Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 203
March 5, 2015
An Article in the Spectator on the Russia-Ukraine crisis
The London Spectator has today published this article by me appealing for more reason, and fewer adjectives, in coverage of the Ukraine crisis (or as Mr Jaremko prefers: 'London Spectator has today published this article by me appealing for more reason, and fewer adjectives in coverage of Ukraine crisis').
Peter Hitchens and Ben Judah debate the Putin issue
Here is a Spectator podcast in which I discuss the Putin issue with Ben Judah, who takes the opposite view from me.
March 3, 2015
Great Europhile Disaster Movie
Some of you may wish to see the Great European Disaster Movie, which I criticised here on Sunday.
You may watch the film here
Here, you may watch the discussion after the film in which I take part (in the latter two thirds, anyway)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b054v5cf/the-great-european-disaster-movie-newsnight-debate
No Surprise Here - 'Jihadi John' was a cannabis smoker
Once again, all I needed to do was wait. And yesterday, in the ’Sun on Sunday’, the news I had been expecting appeared. (it is followed up on Mail Online here)
Mohammed Emwazi, the person now widely known as ‘Jihadi John’, was a drug-addled drifter, and regular cannabis-smoker, before he embraced Islamist fanaticism.
This has now proved to be the case with the killers of Lee Rigby, with two recent Islamist killers in Canada, with all the culprits of the recent Islamist killings in Paris, and the Copenhagen killer, Omar el-Hussein
I just thought I’d mention it. It still seems to me to be a link worth investigating. And while we investigate it, silly politicians and others who seek to weaken the already feeble laws against this allegedly soft drug should surely cancel their plans.
After recent research showing a link between cannabis and mental illness, and graphic demonstrations of its power to bend the human mind in a recent TV programme, its popular image as a harmless recreation badly needs re-evaluating
The Presumption of Guilt - the case of Boris Nemtsov
Since the shooting of Boris Nemtsov (may he rest in peace) in Moscow on Friday, the assumption behind almost everything written and said in British media has been that Vladimir Putin is in some way responsible. Nobody actually says it outright, but you cannot miss the tone. Our Prime Minister, the Hero of Libya and the Guardian of Our Borders, the Great Reformer of Schools and the Man Who Saved the Economy (by borrowing even more money than before) found time to demand an investigation of the killing.
I should have thought that, with this country awash with uninvestigated, let alone unsolved, crimes, he might have more pressing concerns.
And, if he is so hot on expansionist, repressive police states, perhaps he should be summoning Prince William home from Peking, where the heir to throne is currently consorting with one of the world’s most intolerant and ruthless police states, which can disappear and kill its opponents through the use of utterly subservient courts, police forces - all unexamined by a press so controlled that it makes Russia’s look free. Prince Charles ought also to be quietly asked to reduce the frequency of his visits to Saudi Arabia, but, whoops, I am applying consistent principles here, which always leads to trouble.
What does an ‘uncallous’ murder look like, by the way? Is there even such a thing? The incessant deployment of adjectives by modern politicians and media is causing grave strain at the adjective mines in Turkmenistan where (in a little-known but grave, pressing, menacing and indeed possibly terrifying crisis) , adjective-miners are threatening to strike if they are not more richly rewarded. The price of ‘despicables’ has risen to unprecedented heights, and ‘cowardlies’ can now only be obtained on the black market. The only other major adjective mines are in Siberia, under Russian control.
This weblog is taking part in a voluntary rationing scheme, under which we seek to limit the use of adjectives to essentials only.
Now, back to the murder:
First of all, does anyone really think that, when news of Mr Nemtsov’s death reached the Kremlin offices of Mr Putin, that despot whooped with joy and said ‘That is just what we need!’
In what way would Mr Nemtsov’s death help Mr Putin? With all due respect to the dead, Mr Nemtsov was, like his whole generation of Russian politicians, almost totally discredited in the eyes of most Russian voters by his association with the Yeltsin era of gangster privatisation. Though not himself an Oligarch, he was friendly with some of them (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/01/boris-nemtsov ). This absence of effective and convincing leaders has greatly limited the power of the anti-Putin opposition. Moscow liberals tend to blame this problem on Mr Putin’s repression, which is partly true, but it is also much to do with the general awfulness of the Yeltsin years.
