect of police, Maurice Papon, was obliged to resign and others, including the head of the SDECE (France���s equivalent of MI6 at the time), took early retirement.

 

���The state and the deep state are not two things but all of a piece, in what we call democracies as well as in dictatorships. Talk of the deep state in Egypt suggested that its discovery was an unpleasant surprise, which indicates a good deal of naivety on the part of the Egyptian revolutionaries. Would-be revolutionaries who set out to transform a state ��� let alone overthrow it ��� need to know what they���re up against before they start.���

 

I have never been able to walk past the fascinating Brasserie Lipp (if you like Sauerkraut, it���s the place to be)  in the Boulevard St Germain in Paris without thinking of the disappearance of Ben Barka from just outside it one October day in 1965, a fascinating story now largely forgotten. I think we can all think of ways in which the British or American states have slithered beyond the bounds of strict legality and candour. It is na��ve to suggest that such dirty doings are restricted to the ���rest of the world���.

 

I was amazed throughout the ���Arab Spring��� at the naivety of supposedly experienced commentators and politicians, who seemed to think that establishing a law-governed free state was a matter of declaring your intention to do so. Real liberty is like a forest in many ways. It is beautiful. It cannot be built, but must grow over many years. It is irregular, tangled and must be navigated by winding paths. And it can be destroyed in a matter of hours by malicious enemies, or in a matter of centuries by stupid neglect or slow and unnoticed encroachment.

 

But to return to the Syrian question, Professor Roberts is one of those who thinks (I believe he is mistaken) that there ever was a real straightforwardly democratic movement in Syria, rather than a movement with some democrats in it that unwittingly served the purposes of others and which nobody would care about at all if it hadn���t served those purposes. I don���t know how we could ever settle this without actual evidence either way. But the circumstantial evidence for the second theory runs like this:

There are plenty of nasty despotisms in the region, notably our close ally Bahrain,  which contain genuine lovers of liberty, who have also been prepared to demonstrate against their rulers. They have been horribly repressed, and the Western nations have done absolutely nothing to support or rescue them. What���s more, those Arab states which have aided the Syrian ���democratic��� movement have, to put it mildly, not been helpful to the Bahraini opposition. Yet the Syrian opposition was openly endorsed by the US embassy in Damascus, when there still was one. And I think there is no doubt that the governments of the USA, France and Britain (which left the Bahraini opposition to its own devices), actively sought a full-scale military intervention in Syria, on the side of the opposition there. Compare and contrast. What���s the difference? The repression? Or something else?

 

Anyway, back to the Professor, who asks this very interesting question: ���who have been the real hijackers of the Arab uprisings from 2011 onwards, and how have they gone about it?���.

 

After providing a fascinating and valuable account of modern Syrian history, which I commend to anyone remotely interested in the subject, he points out that the Assad regime had by no means invented the idea of military rule in that country.

 

He asks : ���In what sense, then, can Assad and his wing of the Baath [Party] be accused of hijacking Syrian independence? They weren���t responsible for the militarisation of Syrian political life, a process which began years before they took power. More coherently and more effectually than any of their predecessors, they sought to make independence a reality. The tragedy for Syria is that Assad lived so long.���

 

He then argues : ���The brutal repression with which the regime responded to demonstrations in Deraa in the far south of the country backfired; it ensured that the revolt would spread across Syria, initially in the form of increasingly angry demonstrations but soon as an armed insurrection.���

 

I wonder. My own guess is that, had the protestors not had substantial material and political backing from outside the country, the Deraa repression would not have ���backfired��� any more than the same regime���s highly successful repression in Hama in 1982 'backfired' (the centre of the city was flattened with artillery fire, and between 10,000 and 40,000 people, depending on which estimate you prefer, were killed. Nobody in the rest of the world did a thing). It was just that, by 2011, Assad���s opponents had attracted the interest of outside backers who had been uninterested in his father���s opponents in 1982, and had left them to die.  One cannot help thinking that it was not democratic sentiment which caused them to feel differently in 2011 to the way they had felt in 1982.

 

Well, believe what you like. I carry no torch for the Assad state, rather the reverse, but I���m unconvinced that the people of this strategically important state developed a sudden taste for ���democracy��� just when Saudi Arabia was getting particularly hostile to Iran (one of Syria���s principal allies) , and just when the USA wanted to teach Russia (another of Syria���s principal allies) a bit of a lesson about how this really is a Unipolar world, like it or lump it.

There���s some very interesting stuff about the structure and nature of the Syrian National Council and other bodies, such as the Free Syrian Army,  claiming to speak for the Syrian democratic movement. And there���s some very interesting detail of the foredoomed nature of the various negotiations, mainly because the ���opposition��� were completely unwilling to abandon their demand for Bashar Assad���s personal removal from power.  Can they really not have grasped that this demand would ensure that the talks failed?

 

Professor Roberts explains (but does not excuse) the sectarian way in which Assad defended himself, which of course played some part in the even more sectarian nature of the rebellion. Then, in one of the crucial passages of the review, he says this :

������those most responsible for the jihadis��� advance were the external actors who backed and bankrolled them and supplied them with arms. The behaviour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait can at least be understood: the Gulf states are Sunni sectarian monarchies governing disadvantaged Shia minorities, with Iran, the Shia power that gained most from the overthrow in 2003 of Iraq���s Baathist regime, just across the water. They were bound to want to topple the Assad regime ��� the central link in the Iran-Damascus-Hizbullah alliance ��� if the opportunity presented itself. It is the policy of the Western powers that needs to be questioned.���

 

Indeed, it does.

 

Then  there is this amazing segment.  It was like one of those novels where the entire plot casually turns over in a second, so that everything you have hitherto read now means something else (I am thinking especially of Josephine Tey���s marvellous book ���Brat Farrar���, and Philip Roth���s ���The Human Stain���) and you repeatedly go back over the crucial passage,  amazed that so few words can have worked such a transformation. Here, try it for yourself:

 

���Cockburn argues that ���for America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of Isis and the caliphate is the ultimate disaster.��� There are certainly grounds for thinking he is right. But there are also grounds for wondering. His book went to press before he could take account of the extraordinary revelation that US intelligence had anticipated the rise of Islamic State nearly two years before it happened. On 18 May, a document from the US Defense Intelligence Agency dated 12 August 2012 was published by a conservative watchdog organisation called Judicial Watch, which had managed to obtain this and other formerly classified documents http://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/

through a federal lawsuit. The document not only anticipates the rise of IS but seems to suggest it would be a desirable development from the point of view of the international ���coalition��� seeking regime change in Damascus. Here are the key passages:

 

���7b. Development of the current events into proxy war ��� Opposition forces are trying to control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to the western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar), in addition to neighbouring Turkish borders. Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts. This hypothesis is most likely in accordance with the data from recent events, which will help prepare safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre of the temporary government ���

8c. If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.���

���So American intelligence saw IS coming and was not only relaxed about the prospect but, it appears, positively interested in it. The precise formula used in paragraph 8c is intriguing. It doesn���t talk of ���the possibility that Isis might establish a Salafist principality��� but of ���the possibility of establishing��� a Salafist principality. So who was to be the prime mover in this process? Did IS have a state backing it after all?���

 

Well, think on, as I believe they still say in Yorkshire.  Professor Roberts explains this not through cogently understood, clear-eyed intent but through the ���eternally recurring colossal cock-up��� and by C.Wright Mills���s belief that much US policymaking is run by crackpot realists���, all of whose very astute realism is devoted to their own careers, and who cannot therefore see that the policies they are pursuing are ludicrous. It would explain a lot.

PETER HITCHENS: They've destroyed Sunday - just when we needed it most

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Does anyone miss the British Sunday, when our cities were like vast, well-ordered cemeteries, the sky always seemed to be black with impending rain, and a deep quiet fell on the land?

Actually, I do. I chafed at it as a child, because children don���t grasp the point of such things. Now that I know what it was for, it is too late.

