Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 204

An RAF Reminiscence

I publish the following with the permission of the author, whose identity is known to me but which I will not reveal.

 

‘My father was in the RAF during the war, as a flight sergeant. I had never heard him talk about that time. When he was staying with me one I suggested we might go to the RAF museum in Hendon, thinking he would be interested in it. We did go, but he seemed very quiet and subdued during our visit. On the way home he told me that he didn’t like to remember his time in the RAF, because so often he had been preparing planes for men to fly off in, men he knew well and liked, who were not going to come back.

 

‘He also said that they were well aware of what the bombing was doing to the German people and their cities and this too preyed on his mind. Our family comes from Plymouth, which suffered badly from bombing in the war, but they knew the raids on Hamburg and Dresden were far worse. My father said that he and his fellow-servicemen did what they were ordered to do, but had no interest at all in revenge and thought the raids contributed little to the war effort.’

 

 

My Riposte to the Twitter Twisters and Cannabis Comment Warriors

Perhaps Twitter should be renamed ‘Twister’. The cannabis comment warriors were busy yesterday deliberately misunderstanding my article about cannabis. They posted such things as  ‘Peter Hitchens says cannabis causes terrorism’  or ‘Peter Hitchens blamed the Lee Rigby murder on cannabis’, then mocked the claim I didn’t actually make.

 

Perhaps my mistake was in giving my readers information intended to make them think. I am very tired of the weary drivel about the supposed Islamist threat, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘lone wolves’, usually accompanied by demands from MI5 and the politicians for more powers, and more money with which to enforce them.

 

Now, there are plenty of Islamist blowhards in this and other countries, who mutter privately or publicly about beheading the infidel, or who propagate Judophobic verbal sewage. And from time to time there are dreadful incidents in which such people get hold of weapons (or in some cases simply use cars for their purpose – shall we ban cars?) and kill.

 

I believe we should examine these events rationally. Can we prevent them? Possibly we can prevent some of them, though not by turning this country into a secret-police surveillance state , with every mosque monitored, every campus meeting checked for ‘extremism’  every e-mail and phone call logged and listened to. I do not think these things are organised by some central group, be it the fictional ‘Al Qaeda’ or the actually existing but very localised IS.  There’s never been any evidence that the killers in Ottawa, Sydney, Copenhagen, Paris or London were under instructions from anyone but their own drug-frazzled and irrational minds.

 

In a rare break from the standard rhetoric, Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said last week that there was ‘no indication that Copenhagen shooting suspect Omar El-Hussein was acting on behalf of a larger terrorist network. 

 

She added, in words that must have infuriated securocrats from Washington and London; ‘“He was known by the police for several criminal acts, including severe violence, and he was also known to be linked to a criminal gang in Copenhagen. But I want to also make very clear that we have no indication at this stage that he was part of a cell.’  

 

It was soon afterwards that it was revealed that he had twice been arrested for cannabis offences.  As I showed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/01/what-do-we-know-about-the-paris-outrages.html this was also true of the Paris murderers, and of several other recent killings, including the murder of a soldier in Ottawa. I recently discovered that the culprit of another soldier murder in Canada (this killer, like Lee Rigby’s, also used a car to make his first attack) was also a long-term marijuana user. I am fairly sure that the Sydney killer was, too. His bizarre record of crime, fantasy and erratic, wild irrationality stretched back for years, and Iran, from which he fled to avid fraud charges,  has severe problems with drug abuse. But nobody has bothered to find out because of the desire, in Australia’s media and political worlds,  to explain this purely as an Islamist event. And I cannot investigate it at this distance.

 

Am I saying, by pointing this out, that cannabis is the *cause* of these actions? No. First, it is people who commit crimes, not drugs. But I am pointing out an intersection, between crazy jihadism and heavy cannabis use, which seems to me to be to so prevalent that it *must* be worth investigating. At the moment, the authorities are not interested. After a recent school killing, I strove to find out if the culprit was a cannabis user.

 

 But the police involved were very unwilling to answer the question, and I was left with the impression that they had never investigated it. Why should they?   My interest in the dangers of cannabis is not shared by most of the media or by the state. My main aim now is to make sure that they are at least interested, and that this factor is at least looked into in all cases of severe violence.

 

Someone will always pop up on these discussions and tell me I am seeking to ‘excuse’ militant Islam. I am doing no such thing. Intolerant ideologues obviously play their part in putting these terrible desires into the minds of impressionable young men. But I doubt whether they would often get to the point of action if drugs were not involved.

 

Sane people don’t usually want to spend the rest of their lives in prison, or to be shot by the police. Sane people also usually see the problems involved in killing a fellow human being. Mad people don’t.

Which is why this also affects non-Islamists, as I showed with the case of Jared Loughner, in the case of the Sheffield  church organist, Alan Greaves, and as I showed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/high-and-violent.html in a selection of court cases where violent or otherwise irrational offenders were stated in evidence to have been cannabis users. Like the Rigby killers, some of these attacked or destroyed with cars, others with sharp blades.

 

Finally, I reproduced the testimony of Matthew Parris and Jon Snow, who recounted the unexpected powerful effects of cannabis on them (and in Mr Parris’s case, mentioned the personality changes undergone by his respectable middle-class friends who were cannabis users) . I did so because I suspect many people are still beguiled by the drug’s image as ‘soft’, when in facts its immediate effect on the brain is violent and severe. Does it really seem unlikely that repeated exposure to such experiences render the user permanently damaged? And yet people still dismiss the correlation, saying that cannabis sue is no more likely to send people mad than drinking tea, growing a moustache or using a certain type of computer software.

 

We can now add to this the recent experience of the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd ( a policeman’s daughter), who bravely tried legal cannabis in a candy bar, so as to deepen her research into marijuana legalisation in Colorado.

 

She wrote

'I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

‘I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

‘It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly. The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.’

 

Yes, I know which bit of that the comment warriors will seize upon, and so do you. But it is the wrong bit. even in 16 pieces, this is *not a ‘soft’ drug. Later in the article, she said: ’But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.

 

‘In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.

 

‘As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.’

 

The whole article can be found here http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/dowd-dont-harsh-our-mellow-dude.html?_r=0

 

Yet we do not simply face complacency over this. We face aggressive abuse and distortion of any attempt to combat it. That is something many of us will live to regret.

A (not so) Brief History of Crimea

All right, I admit it, it’s not that brief. I didn’t have time to shorten it. But what follows is a condensed history of the argument about who should control Crimea, one which still rages and which (as usual) is not as simple as politicians like to claim it is.

 

I’ll begin with a question.

 

What do you reckon is the date of this Reuters News Agency dispatch? I’ve slightly doctored one or two things in it, but only to conceal the date.

 

‘Elected officials in the Crimea voted on Monday to hold a referendum to resolve heated debates on the future status of the region.

 

‘A Moscow news agency said the regional council voted to issue a declaration restoring the Crimea's "statehood" and also to hold a vote to determine the future of the attractive peninsula on the shores of the Black Sea.

 

‘Moscow television suggested the referendum could take place early next February. It said the region, part of the Ukraine but with a large population of ethnic Russians and other groups, was sharply divided between maintaining its present status or rejoining the Russian Federation.’

 

Well, it was 12th November 1990, nearly a quarter of a century ago.  And it forms the opening page in a fascinating file compiled for me by a friend and colleague in Moscow.

 

What it shows is that the issue of Crimea’s relations with Ukraine ( and of the Donbass region around Donetsk) was a live and troublesome matter even before the break-up of the USSR at the end of 1991. And it also shows that at one stage the recently-established Ukrainian  government  in Kiev acted with considerable ruthlessness to prevent a referendum in Crimea on independence, a referendum which had been requested by 246,000 of the peninsula’s 2.5 million people. I’ll come to the details of this forgotten scandal later.

 

This is especially paradoxical, since Moscow did nothing to prevent Ukraine from declaring its own independence from the USSR, nor did it act to prevent the referendum which confirmed this. At the time, it seemed as if pretty much anyone could declare independence from Moscow. But nobody could declare independence from Ukraine. Or else.

 

One explanation of this was that Russia had, by and large, been liberated from Soviet rule by democrats, or would-be democrats. But in the non-Russian parts of the USSR, liberation tended to be accomplished by nationalists. Nationalists are out of fashion now and frowned on by the EU, especially. But at that time, before and since, in this part of the world, they served a useful purpose in dismantling the Russian empire, as long ago suggested by our old friend Herr Richard von Kuehlmann, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Foreign Secretary, in 1918. So you will find that Ukrainian Georgian and Polish nationalism are viewed as nice nationalisms, in the post-modern halls of Brussels, where the idea is generally despised.

 

Russia, belatedly waking up to the danger,  has now turned nationalist itself, and that is very much not approved of. For Russian nationalism does not serve Kuehlmann’s prescient purpose, continued in modern times by his successors,  in dismantling the old Russian empire and creating a new liberal empire of ‘limited sovereignty’ dominated by German interests. Thus, it is the *wrong* kind of nationalism. Whereas Ukrainian nationalism (if anything even more chauvinistic, virulent and intolerant than the Russian version) is the *right* kind. Which shows that it is its effect on the European map, not its innate characteristics which decide which nationalism is cool, and which despicable.

 

But back to the day before yesterday, by the sunny, rugged shores of Crimea.

 

The BBC Monitoring service , on 19th January 1991, picked up a report that the government of the Crimean Oblast (region) had scheduled a referendum on the legal status of Crimea, for the 20th of that month.

 

On 21st January, Dow Jones reported an overwhelming vote  (93% of an 80% turnout) for Crimean autonomy  - that is, separating the peninsula from the direct authority of Ukraine. This, of course was before Ukraine had declared its own independence. Russians in Crimea had long resented Krushchev’s 1954 transfer of their region to Ukraine from Russia.

 

But Ukrainian nationalists rightly realised this was a canny pre-emptive move, designed to prevent a new Ukrainian state seizing control of Crimea, and opening the way for a reunion with Russia.

 

The Ukrainian nationalist movement Rukh declared ( according to Reuters)

‘the referendum is an assault on the territorial integrity of the future Ukrainian state’.

 

In the following March, in a vote on Mikhail Gorbachev’s curious and murky ‘Union Treaty’ , a last attempt to hold the USSR together by consent instead of force,  87% of Crimean voters voted to stay in the Soviet Union and become independent.

 

This is outwardly puzzling, as the two seem contradictory. But there is an explanation. Presumably they believed a form of Crimean independence would be available within a loosened Union.  And they feared (with reason) the effects of Ukrainian independence on their lives.

 

Then came the failed KGB putsch in August 1991, which finally discredited the USSR and the Soviet Communist Party in the eyes of almost everybody, and spelt the end of both.

 

But very soon afterwards, on August 26th 1991,  a statement issued in the name of the then Russian president Boris Yeltsin warned that borders would have to be redrawn if Ukraine and other republics quit. It’s often said these days that , though the Soviet borders between Russia and Ukraine are quite unfitted  for use as international frontiers, there was never any concern about this at the time of the split. The following newsagency despatch shows that this is not true.

 

 

 

‘Russia warned neighbouring Soviet republics on Monday that it would not let them secede from the Soviet Union taking large Russian-inhabited areas with them.

 

A statement issued in Russian President Boris Yeltsin's name said the Russian Federation reserved the right to review its borders with any adjacent republic which left the Union.

 

His spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, who signed the statement, told reporters at the Russian parliament this referred mainly to northern Kazakhstan and to the Donbass region and the Crimea in the Ukraine.’

 

The ‘Donbass Region’ is of course the area around Donetsk and Lugansk, now in flames.