Interestingly, Mr Nemtsov’s foreign policy appears to have been not that different from Mr Putin’s. Mark Almond wrote in the Daily Telegraph today that he ‘remember[s] Nemtsov pleading with Margaret Thatcher to use her influence to stop Nato expanding into Russia’s backyard because it would revive anti-Western nationalism. He didn’t see the West as a threat, but knew Russians saw its defence wing as one. Because Russians are well aware of the hostility of the Baltic States, for instance, to their old masters in Moscow, the Nato expansion to include Soviet territory was seen as the vanguard of a potential war of revenge by the ex-subject peoples.’
Mr Almond’s article (here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11443566/With-the-murder-of-Boris-Nemtsov-Vladimir-Putins-attack-dogs-have-slipped-the-leash.html )
is interesting and subtle compared with most of the stuff appearing on this subject at the moment. His point, that Mr Putin is not at one with the wilder Russian monarchists and ultra-nationalists who have joined the rebels in Donetsk and seek to entangle Russia in war there, is neglected by crude anti-Putin writers, but valid. All modern Russian strategists are very wary of foreign entanglements, after being drawn into the mantrap of Afghanistan by Jimmy Carter, the decision which more or less finished the USSR. Towards the end of an article to which I refer below, Edward Lucas also engages in similar speculation about these ‘thuggish paramilitaries’ , which is much more worthy of his intelligence than the stuff about Kirov and Stalin.
One has to ask how these ultra-nationalists became important. I have my own theories, and it is not the Kremlin I blame (the Kremlin would much rather not have to deal with these people).
The picture caption in the Telegraph article makes the same amusing mistake as so many others do, confusing the ice-cream domes and curlicues of St Basil’s Cathedral with the very different towers of the Kremlin itself, which is nearby but not the same thing.
This trivial but startling error, made by so many news outlets in the last few days, symbolises rather well the sketchy ideas of most Westerners about Russia, its nature and history. Mixing up St Basil’s with the Kremlin is , in British terms, like mistaking the Houses of Parliament for Westminster Abbey. And if you saw a Russian TV or newspaper reporter opining weightily on British politics, while making that error, you would wonder about the rest of what he or she said.
In any case, do we really think that the killers zoomed out of a secret gate in the Kremlin wall, drove up to Mr Nemtsov, murdered him and then drove back in to the famous fortress, there to be congratulated by the authorities who of course would have revelled in this action on the eve of an anti-government demonstration in Moscow? I mean, wouldn’t they? No. The idea that the crime was done by anti-Putin provocateurs is indeed ridiculous. But it is no more ridiculous than the idea that it is Mr Putin’s work.
But if we don’t think that the killers came from there, why has almost every news account stressed the closeness of the killing to the Kremlin? Most of Moscow is close to the Kremlin, a vast and sprawling city-fortress.
In fact, it happened there because Mr Nemtsov lived nearby and, unlike most prominent Russian public figures, was walking rather than in a car, and had no bodyguards. In a city where gangsterism is far from unknown (though I think it is less bad than it was in the Yeltsin boom years), and in which a flashy fat car is a symbol of importance, this is unusual.
But alas, it made it much easier for any murderer to strike, succeed and vanish unscathed.
Mr Almond’s speculations are interesting , though (like everyone else’s) speculation is what they must remain until we have facts. Many things are alleged against the Putin state, and aren’t deemed to require much proof because everyone thinks he’s guilty anyway.
I personally think Mr Putin would have been mad and stupid to order or countenance the killing of Mr Nemtsov, who was much less of a threat to him alive than he is dead. The same goes for the journalist Anna Politkovskaya. No doubt she was a grave nuisance to the Kremlin, but, as a martyr, she does far deeper damage to the Russian state.
On the other hand, the most unanswerable case against President Putin, and the one which leads me to classify him unequivocally as a sinister tyrant, is the crime against Sergei Magnitsky, mistreated to death in a prison cell while under the direct authority of the Russian state which Mr Putin heads.