I know this partly because of the experience of being in Cairo on a Friday morning, or Jerusalem on a Saturday, cities where a universal day of rest still exists, in defiance of all the racket and commerce of the 21st Century.

Before you have even opened your curtains or fully woken from sleep, you can sense that the day is different from all the others. You can feel the peace in your bones and blood.

Does anyone miss the British Sunday, when our cities were like vast, well-ordered cemeteries, the sky always seemed to be black with impending rain, and a deep quiet fell on the land? (Above, Oxford Street in London) 

Resting from work and routine on your own is one thing. Doing it in company with millions of others is quite different.

Work, especially if you���re lucky in what you do, is one of the great pleasures of life, but ��� like all pleasures ��� it can become selfish. We need to stop.

In fact, we have probably never needed a day of rest more than we do now that we have become the slaves of the alluring hypnotic electronic devices we carry about everywhere with us.

The So-Called Conservative Party would know and understand all this if it were what it claims to be.

But as the amoral mouthpiece of commercial greed and globalisation, it prefers to see us scurrying from workplace to shopping centre every waking minute of every waking day.

Relaxation is a few hours of drugged sleep, preceded by a bout of ���entertainment��� thickly laced with advertising and propaganda. Then it���s back to getting and spending.

Even atheists have begun, in recent years, to see the virtue of gathering weekly to read and hear poetry, think, sing songs and celebrate the joys of being alive. And there���s also this simple point. If you want a day free of work, you must expect others to have the same privilege.

If families are ever to gather, then that free day must be on the same day of the week for everyone.

And if that means a lot of things are closed, it���s a price worth paying.

A world without a proper day of rest is like a landscape without hedgerows, trees or landmarks, a howling, featureless wilderness in which we incessantly seek pleasure because we cannot find happiness.

Farewell to fiery Yanis, a reminder of how politics ought to be

There���s something enjoyably piratical and breezy about the ousted Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, riding off on his motorbike with his lovely wife for a post-resignation beer.

These scenes, and Mr Varoufakis���s general irreverent and non-servile behaviour, remind me of what I once found attractive about politics.

It���s also worth noting that the Syriza government in Athens has pretty much done what it promised voters it would do, and has fought its corner with nerve and style, and with a fair bit of the patriotic feeling that has been missing from British politics for quite a while.

Perhaps it���s time for me to change sides again. It���s a joy to see Europe���s Leftists, from Guardian writers to Greek politicians, finally realising that the European Union is a German-dominated imperial bully.

Maybe conservative patriots should now infiltrate the Left, its media and its political parties. There���s more future there than there is in the dehumanised, passionless, corporate wastes of Cameronism.

It���s quite obvious that the Left-wing candidate for the Labour leadership, Jeremy Corbyn, is a principled and uncorrupted real human, quite unlike the bland cybermen and cyberwomen he is standing against, whoever they are. I hope he wins, not because I think he���s a loser but because it would be good to have someone in front-rank politics who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, as Englishmen are supposed to do.

A combination of fiery Leftism and Ukip-type patriotism could be the very thing to sweep away the So-Called Conservative Party which represents nothing except the careers of its MPs and the interests of its donors.

In Greece, an alliance of Leftism and patriotism demolished the rich established parties in months. I���ve wasted years trying to do it the other way. Well, the last time I owned a motorbike, it ended badly, but I���m thinking of getting another one.

Facing the truth about a legend

Now at last we have absolute confirmation that Graham Sutherland���s ruthlessly honest portrait of Sir Winston Churchill was indeed burned because the great man���s wife, Clementine, couldn���t bear to look at it. You can see why. It���s not flattering. But no good portrait is flattering.

By the time it was painted, Sir Winston, like the country he had led, was failing, weakened by disappointment and fearful of the future. The picture showed that truth. We still do not like to admit it.

I seldom agree with the Children���s Commissioner, whoever he or she is, but Anne Longfield is absolutely right that children in care should not be shoved out to fend for themselves at 18. 

Being ���in care��� is pretty terrible, but it���s the only stability these poor, abandoned teenagers know. And 18 is a ghastly age. 

I remember Harold Wilson giving me the vote and telling me I was an adult when I was 18. I spent the next three years showing him how wrong he���d been. Not that he took any notice. 

How can students be expected to pay for their time at university, an increasingly impossible burden? 

Here���s a wise suggestion from a reader, Mrs Sylvia Langley. Offer them the chance to look after the elderly in care homes (or their own homes). 

In return for doing this, their fees could be reduced or even cancelled altogether. In my view better still, idealistic young people could regain contact with the old, who are rapidly becoming a separate and despised minority, the Untouchables of our time and place.

I see the plans to expand grammar schools in Kent have been strangled by lawyers, as I always thought they would be. But why are we still messing about with this?

Thousands of parents want new grammar schools, all over the country. The only thing that prevents this is a brief, easily repealed clause in David Blunkett���s 1998 School Standards Act.

But there���s no sign of that. The new So-Called Conservative majority is more interested in relaxing the laws against foxhunting, which is obviously so much more urgent than a good education for children whose parents aren���t rich.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

That Education Pamphlet in Full 'The Ins and Outs of Selective Schools'

A recent excellent Civitas pamphlet - a series of essays on 'The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools' , including one by me, is now readable in full on the web, here

 

http://www.alansmithers.com/reports/InsAndOuts.pdf

 

 

 

"The House in Norham Gardens" by Penelope Lively

No Budget analysis here, well , not much. I���ll leave it a few days until the experts have perused the Red Book, and we have found out what it all really means. I recommend this wait-and-see method to anyone trying to work out what has really happened in these much-leaked and carefully-staged events, in which we���re all supposed to react immediately before we���ve had a chance to see the detail. The later verdicts will be the right ones.

 

I was struck by the way that deficit reduction had been put off for an extra year, by the tiny baby-steps towards reducing the range of the punitive 40% tax rate, originally a super-tax for the super-rich but which (thanks to inflation) is rapidly becoming the middle class standard rate. I was also interested by the likelihood that the new ���living wage��� would lead to increased employment for under-25s (who don���t qualify for it) , mostly migrants I should expect -  and reduced employment for anyone else. Apparently about 85 pence in every �� will also be grabbed back by reduced welfare payments. I was also struck by the huge part that VAT now plays in paying for state spending, a tax that people often don���t realise they are paying, and which falls more heavily on the poor, and likewise National Insurance, a tax that is seldom mentioned by politicians and which is levied on people who are actually earning too little to pay income tax. The political concentration on the standard rate of Income Tax has a lot to answer for.  Politicians have just found other ways of squeezing us, while proclaiming with complete accuracy that the standard rate remains unaffected.

 

****

 

SO I thought that instead I���d write about one of my favourite books, a novel which is always marketed as a children���s book, but isn���t one. There���s nothing wrong with it being a children's book in itself, except that a lot of people don���t expect to like children���s books. They expect them (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) to be over-simplified, even patronising to an adult mind.

 

I am quite sure that the ���The House in Norham Gardens��� by Penelope Lively (first published in 1974) is not a children���s book, though it is about a child.  A child could read it, enjoy it and learn from it. But an adult could read it far more productively.

 

It���s set in that extraordinarily foreign place, the day before yesterday, long enough ago to be utterly different, recent enough to be remembered by many, including me. Its action takes place in Oxford, a location that is a sort of international treasure but also a real city, with buses, drains, burglars, supermarkets, potholes and pubs. Legendary places always astonish by having unlegendary characteristics. I could never quite get over the first time I saw ���Jerusalem��� on a signpost, or litter on a Jerusalem street. For my first few hours in Samarkand I just wanted to hug myself because of the amazing fact of being there - though, truth be told, a lot of it was pretty squalid. As for Baghdad���.

 

For me, a deep, cold,  dark river of broken friendships, deaths in the family and general lost innocence (sometimes a good thing to lose)  flows between the early 1970s era and the one I now inhabit. But it is also quite a narrow river, and so I can still see rather clearly across the uninviting chilly water into the unattainable streets, towers, fields and hills of 40 years ago. I just cannot go there. 