 

Instantly, Ukraine’s President Leonid Kravchuk reacted. Reuters reported the following day ‘Kravchuk said on Tuesday Soviet republics were concerned by Russia's warning that it would not allow those with large Russian populations to secede.

 

"(The statement) sent reverberations through the republics...Territorial claims are very dangerous and could end in problems for the people," Kravchuk told a news conference in the capital Kiev.’

 

Within a day, Boris Yeltsin had backed down (I suspect that when the archives are opened, if they ever are, it will turn out that he did so under pressure from the USA, but what do I know?)

 

Reuters reported :’PARIS, Aug 28, Reuter - Russian President Boris Yeltsin said on Wednesday Russia would respect the frontiers of republics that decided to sign the Union treaty.

 

"As for republics that stay in the (Soviet) Union, we will of course respect their frontiers, the Union treaty caters for frontiers to be respected," he said in an interview with French radio.

 

Yeltsin added that a joint Soviet-Russian delegation which flew to Kiev on Wednesday would tell Ukrainians that Russia would have no territorial claims on their republic if the Ukraine decided to stay in the Union.

 

The Ukraine's parliament declared independence from Moscow on Saturday subject to confirmation by a referendum in December.

 

The Soviet-Russian delegation's mission is to try to defuse Ukrainian alarm over Yeltsin's announcement on Monday that Russia reserved the right to contest borders with any republic that quit the Soviet Union.

 

His statement stirred historic suspicions of "Russian chauvinism" in the Ukraine, which contains two areas -- the Donbass and the Crimea -- populated mostly by Russians.

 

"Relations with Russia are becoming more and more complex as a result of Yeltsin's statement," an official in the Ukrainian administration earlier commented.

 

In the radio interview Yeltsin said questions of territory, frontiers, frontier security and diplomatic relations would all have to be settled by negotiation and "without shedding blood.

 

"When I speak of frontiers I am basing myself on laws and international treaties. If a state or republic leaves the union, then we will have to establish state-to-state relations by discussion around a table."

 

Soon afterwards, AP reported:  

 

‘MOSCOW (AP) - The Soviet legislature, backing Mikhail Gorbachev's bid to stem the collapse of central authority, voted today to send a delegation to the Ukraine to discourage the breadbasket republic's secessionist drive.

 

The delegation also will discuss potential border disputes with the Russian republic, which has thrown a scare into some of its neighbors by saying it reserves the right to review its borders with them.

 

Gorbachev put his political future on the line yesterday, threatening to resign if the Soviet Union cannot somehow be preserved and indicating he would settle for a loose alliance of sovereign states.’

 

These efforts would be a complete failure. The break-up of what was left of the USSR was complete by the end of the year, and the old Stalin-Krushchev borders survived.

 

But shortly before the final collapse, Crimea’s local parliament tried to throw a spanner in the works. On November 23rd. AP reported :’ SIMFEROPOL, U.S.S.R. (AP) _ The Crimean parliament laid the groundwork for secession from the Ukraine when lawmakers approved a measure enabling the region to hold a referendum on its political future.

 

On Friday, lawmakers also sent a message to the Ukrainian parliament, asking it to continue to participate in Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's plan to hold the Soviet Union together as a loose federation.

 

The Crimea is an autonomous republic of 2.5 million people in an area that juts from the southern Ukraine in the Black Sea.

 

Its parliament, dominated by former Communist Party members, voted 153-3, with two abstentions, to hold a referendum to decide whether the Crimea should stay under Ukrainian jurisdiction, reunite with Russia or become independent. No date was set.

 

On March 17, voters in the Crimea gave 87.3 percent approval to Gorbachev's federation plan.

 

Ethnic Russians comprise 67 percent of the Crimea's population. Many of them worry that the Ukraine might try to exert more control on the region after the Ukraine's presidential election and referendum on independence, set for Dec. 1.

 

Crimean lawmaker Yuri Ryzhkov said he expected a referendum on Crimean secession within a month of the presidential election.’

 

On the 27th, reuters reported ‘SIMFEROPOL, Soviet Union, Nov 27, Reuter - Angry and frightened Russians in the Crimea are vowing resistance to the idea of their fertile sunny peninsula becoming part of an independent Ukraine.

 

"I don't want to find myself living in a foreign country," shouted 67-year-old war veteran Georgy Malyshev, one of hundreds of Russians who demonstrated here last week outside the Crimean parliament.

 

Inside the parliament, still dominated by the old communist elite, deputies failed narrowly to approve an appeal to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev for the Crimea to be returned to Russia.

 

For nearly four decades, formal subordination to the Ukraine barely mattered as all vital decisions were taken in Moscow and official policy favoured Russian interests.

 

But now, with the Ukraine likely to opt for complete independence in a referendum on December 1, fears are growing that the Crimea could become a flashpoint of tension between Moscow and Kiev.

 

Anatoly Los, a Russian deputy to the Crimean parliament, said he expected the Crimea to vote "No" to Ukrainian independence in the referendum while the rest of the republic votes yes.’

 

On 1st December AFP (Agence France Presse) reported a low turnout in Donbass and Crimea (and other heavily Russian regions) in the Ukrainian independence referendum

 

‘The Kharkhov and Odessa regions reported turnout of 62 percent, while in the Crimea just under 59 percent of the voters went to the polls.

 

In Donetsk, turnout was put at over 67 percent, while the lowest participation in the election -- 51 percent -- was in Sebastopol, the officials said.’

 

In Western Ukraine turnout was 87.8%, in Kiev, 80%.

 

On the 6th January, the Wall Street Journal reported :

 

‘CRIMEA, Ukraine -- When empires start disintegrating, at what point do they stop? Ukraine has now firmly established itself as an independent state, but within Ukraine, there is the Crimea.

 

Home to 2.5 million people, with some 105 different nationalities living on its territory, Crimea, an autonomous republic located in the south of Ukraine, is like a miniature Soviet Union. It, too, is facing a shakeup.

 

While a surprising number of people here say they had never thought about the question of their own independence -- being an autonomous republic within a vast empire was enough -- they are now saying that with the Soviet machine having broken down, the Crimean people now want a shot at their sovereignty.

 

Only 52.6% of Crimeans voted in favor of the Ukrainian independence referendum that elsewhere passed overwhelmingly on Dec. 1. Many Crimeans would like to see their region affiliated with Russia…’

 

 Later in the report, it noted:

 

 

‘Mr. Kravchuk made a fact-finding visit to the autonomous republic on Oct. 23-24 after reports of civil unrest here and to persuade local deputies to vote yes to an independent Ukraine….

 

‘In no uncertain terms, he told the legislators they were not ready for independence -- the Crimea had neither a constitution nor other important laws in place that would guarantee success as a separate nation. Mr. Kravchuk drew applause, however, when he promised that under an independent Ukraine, the Crimea would maintain its current autonomous status, including a guarantee that all languages and cultures on that territory would be respected.

 

‘In a later press conference, Mr. Kravchuk said, "Ukraine will not be cut up into pieces. No one is going to look at all the painful points . . . with a red pencil. We won't sit at a table to cut up the territory. That would be the beginning of the end."

 

‘He noted Ukraine was ready to work with the Crimean parliament and people to build one unified country -- Ukraine.

 

"Today we want to create a nation. The majority of the Crimean people understand the only way to live is with Ukraine," he stressed.’

 

Round about this point, a movement began to collect signatures demanding a referendum on Crimean independence, a legal entitlement under Ukrainian law.

 

In the background, tension was growing between Moscow and Kiev about the future of the Russian naval facilities in Sevastopol.  The Russian Parliament, after the referendum crisis was over, even voted symbolically to rescind Krushchev’s transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Plainly this had no practical effect at the time.  As Boris Yeltsin had discovered when he briefly sought border revision, Russia was too weak to reincorporate what it regarded as Russian parts of Ukraine.  But it staked an implied claim.

 

In February 1992, worried by the threat of an independence referendum, Kiev offered more autonomy to Crimea. By then, the independence campaigners, plainly with Russian backing, had already gathered 50,000 signatures.

 

On 21st February, BBC Monitoring gave this account of a Kiev press conference given by President Leonid Kravchuk

 

‘Is the president of Ukraine going to hamper the collection of signatures and the holding of the referendum on the new status of Crimea? The answer to this question has clearly defined the attitude to processes which are taking place in Crimea and the possible solution of the Crimean issue.

 

[Kravchuk] If people are collecting signatures in order to determine their political situation in their region, I do not see anything unusual in it. Whether or not it is necessary to do that at present is another thing, in my opinion, since the referendum has already taken place and this peninsula has expressed its attitude both during the referendum on 1st December and during the other referendum [all-union referendum] and in a great number of resolutions of the supreme soviet of the Crimean republic - well, that is another matter.

 

But the president will not be able to ban or cancel this referendum. (My emphasis, PH)

 

 We can only pin our hopes on common sense, and the existing legal foundations and legal norms along with the Constitution of Ukraine and the paragraph concerning the Crimean republic which was made part of the constitution. This is the situation here. I somehow think that the supreme soviet of Crimea must show its attitude to this even if those signatures are collected - the supreme soviet must give its assessment of them and I would like it to be the supreme soviet of Crimea.’

 

Four days later, AP was reporting that the independence movement had collected enough signatures to trigger a vote: : ‘Crimea has ancient Greek ruins, Tatar castles, a stunning Black Sea coast, an important navy base and an angry majority of Russians who want independence from Ukraine.

 

‘Russians have gathered nearly 250,000 signatures, enough to force a referendum on Crimea's status. Such a vote would likely increase friction between Ukraine and Russia.

 

"Ukrainians are nationalists," said Alexander Tsitov, a Russian who works in a cooperative in Simferopol, the capital. "They want to introduce their language, and that is no good for us. They want us to be their colony.

 

"There is a danger the tension here could be transformed into armed conflict."’

 

Later President Kravchuk warned that bloodshed was possible if the Crimea went ahead with the referendum, placing established frontiers in question.

 

 

On the 5th May,  things were speeding up, as AFP reported : ‘SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine, May 5 (AFP) - The parliament of Crimea Tuesday voted for secession from Ukraine, subject to confirmation by a referendum to be held soon.

 

The regional assembly of the Black Sea peninsula approved the independence bid by a large majority and offered to enter into immediate negotiations with Ukraine on a future bilateral agreement with the republic, local sources reported.’

 

Reuters elaborated: ‘SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine, May 5, Reuter - The Crimean peninsula passed a declaration of independence from Ukraine on Tuesday, a move likely to inflame relations between Kiev and Moscow.

 

Deputies in the Crimean parliament in Simferopol stood and applauded loudly after passing an "Act of Independence" by 118 votes to 28. The decision must be confirmed by a referendum.

 

Several thousand people standing outside the rambling, modernistic building in the sunshine waved banners and cheered as the decision was announced over loudspeakers.

 

The act stated: "In view of the threat posed to Crimean statehood...and expressing great alarm about worsening relations between Russia and Ukraine, the parliament of the Crimea declares the creation of a sovereign state, the Republic of Crimea."

 

Parliamentary leader Nikolai Bagrov told reporters: "The Crimea is a republic and should have its own statehood."

 

The declaration will infuriate Ukraine, which considers the Black Sea peninsula part of its territory. The referendum is likely to take place on August 2.

 

Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk has said that any referendum on Crimean independence could lead to bloodshed.’

 

Events now became bizarre, and readers will have to form their own conclusions as to how an entire regional assembly can totally change its mind on a central issue in the course of one day. Severe outside pressure seems to me to be one possible explanation.

 

For on the 6th May, we see this despatch:

 

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine, May 6, Reuter - The Crimean parliament on Wednesday appeared to reverse the previous day's declaration of independence by changing its constitution to say the peninsula formed part of Ukraine.

