Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 205
February 13, 2015
Dresden and After. Has the Holocaust Eclipsed all Other Horrors?
On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden (an account of which can be found here, and I beg you to read to the end
I thought it worth asking :
Are all other horrors of war so eclipsed by the Holocaust that we no longer have any usable scale by which we can condemn them? Can we condemn them as much as they ought (in my view) to be condemned without being falsely accused of equating them with the Holocaust?
Here is one answer. In his fine and necessary book ‘Orderly and Humane’ (about the disorderly and inhumane, but forgotten and ignored expulsions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after 1945) Professor R.M. Douglas wrote (referring to these expulsions) : ‘…the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime. With the exception of the war years themselves, Europe West of the USSR had never seen, nor would it again see, so vast a complex of arbitrary detention - one in which tens of thousands, including many children, would lose their lives. That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see.’
Does the fact that Hitler’s Germany was responsible for the Holocaust mean that any measures taken against Germany during the 1939-45 war, or afterwards, are beyond effective condemnation? Does this fact mean that anyone who does condemn such measures is in effect excusing or minimising the Holocaust? Some have, repellently, tried to do so, attempting to equate them.
Does that mean that those (such as I) who emphatically do not equate them but who still regard the bombing of civilians as terrible and wrong, must fall silent for fear of being falsely lumped with such grisly propagandists?
My answer is ‘no’. It is perfectly possible to make a consistent and sincere condemnation of both the Holocaust and the British bombing of German civilians. It is perfectly possible to say that the bombing was wrong, while continuing to believe that the Holocaust was even more wrong, and rejecting any equivalence of the two.
The problem really lies in the ear of the hearer of such condemnations. A lot of British people do not want to know what we did in our bombing of Germany, and as a result remain in a deep and self-imposed ignorance. That ignorance allows them to remain ignorant of the he extent of the bombing (thinking that Dresden was the only serious incident for instance) .they are also uninformed about its true character, continuing to think that our main targets were military and industrial, rather than domestic. Knowing so little of its true character, they can then pretend to themselves that nothing truly bad was done, and even it was, that the mass murder of the Jews somehow excused it. If these barriers fail, they can claim that critics of the bombing are German propagandists trying to excuse the Holocaust. Or they can say that people such as I are attacking the RAF bomber crews, which I specifically refuse to do.
As I know to my cost, from various futile exchanges I have had with people who refuse to listen to facts and logic about the British bombing, many even to this day simply do not want to know what happened in the Dead Cities of Germany, many have a deluded belief that the civilian casualties were an unintended side effect of striking at military targets, many believe (wrongly) that the bombing of German cities in some way ‘saved’ Britain from invasion ( a danger which, if it ever existed, was in no way reduced by bombing) or contributed importantly to winning the war (which they did not, in reality do, as Hitler had already lost the war in the USSR before the major bombing started) .
It is arguable that they may have shortened the war by diverting aircraft and artillery from the Russian front, but it is equally arguable that they may have lengthened it, by depriving our anti-submarine forces of aircraft, and by diverting men and manpower to the destruction of cities and people, who could have been better used in attacking military and industrial targets.
Had they done so, of course, they would have achieved a similar diversion of artillery and aircraft from the eastern front. This rapidly becomes counterfactual and speculative, as it involves such things as the earlier development of long-range fighter escorts, consideration. But in truth it is a diversion from the moral argument – could it ever possibly be right to deliberately bomb civilians from the air?
One solution to this is to apply a presumption of mass guilt to the German people. They must have known, we are told, what was being done by Hitler. I cannot tell if this is so. The industrial mass-murder of Jews took place outside Germany, and it was never publicly stated as an aim. Yet rumours must have reached civilians from the combat zones and the districts in conquered territory where the murders were taking place. I think many knew, and many did not, and many suspected. The outrage of Kristallnacht in 1938 must have warned anyone in any doubt that the National Socialists were ready and willing to murder Jews for being Jews. Whether you could deduce the existence of Auschwitz from that , I am not so sure. The human mind would be inclined to think it impossible, unless presented with actual evidence.
As we know, certain people, either pitiable or disgusting, refuse to this day to believe the extermination camps existed, in spite of incontrovertible evidence and eyewitness testimony.
But I think we must exclude babies and children from this calculation. Yet they were not excluded from the bombing.
Then there is the question of whether they could have done anything about it. Once again, they could have done so. But how many of those who say ‘They should have protested’ would have done so themselves in that society? The threat of losing a job is usually enough to silence most forms of dissent in modern Britain. How much more effective would be the threat of torture, imprisonment and death, made against you and your family?
As I repeatedly point out, many Germans continued to resist, and to vote against Hitler long after most of us would have gone quiet, when the Brownshirt terror was already unleashed.. The English channel , which saved us form these dilemmas, is not a moral quality allowing us to claim superiority. It is just a physical fact, which saved us from being tested.
Maybe you think that failing to protest, even in such danger, is a sin of omission so serious that those who committed it, and their children, deserved to die in firestorms.
Well, that is a point of view, But those who believe it must be careful to apply the same stringency to themselves, and to their own acts of cowardice, probably known only to themselves.