 

The book opens with the first three intensely moving verses of Thomas Hardy���s poem ���Old Furniture���, which you may read here http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/9982/

Like others of his poems ( especially ���The Oxen���) , you will probably feel that you have always known it, even if you have never read it before. It is a good start. The past is always with us, if we are wise. 

 

The heroine is a normally clever and pleasant 11-year-old girl attending what is obviously Oxford High School for Girls, which was in those lost days that wonderful thing,  a Direct Grant Girls��� Grammar School taking private and state pupils side by side, both chosen on merit. Now (since Labour abolished, and the Tories failed to restore, this excellent arrangement, in which the private sector very much helped the state sector - as it is now brusquely being told it ought to do) Oxford High is entirely private, though it maintains a limited number of bursaries for those who cannot afford its fees.

 

The story is set, unmistakably, in the snowy January and February of 1971 (I worked this out because of the passing mention of a Moon landing . The only one I can find which took place at this time of year was Apollo 14, launched on January 31st 1971). The snow, and the closed-in, transformed feel that slush and snowy skies give to city and countryside, are essential to the story, confining almost all its action to the haunted interior of the great decaying house.

 

So it concerns an Oxford I remember rather clearly, having lived in the city from 1963 to 1970 before I went out into the world (I would return there in the mid-1980s, leave again, and return again thinking that, after five years in Moscow and Washington, I might possibly deserve to live there at last. I know it so well now that I���m almost a resident).

 

In 1971 it was a generally scruffy South Midlands town, glorified into the ranks of cities by a tiny Cathedral and by its astonishing mediaeval core, half of it serving industry and the other half highbrow, none of it rich.  Penelope Lively's story concerns what was then the vast noble decay of Victorian North Oxford, a mossy, creaking estate of enormous dark red brick houses, steep-roofed, pointy-windowed, cornery, sitting in large untended gardens, in those days cut up into melancholy bedsits and generally thought to be doomed, now lovingly preserved, converted into language schools or college halls of residence,  and sometimes even revived as family homes by the new rich who have discovered Oxford in the last 20 years.

 

Clare, an orphan whose parents died long ago in an air crash, lives in one of these houses with her two ancient great aunts. In 1971 it was, amazingly,  possible to have great aunts who had grown up before the First World War. These were formidable bluestockings, early feminists, daughters of a distinguished anthropologist, once friends of the Webbs and members of important committees, defiantly and deliberately unmarried.

 

The world, having accepted the revolution they fought for,  has now hurried past them and left them beached on the gravel shoal of North Oxford in their gigantic house,  looming like a beached battleship.   They have no money (the house is on a lease which will probably just outlive them and so cannot be sold). They querulously refuse to understand the modern world, pretending that they cannot cope with decimal coinage, and that they have not noticed that Oxford���s longstanding grocers to the gentry, Grimbly Hughes (it really existed, as did a restaurant called Boffin���s. of the same vintage) has closed down and no longer delivers to its favoured customers. ���Grimbly Hughes has sent the wrong digestives!��� one of them complains . In reality, Clare has bought the offending biscuits from the Co-Op.

 

And yet in many things the old women remain young, funny, observant, close readers of ���The Times��� (still in those days recognisably the rigorous journal of record they had grown up with)  , wonderful at helping with Latin homework, deeply knowledgeable about history and the outside world, untroubled by prejudices (as they rapidly show when a second lodger, a young Ugandan man, appears in the house). They���re bit like my grandfather, though I wasn���t wise enough to understand his qualities when he was still around, and took his self-caricature too seriously,  a thing I continually regret. Clare, by contrast, increasingly understands how wonderful her great aunts are. And she also grasps with a pang of worry how irreplaceable they are. 

 

Things are quietly falling apart. The house is cracked and leaking, and impossible to heat properly. The aunts fear to go out in the snow lest they break a limb (they know what that will mean) and they fear to call a doctor because they do not understand the NHS.  One takes to her bed.  Clare starts to realise that these astonishing women will eventually die, and begins to imagine the world without them, the dissolution of her whole world, which of course is bound to come.

 

Money is so short that they take in a lodger, a puzzled inhabitant of the modern world who gapes in amazement at the ancient lavatories, the dumb-waiter, the bells for summoning servants and the many vast, freezing rooms full of undisturbed relics.

 

And one very cold night, as Clare and the lodger search for extra blankets, they find the tamburan, a startling, disturbing and haunting piece of painted wood, brought back from New Guinea 60 years before by her Great Grandfather.

 

This discovery is actually the great central event in the book. From this mysterious object radiates great power, the power of ancestor worship and respect for the past that  it was designed to embody when its maker long ago fashioned it in his unpenetrated forest. Then the expedition came, an expedition so strange and miraculous that the tribesmen thought these hairy-faced Oxford academics in their mosquito-proof tweeds were their own ancestors, returned at last, as they had always known they would. But in fact they were just the first outriders of an invasion that would destroy everything they knew.

 

After he had given it away, it is clear, the tamburan's maker realised he should not have done so. It belonged where it was. Without it,  there was always a sense of irreparable loss.

 

From then on, Clare is haunted. As she lives her ordinary life in her ordinary town and attends what at the time was her ordinary school, she hears sad or angry distant cries in the singing of the telephone wires in the night wind, mistakes a door-to-door salesman with a shadowed face for a painted tribesman, and dreams of the place where the tamburan came from, and of its owners who make it plainer and plainer that they want it back. All this time, the tamburan���s faded colours grow newer and fresher, and its unsettling resemblance to a human face grows more powerful.  At one point, on a wintry bus trip to an ancient Cotswold church, crammed with the memorials of the dead, she grasps that all proper people seek to maintain their diplomatic relations with those who have gone before them ��� and that when they cease to do so, they cease really to be themselves.

 

She also dreams (this is very cleverly described, so that it is both very realistic and very dreamlike at the same time) of being transported back to the Oxford of her great aunts��� childhood, seeing it as one sees the present, not as one sees the past, never really understanding,  even when she wakes, that she was in the past.

 

The story is cross-cut with bleak and spare accounts of the heartbreaking destruction of the ancient society which produced the tamburan. I won���t tell you how the dream-borne demands for its return are resolved in the end, except that it is a very  sad resolution.

 

The actual road, Norham Gardens, is still very much there. The actual house in the book, Number 40, is an invention and never was. Had it been it would now no doubt (after the great aunts had been carried out , to the tomb or the care home, and the cumbersome remnants of their outdated lives sold as antiques or hurled into skips as junk, or both)  have been beautifully repointed,  re-roofed and restored, as luxury flats or a college annexe. I must say that such survival is better than the heaps of rubble which Clare (who had she existed would now be in her mid-fifties) feared. But the past is obliterated just as surely by such transformations as it is by total destruction, if not more so. I���m not sure anyone who didn���t know it had existed could now begin to imagine England as it was on the brink of the 44 years of incessant change which have passed since the snowy winter of 1971. Worse, they might not want to remember, or care. 

Some Thoughts on the Greek Crisis

It���s a shameful gap in my knowledge and experience. I know nothing of Greece.  When I see TV reports from most parts of the world, I know what lies around the corner from the Red Square, Pariser Platz, Tiananmen Square or White House vantage point from which the reporter is speaking.  I know this actually and metaphorically. I have some sense of the history, some acquaintance with the political balance and the level of freedom, just as I know what it smells like, how cold it can get in January and how it feels when a little breeze blows down that little street that is just out of shot, where the reporter and his crew will go for a cup of coffee after the piece to camera is over.

 

But when it comes to Athens, I���m quite blank. I���ve never been there, or to anywhere in Greece, never having come any closer to Greece than Cyprus, which contains a lot of Greeks but is really in the Middle East. Partly as a result, I have a very sketchy idea of Greek politics and history, a sort of kaleidoscope of Costa-Gavras���s film ���Z���, not seen for at least 45 years, Colonels, an exiled King, and a seemingly endless string of Papandreous. I���m also a little haunted by the Second World War, the miserable scenes in Athens in Olivia Manning���s Balkan trilogy, the even more miserable scenes in Crete in Evelyn Waugh���s ���Sword of Honour��� , oddly merging in my mind with Mary Renault���s astonishing recreations of Athens in the classical era and the astonishing Elgin Marbles, reminding us in our 21st century pride that others came before us who perhaps knew *more* than we did about the world, and whose skills we have lost.