 

"The republic of Crimea is part of the state of Ukraine and determines its own relations with Ukraine on the basis of treaties and agreements," the amendment said.

 

It was passed by a big majority.

 

The Crimean parliament had on Tuesday declared the Republic of Crimea a sovereign state. Independence was to be confirmed in a referendum, likely to be held on August 2.

 

Tuesday's vote was a reaction to a Ukrainian parliamentary resolution giving the Crimea a measure of independence which the local parliament said fell short of its demands.

 

But Wednesday's apparent reversal of the independence vote may be an attempt to find a face-saving compromise which will give deputies more say in running their own affairs but which will not trigger a complete break with Kiev.’

 

Perhaps a clue to  the explanation can be found in these words of President Kravchuk, on a visit to Washington DC at the time :

 

‘"But I would have to say that the voting in the parliament of Crimea is not the last instance," he said during a ceremony marking the opening of Ukraine's embassy in the United States.

 

"We can say one thing for sure that what has been voted in the parliament of Crimea is against the constitution of Ukraine," Kravchuk added.

 

On May 8th Reuters reported :

 

‘KIEV, May 8, Reuter - A campaign by the Crimean peninsula to break away from Ukraine could plunge the region into a conflict similar to that in Northern Ireland, a top aide to Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk has said.

 

Alexander Yemets, Kravchuk's top adviser on legal issues, also said in an interview on Thursday that Ukraine would never give up the peninsula, populated mainly by ethnic Russians but given to Ukraine as a "gift" by Russia in 1954.

 

Speaking a week before a summit of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States, he accused prominent Russian leaders of stirring up confrontation in the run-up to Tuesday's declaration of independence by the Crimean parliament.

 

"The problem is difficult and complex and could take on a violent character," Yemets told Reuters in his office, once part of the headquarters of the now-banned Communist Party.

 

"If we cannot solve this through political dialogue, the situation will resemble that of Northern Ireland in terms of the violence involved. That is, partisan-like actions by different groups pursuing different aims, violent confrontation," he said.’

 

On 13th May, we learned from AFP: ‘The Ukrainian parliament on Wednesday declared unconstitutional a recent declaration of independence by the Crimean peninsula, where the former Soviet Union's huge Black Sea fleet is based.

 

The parliament called on the local authorities in the peninsula, which was ceded to Ukraine by Russia in 1954, to "return to legality" by rescinding the declaration of independence they issued on May 6.

 

The Crimean authorities have said they will organise a referendum on independence on August 2.

 

And on 14th May, the London Times reported : ‘Ukraine's parliament yesterday moved to bury the Crimea's growing Russian separatist movement by issuing a five-point plan over-riding the peninsula's independence vote and threatening direct presidential rule.

 

In a rare show of strength by the Kiev parliament, deputies voted by an overwhelming margin to declare last week's actions by the Crimea's supreme soviet unconstitutional, and banned the Black Sea peninsula's government from holding an independence referendum this summer

 

On 30th June, we learned from Reuters; ‘KIEV, June 30, Reuter - Ukraine's parliament on Tuesday granted the Crimean peninsula wide-ranging autonomy, allowing it to determine its own foreign economic relations and social and cultural policies.

 

The power-sharing arrangements were detailed in amendments to a new law aimed at satisfying the territory's aspirations for self-rule while keeping it under Kiev's jurisdiction.

 

And on the 9th July 1992, Reuters said: MOSCOW, July 9, Reuter - The Crimean parliament voted on Thursday to suspend plans for a referendum on independence from Ukraine, local journalists in the regional capital Simferopol said.

 

The decision, approved by 106 of the 137 deputies attending parliament, will help remove a possible source of conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The referendum had originally been scheduled for August 2.’

 

But it hadn’t really gone away. In summer 1993, BBC monitoring noted :’ A regular congress of the Crimean Electors' Movement [Ukrainian: Rukh Vybortsiv Krymu] was held today [29th May] under the slogan "Away with independence! Give us a referendum!". The movement is made up of adherents of joining the peninsula to Russia. Several resolutions were adopted at the congress, and on the situation in the Black Sea Fleet too. Those present called on the presidents of Ukraine and Russia to hold their meeting on problems of the Black Sea Fleet only in Sevastopol, and to adopt at the meeting an unequivocal decision - on the impossibility of dividing the fleet, and on preserving Sevastopol's status of Russian Federation naval base. In the event that this demand is not fulfilled, says the resolution, the participants of the movement reserve the right, following the sailors's example, to hang Russian flags on their buildings.

 

‘A decision on setting up a civic committee to safeguard the referendum on Crimea's state status was adopted. The movement intends to organize a warning strike of work collectives on 2nd August in support of this referendum...’

 

I have assembled this account because I had not seen a proper explanation of the history of the Crimean independence issue. I think it helps to explain the origin of the dispute. I also think it once again raises the curious and ever-fascinating question of title in international affairs.

 

Who really owns which piece of land? On what is his claim based? Why are some units permitted to declare independence from large countries, and others not? And if there is no consistent legal or moral answer to any of these questions, what lessons should we learn from that?

The real mind-blowing terror threat in our midst: cannabis

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Can you put two and two together? Have a try. The authorities, and most of the media, cannot.

Did you know that the Copenhagen killer, Omar El-Hussein, had twice been arrested (and twice let off) for cannabis possession? Probably not.

It was reported in Denmark but not prominently mentioned amid the usual swirling speculation about ‘links’ between El-Hussein and ‘Islamic State’, for which there is no evidence at all.

El-Hussein, a promising school student, mysteriously became so violent and ill- tempered that his own gang of petty criminals, The Brothers, actually expelled him.

Something similar happened in the lives of Lee Rigby’s killers, who underwent violent personality changes in their teens after becoming cannabis users.

The recent Paris killers were also known users of cannabis. So were the chaotic drifters who killed soldiers in Canada last year. So is the chief suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013.

I might add that though these are all Muslims, who for rather obvious reasons are to be found among the marginalised in Europe and North America, it is not confined to them.

Jared Loughner, who killed six people and severely injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in 2011, was also a confirmed heavy cannabis user. When I searched newspaper archives for instances of violent crimes in this country in which culprits were said to be cannabis users, I found many.

One notable example was the pointless killing of Sheffield church organist Alan Greaves, randomly beaten to death by two laughing youths on Christmas Eve 2012. Both were cannabis smokers.

By itself, the link is interesting. I wonder how many other violent criminals would turn out to be heavy cannabis users, if only anyone ever asked.

But put it together with The Mail on Sunday’s exclusive story last week, showing a strong link between cannabis use and episodes of mental illness.

And then combine it with the confessions of two prominent British Left-wing figures, the former Tory MP and BBC favourite Matthew Parris, and Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, who both tried ‘skunk’ cannabis (by far the most commonly available type in the Western world) for a TV documentary.

Mr Parris wrote: ‘The effect was stunning – and not (for me) in a good way. Short-term memory went walkabout. I would forget what I was talking about even while talking. I became shaky. Time went haywire.’

But immediate effects are one thing. What about long-term use? Mr Parris recounted that he had ‘too many friends’ for whom cannabis had seemed destructive. He quoted one as saying: ‘I think it changed me permanently as a person.’

He said his mainly socially liberal friends, including health workers, generally agreed that ‘heavy use of cannabis, particularly skunk, can be associated with big changes in behaviour’.

Jon Snow said simply: ‘By the time I was completely stoned, I felt utterly bereft. I felt as if my soul had been wrenched from my body.

'There was no one in my world. I was frightened, paranoid, and felt physically and mentally wrapped in a dense blanket of fog. I’ve worked in war zones, but I’ve never been as overwhelmingly frightened as I was when I was in the MRI scanner after taking skunk. I would never do it again.’

This is not some mild ‘soft’ thing. It is a potent, frightening mindbender. If it does this to men in late middle age who are educated, prosperous, successful and self-disciplined, what do you think it is doing to all those 13-year-olds who – thanks to its virtual decriminalisation – can buy it at a school near you, while the police do nothing?

And yet it is still fashionable in our elite to believe that cannabis should be even easier to get than it already is.

It is hard to think of a social evil so urgently in need of action to curb it. Why is nothing done? Need you ask?

Led into another disaster by a bunch of ignorant poseurs

The wild warmongering of our Government and our elite grows louder as our Armed Forces grow smaller.

Are these people up to the job? Can they read a map? Do they know any history? Do they have a clue what they are doing?

As you listen to the Defence Secretary’s bizarre raging about the Russian threat, remember that our Army is now even tinier than the token force Hitler allowed Vichy France to keep after 1940.

Under David Cameron, both the Army and the Navy have, in the past few years, thrown away huge amounts of valuable equipment, and got rid of a vast body of experienced men who cannot be replaced.

So why the belligerence? They surely do not intend to be tested. If they really believed that Russian tanks were about to roll into Riga, then we would be rearming like anything, not disarming as fast as we can.

So they don’t believe it. So why should we believe them? I used to scorn the Left-wing idea that small politicians sought conflict abroad because it made them look big at home.

But our Government’s amazing decision to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi seems to me to show that these clueless beings really are that bad.

They had no idea what they were doing, and now stand, dumb and amazed, as the country they claimed to be liberating descends deeper and deeper into murder, theft and fanaticism.

Even if they don’t care about that, they must surely worry about the resulting disaster, the unstoppable flight of countless economic migrants from Libya’s lawless coasts across the Mediterranean and on, across and throughout a borderless EU.

This, not terrorism, is how the Islamisation of Europe will come about, sooner than most people think.

It is this act of folly that we should be investigating, not the long-ago Iraq War. And these people should be banned from any further bloviating about war or foreign policy till an independent report on the Libya disaster has been published, and we know in detail that we are governed by third-rate, ignorant poseurs.

How can killing 350,000 be right?

If it was wrong (as it was) for the Germans to kill 43,000 British civilians by deliberately bombing their homes, why was it not also wrong for us to kill 350,000 German civilians by deliberately bombing their homes?

If you can’t answer this, then please don’t bother writing me rude, thoughtless letters because I – even more than the Archbishop of Canterbury – think we shouldn’t have engaged in this form of warfare.

This flock of easily-led sheep looks so familiar...

As I watched the new Aardman animation, Shaun The Sheep – The Movie, and its flock of all-too-easily led and conformist woolly creatures, I struggled to work out who they reminded me of.

Then it came to me in a flash – Britain’s monstrous regiment of political journalists.

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

Putin's Bite is Worse than His Bark - should we have been surprised?

I have not yet had time to read the entire report by the House of Lords EU sub-committee on Russia, which can be accessed here http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201415/ldselect/ldeucom/115/115.pdf

 but I do urge my readers to study it, especially the section beginning on page 53. ‘the crisis in Ukraine and the EU’s response’. I suspect the whole thing has benefited by the presence on the sub-committee of Lord (Norman) Lamont, who knows a thing or two about the EU. There is also quite an impressive list of witnesses, who might be expected to know what they were talking about, including Vaclav Klaus, former President of the Czech republic, and Sir Tony Brenton, former British ambassador in Moscow.

 

But it also has a pleasingly sober willingness to examine things that are generally ignored in the ‘Putin is Hitler’ hysteria which has engulfed so much of politics and the media.

 

In his evidence, Mr Klaus said some very interesting things (it is easily found by clicking on the red numbers opposite his name in the list of witnesses)

 

For example , after opening by saying :  ‘I am also no a prioristic advocate or defender of Russia or Mr Putin due to our communist experience. I am the last one to be motivated to speak positively about that country. However, our life with communism taught us something. Since then, I have always tried to oppose lies and manipulative propaganda, which I see in this case just now. ‘

 

He then says :‘Moreover, in April in our commentary on the situation in Ukraine we stated that Ukraine was a heterogeneous, divided country, and that an attempt to forcefully and artificially change its geopolitical orientation would inevitably result in its break-up, if not its destruction. We considered the country too fragile and with too weak an internal coherence to try to make a sudden change. I am sorry to say that it developed according to our expectations. I am afraid that Ukraine was sort of misused. The West suddenly and unexpectedly offered Ukraine early EU affiliation.