We know for certain from the dispassionate official post-war bombing surveys that the effects on the German economy were far smaller than those imagined and claimed by the advocates of ‘dehousing’.
AS for ‘giving them some of their own medicine’, we also know that the British raids on Germany were far larger than those by Germany on Britain (Germany never had any equivalent of the Lancaster bomber) , and that wartime surveys showed that people who had experienced German bombing were *less* keen on bombing Germany in return than those who had not experienced it. The question of ‘who started it’ is also a good deal more complicated than we like to think. AS for the argument that ‘you weren’t there, you couldn’t know’, Bishop George Bell of Chichester (an unimpeachable patriot, by no means a pacifist and an early and principled opponent of the Nazis well-informed about events inside Germany) was ‘there’, experienced bombing himself and still opposed it. Indeed, he and those like him were in a minority, but the fact that he did and said what he did and said, shows that it was possible be ‘there’ and oppose it.
I often think that the expression ‘War Crime’ gets in the way of our understanding. If you don’t want to lose a war you must fight with ruthless violence. Almost every effective act of war ( I say ‘almost’, in case there are exceptions I can’t think of) would be a crime in civilian life. The only excuse is self-defence or justice, and – if we knew how terrible war was going to be – most of us would set the bar of justice a good deal higher than we do. I’m still not a pacifist – I tried that in my teens and found it impossible to sustain. But I am harder and harder to persuade of the need for war except in direct self-defence . Well-prepared and thoughtful deterrence, on the other hand, is a moral act of great value.
February 12, 2015
Some Thoughts on Political Party Funding
The political parties use some pretty unappealing ways to raise money. The power of the unions over Labour is obvious and undeniable, though there’s nothing in principle wrong with the trades unions having a political party that speaks for them. A lot of conservatives seem to have forgotten that trade unions are perfectly legitimate part of any free society, and that a country that suppresses them cannot be free. They should always recall that it was trade unionism – in the form of Polish Solidarity – that struck the first truly damaging blow at the Communist monolith back in 1980.
Anyway, the alternative – stacks of cash from millionaire donors during the Blair years – wasn’t any better. New Labour ruined the country in ways never imagined by Michael Foot.
The less said about Liberal Democrat funding, the better. As for the Tories, well, the ‘Black and White Ball’ and the efforts made to keep details of its donors out of the public eye say more than I ever could.
I really can’t see how a socially conservative party could take money from pornographers, for instance. Pornography takes the human body, made in the image of God, and uses it as a commodity. It takes physical love, an expression of the deepest feelings we have for each other, and turns it into a commercial performance between strangers.
Of course, if you don’t believe in God or in unselfish love of any kind, that won’t trouble you. But if you do, it will. I’m also not sure how such things relate to patriotism. For me, patriotism is a subsidiary of religion. That is not to say that one worships one’s country as one worships God, but that the country to which one belongs is the largest human society in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish. It is the place in which we can try to be Christians (or try to be any other kind of believer in practical, everyday unselfishness in the minute particulars of life).
Can a pornographer possibly be included in such a company? On the face of it, it seems unlikely. Pornography and unselfishness somehow don’t seem to go together. Anybody can wave a flag, but we all know that love of country does not actually consist of waving flags. I would say that, in theory as well as in practice, they aren’t compatible. But others would perhaps say that my form of patriotism is outdated, and that I should rejoice at any activity which boosts the national balance sheet. Let them say that. I just won’t join, support or vote for their political party, that’s all.
Anyway, here we are with all the big parties in trouble over their funding, and the response of the elite is always the same – the best way to overcome this is state funding.
Actually, we already have state funding of *Opposition* Parties, the so-called ‘Short Money’ first paid in the 1970s , named after the Labour politician Ted Short, and far from ‘short’ in fact. Based on the number of seats held, it currently nets Labour more than £5.4 million a year in taxpayers’ cash, and was worth roughly £1.7 million a year to the Liberal Democrats while they were last in Opposition. More taxpayers’ cash (‘Cranborne Money’) goes to Opposition parties in the House of Lords. The big parties, in Opposition, get about half a million pounds a year through this scheme.
Another indirect subsidy is provided by the Broadcasting Rules, and the party political broadcast system, which give the main parties guaranteed access to the airwaves in rough proportion to their levels of support
All these subsidies encourage political inertia, nationalising the existing parties and favouring them because of their previous levels of support. Thus, if they are in decline (and most of them are) the subsidies tend to delay and obstruct that decline and prevent the emergence of new, more representative parties. In my view, Labour and the Tories are dead, speaking for nobody. UKIP and the Greens (though themselves imperfect in many ways as vehicles of the new left and the new right) are each much better representatives of the real divide in our society.
It is perfectly true that full nationalization of parties, with guaranteed state subsidies to all parties based on their existing support, would enable them to shake free of the trade unions and the pornographers and all the rest.
But why would this be a good thing? First, as I’ve said, such interests as unions and business, even pornographers, are entitled to spend money pursuing their aims in a free society, provided this is openly done.