Interestingly, the phrase ‘sinister tyrant’ was used in this article today by my old friend and adversary Edward Lucas http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2974971/My-friend-s-murder-chilling-echoes-Stalin-Edward-Lucas.html
But, much as I love Edward (and I will be debating against him in Cambridge on Friday week http://www.sid.cam.ac.uk/life/news/762/poland-between-russia-and-germany.html ) I don’t buy his parallels between Putin and Stalin, or between Sergei Kirov and Boris Nemtsov.
The Stalin comparison seems to me to utterly misunderstand both Stalin, an ideological dictator on the edge of megalomania, invested with absolute power in a closed society, and Vladimir Putin, a surprisingly precarious minor despot, much mere comparable with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, where a repressive government is, even so, tempered by pockets of free media, an openness to foreign scrutiny, and even legal protest on the streets. Boris Nemtsov could not have existed in a Stalinist system. As for the Russian media, no doubt they tell many lies and descend to crude propaganda.
But their view that the country is now under a sustained western attack is not wholly unfounded.
The catastrophe of western policy towards Russia, and its accelerating drive towards what may be actual war, is very well explained in a powerful new book by Professor Richard Sakwa, (Frontline Ukraine, Crisis in the Borderlands, published by I.B. Tauris). This book, interestingly, has been reviewed in only one newspaper, the Guardian,
I plan to review it here shortly. My main difficulty with it is that its author’s position is perhaps too close to mine. I would almost rather it was more hostile to my arguments.
But I will provide a couple of quotations which I think are rather apposite to our current mood:
‘In the end’, Professor Sakwa writes, ‘NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage the security threats provoked by its enlargement….This fateful geopolitical paradox – that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence – provoked a number of conflicts. …by treating Russia as the enemy, in the end it was in danger of becoming one’.
February 28, 2015
PETER HITCHENS: Reasonable, peaceful, sober. That's why they terrify me...
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column
Please permit me not to care about ‘Jihadi John’, whose participation in a series of gruesome videos has made him a useful frontman for his murderous accomplices.
They love to provoke us into more futile flailing and squawking about the need to fight back. Most of this fightback consists of adjectives, the only weapons this country now possesses in any quantity. Watch out for them, rolling by like a verbal Red Square parade: ‘Horrific!’, ‘cowardly!’, ‘extremist!’.
Islamic State’s strength depends greatly on its ability to mesmerise Western media.
And the idea of a Londoner presenting the group’s macabre videos might have been designed by a public relations man who understands exactly what makes the British mass media salivate.
Even so, there’s very little we can do about it. Terror is all about nasty surprises, and MI5, for all its poker-faced grandeur, cannot predict the future. Nor will it help anyone to ban Islamist blowhards from speaking at university meetings. It will just make us look silly.
If you’re worried about an Islamist threat to Britain, Jihadi John isn’t the problem. That’s to be found in the astonishing figure of 300,000 net migrants into Britain last year. A fair number of them will be Muslims, reinforcing what is rapidly becoming a highly influential minority in this country.
As we saw in an interesting poll, these Muslim fellow citizens don’t want to chop our heads off or murder us. They are reasonable, peaceful people who make better neighbours than many indigenous Britons.
But they think differently from us about the world. And they believe in something, which most of us do not. That’s the chief difference between us. And bit by bit, as they become more numerous and find their way into our institutions, helped by their competence, self-possession and sobriety, they will change society into one that suits them.
I don’t see how this process can be stopped now. I sympathise with a lot of their concerns, though I greatly dislike their attitude towards women. Like them, I find our way of life tawdry, immoral and often debauched. I just wish we had found our own British, Christian solution to these problems.
But we turned our back on patriotism and the church long ago. And round about the same time, we opened our borders, so wide that I do not think we will ever be able to close them again.
This thing has happened. We are going to have to try to learn to live with it as best and as kindly as we can, for the alternative is horrible. But I for one will never forgive those who allowed this to happen to what was one of the world’s great civilisations.