‘I am afraid that the West, especially western Europe, has accepted a very simplified interpretation of events in Ukraine. According to the West, the Ukraine crisis has been caused by external Russian aggression. The internal causes of the crisis have been ignored, and so are the evident ethnic, ideological and other divisions in Ukraine.

‘The developments that have taken place since the spring of this year have proved that this approach cannot lead to a solution of the problem. It only deepens the division of the country, increases the tragic costs of its crisis and further destabilises the country. So I do not see that the politicians in Ukraine are looking for a political solution. They do not have any compromise proposals that they could offer to the people of eastern Ukraine to win their confidence. They rely on fighting, on repression and on unrealistic expectations of western economic and military aid.’

 

He then adds: ‘ I cannot see inside the heads of leading Russian politicians but I do not believe that Russia wanted or needed this to happen. My understanding is that Russia was dragged into it. Dragging Russia into the conflict is a way of making Ukraine a permanent hotspot of global tensions and creating permanent instability in a country that deserves, after decades of suffering under communism, a quiet and positive evolution.’

 

He says  (Q.211) that he suspects that the EU had got into the habit of making vague future promises of EU memevrship to Ukraine .

 

But this answer , from a leading statesman of a formerly-Communist Central European state,  who cannot conceivably be accused of being a Kremlin stooge or of desiring the return of the USSR, is absolutely gripping:

 

 ‘ I am afraid that just reading the misleading headlines in the media and watching CNN or BBC news is giving such a distorted picture of the situation. I am afraid that the knowledge is missing. I was shocked two weeks ago. There was a long interview with a 21 year-old Ukrainian student in Prague, a lady from western Ukraine. She was on the side of western Ukraine politically. A question was put to her: “What about the Crimea?”. She was a 21 year-old student abroad, which means that she was a literate person. “I visited Crimea for the first time in my life last year, when I was 20, and I was absolutely shocked that no one understood my language. They supposed that I am from Moldova”. For me it was eye-opening that there was such a problem. The eastern part of the country is really, really different, and the question is whether we can help.

I would suggest one thing in a negative sense: do not support the Maidan demonstrations in an unconditional way. That is the best recommendation that I would dare to give to anyone in western Europe and in Britain.’

 

The report itself, in the passage I named above, also shows quite clearly that the EU simply did not take seriously the Russian objections to the Association Agreement . Nor did it understand or take seriously Russia’s very real fears about the possible cancellation of the treaty by which it retained fleet basing rights at Sevastopol.

 

There is, of course the general problem about so many people in the West assuming that Russia’s supine, stunned posture under Yeltsin after 1991 was normal and likely to endure.  A Russian witness, Fyodor Lukyanov, said the European Commission never showed any interest in discussing Russia’s concerns over the planned agreement.

 

The Russians never even saw the planned text until the summer of 2013, and plainly assumed that a resolution was still a long way off, not least because the EU were still very hostile to Ukraine because of the continued imprisonment of Yulia Timoshenko.

 

Even so, there was alarm. Another Russian official witness, Dmitriy Poliyanskiy, said ‘The detail in the annexes “clearly showed to [the Russians] that with such an agreement Ukraine would no longer be able to maintain the same level of relations” with Russia’.

 

And from August Russia began to fight against it, using ‘coercive economic  diplomacy’. Andrii Kuzmenko, Ukrainian Acting Ambassador to the UK, spoke of a “number of different ‘wars’—a customs war, a gas war, a milk war, a meat war, cheese war, a chocolate war”, which “the Russians started against Ukraine with the solemn purpose of pursuing us to postpone and then refuse European integration.”

 

No doubt these Russian methods were unpleasant. But the point is that they were a reaction to an EU initiative. And by November 2013, Russian hostility to the agreement was so obvious and fierce that the EU were at last aware of it. Whether they understood its depth and power is another matter.

 

Paragraph 181 is worth quoting in full : ‘Mr John Lough, Associate Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House (Britain’s premier foreign affairs think tank),  informed us that Russia “suddenly woke up” to the challenge, having believed the AA to be “a totally under-resourced and hopeless initiative that was being conducted by an organisation with so many divisions in it.”266 Mr Lukyanov agreed that Russia was surprised that the signature was imminent, because the situation in Ukraine—“corruption, dysfunction” and the detention of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko—suggested that Ukraine was far from meeting the requisite conditions. However, when the issue of Tymoshenko’s fate was “removed from the picture and the decision was made that it should be signed anyway”, then “Russia woke up’.

 

There’s some dispute about whether, at this stage, the EU was ready to listen Russia’s concerns.

 

In any case, the putsch against Yanukovych followed soon afterwards. The report recounts ‘By February, Sir Tony Brenton explained, the “Russians had decided that there was a great western plot against them, probably more American than EU, to displace them from their oldest and closest friend, Ukraine”. 291 The trope of a western-fomented plot was one that recurred in Russian political thinking: in the words of Dr Alexander Libman, Associate of Eastern Europe and Eurasia Division, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, in the “eyes of the Russian leadership, Euromaidan is just one more step in the sequence of events, which were initiated by ‘the West’”.

 

This was greatly reinforced by moves in Kiev to de-privilege the Russian language, and to make NATO membership a Ukrainian national strategy.

 

But most pressing of all was the issue of Sevastopol,. Paragrph 193 relates:

‘In particular, Moscow feared that the 2010 Kharkiv Agreements, which had extended the Russian Navy’s lease of Sevastopol as a base for 25 years from 2017 until 2042, would be renounced. Professor Roy Allison has pointed out that even in 2010 “President Yanukovych’s approval of this extension was virulently opposed by Ukrainian opposition politicians, suggesting that efforts may well be made to revise it in the future.” On 1 March 2014, three former Ukrainian Presidents, Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, called on the new government to renounce the Kharkiv Agreements. Mr Lukyanov said that President Putin’s “real motivation was national security and the risk that the new rule in Kiev would very quickly denounce” the agreements of 2010 that prolonged Russia’s base in Crimea for 25 years.’

 

I think that is very probably the case. Here’s a good line, too ‘Sir Tony Brenton said that “the assumption that ‘the Russians don’t like this but they will probably live with it’ was reasonably consistent with the Russia that we thought we had prior to the Maidan revolution.”

 

Yes, ‘the Russia we thought we had’. But that Russia had been,  for many years, an illusion. President Putin’s speech in Munich in February 2007 was  a clear change of tone, for anyone who wanted to know. But it was ignored.  In the end, we tested him by action, and found that , after all, he did bite, and his bite was worse than his bark his bark, an unusual thing in modern politics. Now we complain about hs teeth, but is that a rational attitude towards events.

Lack of Moral Fibre

An aspect of the Bombing War that seldom gets much attention is the terrible squandering of young lives – British lives. I’m told from time to time that Arthur Harris was popular with his crews, and that their nickname for him of ‘Butch’ (short for ‘Butcher’) was affectionate.

 

Maybe so. I am not sure how one can know the whole truth of this, thanks to the 44% casualty rate which meant that so many of them were dead long before they could make a considered assessment of their commander.

 

In round numbers that means that, of 120,000 Bomber command aircrew, 55,573 were killed, (this includes more than 10,000 Canadians) . Only one in ten of those flying at the start of the war survived to the end. Of every 100, 45 were killed, six seriously wounded , 8 were captured and so only 41 escaped unhurt.

 

This carnage is comparable only with that of the First World War’s worst battles.

 

As Siegfried Sassoon wrote in a different context

 

 “ ‘Good morning; good morning!’ the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

‘He’s a cheery old card’ grunted Harry to Jack,

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack

….

 

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.”

 

Though I am repeatedly (and stupidly) accused of attacking the fliers when I attack the British state policy of bombing civilians (over which serving airmen had no control at all, and about which I think they were told little) , I am in fact lost in admiration for the aircrews, and cannot imagine how they did what they did. I’ll come to that in a moment.

 

Arthur Harris wasn’t so admiring. Richard Overy writes on p.353 that Harris thought only a quarter of his crews were effective bombers, the rest merely there to give the Germans something to shoot at.

 

I was thinking about this anyway, because of the Dresden anniversary. But I thought about it even more after reading Helen Dunmore’s recent short novel ‘The Greatcoat’, a sort of ghost story featuring an airbase and a pilot, whose plot I will not here give away. Helen Dunmore wrote a superb novel about starvation and war in Leningrad (‘The Siege’), and she has a particular skill in describing cold, the way it surrounds us, and the ways in which we seek to escape it, which I (who love the cold ) find particularly moving.

 

But this book has another feature, which I think I can give away without spoiling it. It mentions a cracked, yellow little song (as George Orwell might have put it) , which in the book is sung by some airmen.

 

It runs (to the tune of Haydn’s ‘Austria’, used for that great hymn ‘Glorious things of Thee are Spoken’  (or ‘Deutschland Ueber Alles’ if you prefer):

 

‘I don’t want to go to Chopland

I won’t want to go at all

I don’t want to go to Chopland

Where our chances are f***-all’

 

And it sends a chill right through me because I can almost hear it being sung in a low, miserable flat tone in Nissen hut in a sea of mud one foggy night, by a man (or maybe a couple of men) and I can hear the angry Flight Sergeant yelling ‘Will you shut up! If I hear you singing that ****ing  **** again, you’ll be on a charge!’ And then a long sullen silence. Best not talked about, eh? But who can doubt that something of the sort happened? How would any of us have coped with the more or less 50% chance of a screaming, fiery death some night very soon, while living in reasonable comfort on an air base by day?

 

If the book is right (and purists criticise some of Ms Dunmore’s technical facts, so who knows?) the word ‘chop’ had a very special significance in the language of RAF crews. It was the way in which the unsayable – that most of them were going to die horribly - could be said.  Doomed crews,  who had run out of luck,  before their 25 or 30 missions were up,  would (it is claimed)  *look* doomed . They would have ‘the chop look’. And if they did, they wouldn’t come back.

 

I don’t know where she got this from. It’s obviously the sort of superstition that flourishes on the edge of the pit of death.  I’d be interested if anyone had read anything substantial on morale among the Lancaster crews. I suspect that, like so much else to do with this episode, it’s something those involved weren’t then and aren’t now that keen to talk about.

 

 

Apparently 3% of flying officers (3% of those who survived) were removed from flying status before completing 25 operations. Some, it’s very hard to find out how many, were categorised with the harsh words ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’, humiliated in various ways, stripped of rank  and sent off in disgrace to do menial tasks elsewhere.

 

I would guess that most flyers put up with it rather than look weak in front of their fellow airmen. That’s generally what keeps soldiers form running away in battle, the fear of letting their mates down.

 

But it is very hard to imagine how they felt, physically, as they set off on each flight towards the storm of steel that waited them. Hard, also, to imagine how they lived by day in the English countryside, went to the pub, courted girls, knowing that so many of their comrades had already made the journey into the dark and not come back. And having, in many cases, seen aircraft from their own squadron shot down close to them, so needed no imagination to know what fate awaited them.

 

They deserve their memorial. Who can question it?

When Will they See the Link Between Dope and Mental Illness?