It was once suggested (I wish I could remember by whom) that each session of the US Congress should begin and end with a live televised ceremony, in which political donors, wearing large identifying labels, walked in procession into the chambers of the House and Senate and presented their chosen Congressmen and Senators with cheques or bags of cash, loudly stating the sums involved, for the record, as they did so. The theory is that it will happen anyway, so we might as well know precisely who owns whom, and what price was paid and accepted. And then it will truly be the case that we have ‘the best Parliament that Money can Buy’.
This would certainly be better than institutionalising the current dead or dying parties (who could barely raise the price of a Big Mac if they approached the general public directly for help), by putting them on the state payroll.
The alternative which I propose is this. No state subsidy of any kind to any political party ,ever. All members of parliament to have a paid, trained and experienced staff for constituency business, research etc, forbidden to engage in partisan or electoral activities, hired and paid for by the taxpayer. Partisan and electoral work is to be done by their constituency offices, for which they or their party must pay, but such offices to be limited to a modest maximum expenditure in each constituency, to be strictly policed. A ban on national political advertising, which has no place in a parliamentary election. The broadcasting rules to be amended so that reasonable airtime is given to parties which are not yet established but have plainly achieved a level of support in the opinion polls which merits it.
Trade unions and businesses to be allowed to contribute (but only locally, not nationally) to political parties only after open postal ballots of their members or shareholders, such ballots to be repeated every five years and to require a threshold of (I suggest) 40% of members or shareholders before they can be considered valid.
Individuals to be allowed to donate to the party of their choice, up to a maximum of £500 a head. No person who has contributed to a political party to be able to accept any honour, peerage or publicly salaried position until at least 10 years after his or her last donation.
Then let’s see how we get on. I think we might quite quickly get some new political parties.
February 11, 2015
A Plea for Considered Coverage, lest Fear and Panic Drive us into the Pit of War
Listening to the BBC’s interview with Syria’s President Assad, I was struck by the way that Jeremy Bowen went on and on about ‘barrel bombs’. Try as I might, I can’t really see why this seemed so pressing. Mr Assad’s government is not known for its kindness or mercy. We know that it maintains torture chambers and prisons of great horror. It would not be surprising if it waged war pretty ruthlessly, especially in urban battles against forces which would return the Assad state’s treatment with interest if they won.
If you drop high-explosive on people from the sky, the results will be frightful, whether the explosive is in a barrel or a neat, western-designed bomb with fins and guidance devices. The idea that such munitions can be dropped in a kindly or civilised way is hogwash. Western air attacks on Tripoli, as I mentioned here, http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/06/as-dave-does-the-talking-war-dead-are-sneaked-out-of-the-back-gate-.html
were not by any means ‘surgical’.
As I wrote at the time; ‘You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher: ‘In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more. Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.’
The previous day, Martin had written from the scene of an air strike in Souk- al-Juma, which is a centre of opposition to Colonel Gaddafi: ‘In the rooms still standing there were beds, a freezer full of food, plastic flowers, clothes, cushions and a children’s bedroom with a cot, bunks and a yellow teddy bear. The apartments had clearly been civilian and were manifestly in a residential area... There was no sign of any military or government installation. Locals insisted that there were none.’
Our side did these things. I left out some more gruesome details of the dead and injured.’
And anyone who uses bombs will do such things. There is no such thing as a ‘surgical strike’. What could be less ‘surgical’ than the death in fire and shrapnel (often prolonged) of an innocent ent human creature. ‘Collateral damage’ is a disgusting euphemism, meaning innocent civilians reduced to hunks of flesh and strings of intestines draped on ruins. We should stop using both these terms.
Had we intervened in Libya, we would have done them again (just as Israel repeatedly does them in its stupid, futile and politically unhinged attacks on Gaza, which do not stop rocket attacks on Israel in the long-term, but which do grave and irreparable damage to Israel’s standing in the world.
Aerial bombing, with barrels or otherwise, is not nice. Personally, given the choice (and who knows the future, given the current frenzy for war? ) , I’d prefer to be attacked with ‘barrel bombs’ than with modern cluster bombs, which scatter the ground with ‘bomblet’ booby traps , some of which do not detonate but lie ready to blow the limbs off any child who foolishly picks up one of these shiny baubles.
I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. And there is no doubt at all that intervention, from the ‘west’ and the Gulf’ began the terrible Syrian civil war which has plunged countless people into misery and pain.
Considered coverage would recognise this fact. But there is so little considered coverage of anything.
Who would know from most media, for instance, that Ukraine is still just as corrupt as ever, and that its government is deep trouble over conscription, as most Ukrainian men are not especially anxious to serve in the war we have made in their eastern provinces. Note the fierce, and far from ‘democratic’ treatment of a protestor against the draft, as recounted in this story, creditably (though not prominently) carried by the ‘Guardian’,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/10/ukraine-draft-dodgers-jail-kiev-struggle-new-fighters
Then there’s that story about Russian ‘Bear’ bomber planes, described in one headline as having flown ‘over Bournemouth’. They didn’t. In fact, though readers might easily have formed a different impression, they didn’t enter UK airspace. The phrase ‘the English Channel’ was used in descriptions of their flight route, but ‘the Channel ‘ would be more correct. They stayed clearly outside UK territorial waters and airspace. Flights of this kind happen about three or four times a month, and were taking place long before the current confrontation in Ukraine. I followed up the story by talking to informed defence sources, and the only new thing about the most recent flight was that it came right round the West of the British isles and eastwards along the Channel, rather than ( as more usually) towards the north-eastern coast of our islands.