 

So I can say nothing remotely authoritative about internal Greek politics, or why Greek voters did as they did, or the influences on Syriza or anything like that.

 

I can only examine it as an EU matter. It seems strange now but during much of the Cold War there were still several Western European countries which did not precisely follow the model of France or Germany. They were all poor ��� Portugal, Spain, Greece, Ireland.  They were all socially conservative. Three, or sometimes two of them, depending on the current state of Greece,  were also politically conservative and had openly authoritarian governments.

 

 

 I say ���openly authoritarian��� because it seems to me that almost all most continental governments with their Civil Codes, examining magistrates, institutionalised official corruption, national police forces,  identity cards, juryless trials, semicircular non-adversarial parliaments  and gutless newspapers are authoritarian anyway, but have learned in recent years to look as if they���re not. These are improvements, and I���m glad of them, though they seem to me to be superficial. As a visiting journalist or a well-off traveller, I���m always aware of floating on a shiny surface. The real hard nature of these countries is seen only by those who live and work in them. I used to be absolutely astonished, for instance by the contempt which middle-class French people felt for their police force.  Now that our police force has become so much more like theirs, I understand it all too well.  The improvements in continental countries have been matched by a dreadful weakening of my own country���s liberties, so this is not in any way a smug assertion of superiority.

 

It was a bit embarrassing to have such openly authoritarian countries on ���our��� side, especially General Franco���s Spain, whose survival into the modern age seems increasingly unbelievable.   Greece joined NATO in 1952 ( as did Turkey, the country that never quite made it into the EU and now, I suspect, never will) , Portugal in 1949, Spain in 1982 (Though Spain had quietly hosted large US Naval and air bases since the early 1950s under the ���Pact of Madrid).  Ireland, of course didn���t join NATO at all because she was neutral.  Greece joined the EU in 1981. Spain and Portugal did so in 1986.

 

There was an assumption that membership, and the resulting dependence on credit and subsidy, would somehow anchor them in ���democracy���,  or at least in ���democratism���, the obeisance to the external aspects of government by the people, which is the ideology of the New Europe and indeed of the new globalism, and which is a very different thing from freedom. It seems to me to mean that , if one goes through the required motions, of regular contested elections, one is approved of ��� provided one does not vote for the wrong people.  The key to discovering who the ���wrong��� people are is the word ���centre���. A party may be of the ���left if it is ���centre-left���, or of the right if it is ���centre-right���, but not otherwise.  

 

Until now, the left has been more ���central��� than the right, because old-fashioned pre-1939 sovereigntist nationalism is pretty much banned on the Continent, where it is associated with ���Fascism, Falangism and authoritarian government, or with collaboration with the German occupation.

 

In Britain, where it has no such associations (though frequent attempts are made to smear it as if it did) conservative patriotism  is  only tolerated in a symbolic ���Last Night of the Proms��� and ���pint-of-bitter��� way in Britain. If it starts making actual demands for independent action, it is derided and marginalised. The single exception to this rule has been the defeat of the attempt (failed so far, but far from over) to get the United Kingdom to join the Euro. By doggedly treating this question as if it is an economic issue (because hardly anyone understands the political issue it really is) , opponents of the Euro have managed to keep us out until now. When economic crisis strikes this country again, as it must, that protection may prove remarkable weak.

 

An interesting test of EU ���democratism���  was the success at the polls of the Austrian Jorg Haider, whose controversial career ended in a car accident in 2008.  Let���s be clear why the EU���s treatment of Mr Haider was so disturbing.  It���s not because Mr Haider was nice, and the EU nasty.  Mr Haider was horrible. I did not like the look of Mr Haider. I have an unshiftable prejudice against populist right-wing leaders in German-speaking countries. I have a lingering suspicion that Germany���s own de-Nazification was not wholly complete, but there���s no doubt that Austria, having somehow attained victim rather than aggressor status in the post-war settlement, has done significantly  less to confront its tricky past. 

 

But the EU���s boycott of Austria when Mr Haider joined a coalition with Vienna���s more mainstream  ( ���centre right���?) conservative party, and entered government was also very worrying, a multinational power denying voters the freedom to choose their government.

 

 

Yes, they did this. See, for example http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/01/austria.ianblack .  What was it really about? There was no doubt Mr Haider���s rise was ���democratic���. The voters had, embarrassingly, voted for him, much as they now vote for the French National Front.  Many bad things are, always have been and always will be democratic, and popular.

 

But the EU still boycotted this freely-elected and constitutional government on its territory,  so making clear that its principles were not in fact ���democratic��� but something else altogether (���centrist���?). The easiest word is ���liberal���, though of course it���s also not very liberal to boycott a foreign country because you disapprove of its people���s choice of government.  Mr Haider���s offence, I think, was to reject by implication the EU���s ideas of open borders and multiculturalism. You do not have to accept Mr Haider���s rather gamey version of Austrian nationalism to be concerned about those. 

 

 

Which brings me back to those fringe EU states, rescued from blatant authoritarianism by the EU, and defended against a relapse by the EU. For their poorer citizens ���Democracy��� was completely associated with a new prosperity, rising standards of living, infrastructure, greater freedom to travel and work abroad.

 

 

Huge amounts of money began to flow into the former fringe states, in transfers and easy loans.  I���d love to know how much, and how much of it, in the end, came from Britain. When I was in Andalusia last autumn, I was amazed to see the pristine white concrete of the new high-speed railway lines, the vast subsidised olive groves stretching from horizon to horizon and the new motorways, far beyond the apparent means of Spain itself to pay for such things. 

 

As these societies were transformed, I didn���t initially connect it with the EU, or the Common Market as it then was. Only later did it seem to be a sort of imperial process, by which these fringe provinces, the loyalty of their elites bought with rivers of EU gold,  were helped to become markets for the manufactured goods of the North, and producers of raw materials and agricultural products, and also suppliers of cheap labour, either in situ or as migrants within the EU.

 

It wasn���t just avuncular generosity. It was a way of buying power, of turning poor, dictatorial or theocratic  but independent countries into affluent but subservient provinces, whose economies and cultures were reordered to suit the rich north of the EU. In all of these countries, religious social conservatism has been routed by waves of apparently easy money. The old hard question, ���Who whom?��� once again discovers the reality . A loan, like a  gift, can also be a chain and a fetter, even if it is made of gold or silver. Bonds aren���t called bonds for nothing.

 

Old-fashioned conservative nationalists couldn���t fight this on the continent because of the Fascist and collaborationist past.  Even in France I have a feeling that the National Front is unable (for that reason) to break into the second rounds of the Presidential and Parliamentary elections, and so elbow aside the French Tories, currently known as the ���Republicans���

 

The enjoyable paradox now is that a far stronger threat to the EU���s centralised democratism now comes from the Left, especially from Syriza in Greece and their Spanish equivalent Podemos.

 

So many paradoxes follow.  It is the Utopian Marxist left, not the conservative patriotic right, that has actually come into full-scale national conflict with the imperial power of the EU, even though the EU is. at heart, a leftist utopian project.  The trouble is that, while these movements quite rightly resent the imposition of mad Procrustean economic policies on them, weirdly punitive and deterrent given the liberal relativism that lies at the heart of the EU,  they are fighting against their own globalist anti-national ideals.

 

In fact the purest exposition of modern Greek nationalism is left-wing. The hardline nationalist right is by contrast a sideshow. You might claim this has always been so because of its Byronic, radical origins. But it hasn���t. The last Greek government to say ���Oxi��� (no!) to an arrogant continental neighbour was that of General Ioannis Metaxas, a monarchist tyrant, who refused Italian demands for occupation rights to parts of Greek territory.