Bear warning is just hot air
Liberal leftists love to laugh at Mormons, but the Climate Change Cult, to which leftists all belong, makes Mormonism look mild and undogmatic. In a way it’s lucky that the Warmists (perhaps we should call them the Warmons?) have the BBC to do their missionary work for them, or we’d never get them off our doorsteps.
You can almost see the Warmists’ brains glaze over as they start to make their incantations about carbon dioxide. And, like the Book of Mormon, the Warmist Bible is full of the most obvious twaddle, a yawning trap for the credulous.
Most blatant of all their falsehoods is the cult of the poor little polar bear, martyred symbol of man’s carbonic greed, stranded sadly on a melting ice floe as it contemplates a watery grave.
In fact these rather savage and uncuddly predators are doing extremely well just now, with numbers at record highs thanks partly to the plentiful supply of nice fat seals in Arctic seas (yes, they eat those sweet little seals). As Susan Crockford in a new report on the bears says: ‘On almost every measure, things are looking good for polar bears. Scientists are finding that they are well distributed throughout their range and adapting well to changes in sea ice. Health indicators are good and they are benefiting from abundant prey. It really is time for the doom and gloom about polar bears to stop.’
And I also ought to point out one other thing. Polar bears can swim.
Dr Osborne's dodgy prescription
If you had stratospheric blood pressure, were grossly obese, lived a sedentary lifestyle and smoked constantly, what would you think of a doctor who told you to carry on as you were? That’s what I think of George Osborne, and of his admirers.
What can one do about those who are fooled by the Chancellor’s phoney boom, with its empty fake jobs, its miserable productivity, its galaxy-sized national debt, its swollen deficit and its dangerous housing bubble?
Perhaps I could quietly mention the external debt on our current account. This is the measure of Britain’s ability to pay its way in the world. And in the third quarter of last year it hit six per cent, a peacetime record, but not in a good way.
This is partly caused by an appalling trade deficit of £34.8 billion, plus a collapse in earnings on foreign investments, which were in surplus in 2011, and are now heavily in the red.
Have you, too, been forced by your bank to have a contactless credit or debit card which you can use without a PIN? Are you frequently urged by shop assistants to ‘pay by contactless’?
My advice is to object. The contactless system is an invitation to spend more, faster. It is, by its nature, insecure and means a lost or stolen card can be quickly used to make plenty of unverified purchases, while you are still trying to cancel it. And the £20 limit on contactless purchases will start to go up in September. How long before it is much, much higher?
Some companies will relent, and give you a non-contactless card. Others are obdurate. They should be challenged.
There was much trumpeting of a drop in teenage pregnancies last week, hilariously attributed to sex education programmes that frantically avoid mentioning abstinence or marriage, and assume promiscuity is normal.
If this ‘education’ is so effective, it’s odd that sexually transmitted diseases continue to be rampant, and Britain’s teen pregnancy rate remains among the highest in Europe.
Here’s another explanation – the ‘morning after pill’ now available over the counter to anyone who looks 16, and which makes sure that a one-night stand doesn’t lead to pregnancy. This charming treatment, by the way, was originally developed by vets, to stop pedigree poodles conceiving after a street-corner dalliance with the local mongrel.
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February 26, 2015
A Few Scrappy Thoughts on 'Our Friends in the North'
Unenthused by much that is on television (even University Challenge is losing its appeal, thanks to the absurd number of non-general science questions inserted to make up for the low standard of the rest) I use my set to watch old films or TV series.
And I recently watched, for the first time ‘Our Friends in the North’, which I ignored when it was first on 1996 because every left-wing person I knew kept telling me how wonderful it was, and as a result I dismissed it as some sort of dramatic prelude to the coming Blairite takeover and the resulting vengeance for the Thatcher Terror which had until recently stalked the land, laying waste to the country with cuts.
Some of it is. The episode concerning the miners’ strike, though it gives a couple of nods to the fact that Arthur Scargill held no ballot and called a coal strike in the summer, is pretty bog-standard leftist stuff. The miners who want to return to work are (for instance) portrayed as ugly, shifty trolls, the police drafted in from the South as caricature baddies. If only it had all been that simple.