The Russians do behave badly on these flights, by not using their ‘Identify Friend or Foe’ transponders and always have, but the risk to civil aircraft is very small. Civil air traffic control immediately picks them up and reports their position, speed, height and course to other traffic in plenty of time to avoid danger of collisions. Western aircraft do not behave in this fashion on the edges of Russian airspace (though western submarines certainly *used* to make forays very close to the Russian naval bases on the Kola peninsula, I do not know if they still do) . But we have recently begun to station troops, and hold exercises, quite close to the Russian border. Russia, having long ago (peacefully) ceded the Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltic States to Western control, cannot respond in the same way. The Warsaw Pact is gone and they cannot move troops around it to make a point. Perhaps these flights by these ancient aircraft are a substitute.
In the light of these notes, the tone of much that is broadcast and written seems to me to be overblown. I do wish my trade would learn from Iraq, and try harder not to promote an atmosphere in which people are scared out of being reasonable.
And how swift, after that, is the descent into the steep-sided bottomless pit of war, from which many of those (people or countries) who slide into it will never emerge whole, or even emerge at all.
February 9, 2015
What the Papers Say
Some of you may like to listen to BBC Radio 4's 'What the Papers Say' which I presented on Sunday evening. It's available for the next four weeks:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b051rbl0#auto
What are the Police for, actually?
I was struck today by stories about Leicestershire Police apparently instructing officers to talk to the public and tackle-low-level anti-social behaviour’. The stories seem to suggest that the instruction to these officers, to ‘stop investigating crimes’ is self-evidently wrong.
A Labour MP and member of the Commons Home Affairs committee, , Ian Austin, is quoted as saying: 'When a crime is committed, people want a police officer to investigate and the guilty people found, charged, taken to court and punished.
'Giving advice on not becoming a victim of crime is obviously important, but surely the police's number one job is to catch criminals so they can be convicted. We have got to be wary of anything which gives the public the impression that fewer crimes will be investigated.'
Well, I’m not an admirer of the Leicestershire Police (especially after their handling of the Fiona Pilkington case) and I don’t see why this action should be a response to budget cuts, as it is described. I am also infuriated when the police tell me to live my life as sort of cowed fugitive behind alarms, bars and lights, hiding my possessions, and dare describe this retreat in the face of lawlessness as 'crime prevention'.
I shout rude things when the public address at Paddington Station in London tells me that thieves 'operate' there (why do they do this? If the authorities know that they so 'operate'why do they not act to stop them?), adding 'Do not become a victim of crime!', as if I intended to.
But Mr Austin is quite wrong to say that ‘the police's number one job is to catch criminals so they can be convicted.’
When will politicians grasp that arrests and prosecutions are marks of failure, not of success? When will they grasp the simple truth that a police officer (unless he or she can do first aid) is of almost no use *after* a crime has been committed. His whole purpose is to stop the crime form, happening in the first place.
Both arrests and prosecutions have increased hugely in the past few decades, so much so that the courts and the prisons cannot possibly handle them and many arrested offenders end up by being let off, or given ‘penalties’ so feeble that they are only encouraged in their careers if crime, to think they can get away with it again.
The police are not, like ambulance crews or fire crews, paid to wait for disasters to happen and clear up the mess .Indeed the fire service increasingly sees it as its duty to *prevent* fires, a praiseworthy tendency which contrasts sharply with the police’s almost complete transformation into a high-speed (and increasingly armed, according to figures revealed by ‘the Times’ last Saturday) response service, chasing about the place with sirens howling, after the damage has already been done.
When the police arrive, is the dead person brought back to life, the house unburgled, the shop unlifted, the bodily harm no longer grievous, the window no longer broken, the wound healed? Nope. All they can do is write stuff down in their notebooks and prepare a prosecution which may well never take place, and if it does, will in many cases collapse or end with a feeble conclusion.
They are paid to prevent the disasters happening in the first place, and conspicuous foot patrols are beyond doubt the best way of achieving this aim. As soon as officers are diverted form this task so-called ‘low-level anti-social behaviour’ which is of course exactly what drove Fiona Pilkington to kill herself and her disabled and vulnerable daughter Francecca is precisely what increases.
You know the sort of thing. Small fierce boys riding bikes along crowded pavements and swearing at anyone who gets in their way or rebukes them; , vandalism, scribbling on wall, people using the streets as lavatories, loud public profanity, youths gathering in noisy knots in residential streets or shopping centres. These things ruin lives, and when unchecked lead on to much worse things, the stories which always end ‘and then they kicked his head as if it were a football’ .
I don’t know if the Leicestershire initiative is a genuine move back towards proper beat policing. I fear it won’t be, because I am an ingrained pessimist who has seldom been let down by his pessimism, and because the police have lost so much of their old authority since they were withdrawn from preventive patrol nearly half a century ago (see my book ‘the Abolition of Liberty’ , for details of how and why this happened) But to imagine that arrests and prosecutions are the main purpose of the police is to misunderstand, completely, the reason for which they were founded.