 

The EU���s response to this rebellion has so far been imperial far more than it has been leftist. France has been more willing to see the problem from Greece���s point of view. But Germany, and its many desperately sycophantic self-abasing clients in the ���new��� formerly Soviet-dominated EU states, who whose leaders would have been ready for their people to eat thistles if it was the price of getting into the Euro, continues to support a policy of exemplary punishment for rebels. I think all this gives us a clue as to what the EU really is, deep, deep down.  

 

As I write, I have no idea how or where it may end, but I am reminded of Dominic Cummings���s warning about Britain���s government.

 

���Everyone thinks there's some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that's where the really good people are, but there is no door.���

 

There is no door in Brussels or Berlin either. These people are human, they lack sleep, they don���t understand economics, they let petty ambition or dogma blind them to obvious facts. They may not even have been very bright in the first place.

Arguments About Existence and About Causation

Mr Andrew Platt thinks he has found a way of establishing that ���addiction��� can exist even though its own proponents are abandoning the claim that it is a ���disease��� and even though there is no objective test for its presence in the human body.

 

His main line of attack has been that there is no objective test for some other things that are generally agreed to exist.

 

One of these is ���love���.

 

While I���m afraid this is a bit too reminiscent of the linguistic philosophy that nearly drove me to distraction at York in the early 1970s, there���s an interesting point here. But only determined readers should attempt this paper.

 

Mr Platt and I first grappled thus, on the ���Addiction is not a disease��� thread. The original idea came from Mr ���Phil W���,  who wrote: ���Mr Hitchens, 'Addiction' is an internal mental state. It is not possible to prove addiction objectively exists since it is not an object. This doesn't mean that internal states of mind don't exist. You believe in mental illness and you believe in love but you couldn't provide the 'objective proof' for those either. Can you address this simple point that I and other contributors have made?���

 

Mr Platt intervened to say : 'Mr. Hitchens is still reading this thread. What a shame he has not answered Phil W���s excellent point: ���You believe in mental illness and you believe in love but you couldn't provide the 'objective proof' for those either.��� Of course, he has not answered because he has no answer.'

 

I answered: 'Good heavens, I had no idea anyone seriously expected me to bother with such stuff. I don't 'believe in' mental illness. There's no need to. People behave irrationally, and against their own interests, generally as a result of some sort of physical damage, sleep deprivation, or extreme terror or grief. That is mental illness. The difficulties arise , as I have said here many times, in categorising it, for it takes many forms, and in treating it. Nor do I 'believe in' 'love'. There are many and various experiences and affinities which go by that name, and most of us have experienced them subjectively, though we could not define them objectively. Poets and other artists have attempted to describe aspects of it. But nobody has sought to overturn the entire system of morality and law on the basis of love of any kind. You cannot be excused from responsibility for your actions or from penalties for your crimes, or excused from supporting yourself, or excused from telling the truth, because of love. And if anyone suggested that you could, then we would all be entitled to demand that it should be objectively defined and definable. Fortunately for us and for love, this is not likely.

 

Mr Platt responded :'I thank Mr. Hitchens for his reply, which I was not expecting. Not for the first time, he moves the goalposts. Whether anyone has ���sought to overturn the entire system of morality and law on the basis of love��� is not relevant. What is relevant is that love exists, yet it is not possible to provide objective proof for it. Mr. Hitchens admits as much. Now we have agreement that certain mental states exist for which there can be no objective proof, how can he continue to use the lack of objective proof for addiction to argue it does not exist? If addiction is a fiction, then so is love. I feel we have been over similar ground before with the coffee argument. For someone who likes to think he knows how to argue this ought to be basic stuff: concentrate first on something we are familiar with (love), establish a principle (it can exist despite lack of objective proof) then apply it to the thing under consideration (addiction). The logic is really not that difficult.'

 

! wrote: No, it isn't. I have not 'moved any goalposts'. This is a useless metaphor in a matter not comparable with football. The word 'exist' means different things in each proposition. The tests of existence in each case are different, and the weight which can be placed upon the things whose existence has been demonstrated is different. 'Addiction', whose existence cannot be demonstrated by any objective test, is even so allowed to influence the objective administration of law and the objective practice of medicine. 'Love' is a word which has many separate meanings and indeed in Greek is described by several different words, is a concept wholly incomparable with 'addiction'. Nor is it used to influence the practice of law or medicine.

 

Mr Platt retorted: 'More obfuscation from Mr. Hitchens! If he does not like the goalpost metaphor then let me spell it out in plain language: please stop bringing things into the discussion which are of no relevance. Neither the Greek language nor medical and legal practices have any bearing whatsoever on the issue. Has he never carried out a thought experiment to test a hypothesis? It seems not! Someone holding a ripe banana might proclaim ���all fruit is yellow���. We can test this hypothesis by recalling all the different fruits we have encountered to see if we can think of one that is not yellow. As soon as we think of an orange the hypothesis is discredited; where oranges grow and what they are called in other languages has no bearing on the matter. When someone says ���addiction does not exist because it cannot be demonstrated by an objective test��� we can do a similar thought experiment to test the hypothesis. We try to recall all the mental states we can think of whose existence is beyond question and ask if there are any that cannot be demonstrated by an objective test. If we can think of any then the hypothesis is discredited. Nothing else is relevant. Phil W (who really should be arguing this, not me) performed such a thought experiment and came up with the good examples of love and mental illness. If Mr. H accepts their existence then his hypothesis is discredited. Note that we have not proven the existence of addiction through this line of reasoning; we have merely removed the objection concerning the lack of objective evidence for it. As far as I know, however, that seems to be the only objection Mr. Hitchens has. I do not wish to get side-tracked by all the spurious information Mr. Hitchens has brought up, but in passing I would note that perhaps love and addiction are not as incomparable as he seems to think. Both can cause unusual behaviour; neither necessarily last forever, but can be overcome; addiction always leads to harmful behaviour and sometimes death, but even love can do that too in certain circumstances.

 

To which I now reply.

 

I am surprised at his curt dismissal of my point about Greek, in so many ways the parent of all modern language. As C.S.Lewis points out in his ���Four Loves��� Greek has four different expressions which English generally translates as love ��� Philia, the bond of friendship, Agape, the unconditional love of God, Eros, the non-physical side of sexual love, and Storge, empathy and familial love. 

Each can be fairly clearly defined, in my view. These are all so deeply different that many of us will not have experienced all of them, some will have experienced one or two but not the others and some sad souls may never have experienced any of them. But the point is that the experience necessary to conclude that these exist would be entirely different in each case.

 

In each case, to say that they exist objectively is to make a qualitatively different statement. And the evidence we would require in each case would be different.

 

If that is the case within the single word ���Love���, then it is even more the case *between* the wholly different words and concepts ���Addiction���, ���Love��� and ���mental illness���.

 

There is a closer congruence between ���mental illness��� and ���addiction��� as it is significant in both law and medicine.

 

And one of the very interesting things about ���mental illness��� is the way in which it can be misused as soon as it strays from the strictest possible definition, that is to say, the objectively observable overthrow of the ill person���s reason.

 

Most of us have called a political opponent or an enemy ���mad��� at some point or other. Thousands of defence lawyers have tried to claim that their clients are ���mad��� to save them from prison. Some political regimes have also claimed that their opponents are insane as a way of torturing and incarcerating them, most notably the USSR. In some ways worse, in some ways not, psychiatrists in free countries have subjectively classified as mentally ill, or disordered or otherwise afflicted, persons who in the view of many are perfectly sane, and have then imposed upon them objective and potent biochemical or physical treatments, such as powerful psychotropic drugs, electric shocks or lobotomies. 

 

 

This is why I insist on the most narrow precision when using the term, and think others should too.