After the horrors in Denmark on Saturday, I waited for the information I knew was coming to emerge. It did so on Monday night. The Copenhagen killer, Omar el-Hussein was (as I had been all but sure he would be as soon as I heard the news) yet another low-life petty criminal loser, whose brains had been addled by cannabis use, were the culprits of the Lee Rigby murder, the Ottawa murder of the soldier Nathan Cirillo and the ‘Charlie Hebdo ‘ murders and the other killings linked to that incident. (I suspect that the Sydney killer also falls into this category, but so far as I know nobody has bothered to find out. He was certainly far from sane, and drug abuse is by far the most common predictor of insanity in this age).

 

The Danish newspaper Politiken quoted an acquaintance as saying he was a ‘heavy user’ of the supposedly ‘soft’ drug. Other reports said he had been arrested twice for possession of cannabis, but let off.  Pity.

 

Now the costly PR campaign for cannabis is so powerful that this crucial information was barely mentioned, amid the usual sloshing drivel about radicalisation and Islamic terror.  No doubt el-Hussein (who after a reasonably successful school career developed an uncontrollable temper and was imprisoned for randomly stabbing a commuter on a train). imagined that he was serving some cause. But he was a chaotic violent drifter with an addled mind, not the honed instrument of some global Islamist plot.

 

And if we want to see fewer such incidents we would get a lot further if we realised just how dangerous cannabis is, and acted accordingly, than we will by giving yet more money and power to pretentious and rather sinister ‘security’ organisations, who couldn’t stop a bus, let alone a terror attack.

 

You’d have thought it had been a bad week for cannabis, what with the new report in the ‘Lancet’  strongly linking Skunk cannabis with mental illness. And it might have become even worse, when the BBC favourite and liberal hero Matthew Parris recounted his experiences with the drug (under controlled conditions at the behest of a TV company) in an article (behind a paywall) in ‘The Times’.

 

You’ll have to subscribe to read the whole fascinating thing. I can share with you that Mr Parris wrote : ‘I have too many friends for whom prolonged and heavy use of cannabis has seemed destructive; too many for me to feel entirely at ease with words such as "mild" or "recreational" — or not in their case. Two friends, both in their forties, told me they smoked weed regularly, sometimes even in the morning, with the same result. "I think it changed me permanently as a person," one said.’

 

And also : ‘I have since interviewed friends who have been heavy users and talked to an old friend who was a distinguished clinical psychiatrist, to a younger psychologist she introduced me to and to his colleague in the London addiction centre where they work. I would describe all my interviewees as basically socially liberal, with no axes to grind, no drugs "agenda".

‘There is considerable agreement between all of them, users and health workers alike, that heavy use of cannabis, particularly skunk, can be associated with big changes in behaviour. One friend, a heroin addict now trying to kick the habit, told me that he had been finding it easier to hold down a job on heroin than when he was using cannabis, which he had stopped 12 years ago. Although he was pale and his hands shook, he seemed to be back to his old, pre-cannabis self. He talked about a friend he'd known for 30 years who had never stopped the cannabis and was now paranoid, convinced his neighbours were denouncing him.’

 

The Channel Four news presenter Jon Snow recounted a similar experience (undergone for the same programme) :

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2957957/Smoking-skunk-scarier-war-says-Jon-Snow-News-host-explains-felt-utterly-bereft-taking-drug-experiment-effects-brain.html

 

 

By the time I was completely stoned I felt utterly bereft. I felt as if my soul had been wrenched from my body. There was no one in my world.

‘I was frightened, paranoid, and felt physically and mentally wrapped in a dense blanket of fog.

 

‘I’ve worked in war zones, but I’ve never been as overwhelmingly frightened as I was when I was in the MRI scanner after taking skunk. I would never do it again.’

 

And yet, two and two were not put together by the media. They never are. The current fashion prevents it. Do you think you can manage, or do I have to spell it out?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now it's Time for a Chilcot-Style Inquiry into the Libya War

Having spent much of the weekend on Twitter, struggling and largely failing  to explain the concept of preventive patrolling to people purporting to be policemen (with ghastly punning pseudonyms), I turn with relief to the this morning’s headlines on the BBC. (I notice, having finished this paragraph, that it contains one of the longest alliterations I have ever seen. I promise that this was accidental).

 

I will in time get round to the new ‘Lancet’ report on cannabis and mental illness. I’m currently waiting for a certain organisation to reply to a certain query I sent them this morning.

 

I’m delighted that it has attracted some notice, after months of unchallenged legalisation propaganda on the airwaves and in the press. But as it happens I don’t think it contains anything hugely new. And it still suffers from the grave problems of all such research : what exactly is ‘psychosis’ and what objective means do we have of knowing that someone has suffered from it? How accurately can you measure the use of an illegal drug taken in unquantifiable doses through lungfuls of smoke? How do you measure the supposedly ‘minor’ effects of such drugs, the school failure, the diminished memory and concentration, the unemployability, the loss of patience and other virtues and – as I frequently hear in my correspondence – the long-term delayed-action effects, which can lead quite suddenly to the locked ward and even serious violence? The Lancet report also appears to acquit old-fashioned sixties cannabis.

 

But my main concerns were two other reports. One was that some murderers ‘loyal to Islamic state’ had wantonly killed a number of Coptic Christians. The fact that this took place in Libya trailed in at the end of the account. The casual first-time listener, as I was at 5.30 this morning when I first heard it, will tend to hear the words ‘Islamic State’ and assume the event is in Syria or Iraq.

 

It was only when I absorbed the word ‘Coptic’ that I stopped in my tracks. What were Copts doing in Iraq? Well, of course, they aren't in Iraq. They are almost all in Egypt, as I know very well, having interviewed such a person on the plight of Christians in Muslim majority countries during what I rather hope will be my last-ever visit to Cairo in November 2011. See here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/11/special-report-the-overthrow-of-egypts-despotic-ruler-was-hailed-a-success-but-nine-months-on-peter-.html

 

And of course the victims of this murder (why do many of my fellow-scribblers refer to such crime as ‘executions’, when they are the opposite?) were in Libya, where many poor Egyptians go in search of the work that is so hard to find in Egypt.

 

The whole point of the story is surely that this grisly death cult has now spread to Libya.

 

And that this horrible news came on the same day as fresh reports of migrants having to be rescued in the stormy Mediterranean, from leaking and unseaworthy boats into which they had been crammed by armed smugglers.

 

Where were they coming from?

Libya.

 

Of course, we are perfectly right to pursue those who got us into the Iraq war, an action of incalculable stupidity which was much like the opening of Pandora’s Box, except there seems to be no hope lying at the bottom. The consequences of that ill-considered, ignorant and half-witted action will continue to plague the world for decades to come. It may turn out, in the end, to have been the action which finally brings down the proud civilisation which we rebuilt after the Second World War, and hands the remnants over to the Chinese.

 

But it seems to me to be time for a Chilcot-type inquiry into the Libyan war, likewise sold to us as an urgent and morally good intervention, but which has been disastrous for Libya itself, now a cauldron of murder, fanaticism and gangsterism, and for Europe as a whole, as the Libyan coast, uncontrolled by anyone,  provides a point of departure for an incalculable number of desperate migrants wrongly convinced that a better life awaits them in Europe.

 

This promises to subject our borderless new Europe to a  revolution far greater than the huge Hispanic migration which has in recent years transformed the USA. Turning it in an amazingly short time into a bilingual country whose political leaders must increasingly adapt to a wholly new constituency.

 

The development is so huge that nobody can really think about it.

 

Nobody can blame the migrants, whose bravery is admirable and whose plight in their coffin ships is pitiable, for seeking a better life. But can this development possibly benefit our already-troubled continent? And did those who made it possible, by using Western air power to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi, have any idea what they were doing?

 

Isn’t it time they were called to account? Yet it is barely mentioned.

Why catching crooks is NOT the police's most important job

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
After more than 40 years as a journalist at home and abroad, often experiencing history at first hand, I am certain of only one thing – that most people in power are completely clueless about what they are doing.

They seldom, if ever, think. They know no history. They are fiercely resistant to any facts that might upset their opinions. They take no trouble to find out what is actually happening.

Here is an example. Ian Austin MP, a member of Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee, last week extruded the following opinion: ‘The police’s number one job is to catch criminals so they can be convicted.’ He was objecting to a scheme that gave priority to contact with the public. 

I am pretty sure the same dim view is shared across Parliament, in every police HQ and in most media outlets in the country. Yet it is utterly, totally mistaken. Every arrest and prosecution is, in fact, a failure by the police. It’s necessary, but it’s also secondary.

Their job, the reason we hired them in 1829, was to prevent crime and disorder. That’s what the constable’s oath says, and they successfully did prevent huge amounts of crime and disorder for more than a century, by patrolling on foot.

And so it continued until the country went mad 50 years ago in the first heady years of the Age of Mistakes in which we continue to live – the era of instant mashed potato, Jimmy Savile, Watney’s Red Barrel, tower blocks, comprehensive schools, votes for teenagers, inner ring roads, the Common Market and Dr Beeching’s railway massacre.

What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he can do first aid?

Most of those errors were made in public view, cheered on, as usual, by the political and commentating classes who invariably mistake novelty for progress. 

But the decision to abolish police foot patrols went unnoticed at the time. It was only afterwards that British people of a certain age wondered where the police – once visible everywhere – vanished to.

For the decision was taken in secret, by an unknown body called the Home Office Police Advisory Board, on December 7, 1966. It was adopted by new, unwieldy and unresponsive merged police forces that were created soon afterwards. 

Since then, the police do not prevent crime or disorder. They wait for it to happen, and then come rushing along to the scene of their failure, accompanied by loud electronic screams and wails and flashing lights.

What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he can do first aid? He cannot unstab, unshoot, unburgle, unmug or unrape the victim. 

Nothing he does can bring back what has been lost. The chances are that he cannot find or catch the culprit – and if he does, the miscreant will get off anyway, and skip, laughing, down the steps of the courthouse, as two did last week.

If you wait for people to commit crimes before you do anything, you will never, ever be able to build enough prisons to hold them.

It’s obvious if you think about it. It’s not obvious if you don’t.

Proof the Tories stand for nothing

I suppose if a Left-wing political party sought cash from pornographers, it would make a kind of sense. 

The Left, after all, cheered on the liberation of pornography by ripping up the obscenity laws and deriding poor old Lord Longford when he tried to warn against this. 

But if a party that calls itself ‘Conservative’ readily seeks the money and friendship of such people, it robs itself of its right to use this name. 

If conservatism doesn’t stand for faithful marriage, unselfish love, constancy and modesty, then what does it stand for? Anyone who still deludes himself that the Cameron Tories offer any hope to the country will deserve what he gets. 

We should pick our 'friends' with a bit more care

Here is a Chinese billionaire, Liu Han, being hauled away by the police. He looks terrified, and with reason. He is now dead, having been executed a few days ago. He may be shouting: ‘I’ve been framed!’ He certainly did so during his sentencing hearing.

Because China has no independent courts, no juries, no presumption of innocence, and because its press is not just unfree but chained to the state, I have no idea if he is guilty of the charges of gangsterism laid against him.

This is interesting because this country and its leaders have good and close relations with China, whose government famously massacred its ‘own people’ in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and got away with it. It seems we send a trade delegation there every week, begging for business and stifling misgivings about the appalling lack of freedom. 

In the same way, we are still on good terms with Saudi Arabia, a heavily armed and secretive despotism which bans the practice of Christianity, stages public beheadings and sentences polite and cautious dissidents to murderous floggings. Yet we snarl and snap with righteous moral outrage at Vladimir Putin’s Russia, supposedly a unique demon among nations.

This is silly, and if we do not grow out of it we may find ourselves in a futile and dangerous war in Ukraine, no affair of ours anyway, under the delusion that it is some sort of crusade.