February 8, 2015
Educating Theresa
I think I can count this as a breakthrough. For years, Mrs Theresa May has said in ‘Dod’s Parliamentary Companion’, the MPs’ reference book, that she attended ‘Wheatley Park Comprehensive School’. (Her ‘Who’s Who’ entry mentions no education before St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Her own website is more forthcoming. But most journalists will use those reference books, and their newspapers’ cuttings libraries). For many of those years, I have pointed out, here and in letters to those newspapers which repeat this, that the facts are slightly more complex.
For example:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/10/mrs-theresa-may-a-correction-and-a-clarification.html
I don’t do this out of spite. I have no animus against Mrs May personally. I am sure she is a perfectly nice person.
I do this because I see it as highly significant that a senior figure in a supposedly ‘Conservative’ Party seems reticent (which, by the way, is not a synonym for ‘reluctant’) about having attended a selective state grammar school . This is a type of school her party used to claim to support (though in government it closed many of them) .
But in recent years it has more or less adopted the Labour and Liberal Democrat Policy of openly opposing the establishment of new grammar schools, and so endorsing ‘comprehensive’ education as the ideal. I think this is an extraordinarily significant indicator of the real nature of the Tory Party. It is hard to think of a more conservative, traditional institution than a grammar school. It is hard to think of a more radical, egalitarian institution than a comprehensive school.
The political left are completely unmoving about their support for the comprehensive model and their dislike of grammar schools, and have been so for decades. This is because they understand that this issue is one of the main battlegrounds in the struggle to revolutionise Britain. The capture of the Tory party by the pro-comprehensive lobby is therefore an indication that the Tory party has now become an actual part of the Left (a change which has led to it being treated far more kindly by the BBC, the Curia and magisterium of radical politics and culture).
So hurrah for Gaby Hinsliff, here in ‘The Guardian’ in the latest of that newspaper’s accounts of Mrs May:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/03/can-theresa-may-make-it-to-the-top
For she writes : ’When she was 13, her father took over the south Oxfordshire parish of Wheatley, and May was accepted at Holton Park girls’ grammar school in the village. Housed in an old stately home, complete with a moat into which girls tossed their straw boaters on leaving day, it looked rather like a minor public school – although a memoir by local author Marilyn Yurdan, complete with nostalgic foreword by May, notes that its pupils were the daughters of farmers and shopkeepers rather than wealthy families. When May was 15 it turned comprehensive, merging with the nearby secondary modern.
Although she went on to study at St Hugh’s, Oxford, her set, said a contemporary, “wasn’t Bullingdonesque; we were middle-class, grammar-school people” ‘
The question of exactly what happened during the merger with Shotover School ( the Secondary Modern in question, which was some distance away from Holton Park) is , alas, not dealt with. I am still hoping to find out what happened. It was normal, though not universal, for grammar school pupils in merged schools to continue in a ‘grammar stream’ to the end of their schooling. But the quoted contemporary does describe her set as ‘grammar-school people’ which I think makes my point.
Times tables? No, the only maths we teach children is 'go forth and multiply'
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
There are three months to go before the Election and we are already chest-deep in ludicrous partisan drivel. Funny that the more alike the parties are, the more slime they chuck over each other.
But education is a special case even in this miserable apology for a national debate. For instance, the Prime Minister is now promising an all-out ‘war on mediocrity’, which will be waged by nationalising as many schools as possible.
I suppose that means that all our children will be above average, yet another example of Mr Cameron’s strange arithmetic.
We already know he can’t tell the national debt from the deficit. He revealed in a TV documentary last week that he thinks three halves make a whole. His increase in school spending turned out to be a cut.
And, along with his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, he didn’t dare answer a question on times tables.
Political maths, I suspect, work on a completely different principle, and have more to do with how much money you can squeeze out of a hedge-fund billionaire in a tax shelter.
Yet Ms Morgan had begun the political week by promising a new emphasis on the ‘three Rs’, and saying that all children leaving primary school should know their times tables.
Sound familiar? Possibly. Who ‘ordered a curriculum review to boost grammar, classic literature, traditional methods of learning to read and spelling’?
Why, it was the forgotten Tory Education Secretary John Patten, in September 1992. In November 1994, another one, Gillian Shephard, launched a ‘school blueprint aimed at putting the “three Rs” at the centre of lessons’.
In January 1996, Shadow Education Secretary David Blunkett urged teachers to concentrate on the ‘three Rs’. A few days later Anthony Blair, then Opposition Leader, condemned the ‘appalling’ levels of literacy and numeracy among schoolchildren. By January 1998, these two were in office, and Mr Blunkett was demanding, yes, a return to chanting times tables.
Apparently nobody was paying attention, because a year later it was revealed that ‘schoolkids will be going back to learning their times tables tomorrow as David Blunkett scraps 30 years of trendy maths teaching’.
In September 2004, they still weren’t listening, as an academic study demanded that ‘schoolchildren should be made to chant their multiplication tables in class’.
By August 2006, the Labour Education Secretary was Alan Johnson, who proclaimed that children would be fast-tracked through their times tables in a string of reforms to the way the ‘three Rs’ were taught in primary schools.