 

I simply do not think that ���love��� needs to be treated with such precision or such caution, as the law does not use it to excuse crimes and the medical profession does not use it as a pretext for prescribing medication or for requiring ���treatment, let alone invasive brain surgery. The clever-clever but ultimately unconvincing attempts to drag the love of God into the law-making process is a dud. There is obviously not a parallel for the use of the term ���addiction��� to allow criminal drug abusers to be sent for ���treatment' rather than punished according to law.  Nor is there a parallel in medicine for the drugs prescribed to ���treat��� ���addiction'. No such drugs are prescribed to ���treat��� love of any kind.

 

If ���addiction��� is an ���internal mental state��� then it cannot conceivably be used as a reason for changing our behaviour towards lawbreakers who claim to be influenced by it. If ���love��� is in fact comparable to ���addiction���, in the sole sense that that its existence can be claimed without objective proof, then that is the only similarity between the two, either in general usage or in application. 

 

 

DRUGS AND THE RIGBY MURDER 

I have also been challenged by various contributors over my original point about the Lee Rigby murder, that its perpetrators were unhinged and that this is the principal reason for their action.  

 

I should emphasis here that ���Principal��� does not mean ���only���. Some have said they cannot find my original posting. These are the two earliest articles which I published in the Mail on Sunday, and which would therefore have been published here too.

 

 

I wrote on  26th May 2013

 

���WHEN a soldier was murdered on the streets of London, what use was it to anyone that the Prime Minister flew back from Paris? What use was the fatuous committee, grandiosely called COBRA (SLOW-WORM would be a better name), that gathered portentously in a bunker, as if the Blitz was still on? This is just street theatre - a bunch of powerless people pretending they can protect us from the wholly unpredictable.

What use are the expensive spooks who track, snoop and file, who want the power to lock us up for weeks and to peer even more deeply into our lives? They failed to prevent this, though they knew all about the suspects.

As for the police, living on a reputation they won decades ago and no longer deserve, wouldn't a constable on old-fashioned foot patrol have been more help on this occasion than the squadrons of armed militia who appeared long after the event, blazing away in the street? The police force in this country is now bigger than our shrunken Army, but it is extraordinary how its members are never, ever there, except to protect the powerful. Too busy patrolling Twitter, perhaps.

Now look at the suspects. Oceans of piffle have been written (as usual) about the mythical bogey of 'Al Qaeda'. We are in yet another frenzy about the 'hate preachers' who are the inevitable result of 40 years of state multiculturalism. The English Defence League (even stupider than the liberal elite) is 'defending our way of life' by throwing bottles at the police.

But nobody has seen any significance in the fact that Michael Adebolajo's life changed utterly when, as a teenager, he began taking drugs, especially cannabis. Use of this drug, particularly when young, is closely correlated with irreversible mental illness. That's also when he embraced the barmy version of Islam that seems to have him in its grip.

There are plenty of other young drug users roaming our streets. Most of them couldn't even spell 'Al Qaeda' and won't embrace Islam. But many of them will become mental patients. Some of them, alas, will be 'released into the community' to commit awful acts of unhinged violence that barely make the local TV news.

No Prime Ministers will fly back from Paris. No Whitehall committees will meet. No noble statements of defiance will be made. And yet, if we strengthened and enforced our drug laws, instead of watering them down to nothingness as we have done, much of this would be preventable.���

 

And I wrote on 22nd December 2013

 

���BACK in May, I pointed out that at least one of the Woolwich killers had wrecked his brain with cannabis from an early age.

Now we know that both of them had done so.

My point was this - that the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby were among the large number of British criminals sent mad by this terrible drug.

Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale both acted like drugged madmen on the day of the killing. For instance, Cheralee Armstrong said in a statement read in court on December 2 that Adebowale 'looked mad, like he'd escaped from a mental hospital'.

We now know that, for a week before the murder, Adebolajo was living in a house where there was a cannabis farm. Both men were habitual users of cannabis, and had been since their teens. The correlation between the use of this drug and severe, irreversible mental illness is very strong, especially in the young.

Many violent criminals, most of them having nothing to do with politics or Islam, are long-term cannabis users.

The important element in this case is not the religion. It is the dope. Many young men become militant Muslims but never kill. Many young men never embrace any religion, but take to skunk and become mad and violent. What, then should we be worrying about more? Skunk? Or Militant Islam? But cannabis has so many friends and secret users in the political, legal, and media establishment that this crucial connection is repeatedly ignored.

Rather than indulge in secret police fantasies about somehow guarding against 'extremism', we should treat cannabis as the menace it is, and severely punish all those found in possession of it.���

 

 

 

To emphasise one cause of an event or one explanation is not to say that there is no other influence on the event. My point was then, and is now, that to attribute the Rigby killing to some sort of Islamist conspiracy( as much of the media has done) is a ludicrous misunderstanding of a crime mainly attributable to the severe mental illness of the perpetrators. AS for 'total exclusion' Let's try it this way: Was the killer's choice of victim influenced by their Islamic beliefs? Probably. Had they not been Muslims, would they have killed someone else under a different pretext? Almost certainly Had they not been mentally ill, would they have killed anyone at all? Almost certainly not. Therefore their adherence to Islam, while playing a part, was not the central question. How do I reach these conclusions? By adducing several cases of grotesquely violent murders involving obscene mutilations of the victim using knives, including beheadings conducted by persons who were not Muslims but who were insane and who were known drug abusers. I have not been able to find comparable cases in which the killers were Muslims but *not* drug abusers. If anyone wishes to argue against this, I'd be obliged if they'd do so without trying to claim that I'm excusing Islamic fanaticism, or any similar rubbish. It's demonstrably false and I have no such aim. And can someone explain to Mr Owen that to say that a) is the principal cause of something is not to say that b) or c) played no part in it. It is to say that a) was the principal cause. no more, no less. ***

PETER HITCHENS: The best way to tackle terror? Keep calm and carry on quietly

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Politicians react to terrorism much as parents might respond when their lisping tiny offspring come home from sex-ed classes and ask them to explain what lesbians do. They panic.

They have no idea what to say and they are terrified of committing themselves, rightly suspecting that their answers will be stored up and embarrassingly remembered years later.

But they have to pretend to know. And so they talk drivel.

I have watched this for years, with growing, grim amusement. But last week they outdid themselves, churning out gallons of swirling hogwash.

The most ridiculous of all was (as usual) the comically unqualified Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan. Attempting to explain the latest goofy, futile plan to root out extremism in the classroom, she groped for an example.

How could teachers spot a potential fanatic, who was in danger of rejecting British values and might end up waving an AK-47? You could almost hear the poor woman���s brain flapping wildly from side to side.

Then she reached for the one thing that absolutely everyone is now compelled to agree on, if they don���t want the thought police and everyone on Twitter to think they are an extremist.

���Sadly, Isis are extremely intolerant of homosexuality,��� she gabbled.

Alas, until quite recently, Ms Morgan took a position which could, in these days of sexual liberation, be viewed as ���extremely intolerant��� of homosexuality.

���Marriage, to me, is between a man and a woman,��� she said in February 2013, after voting against same-sex weddings. This view, she argued, tied in with her Christian faith.

She has since had the politically correct technicians in to adjust her brain, and said in October last year that she had changed her mind, though it wasn���t quite clear how she had done this. The fact is that, in her previous state of mind, she could quite easily have been reported to the police by some zealous sneak, under her own guidelines.

Even more hilarious (if you find this sort of thing funny) is the fact that homosexuality is now officially a fundamental British value.

It���s true that the French have always claimed this was so, especially in the upper reaches of our ruling class, but I have never before heard it confirmed by a Minister of the Crown.

This was followed closely by a widely publicised attempt to spread fear and despondency, by mocking up a gun battle in the middle of London, in which men dressed up as terrorists ran about shooting off blanks, and a woman lay groaning in the street.

I can think of few ways better designed to help Islamic terrorists in their task of frightening us all into a state of quivering funk.

Then there was the Prime Minister���s weird attack on the BBC for using the term ���Islamic State���. This was very ungrateful, given the Corporation���s huge efforts to rehabilitate the Tory Party, after it turned liberal and decided that homosexuality was a core British value.