I should point out here that Ukraine is no angel. To say it is corrupt is like saying that the Atlantic is a bit damp. Its leader, Petro Poroshenko, threatened to impose martial law last week. A Ukrainian journalist, Ruslan Kotsaba, was detained last week for protesting against highly unpopular (and widely ignored) efforts to impose conscription, which have led to a temporary ban on foreign travel for men of military age.

Poroshenko is not in full control of the piratical ultra-nationalist militias which are doing much of the ‘pro-Western’ fighting in and around Donetsk. 

In fact, I suspect he fears to make peace on sensible terms in case these people violently overthrow him – as they did to his predecessor Viktor Yanukovych.

To those who persist in making out that this is a simple conflict between good and bad, I can only say: Grow up.

There's a serious gap in the regulation of charities. What are we to do when worrying questions are asked about the running of much loved charities that do a great deal of good? 

We want to be sure our money is being effectively spent. Last week, The Spectator magazine raised questions about Kids Company, run by Camila Batmanghelidjh. 

The Charities Commission, which most people assume keeps an eye on such things, has limited powers and is reluctant to use them. 

The best solution, for charities and the public, would surely be a new body with the power to conduct a wholly independent audit of any charity.

Now that the baseless campaign against cream and butter has at last been exposed as the rubbish it was, can we please see the end of the tyranny of skimmed and semi-skimmed milk, horrible in tea or coffee, and probably bad for you. 

Amazingly, many coffee shops don’t even stock or use whole milk. Boycott them till they end this stupid policy.

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

The Bombing Files - Arguments against the RAF bombing of German Civilians summed up

The Bombing Files – a compilation on the question of bombing by the RAF during the Second World War.

 

I thought I would assemble in one place my recent articles and book reviews on this difficult and complicated subject. I do very strongly urge those interested to read the whole thing, as it may save them from accusing me of holding views I don’t hold, or of having ‘never addressed’ various topics.

 

I begin with a review of Richard Overy’s recent book ‘The Bombing War’, because it contains so many useful facts:

 

Richard Overy’s ‘The Bombing War' is now available in a reasonably portable Penguin paperback (though I wish it was easier to navigate the footnotes).

 

 My own position described and explained

 

 

Longstanding readers will recall my accounts of Anthony Grayling’s devastating account of the British bombing of Germany ‘Among the Dead Cities’, and of Sir Max Hastings’s excellent ‘Bomber Command’ . Others will, I hope, recall my championing, on Radio 4 and elsewhere, of Bishop George Bell (who lost two brothers in the Great War) and Major Richard Stokes MC MP (a highly-decorated Great War artillery officer) , non-pacifist objectors to the deliberate bombing of German civilians. Also some may remember a discussion of the criticisms of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign levelled by Sir Henry Tizard, as described in an interesting series of lectures by C.P.Snow.

 

 

 

I get into no end of trouble for my position on this. I am told that I am unpatriotic, even now, for discussing it or for being distressed by the extreme and horrible cruelties inflicted by our bombs on innocent women and children, who could not conceivably be held responsible for Hitler’s crimes. On the contrary, I believe it is the duty of a proper patriot to criticize his country where he believes it to have done wrong.

 

What I do not think and have not said

 

I am told I am defaming the memory of the bomber crews. I have never done so, and never will. They had little idea of what they were doing, died terrible deaths in terrible numbers thanks to the ruthless squandering of life by their commanders, and showed immense personal courage. It is those who, knowing what was being done, ordered them into battle that I blame.

 

 

 

I am told that I am equating our bombing of Germany with the German mass murder of the Jews, when I would not dream of making such a comparison, never have done so and never will. I am told that I am excusing the mass murder of the Jews, when nothing could ever excuse it and I should certainly never attempt to do so. Is it still necessary to say that two wrongs do not make a right, and that one horribly wrong thing may be worse than another horribly wrong thing, and yet they may both still be horribly wrong, examined by themselves as actions?

 

 

 

I am told that I wasn’t there. This is true, but Bell, Stokes and Tizard were there, and protested, much as I do and for the same reasons, moral in two cases, practical in one. I hope I should have had their courage. I think I can say that I am sometimes prepared to espouse unpopular causes.

 

Our survival was not at stake

 

I am told that the bombing was necessary because our survival was at stake. It quite simply wasn’t – Hitler had been irreversibly defeated at Stalingrad, and the USA were in the war, long before the mass bombing got under way.

 

Civilian deaths were intended, not a side-effect

 

I am also told that it was not our policy to kill civilians, and that they died accidentally as a result of attacks on military targets. This is flatly untrue, as I shall shortly show.

 

 I am also told that the bombing was justified by its military effect upon Germany, and that it advanced Germany’s defeat. This is, to put it mildly, highly questionable.

 

In the following review  of Professor Overy’s book, I shall adduce evidence which seems to me to devastate the case of those who continue to claim that the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes was militarily or morally justified. I would urge any who wish to attack this view to obtain and read the book before doing so. It is a formidable work of research and marshalled scholarship, dispassionate and carefully referenced:

 

 

 

The book ranges over much more than the British bombing of Germany. Did you know, for instance, that the Italian Air Force once bombed Tel Aviv?  Details of German bombing of  the USSR, and accurate accounts of the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939 and 1940, are well worth reading, not least because of the large myths which have grown up around both of these events, quite horrible enough unadorned. The descriptions of the very heavy Allied bombing of German-occupied countries, and the strains this caused to their powerless populations, are particularly painful.

 

 

 

But these are things I must urge the reader of Professor Overy’s book to examine for himself or herself.

 

 

 

It is the British Empire’s bombing of Germany, and to some extent the parallel American bombing of Germany, which I wish to examine on the grounds of both military effectiveness and morality.

 

 

 

It is my view that the facts form a great cloud of witness against this form of warfare, which we must hope is never again adopted by any civilized nation, or indeed by any nation. I used to hold another view. Let us see if I, helped by Richard Overy, can persuade you.

 

They started it! Did they? This may surprise you

 

On page 243 we learn that the deliberate bombing of cities in World War Two was not a retaliation against Hunnish barbarism, but definitely begun by the RAF, on 11th May 1940, long before the Blitz, with a  raid on what was then known as Muenchen Gladbach (it is now, for tedious reasons,  known as Moenchengladbach) in western Germany. This was not, as some claim, a response to Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam, because Rotterdam was not bombed till 14th May.

 

The main reason for the attack seems to have been that Winston Churchill, who favoured bombing in general and had always supported the idea of a separate Air Force,  had taken over from Neville Chamberlain, who opposed the bombing of cities on principle. The town was defined as a military-economic target and the attack was supposed to be in response to Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries, just begun. 

 

 

The extent of the damage was slight. As discussed here, and particularly dealt with by Max Hastings, the RAF missed most of its targets hopelessly badly, and its inadequate bombing planes, mostly poorly designed and using outdated tactics, were blasted from the sky by the Luftwaffe in terrible numbers during the early part of combat.

 

 

 

Churchill’s mandate for bombing

 

 

On page 254, the language of British leaders began to take on a rather fearsome tone. Winston Churchill speculates in a letter (8th July 1940)  to his friend and Aircraft Production Minister Lord (Max) Beaverbrook that an ‘absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ would help to bring Hitler down. Arthur Harris kept a copy of this letter and told Andrew Boyle in 1979 ‘That was the RAF mandate’.

 

 

Human beings are the stated target

 

 

 

The killing of workers was an explicit policy. In June 1941 (p.257) we find an Air Ministry draft directive saying that ‘Continuous and relentless bombing of these workers and their utility services, over a period of time, will inevitably lower their morale, kill a number of them and thus appreciably reduce their industrial output.’

 

 

 

In April of the same year (p.258) a policy review urged attacks on ‘working-class’ areas. In November that year (also p.258) a memorandum almost certainly written by Harris was asking if the time had not come to strike ‘against the people themselves’.  In May (p.259), the Director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on the ‘the livelihood, the homes, the cooking heating, lighting and family life of…the working class’ (they were the lost mobile and most vulnerable to such an attack).

 

 

 

In November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, then Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, told ‘the Thirty Club’ that his planes had nearly a  year been attacking ‘the people themselves’, intentionally.(p.259)

 

‘No scruples’ - though we preferred the world to think otherwise

 

‘I mention this because for a long time the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. …I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.’ 

 

 

On the same page it is shown that senior officials knew of the policy but preferred the truth of it not to be widely known in case ‘false and misleading deductions’ were made.

 

 

 

A profoundly disturbing Air Staff memorandum (p.265) explicitly desires that towns should me made ‘physically uninhabitable’ and the people in them must be ‘conscious of constant personal danger’. The aim was to produce ‘destruction’ and ‘the fear of death’.

 

 

‘Kill a lot of Boche’

 

Harris himself wrote in April 1942 (p.287)’We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war’. Harris, paradoxically to his credit, never lied to himself or anyone else about what he was doing. He never shied away from his purpose of killing Germans and wanted it acknowledged publicly. Perhaps he suspected that Churchill and others would seek to disavow the policy later.

 

 

 

Lord Cherwell’s ‘de-housing’ Minute

 

On p.288 you will find details of Lord Cherwell’s famous minute calling for the de-housing of a third of Germany’s population (an aim based on totally wrong and exaggerated ideas of the power of bombing, as it turned out). ‘Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale’, it said, airily. You might say. You might also say that it would be hard to destroy that many houses intentionally without, equally intentionally, destroying many of their occupants.

 

 

 

There is plenty more of this in Professor Overy’s account.  I’ll turn later to the effectiveness, or otherwise, of the bombing.

 

I should point out here that careful readers of the book will find that a neglected theme of this controversy is the constant and rather nervous desire of the RAF, and of Bomber Command, to justify their actual existence, and to advance the claims of air power as an independent force, rather than (as both Army and the Navy have always wanted and still want) as an adjunct to the Army and Navy, aiding them in their purposes.  The bombing of cities as independent targets, unconnected with any ground operations, is a direct outgrowth of this highly questionable view of military science.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stalin liked bombing

 

 

As one might expect, a significant part of the drive for the killing of Germans did come from Josef Stalin, our ‘noble’ ally against Hitler, and (like Hitler)  a man to whom the killing of innocent people was never a problem. Though it seems (p.394) that Stalin was not to blame for the attacks on Dresden.

 

 

 

Let us proceed to pages 296 and 297, where Churchill has gone to visit Stalin, who is very annoyed that the British and Americans have abandoned a plan for an invasion of Western Europe originally set for 1942, and is more or less insulting.  Churchill says there will be bombing instead, lots of it.

 

 

 

 

 

‘Stalin took over the argument himself and said that homes as well as factories must be destroyed.’

 

 

 

Soon afterwards, Churchill (p.297) was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. It was, Churchill said ‘better than doing nothing’.

 

 

 

But better for whom? This is basically war by public relations, with actions judged by their political and morale effect, rather than their military result. Can one kill innocents for the sake of appearances? It seems a moral stretch to me.

 

 

 

Leo Amery, a War Cabinet member, was not taken with Harris’s urgings for a full-scale bombing attack (p.297). Quoting a scientist at the Air Warfare branch who said the RAF could not hit enough German industry to do decisive damage, Amery wrote: ‘I am aware that this view of night bombing is shared by a very large number of thoughtful people’.

 

 

 

One answer to the claim that the bomber offensive forced Germany to divert resources from the Russian front is that a more effective bomber offensive against military targets would have done the same. Another is that the bombing campaign also forced Britain to divert scarce and costly resources – trained men, metals, explosive, engine manufacturing capacity, from the build-up of its D-Day army, and of course from the Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boat war which Churchill later confessed was the only part of the conflict that had truly worried him.

 

 

 

Was it a sensible use of resources?