But by December 2010 it was reported that ‘one in four 11-year-olds leaves primary school without a proper grasp of the three Rs, according to detailed Government data released yesterday’.
And lo, in June 2012, Ms Morgan’s forerunner, Michael Gove, was reported to be planning to ‘tear up the rules’ about what must be taught in primary school. Among his plans, yes... times tables were to be put back at the heart of the curriculum for children’s first years at school ‘for the first time in decades’.
There’ll be another Education Secretary along soon. Just wait for him or her to make the same pledge. And then laugh.
The only times table that actually applies to these people is the nought times table. A thousand times nought still makes nought. The only multiplication our children are reliably taught and encouraged to do is sexual reproduction.
And as long as our political leaders jointly refuse to restore order, authority and selection in the state schools, the result will be the same.
Don't fall for the sex education myth
People still mistakenly think that there is an important difference between the Tory and Labour parties over sex propaganda in schools.
On the contrary, both parties are entirely wedded to the radical sex-liberation policies of the 1960s, now the iron-bound law of the land, which it is dangerous to question, let alone disobey.
Mr Cameron, when he was still Leader of the Opposition in April 2010, had this exchange with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight:
Paxman: ‘You’re in favour of faith schools being able to teach sex education as they like?’
Cameron: ‘Not as they like. That’s not right. What we voted for was what the Government suggested in the end, which is proper sex education...’
Paxman: ‘Should they be free to teach that homosexuality is wrong, abortion is wrong, contraception is wrong?’
‘No, and the [Labour] Government discussed this and came up with a good idea, which is to say that we wanted a clearer path of sexual education across all schools, but faith schools were not given any exemption, but they were able to reflect some of their own faith in the way that this was taught.
‘But no, you must teach proper lessons in terms of gay equality and also combat homophobic bullying in schools, I think that’s extremely important.’
I’d be interested to see evidence that such teaching does actually reduce bullying.
But in any case, it’s quite clear that the ‘Conservative’ Party has no serious differences with Labour on this.
If you don’t like Tristram Hunt’s latest plans for talking about sex to tots, don’t expect any help from the Tories.
I wonder what God makes of Mr Fry
My old adversary Stephen Fry (he calls me a ‘slug’) has been attacking God on TV, calling the Ancient of Days ‘capricious, mean-minded’, 'selfish’ and ‘a maniac’.
Obviously Mr Fry, left, gets to meet God quite a lot, being so important and all, but it would be good if someone could get the Almighty to let us know what He thinks of Mr Fry.
Falling into the Islamic State trap
I absolutely decline to watch horror videos showing fanatics murdering their prisoners. I am sure it is morally wrong to do so.
I am still haunted by my decision, when I was younger, to witness two lawful executions of heinous convicted murderers.
But aside from that, I believe these zealots hope we will watch this obscenity and as a result lose our reason and launch unwise and stupid attacks on them, which will end in our moral and physical defeat. Some people are already falling into this trap.
Arming Kiev
I have never doubted for a moment that Russia is aiding the rebels in Ukraine with men and munitions, though this is difficult to prove.
What puzzles me is that so many do not seem to suspect that the USA and other Nato countries are likewise helping Ukraine’s shambolic army fight the war we urged them to start. How naive can you be? The American threats to arm Kiev’s forces may already have been carried out, but by deniable and indirect routes (as happened in Afghanistan).
I continue to be amazed at the enthusiasm in this country for getting involved in the third major European war in a century. What do we hope to gain?
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February 5, 2015
We've lost our Innocence - So Why Are We Still so Gullible?
How astonishing, after all the disasters of the last 50 years, to read a distinguished historian (Michael Burleigh) writing in the Daily Mail today that he believes:
‘….we should launch devastating attacks on ISIS's nominal headquarters in the city of Raqqa in Syria. Vast bombardments, using B52s, would inevitably mean civilian casualties. But unless we are ready for this to drag on for several years, it seems to me this is necessary to obliterate its command and control systems.
‘It may be an unsavoury choice, but Churchill had to make many of those for the greater good — in the firebombing of Dresden, for example. The problem with sending troops to fight IS is that they would inevitably stoke local tensions further. Western forces cannot be used because the entire Arab world would object. More depressingly, the Arab nations — which are terrified of even getting involved in airstrikes — would not dream of sending in ground forces.’
The whole thing can be found here:
Oh dear. I am currently busily re-reading my ancient copy of Vera Brittain’s memoir ‘Testament of Youth’, having seen the duff new film, and watched the excellent BBC-2 1979 dramatization. This older version, much closer to the text and its spirit, rubs in yet again how thought has been displaced by visual tricks, and how vanishing direct knowledge of the recent past allows people to take liberties with the facts which would once have been shocking.
In this passage, she has just attended, in the English church at Boulogne, a service marking the third anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. She is in Boulogne because she is serving (and has been for some years serving) as a volunteer temporary nurse, often treating men with horrible and shocking wounds – a form of courage in its own right, and a way of life once unthinkable for an unmarried, gently brought-up young woman who would normally never even glimpse an unclothed adult male body. She had by then suffered the deaths of her fiancé, Roland Leighton, and two very close friends. Not long afterwards she was also to lose her only brother.