If we can���t use the term ���Islamic State���, on the grounds that it���s not Islamic or a state, then surely we can���t use the term ���Conservative Party��� either. It certainly isn���t conservative, and I���m not sure it has enough members left to be called a party.

But our glorious rulers were not done yet. To crown a week of wild floundering, the Government announced that our few remaining bombers will soon be fighting alongside President Assad of Syria.

Two years ago they wanted to use the same aircraft to bomb Mr Assad.

Four years ago they did use them to overthrow the Libyan government. As a result Libya is now a failed state, where the man who murdered 30 British men and women in Tunisia is said to have been trained. Had our Prime Minister not bombed Libya, Seifeddine Rezgui could not have been trained there.

I can think of no simpler way of explaining what a stupid mistake this action was. Yet the man who made it still sits in Downing Street posing as a world leader.

Our Government do not know what they are doing. Let us hope that they all calm down before they do any more damage.

Anna's gripping drama, and a very troubling thought

I was gripped, against all my instincts, by Anna Friel���s performance as a female soldier who suddenly finds her own side is the enemy, in BBC2���s Odyssey.

Perhaps I���ve had enough of thrillers with plots so subtle that you can���t work out who���s good and who���s bad.

Perhaps, after years in which I genuinely believed that our Government and the Americans were a pretty straightforward force for good, I now find it harder to accept, having seen the wrong and foolish things we do in the Middle East and now also in Ukraine.

It���s hard to be a conservative patriot when your beloved country is run by people who aren���t conservative patriots

Why do we need a new gigantic airport?

I still don���t understand why we need a gigantic airport sprawled across South East England. What does it gain us, compared with the misery of noise, pollution and congestion it causes in our cramped country? Would it really be so bad if we had to take a train to Paris or Amsterdam to fly to the USA?

Why the obsession with grandiose projects, such as new runways and the mad, useless HS2, when the shocking scandal of the broken promise on electrifying our decrepit, low-speed railways passes without scandal? The abandoned plans were specifically promised in a Tory manifesto published only a few weeks ago (pages 11, 13 and 14, if you want to check).

I know politicians lie habitually, but this is surely the most blatant false prospectus of modern times. Yet nobody has even resigned.

Greece isn't the only debt dodger

Whatever happens this weekend, the poor Greek people are helpless in the hands of dogmatic zealots who want to save a political project, the euro, at all costs. 

For them it must be much like waking up in the middle of an operation and realising the doctors are all mad and cannot hear you. Of course, their past governments were to blame for swallowing the promises of magical prosperity that came from Brussels. But why should ordinary people pay for this?

I see no end to this except more pain. But those who smugly lecture the Greeks for being in debt should recall that Germany was once a prostrate debtor nation, too, and was forgiven, and that in 1934 Britain defaulted on war debts to the USA worth about ��225billion in today���s money.

Most people think we have paid them off, but we haven���t.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

More Arguing Lessons for Slow Learners

I can���t predict the future, as I know to my cost. But it���s generally pretty easy to see how the pro-drug lobby, its shills and dupes, will react to anything I write on the subject.

 

So I can usually build in defence mechanisms against foreseeable lines they will take.  Do these defences work? Well, possibly for others, but not, it would seem, against them. One thing about the drug lobby is that it *simply does not listen* to what its opponents say. I cannot count the number of debates I have had, on broadcast forums, on the web or in public meetings, where my pro-drug opponent simply pays no attention at all to anything I have said.  Howard Marks has been a rare exception, which is why I exempt him from the exasperated contempt I feel for almost all these people.

 

He listens, learns and comes back with an improved case. Perhaps it���s his old-fashioned, pre-cultural revolution grammar school and  Oxford scientific education kicking in. Howard was taught how to think. Most of my opponents, and almost all of their audiences, have been taught what to think.

 

The BBC, furious that I actually stood up to its beloved Professor Nutt,  has pretty much excluded me from the airwaves on the subject of drugs, where in many cases its ���debates��� on the subject are disgracefully one-sided and simply exclude any voice which does not favour weaker laws. It gets round this by giving airtime to vacuous ministers, who pretend to be ���tough��� , and assure the public they have no plans to get rid of the existing laws while continuing to preside over a state which ensures that the ostensibly punitive laws against drug possession are not in fact enforced.

 

A fascinating sideline on this has been the recent legislation on ���legal highs���, which contains no penalties for *possession* at all,  only for sale and distribution - an exact parallel to the *de facto* state of the laws on cannabis. The laws against simple possession are more or less unenforced, except in various circumstances where they are useful to the police as holding or alternative charges for people they can���t actually prove a case against in other matters. After all, the material possession of cannabis can be proven in court more readily than most offences, and anyone charged with it is going to  have a hard time pleading not guilty if cannabis has been found on their person.   

 

Anyway, a lot of Big Dope response to my 29th June article http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/06/yes-the-tunisian-killer-was-on-cannabis-too-so-what-.html

 

���was on the basis of correlation. I hadn���t shown it, they claimed. Where was my evidence? Well, in a sense this was just obtuse. I *had* shown that , in a number of prominent terror and mass-murder cases ( and in a number of ���ordinary���  criminal cases which I assembled in my old blog posting ���High and Violent���, to which I linked), the culprit had been found by the authorities to be a cannabis user. That���s correlation.

 

I had conceded, to be scrupulous, that in some cases I couldn���t show this was so. Nor could anyone else know that it wasn���t. There was just no information. I sometimes wonder whether to bother to *be* scrupulous, if my opponents are going to respond by saying that this is in some way evidence of the weakness of my case.    I was pointing out that I knew the evidence wasn���t universally confirmatory, but that I still believe it to be strong enough to merit further investigation.

 

More than that, I also referred to other cases in which wholly different drugs (Steroids in the case of Raoul Moat and Anders Breivik, ���antidepressants��� in some others) seemed also to be correlated with violent acts. My argument has never been about cannabis alone. In fact my discovery of the cannabis-violence correlation came *after* my discovery of the correlation between ���antidepressants��� and violence, which is itself a step on from my original concern about the correlation between ���antidepressants��� and otherwise inexplicable suicide.

 

Now, here is the key passage in which I armoured my case against predictable criticism. I have emphasised the passage which seems to me to have been particularly important:

���There appears to be a correlation between the use of this drug and violent, irrational acts, a correlation so strong and so frequently observed in prominent events that it seems to me that we need a proper inquiry to see if it is significant. We know about the correlation because such horrors are much more intensively covered by the media and investigated by the authorities than other crimes. It is reasonable to contend that if other, less noteworthy crimes of violence were subjected to the same scrutiny, similar correlations might well emerge.���

 

Let me say that again. The correlation in this necessarily small number of cases is significant because it is only such high-profile cases which attract the sort of attention necessary to obtain the facts. I am a journalist, one person with many interests and nobody but me to do my research. I have limited (that is to say almost no) access to case files, police and court records. I am unaware of thousands of crimes that are prosecuted every year, and scores of deaths that are subject to inquests each year, because the media do not report them at all, or do so so scantily and in such obscure places that I could never keep track of them.

 

Only an inquiry, of the kind for which I call, could take us to the next stage of correlation. In many cases, as the police and the media are not interested and don't ask when the information is available, we may never know if drugs were involved in most past cases because nobody tried to find out. The inquiry would require police and courts to ascertain and record such facts in all violent crimes and in all suicides.

 

One other point. I���m also accused of saying that, because such killers were cannabis users, their Islamism (where present) is irrelevant.  I don���t recall every having said this, because I don���t think it. Their choice of targets can be said without doubt to have been influenced by this on several occasions. But not, crucially, on all occasions.

 

 

The man who beheaded Jennifer Mills-Westley did not do so because he was an Islamist. He wasn't one. Nor did the man who opened fire in a  crowded street in Tucson, Arizona. He wasn't one either.   These actions,  horribly similar to killings committed by men who *were* Islamists, took place with no religious or coherently political aim.