But for a lot of it one wishes that there was a novel on which it was based, rather than a long-ago stage play by Peter Flannery (an almost exact contemporary of mine, having been born in October 1951). For it is obvious that the author, and the characters, know a lot of things about each other which the audience never find out. The viewer dips into their lives every few years (often politically significant ones) and has to guess what has happened in between. Each episode fades out with a once-popular song. For me these songs ceased to be familiar very quickly, as I have absolutely no idea of popular music after 1969.
But it is a powerful work, well worth watching. It deals with serious things – the loss of belief on the left ‘We wanted to be part of something that used to exist’; the fact that London had become a sort of Gomorrah long before the sixties got properly under way and that the 1950s, far from being a golden age, had been a pretty squalid and uninspiring period (though the Obscene Publications Act had indeed destroyed any basis on which the police could really keep the porn industry in check) ; the corruption that went hand in hand with town planning. I was rather surprised at how easily some of the characters manage to join the Labour Party in the North-East in the 1960s and 1970s. The joke at the time was that new applicants, who were not in on the tight circle of power, would be told ‘It’s full’.
It even dwells on, though has no answer to, the corruption of life which produces criminal louts, and the desperate sadness that the socialist pursuit of the New Jerusalem, the new houses, the libraries, the schools, do not in fact produce a contented society on their own, and may even be followed by worsening behaviour and morals. For man does not live by bread alone, and never will. As the grime and darkness were swept away, and the smoke cleared, another, less visible shadow fell over the places where the poor lived, the disorder and (later) the drugs. Not but what there’s a pretty accurate portrayal of desperate drunkenness and the hopeless misery of it.
I have to say I find it a bit of a stretch that a bright girl such as Mary Soulsby could be inveigled into parting with her virginity in a park, but I suppose if people didn’t behave out of character, the plots of these things could never get properly going.
And I was momentarily manoeuvred into sympathy for her boyfriend Nicky, when a collection of newspaper reptiles bait and jeer at him about his rather tricky past and it his attitude to the IRA. Then I remembered that there was actually a sub-machine gun still buried in his father’s back garden, a relic of his flirtation with Angry-Brigade-type terrorism. I have to say that my lot of leftists would never have had anything to do with that sort of thing. We didn’t like it, or think it worthwhile, and we knew very well it would disgust the tough old war veterans who still inhabited the Labour movement in large numbers in those days and who as Linda Grant says in her book about that that time ‘Upstairs at the Party’ , had already had their minds expanded quite enough in the Western Desert or on the D-day beaches.
Much of the portrayal of the North in the 1960s and 1970s reminded me of my time in York in 1970 to 1973. The North at that time still had a strong savour of the industrial revolution, a deeper blackness in the soot on the railway bridges, a darker light even in summer, a colder, sharper snap in the foggy winter air than you’d find now. I have never forgotten the symbolic end of the age of coal, when they burned off the old town gas in the pipes in York, before pumping in the new stuff from the North Sea, and the streets were full of great iron torches glowing red, mounted above manholes which gave on to the gas mains. It lent the shabby streets a slightly hellish, glamorous air. It also made me think of the scruffy bit of Cambridge around the East Road where I offered my public-school self to help canvass for Labour in March 1966, and the actual night of the election on March 31st , out on the fringes of oxford, knocking up the last of the voters for Harold Wilson. I have it in mind as a grey, windy twilight. I wonder if it really was. If only I’d known what I was doing.
And, as an active Trotskyist troublemaker, I spent quite a lot of time on council estates and at factory gates, or outside docks and mines. Many of the scenes brought all that back, sometimes more than I expected.
But who were these people in the drama? A young man with a father in the Shipyards who went on the Jarrow March, has won a place at Manchester University, and spent the summer on Civil Rights marches in the American South (where almost nobody form Britain could go in 1964, not least because of the severe foreign currency restrictions and the lack of cheap flights or sea passages). How did he do that, when his father is a shipyard worker who went, as a child, on the Jarrow March? How can he and his girlfriend ( a near neighbour) understand the dirty joke in French that they share during what I think is an episode of what we used to call ‘heavy petting’ (Is it just me? Do most people really like watching actors simulating sexual acts on the TV screen, or does everyone find it an embarrassing turn-off, as I do)?