‘…as we stood in honour of the dead who could neither protest nor complain, I was as ready for sacrifices and hardships as I had ever been in the early idealistic days…
‘…Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually rededicating themselves – as I did that morning in Boulogne – to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.’
I think the expression ‘disastrously pure in heart’ is one of the saddest things anyone has ever written. 'Blessed are the Pure In Heart, for they shall see God' is one of the Beatitudes which we used all to know by heart. The exploitation of that purity by Church and state in 1914 was one of the worst betrayals of human goodness in history, and we live in the moral ruins which resulted from the slow realization that the whole thing had been a monstrous fraud, finally and unavoidably clear when the European war had to be fought again in 1939, 20 years after the end of the ‘war to end war’ and the ‘great war for civilization’.
As far as I can see, Miss Brittain was not a pacifist while she wrote the book, or during the experiences it describes, though she later became one, and was excoriated for her opposition to the British bombing of German civilians.
Which brings me round to Professor Burleigh (whose book ‘Moral Combat’ sought. among other things, to justify the British bombing of German civilians). Can he really think Dresden was bombed ‘for the greater good’? Perhaps. He is an interesting and powerful historian, but keener on war than some. And while I disliked ‘Moral Combat’, finding its case for bombing inadequate and unconvincing, I think another of his recent books ‘Sacred Causes’ is excellent.
But why is he advocating carpet-bombing Raqqa? And why is he comparing it to Dresden?
Of course the murder by fire of a captured prisoner of war is a dreadful act, and the filming of it, and the distribution of that film, cruel and grotesque. But it does not change the nature of the conflict. Is it possible that it is entirely meant to goad us into a reaction both foolish and ultimately self-destructive?
He rightly blames naïve Western intervention in the area for the growth of ISIS, though I’m not sure he goes far enough back in history. : ‘Hatreds that were once held in check by strongmen (despots and brutal dictators such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq), but which have now been unleashed by the naive intervention of Western powers determined to replace their authoritarian rule with democracy. Islamic State came into being only because Saddam had been toppled, and President Assad of Syria has been crippled by the Western-backed revolution in Syria.’
Indeed so. There was some naivety about. As a certain historian wrote in the Sunday Times in December 2003, reviewing a book by William Shawcross (‘Allies – the United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq’) :
‘William Shawcross is one of a handful of European intellectuals who have bravely resisted the Gadarene rush to condemn Bush and Blair for liberating a country [Iraq] accurately described as "a prison above ground and a mass grave beneath it".
‘Much of the international left's hatred of Bush is explicable by a juvenile frustration at the replacement of a self-indulgent, vain baby-boomer who had been at Oxford by a focused, religious, Texan businessman who rejects everything they stand for. Some of this hatred has spilt onto Tony Blair, another decent man who is willing to use the word "evil", and who in foreign policy has broken with the left's habit of excusing squalid Stalinist or Third World dictators whenever they are opposed to America.’
He knows who he is. But we all make mistakes, me included. My trouble is that, the more I know about the free, democratic West’s war-waging in the past century or so, the more it seems to me to have been misconceived, ill-led, politically naive at best, cruelly profligate first with the lives of its own people and then with the lives of other peoples. We pay the price now for the violent takeover of Iraq we launched 90 years ago, and enforced by aerial bombing, and of course for our more recent war in the same place, and our part in the terrible destabilisation of Syria, which has ruined so many formerly contented lives in the name of freedom.
Carpet-bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia produced what? Shock and awe in Iraq achieved what? Who now revisits the Kosovo we ‘liberated’ by bombing it? ? Who would admire the results if they did? Is the devastation of Syria’s formerly prosperous cities justifiable by any moral measure? When will we get out of the habit of forgetting the horrors of wars, and claiming good results from them?
Who, as they congratulate their own ‘West’ for ‘ending’ the Holocaust , bothers to note that World War Two was not just *not* fought for that purpose, and so cannot be credited with that aim or that result (which was incidental to it, and not its intention at any stage). The conductors, designers and leaders of that war actively avoided any serious efforts to save the Jews of Europe from mass murder, despite knowing what was going on thanks to the incredible courage of brave men and women.
Here is an account of one appalling example of this active, knowing failure
That’s not all. Next week we mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, the one part of the immense Allied bombing of German cities that everybody has heard of. At least they have, and in many cases are troubled by what they know.
But who among the enthusiasts of the last ‘War for Civilization’ even knows about, or is prepared to confront the appalling barbarities of the deportations brought about by the Potsdam agreement, the handover of anti-Communists for Stalin to murder, or the general betrayal of the whole of Eastern Europe as the price we paid for the freedom of the Western part?
Oddly enough, it is those who agitate righteously for war against Russia now, who seem most oblivious to the devil’s bargain the ‘West’ struck with Moscow from 1945 to 1989, under which we forgot the plight of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ( and indeed the peoples of the old Russian Empire) under a Communist regime – in return for our own liberty and prosperity.
The wretched truth remains, that the enduring myth of World War Two as a crusade for goodness continues to encourage the delusion that future warfare may also be benevolent.