 

 

 

On pp 298-299 we find that in 1942 the RAF dropped 37,192 tons of bombs on Germany. Most missed their targets completely. The raids cost 2,716 bombers lost on missions or in accidents. During 1942, the RAF also killed 4,900 Germans, two for each bomber lost (Bomber Command itself lost 14,000 dead from September 1939 to September 1942).

 

 

It was not central to victory

 

On p.303 Overy notes that the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, at which the USA and Britain hammered out their European strategy, did not really view the bomber offensive as central to victory. He writes ‘Bombing survived as an option not because it was central to the strategic outlook of the western allies, but because it was secondary’.

 

 

 

 

 

On p.310 we learn that the RAF’s Charles Portal was predicting that his force could kill 900,000 Germans in 18 months, seriously injure 1,000,000, destroy six million homes and ‘de-house’ 25 million people (so much for deaths being unintended collateral damage). Overy also points out that American fliers were puzzled as to what the RAF’s actual strategic aim was in pursuing this policy.

 

 

 

It was too late to ‘save us from invasion’

 

 

On p.322, we learn that Arthur Harris admitted that his bomber offensive only started seriously in March 1943. This is important because so many people like to claim that the bombing ‘saved Britain from invasion’ or ‘won the war’ or was ‘the only way we could strike back’.

 

 

Nor did it ‘win the war’

 

Yet the invasion had been cancelled in September 1940. Russia and the USA had joined the war in 1941(making German eventual defeat inevitable) but for nearly three years after Dunkirk, this ‘sole weapon’ had barely begun to be used.

 

 

 

What is more, the decisive battle of Stalingrad, after which the victory of the USSR over Germany was pretty much assured, had ended with a Soviet victory in February 1943, Von Paulus and his armies had been marched off to prison camps before Harris’s offensive even got under way. 

 

 

 

Claims are often made that the firestorm in Hamburg, if replicated, could have destroyed German morale. Hitler’s favourite, Albert Speer is said to have held this opinion. The damage was indeed appalling.  But in fact (pp.337-338) Hamburg recovered as a functioning city and port with remarkable speed.

 

 

 

On pp 343 there are some striking figures about RAF losses 4,026 aircraft lost, 2,823 of them in combat (the constant attrition of experienced crews meant rapid training and many more flying accidents than would have befallen well-trained crews) .

 

 

 

As Overy writes ‘Although both forces [British and American] advertised their success in diverting ever-increasing numbers of German fighters to the defence of the Reich, this was in some sense a Pyrrhic victory, since the bomber forces were now subject to escalating and possibly insupportable levels of loss and damage’.

 

 

 

Harris ludicrously overestimated the economic damage he was doing

 

Harris (p.344) was livid when researchers said his attacks had only reduced German economic potential by 9% in 1943. He was sure he had done far more damage. But after the war 9% turned out to be an over-estimate.

 

 

 

Again, the human cost of the war to our own side was appalling. During 1943, Bomber Command lost 15,678 killed or captured, and the US 8th Air Force lost 9,497.

 

 

 

The idea that the bombing might create some sort of revolution against Hitler was often touted. But expert analyses pointed out that Nazi Germany offered no avenue for protest, and the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender (an unexamined policy which may well have prolonged the war for a year or more) rather ruled out a more compliant government coming to office and suing for peace.

 

 

Should we have done what the Americans did?

 

This is not the place for a long debate on the American daylight bombing, under increasingly heavy and effective long-range fighter escort – though there is no doubt that experience shows that, had the allies made a determined attack on German oil production and refinery capacity, they would have done far more damage to the war effort than by any other means.   Overy concedes that many of the American raids were in effect area bombing since they could not achieve the accuracy for pinpoint bombing,

 

He contrasts the Americans’ decision to take the war to the Luftwaffe itself (which in the end destroyed German air power) with the RAF’s persistence, to the end, in bombing urban targets.

 

 

 

In April 1944 (p.368) Overy details a costly and ineffective RAF raids against Berlin (too far away, too spread-out and too well-defended to allow concentrated attack easily) , and Nuremberg. Even Harris conceded that German night defences were so effective that they might create conditions in which loss rates ‘could not in the end be sustained’.

 

 

 

Overy writes ‘Between November 1943 and March 1944, Bomber Command lost 1,128 aircraft for little evident strategic gain’.

 

 

 

On p.381 there is an interesting discussion of possible retaliatory gas attacks, and of how they were contemplated by Churchill .

 

 

 

But they were not used.  They would only have been used, I am sure, in retaliation against such attacks by Germany. But by then there would have been few scruples. In a very telling paragraph, Overy writes (p.382)

 

 

 

Why we didn’t use gas

 

'The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated - *deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted*(my emphasis). This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons on German targets in 1945 if the war had dragged on late into the year.’

 

 

 

 

Who called area bombing ‘Acts of terror and wanton destruction’?

 

 

Overy recounts how on 28th March 1945 (p.396) Churchill referred to area bombing in a memo as ‘mere acts of terror and wanton destruction’, urging that attacks turn instead to oil and transport. Harris paid no mind, and horrible things were done to several German cities in the last weeks of war.

 

 

 

The two major bombing powers, the USA and Britain, both conducted surveys of the effects of bombing after the war. These are described on pp 398-409. Captured Germans tended to agree that bombing of transport links and oil facilities had been crucial, bombing of cities comparatively unimportant in hampering the Nazi war effort (p.400). It is hard to see why they should have dissembled about this.

 

 

 

The American survey itself (p.401) said that city attacks cost only about 2.7% of German economic potential. The whole combined offensive cost a total of 17% of German economic potential by 1944, mostly due to US bombing of selected targets. (p.401). the British report largely concurred, except that it was in some way even more modest in its claims for area bombing’s effects, especially in the key year of 1844. (pp 401-402). Transport and oil remained the most important targets whoever was looking at it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Overy writes (p.402) : Given the uniformity of opinion on both the German and Allied sides, the one based on experience, the other on extensive research, it is surprising that the effects of bombing have occasioned so much debate ever since. The proximate causes – defeating the German Air Force and emasculating oil supply and transport - are unlikely to be undermined by further research’.

 

 

 

He quotes a senior RAF officer Norman Bottomley (Portal’s former deputy during the war) as saying the effect of area bombing was ‘great but never critical’.

 

 

 

Of course it had an impact (pp 404-405). Industrial workers died, many hours of work were lost, and most crucially huge numbers of fighter aircraft were diverted from Italy and Russia.  Overy writes: ‘This situation left German armies denuded of air protection at a critical juncture’ (p.407). Though I repeat here that attacks on actual targets , as opposed to night-raids on crowded cities, would have achieved the same effect, and that the attacks were themselves a diversion of Allied strength from other fronts and aspects of the war which might have been more urgent and more productive of victory) .

 

 

 

But he also quotes J.K.Galbraith as saying the man-hours, aircraft and bombs ‘had cost the American economy far more in output than they had cost Germany’. This again suggests that the same resources, used elsewhere, might have achieved just as much if not more effect on Germany, without the severe moral problems of bombing cities.

 

 

 

Overy is not much concerned with the moral aspect of the controversy. He ends his chapter on the offensive with a sort of shrug. Governments liked bombing because it squandered fewer lives than ground offensives, because they believed it was good for propaganda and morale, because it made maximum use of new technology.

 

 

 

To some extent the continued popularity of bombing was then, and is now, an effect of universal suffrage democracy, whose wars, as we know, are crueller than those of Kings. To question it (as I well know) leads swiftly to a questioning of the whole myth of the war, and an unwelcome examination of how we came to be waging a war in Europe against one of the greatest land powers in human history, yet had no army in Europe with which to fight it.

 

The day has not yet come when this conundrum can be calmly discussed in this country, even though the whole episode began 75 years ago, and finished 69 years ago.

 

***

Next, I’ll turn to another historical, rather than polemic, examination of the conflict, Sir Max Hastings’s ‘Bomber Command’

 

I’ve never been a great admirer of Sir Max as a journalist or editor (though I respect all war correspondents who venture directly an deliberately into combat zones). I think he has often been too ready, as a writer and an editor, to accept conventional wisdom – though of late he’s also been very brave in admitting that he has in the past been mistaken.

 

But his military histories are simply unequalled. He has found an extraordinarily clear and authoritative voice. He has done superb research. And his great respect for courage does not blind him to folly or wrongdoing by the courageous.

 

‘Bomber Command’ is in many ways a more effective polemic against Arthur Harris’s campaign than A.C. Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities’. This is because it is not written as a polemic, but as an engaged and intelligent history of this episode. It is very well written  (as Hemingway used to say ‘It reads easy, because it was writ hard’) and no reader here would be disappointed by it.

 

The claims of the Harris camp, for the military value of area bombing, are thoroughly debunked. The terrible losses of brave aircrew are heartbreakingly described. One officer’s words, those of Flight Lieutenant Denis Hornsey of 76 Squadron, deserve to be read and remembered by all thoughtful people. He wrote in 1943:’If you live on the brink of death yourself, it is as if those who have gone have merely caught an earlier train to the same destination, and whatever that destination is, you will be sharing it soon, since you will almost certainly be catching the next one’. I won’t tell you what happened to Denis Hornsey in the end. You’ll have to read the book.

 

They knew, you see, that they were almost certain to die, and not just die, but die horribly in the dark and the cold, and only a few hours from the comfort of homes which in many cases they had left that morning and to which they would never return.

 

Harris’s own obdurate resistance to more effective types of bombing is recorded (a concentrated campaign against German fuel installations might actually have shortened the war in Europe). Harris’s supporters always claim he shortened the war, but he didn’t, not least because he always objected to the use of ‘his’ bombers for such action as the raids on the synthetic fuel plants.

 

Sir Max also deserves much credit for the chapter in which he describes the indefensible destruction of the city of Darmstadt on 11th September 1944 (it was not, in any significant way a military target) and what it involved for those living there.

 

 

As I know well, and as I have had confirmed in many exchanges with readers in the past few weeks, there is a dogged, almost furious resistance in this country to recognising what we actually did in Germany. I think this is because many people fear and suspect that it was wrong, and prefer their comforting illusions. So they will not open the door that leads to truth. Sir Max’s book is a door that leads to truth. Try this small sample: ‘the first terrible discoveries were made: cellars crammed with suffocated bodies – worse still, with amorphous heaps of melted and charred humanity. There were whole families whose remains could be removed in a laundry basket. Some bodies had shrunk to a quarter of life-size. …There were blue corpses and purple corpses, black heaps of flesh and protruding bones. Kramer saw a man carrying a sack containing the heads of his entire family…’

 

Which leads me to Anthony Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities, which is highly polemical, but also (in my view) devastatngly forensic (as you can see, I wrote this some time ago):

 

‘Last weekend was the 65th anniversary of the RAF and USAAF bombing of Dresden. I was impressed to see that residents of that lovely city formed a human chain to prevent a demonstration by neo-Nazis, trying to equate the bombing with the Holocaust. Appalling as the bombing was, it was an act of war taken against an aggressor nation, not the same as the deliberate, cold-blooded industrial slaughter of Europe's Jews, a unique crime (which I hope will remain unique and is often falsely compared with lesser horrors by irresponsible propagandists of many kinds).

 

The citizens of modern Dresden, which has now at least partly recovered from the destruction, and also from nearly 50 years of Communist vandalism and stupidity, are a credit to the German Federal Republic, which has made immense efforts to build a free, law-governed society out of the ruins of Hitler's Reich, and doesn't get enough credit for its success. No, it's not a perfect society (its attitude to home schooling is insupportable, for instance). But it is a very creditable one. Perhaps now we can see (in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance) how badly such attempts to build freedom out of the rubble of tyranny can fail or falter, we should pay more attention to the German success.