 

The question is not what politics or non-politics may have moved these people, but what made them able to do such dreadful things to their fellow-creatures (and in general to be so happy about it afterwards) . The inhibition against doing violent harm to fellow creatures is common to all of us, and very strong, or the streets would run with blood. It takes very powerful forces to overcome it, as military training experts well know. The thing they have in common, the Islamists and the non-Islamists, is cannabis, or some other potent mind-changing drug. Why is this simple point so hard to get across?  Because the Big Dope Billionaire Lobby is incommoded by it and doesn't want to acknowledge it. The recognition of such a link, by a proper inquiry, would halt in its tracks their almost-complete campaign for legalisation. They know that.  So they don���t argue. They obfuscate, in the hope you���ll be fooled. Don���t be.

 

And yet,  still, I get nit-picking resistance, and claims that I have prejudged the matter. Can anyone be surprised that I get exasperated with the Big Dope Dupes?

 

By the way, the links below may be of interest to those who have taken part in the separate discussion on the drug laws of Tunisia.  I think they tend to support my view that enforcement of these laws is episodic, probably not that consistent and just, perhaps, subject to corruption. :

 

Associated Press reports on Tunisia revamping drug laws (almost exactly a year ago) .  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-2670695/Tunisia-revamp-drug-laws-prisons-up.html

Global Post on same story, a week or so alter

 

http://www.mintpressnews.com/tunisian-prime-minister-says-drug-law-no-longer-in-tune-with-the-times/193458/

 

Huffington Post reports here that 3,000 dinars is the ���price��� of a clear urine test, and that law is widely abused as a catch-all employed against people the police want to get anyway, rather than against drug consumption as such.

 

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.huffpostmaghreb.com/news/loi-52-tunisie/&prev=search

Did we ever take Goldfinger seriously?

I have never seen ���The Sound of Music��� (I refused to go and see I on principle, during the months when it incessantly occupied the biggest Cinema in Oxford, week after week after week) or ���Mary Poppins���, and wouldn���t take the chance now if it was offered to me.  I feel I have a more-than-sketchy idea of what goes on in both of them. I also managed to miss most of the early James Bond films, probably because my parents thought I was too young.

 

But I have always felt slightly at a loss through not having seen ���Goldfinger���.  I can recall a friend of my mother���s being embarrassed at being seen reading the book, with its unforgettable and disturbing cover of a skull with gold coins in the eye-sockets. She quickly put it away, to keep it out my sight. Having sicne read it, I���m not surprised. That must have been about 1959 or 1960, and  That skull , and the coins, was all I did remember. I see now I���ve looked it up that the skull had a rose clenched between its teeth, but I must have thought that a silly girlish detail, and erased it.

 

 I can remember schoolfellows boasting about having been taken to see it , going on and on about Aston Martin DB5s, ejector seats, revolving number plates and machine guns,   and it contains some of those things that ���everybody knows��� ��� people can die if you paint them all over with gold; if you shoot a hole in a pressurised plane,  you���ll be sucked out through it; everything we think we know about Lasers, which we had in 1964 only just heard of,  all the gold in the USA is in Fort Knox (this last is apparently very much disputed these days) . It must have the most memorable cinematic clich�� of modern times - the hero about to be sliced in two by a Laser beam, as the smiling villain looks on.  I never caught up with it on TV, Bond films are too boastful to fit on a TV screen, I suspect. Certainly, ���From Russia With Love��� on screen was very disappointing.

 

So when one of my local art-houses screened it on a Sunday afternoon, I felt almost obliged to go. Gosh,  it made me feel old.  Thanks to the cultural revolution in humour and sexual attitudes, it was frequently unintentionally very funny. I wondered from time to time whether Sean Connery and Honor Blackman had somehow seen into the future as they filmed it, and realised that all the assumptions of their age would become ludicrous before they died.

 

Its ideas of luxury and style, almost pathetic, reminded me of a remark by Kingsley Amis, (in an essay collection called, I think ���Whatever happened to Jane Austen?���, which I haven���t seen for years) of an era of gross rather crude uxury, seen through a ���miasma of Drambuie and king-sized cigarettes���. Only a country recently relieved from rationing would have been much impressed by that sort of thing.  It reminded me of the days when restaurants would bring the wine, reverently tipped up in a  basket.

 

 

 

The ���best hotel in Miami beach��� looks like a  fairly basic Holiday Inn, the room-service meal looks, well, like a room-service meal,  and the room telephones don���t even have their own dials, let alone push-buttons.

 

 I���d have laughed if I���d been at home, especially at the fights and the scornfully-treated floozies,  but could I laugh in an (uncrowded) cinema, or were some of these people talking it seriously? A woman called ���Pussy Galore��� indeed. How did they get away with that in 1964?  A modern version of the film couldn���t use the ludicrous name, but would certainly make a lot more of the fact that in the book on which the film is loosely based, Miss Galore is a confirmed lesbian, as are all her troupe of girls. I suppose this possibility is very faintly hinted at when she tells Bond she��� immune to his charm, but it really is a very soft whisper indeed.

 

But what struck me most of all was the the great Bond himself was so totally useless. Sent to spy on Auric Goldfinger, he immediately exposes himself and breaks his cover  to rescue a foolish man from being tricked at cards. Why bother?  Anyone who played cards ( and repeatedly lost) against a man with a huge earpiece stuck in the side of his head, who insisted on sitting in the same seat for every game, deserved to be cheated.

 

Having done so he also exposes a beautiful girl to danger, who is promptly killed. Bond cannot save her because, despite his MI6 supertraining and licence to kill, he does not notice when Goldfinger���s henchman, Oddjob, sneaks into his hotel room, or when Oddjob creeps up behind him and knocks him out,  before painting the girl gold all over and killing her. Why Oddjob doesn���t kill Bond as well I cannot for the life of me work out, except that the film would have to be abandoned if he did. .

 

Somehow, even after this, Bond continues to pretend he has not been unmasked, playing a futile game of golf with Goldfinger at an expensive course, during which both men pretend that they don���t know that one is a villain and the other a spy.

 

From that moment onwards. Bond does nothing either useful or intelligent. He gets in the way of the dead girl���s sister, who is trying pretty gamely to shoot Goldfinger, so saving the British taxpayer a great deal of money.

 

He then gets her killed too. His Aston Martin super car, ejector seat ,revolving number-plates, machine-guns etc is as much as use as a bicycle against Goldfinger���s small army of trained (North?) Koreans. After driving around in it for a bit,  shooting people, ejecting a Korean and crashing, Bond is captured and duly strapped to a  gold table while a laser is aimed at his crotch. Goldfinger then lets Bond go, on the flimsiest pretext possible  after which he surely deserves to die.

 

Bond later escapes and manages to get captured *again* because he is not paying attention. His attempt to smuggle the details of the plot to the CIA fails completely. The world is in fact rescued by Pussy Galore, who turns out not to be immune to charm and changes sides.

 

The more I write this the more I am reminded of the late Anna Russell���s deadpan description of what happens in Wagner���s ���Ring of the Nibelungs��� (which you can read here,  http://www.markelliswalker.net/music/albums/anna-russell-ring.html , or watch on YouTube, in which she also impersonates a giant pink blancmange) . I think she is the origin of the much-copied expression ��� I am not making this up, you know���. I can���t begin to match its majestic mockery of opera, an art form whose supposed glories have always eluded me. But there is something about a  straight recitation of this rubbish which brought it to mind).

 

It is just astonishing how useless Bond is.  At the end of the film, he can���t even manage to defuse the atomic device whose lid he has taken about 20 minutes to get off.  A technician has to do it for him. *And* Goldfinger almost gets away, only failing to escape through his own sudden an unexpected stupidity . Was the whole thing meant to be a joke from start to finish? How and why did it become such a cult that they are still churning them out half a century later with no sign of an end.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An old debate on the wickedness of New Labour

My contribution to this debate, perhaps two years old, at the Cambridge Union, has appeared on the world wide web.

 

Some of you may find it interesting.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUHNFY1ksPw

 

The whole thing is here

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3HXNgsl8Yo