I’m not here going to go deep into the horrible matter of the burning to death of a Jordanian pilot by ISIS. I refuse to watch the film, believing that by doing so I serve the purposes of those who made it, and being in enough peril of perdition already. Who can do anything but weep at such things? The question seems to me to be more worrying. If we do rightly feel terrible grief and anger at this man’s fate (and I don’t doubt that we do), what righteous and civilised action can we take, in all conscience, to respond to it?
Or do we prefer not to think, and just to follow our instincts? In that case, we’d better start warming up the B-52s and loading their bomb bays with the highest of high explosive. But as we do so, we might think of our forebears - ‘men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation … continually rededicating themselves … to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.’
We cannot be as pure in heart as they were. Their innocence is inconceivable to us. Our morality is more righteous than pure, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, but oddly prepared to use violence to get it. So why aren’t we more suspicious, when presented with ends which are portrayed to us as lofty and ideal? Having wholly lost our innocence, we seem to have retained our gullibility intact.
February 2, 2015
Old favourites
I'm not sure who has made this compilation (much of which comes from my neglected 1999 London debate with my late brother). But some of you may enjoy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVztwcnvIS4&feature=youtu.be&a
Small Upset in France - Not Many Interested. But should they be?
Are we looking in the wrong direction for the blow which may undo the European project? David Cameron’s ‘referendum’ is obviously designed never to be held. As I keep pointing out, he wouldn’t promise it if he genuinely thought he might have to deliver it. He espouses it to remain the largest single party, not to attain the absolute majority which would compel him actually to hold the promised plebiscite.
Greece and Spain may be contained. The PEGIDA movement in Germany looks enfeebled already, much as its most obvious parallel, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation movement in Australia, eventually ran out of momentum because its leaders were too inarticulate and short of ideas, and couldn’t bear the weight of the revolution they almost created.
If you’re going to challenge globalist multiculturalism, which means not just attacking the thing itself but confronting the fake political parties which pretend to oppose it and don’t, you’re going to need a pretty strong understanding of the foe, or perhaps a huge measure of luck and cunning. Nigel Farage, so far, has thrived on luck and cunning, rather than understanding, but in the hurricane-like storm of lies which is a modern British general election, I wonder if that will serve. Huge piles of £20 notes are being fed into the Tory wind machine at the moment, and the low, sinister whine you already hear will increase to a screaming, howling roaring climax of mendacity by May.
But the political crisis in France looks to me to be very deep indeed. UKIP’s challenge , by comparison with that of the disreputable French National Front, is tiny.
You’d be hard put to glean it from the British media, but the French National Front (FN) has just wiped out the ‘centre-right’ party of Nicolas Sarkozy in the first round of a by-election for the 4th District of Doubs in Franche-Comte. An unnamed French Tory has been quoted as saying that the FN is now ;on the doorstep of power’ This seat was previously held by a Socialist Deputy, Pierre Moscovici, recently appointed as France’s European Commissioner. . It was marginal in 2002 and 2007, and last held by the French Tories in 2002). The Socialists (party of the beleaguered President Francois Hollande) came second. There will now be a run-off.
Maybe it was the bad weather. Maybe it was revenge on Mr Moscovici for the policies he was closely associated with, which have led to high taxes and high unemployment. Maybe it wasn’t. It was a 60% poll . The FN Candidate, Sophie Montel scored 32.6% of the votes cast (8,382) , with the Socialist candidate, Frederic Barbier, polling 7,416 (28.85%). Charles Demouge, the Tory equivalent (UMP – it stands, hilariously for Union for a Popular Movement’, a party name so wholly empty of meaning that I’m surprised David Cameron hasn’t copied it) trailed in third at 6,824 (26.54%). Nobody else even got 1,000 votes, so it’s the homeless Tory votes that will decide the matter when the second round takes place next Sunday. Will they bolster M.Hollande, whom they despise? Or toy with Marine le Pen’s FN to upset M.Hollande? Or abstain? Or a mixture of all three, making the result hard to predict?
In the 2012 general election, Moscovici got 49.32% (19,311) , Demouge 26.2% (10,260) and Montel 24.5% (9,581) . In an unpopularity contest, the FN have held on their vote rather better than the others. Both the traditional French parties are in a bad way. Mr Sarkozy doesn’t seem to have regained the appeal he had hoped for , after the general failure of the Hollande presidency.
Readers will recall that Marine Le Pen was , one way or the other, excluded from the great national rally in Paris after the recent terror murders there. This policy, of treating her as a pariah, doesn’t seem to be harming her or her party very much. John Lichfield in the Independent says in his account : ‘The party's leader, Marine Le Pen, campaigned on an “Islamist threat” to French identity. She has, however, faced extremist challenges in recent weeks to her relatively moderate line from senior party diehards including her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.’
Hmph. Or perhaps Umph. I should have thought that it did her nothing but good to be attacked by her ghastly father, as her growth in popularity has, I think, been based on the idea that she is not him, and the heaviest burden she bears in politics is that she is his daughter. In any case, , France’s next presidential election could be the biggest challenge to the EU monolith so far. Keep a watch on it.
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