 

Apart from anything else, anyone who seeks to excuse or minimize or diminish the Holocaust may have the effect of making a repeat of it more likely, however unintentionally. That is why the 'revisionist' arguments of some German historians, who seek to equate Holocaust and bombing, ought to be resisted.

 

Even so, I think we have to admit that the bombing of civilian targets by the RAF during World War Two was wrong. We can say this without in any way impugning the undoubted courage of the young men who flew in the bombing missions - and who suffered appalling casualties while doing so. But their commanders, and the politicians who knew full well what was going on, cannot be let off.

 

I have just read A. C. Grayling's powerful book ‘Among the Dead Cities’ (you will have to read it yourself to find out where this startling and disturbing phrase comes from). I think its case against the bombing of German civilians is unanswerable. He deals with all the standard arguments of those who justify it, pointing out that all of these would be a better argument for what the RAF largely didn't do - that is, accurate bombing of industrial, economic and military targets. One of the few missions where careful targeting was involved was the rightly famous 'Dambusters' raid, though that did inevitably cause some severe civilian casualties, many of them slave workers from defeated allied nations. Another was the bombing of the missile factory at Peenemunde. Such bombing, which was also tackled by the USAAF, also at great cost in young lives, did in fact have a much greater effect on the German ability to wage war than the bombing of civilians. The Americans, by the way, did bomb civilians in Japan, another dubious episode.

 

Many other issues flow from this, including the validity of the 'finest hour' and 'glorious struggle' views of the Second World War, which seem to me (who once believed them entirely) to grow more threadbare by the year. And I know that many people would simply rather not think about the matter for this very reason. The market for accounts of the Hamburg firestorm is pretty limited in Britain. That's a pity. We need to know what was done in our name, and in my view to be horrified by it, so that we can be sure we are not again reduced to this barbaric and - as it happens - ineffectual form of warfare.

 

It is my suspicion that the moral shrivelling of Britain since 1945, the increased violence and delinquency, the readiness to accept the abortion massacre, the general coarsening of culture and the growth of callousness have at least something to do with our willingness to shrug off - or even defend - Arthur Harris's deliberate 'de-housing' of German civilians. The British people in 1939, told of what would be done in their name within six years, would have been incredulous and astonished. I am glad at least that people such as Bishop George Bell of Chichester raised powerful voices against it at the time, at some cost to themselves. We owe it to them to revisit the argument.

 

*****

 

While I myself think the moral objections to the bombing are overpowering, and that retaliation for German barbarism simply doesn’t pass as a justification, I know that many seek to defend area bombing as a practical necessity of war. That is why I include this article, which explains that, at the time, notable military and scientific experts rightly warned that area bombing would not be as effective as claimed

 

Contemplating a solitary night in a hotel somewhere deep in the new East End of London, probably accompanied with pouring rain, I needed something exceptional to read. So I did something I had been meaning to do for years. I went to the London Library, membership of which is my greatest single self-indulgence, and hunted down in its haunted, mysterious  Edwardian shelves a copy of C.P. Snow’s  ‘Science and Government’, the text of the Godkin lectures which he gave at Harvard in 1960.

 

 

 

Just finding the little volume was fun. What a setting for a ghost story or an old-fashioned murder mystery this wonderful library would be, with its vertical maze of staircases, its iron floors, its long banks of shelves, illuminated only when a reader is searching them. Like H.G.Wells’s Magic Shop (a lovely short story which I re-read for the first time in years a few nights ago) it seems to stretch on and up and in forever, like a pleasing dream,  and I have never failed to get slightly, if pleasantly,  lost while in search of something. More than once I’ve had to ask one of the delightful staff to find the book I’m looking for, as its system of shelving is quite unique and not all that easy to follow, and the maps it issues are baffling to me.

 

 

 

You don’t need to belong to the London Library to get hold of Snow’s little book. I’m sure many other libraries either have it (it was published by the Oxford University press in 1960 and 1961, and presumably in the USA by a Harvard imprint) or can get it for you on inter-library loan. It’s quite slender. But the first half of it is absolutely astonishing.  I’ve always known it contained the factual background to some scenes in Snow’s particularly moving novel about deep friendship,  ‘The Light and the Dark’, in which the Second World War plan to bomb German cities, and the Whitehall row about it, forms at first the background and later, rather tragically, the foreground, to the final part of the story. But I didn’t know the half of it.

 

 

 

Snow was deeply involved in the British state’s effort to recruit science to prepare for the Second World War. As a man of the pretty hard left of the time (just how hard is hinted at in the another book in the series, ‘Corridors of Power’, in which Snow’s semi-autobiographical hero more or less admits to sympathy for the USSR) , he longed for Winston Churchill to be in office throughout the late 1930s, believing that a Churchill government would stand up to Hitler. 

 

 

 

And he knew several extraordinary figures in the semi-secret world where government, science and politics intersect. One was the fascinating Maurice Hankey, who appears in some of the books (as I believe) as the politician Bevill. The others, who are the principal characters in ‘Science and Government’ are Sir Henry Tizard  (whom Snow obviously admired greatly) and F.A. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), the mysterious German-born naturalized Briton, scientist and intriguer  who became Winston Churchill’s chief scientific adviser. Snow is utterly fair to Lindemann, and seems to have liked him as far as it was possible to do so. He notes that both Lindemann and Tizard were abnormally physically brave, and both proved it by extraordinary flying exploits during the First World War.  It is amazing that they survived.

 

 

 

But it would not be true to say he admired Lindemann.

 

 

 

The two scientists quite famously quarrelled over Lindemann’s belief that bombing German civilians would win the war.

 

 

 

Lindemann advocated, quite specifically, the bombing of German working class homes. ‘Middle class houses have too much space around them and so are bound to waste bombs’, as Snow explains the view. ‘Factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit.’

 

 

 

Lindemann argued that, given a total concentration of effort, bombing all the major towns of Germany could destroy 50 per cent of all houses.

 

 

 

Snow notes at this point, in a superb and (to me) moving piece of understatement: ‘It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing’…. ‘…Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right’.

 

 

 

But he returns to the practical point. As well as being wicked, the policy was plain wrong.

 

 

 

Tizard said that Lindemann’s estimate of the possible destruction was five times too high. Patrick Blackett (a former naval officer who had become a noted physicist high in the scientific councils of the day and later the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics and ennobled as Lord Blackett), independently advised that Lindemann’s estimate was six times too high (Both were slightly out. But nothing like as wrong as Lindemann was.  Lindemann’s estimate of destruction was in fact *ten times too high*, as the post-war bombing survey revealed).

 

 

 

They might as well not have bothered to argue. ‘The minority view [that of Tizard and Blackett] was not only defeated, but squashed. The atmosphere was more hysterical than is usual in English official life; it had the faint but just perceptible smell of a witch-hunt. Tizard was actually called a defeatist’.

 

 

 

As Snow says‘It was not easy, for a man as tough and brave as men are made, and a good deal prouder than most of us, to be called a defeatist’

 

 

 

Perhaps worse was the internal exile into which Tizard was forced, denied all further influence, despite his great knowledge and experience, and exiled to the Presidency of Magdalen College in Oxford, his talents wasted at their very peak, and when they were most needed by the country he loved. No, it is not Soviet, there was no Siberian power station, and no bullet in the back of the head. But it is not English either. And it is stupid, stupid, stupid.

 

 

 

You will search in vain in most histories of the war for more than tiny passing references to Tizard. If there is another book which describes this moment of official insanity, I do not know where it is. I sat over my supper, shocked into immobility, my knife and fork abandoned and my glass of wine ignored, almost trembling with wasted anger over this awful story of long ago.  Why had I till then been only dimly aware of it? Why is it trapped inside this small, obscure volume retrieved from deep in a rather impenetrable library? Why isn’t it taught in schools? Why hasn’t anyone written a play about it?

 

 

 

Well, partly because it would undermine the nonsensical cult of Winston Churchill, who for all his merits had many bad qualities which we are generally not supposed to go on about.

 

 

 

His complete support for Lindemann (who by the way was a non-drinking , non-smoking vegetarian with no known sexual relations with anyone,  who lived on the whites of eggs, Port Salut cheese and olive oil, a strange boon companion for the boozy Edwardian WSC, who is said to have occasionally persuaded Lindemann to drink a glass of Cognac) simply crushed all opposition.

 

 

 

Well , that’s half the story, but – shocking as it is – there’s an even more worrying postscript. I reckon that most of my critics on the subject of bombing, the ones who say the Germans deserved it, the ones who think that burning and mangling women and children in their homes was a justified and effective means of war, the ones who tot up the diversion of resources to anti-aircraft measures and claim this somehow turned the scale in Russia  (even though the bombing didn’t get properly under way until long after Hitler was beaten at Stalingrad and the course of the war was decided anyway), and yet who don’t find that the deliberate killing of civilians, in areas where opposition to Hitler was concentrated, was both stupid and immoral….

 

 

 

….I would reckon that even these people would say that the invention of radar and its deployment in the Home Chain on the eve of war was an unmixed blessing and possibly saved this country.

 

 

 

Well, if Churchill had been in power a few years earlier, there would have been no radar, because his pet Lindemann would have stopped its development.

 

 

 

The ‘Tizard Committee’ (officially the 'Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence’) began meeting in secret in January 1935. Tizard  kept it small and concentrated, and picked its members with great care (Blackett being one of them) . They decided quickly that radar was the one thing to back. And they began the concentrated, brilliant, exhausting work on it  (and on persuading the armed forces that it was what they needed) which would put Britain significantly ahead in its develop at a vital moment in world history.

 

 

 

As Snow says, most of the vital work (which made it available to the RAF in the summer of 1940)had been done by the end of 1936. The development of such devices is slow, and this was an amazing piece of prescience and competence.

 

 

 

And yet in 1935, Lindemann became involved. This was a result of a secret arrangement under which then then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, agreed to allow Winston Churchill to sit on another secret committee on air defence, one for politicians rather than scientists.

 

 

 

With Churchill came Lindemann, who was placed on the Tizard Committee.

 

He very nearly wrecked it. It became full of ‘diatribes by Lindemann, scornful, contemptuous, barely audible, directed against any decision that Tizard had made, was making, or ever would make.’

 

 

 

Lindemann ‘demanded that [radar] should be put much lower on the priority list and research on other devices given the highest priority’.

 

 

 

These other devices included wholly impractical plans for infra-red detection, and the dropping of parachute mines and bombs *in front of hostile aircraft*, as if they were ships.

 

 

 

Two members of the committee, including Blackett, could bear it no longer and left. This happened after Lindemann abused Tizard so fiercely that the secretaries ‘had to be sent out of the room’.

 

 

 

With typical Whitehall cunning, the committee was reconstituted and Lindemann was somehow left off it. Radar survived and was ready in time.

 

 

 

But what if Churchill had by then been Premier?

 

 

 

Snow admits the paradox - he and his friends had at the time clamoured for Churchill to be brought back into the Cabinet, to strengthen our war preparations and stiffen our national sinews..

 

 

 

But if that had happened, Lindemann would have been able to do to Tizard in 1936 what he did to him in 1942 over bombing – deploy the power of Churchill to crush him.

 

 

 

And then what would have happened to radar? It would not have been remotely ready by 1940. Good speeches by WSC wouldn’t have won  the Battle of Britain if there hadn’t been radar too.

 

 

 

‘With Lindemann instead of Tizard’, Snow concludes,  ‘ it seems at least likely that different technical choices would have been made. If that had been so, I still cannot for the life of me see how the radar system would have been ready in time’.

 

 

 

It’s an interesting contrast between what we thought we knew, and what actually happened. I do urge you to read ‘Science and Government’. And I wish someone would write a play, or a TV drama about Tizard and Lindemann. That’s the way to get such things into history, now nobody knows any.