I suppose it must be assumed that (as this is 1964, when university rare and French, then as now, not widely spoken on the banks of the Tyne, Wear or Tees) both of them went to grammar school. But it still doesn’t explain the American trip.
Funny how this part of our great social revolution, the grammar schools, isn’t even alluded to, though without it these people would not have been who they were.
It’s always that which haunts me when I look back at that time, the wide-open door through which the shipyard workers’ sons and daughters could make their way to the very top of everything, and did.
Now there are neither shipyards nor grammar schools. I’m not sure which loss I feel more keenly.
Billionaires and Cannabis
I am asked from time to time why I refer to Billionaire backing for the Big Dope campaign. ‘Big Dope’ is indeed my own formulation, coined to mock the fairtrade, supergreen, anti-corporate types who yet lend their support to a cause whose effect will be to create a whole new global market for a product rather more harmful than fizzy drinks or greasy burgers.
Well, here, in the Independent on Sunday, is some evidence of billionaire backing for this campaign.
You may think this is a bit long ago.
So here’s another, from the Washington Times ( I know a lot of people don’t like the Washington Times but I have found that its news staff are pretty good at what they do, and I don’t think these facts are challenged)
And this was picked up by my own group here
No doubt Mr Soros is moved solely by libertarian idealism.
But It seems likely to me that the campaign is also supported by others, not so well known, who might benefit materially from the legal sale of marijuana across the world.
February 25, 2015
Obviously No Connection Here
These news items, just in:
Eddie Ray Routh, killer of the ‘American Sniper’ author Chris Kyle, and his friend Chad Littlefield,
was a marijuana user.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-31617308
Routh’s lawyers said he was ‘psychotic’ at the time of the shootings two years ago.
The report says (readers of my articles will be unsurprised by all that follows) : ‘Routh, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, was under extreme mental distress and was convinced the two men would turn on him on the day of the killing, his lawyers argued.
The court also heard that Routh was under the influence of marijuana and alcohol at the time of the shooting. In addition, he had been prescribed anti-psychotic medication often used for schizophrenia, reported the Associated Press news agency.’
Richard Gatiss, the mugger who attacked Alan Barnes, a disabled and defenceless pensioner, was last convicted in 2009 for, wait for it, possession of cannabis, an offence which you pretty much have to commit in a police station three or four times while making faces before anyone will prosecute you for it (if then) .
There are two things in common here. The actions of both men were appalling, well outside the range of normal behaviour even for wicked and criminal persons. Both were users of a drug still officially believed to be ‘soft’. If that belief were to be revised, then authority might make a connection between the drug abuse and the unhinged behaviour. But as long as the potent dogma, that cannabis is safe and ought to be decriminalised is promoted by the billionaire Big Dope lobby and its addle-headed dupes, the connection won’t be made.
And so a cannabis-frazzled killer or mugger will come into more and more of our lives as the years go by.
Any hostile commenters on this article are asked to declare whether they are cannabis users themselves, or have any interest in commercial sale of this drug. . If they don’t give this information, readers will be reasonably entitled to draw their own conclusions.
What is happening in Colorado, since Dope was Legalised?
Big Dope’s smug advocates like to say that , if my warnings about cannabis were true, American states where it has been legalised would already be running with blood. Of course, this isn’t so and I never said it would be. The effect of legal changes often lags some time behind the actual moment of change, and most cannabis users do not go crazy overnight (most don't, but alas, some do, as you will see from this report). Nor does every cannabis smoker become a violent criminal. But some do, and quite enough for us to be extremely worried about further steps to make this drug even more readily available than it is.
I would think a proper controlled study over five years would probably be needed to reach a serious conclusion.
Even so, I think this report from Colorado, one of US states which has legalised cannabis, called marijuana there, should be cause for concern. The newspaper involved, the New York Times, is far from being socially conservative.
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