Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 207

Why I Like Howard Marks

I was very sorry to hear that Howard Marks, the famous cannabis smuggler and advocate of cannabis decriminalisation, has inoperable cancer.  I disagree with everything he argues for, and have debated against him on four occasions. But I regard him as a civilized opponent, a gentleman and a principled defender of free speech.

In fact I am often thinking of him when I experience the other thing – an opponent who lacks generosity, who misrepresents me, who confuses disagreement with personal dislike and lets one become the other, who isn’t actually paying attention to what I say, and who probably wishes in secret that I could be shut up by force.

 

Howard is the opposite of all these things. I’ll describe the strongest instance of his generosity in a moment. He’s never been other than friendly despite our disagreement. A few years ago, when I bested him on a point on a debate, I was struck by the way he had carefully researched that very point the next time we met. Because we each listened to the other, we both made each other think and came back with a cogent answer to it.  

 

He is also possessed of the picturesque ruin of a once-beautiful voice. And I often wonder what he might have made of himself had he not chosen the sad path of drugs. He has a considerable mind, and the country would have benefited greatly had that mind been used for another purpose. He is of course a grammar school product, from the lost days when the sons of Merchant Navy captains from Bridgend could get into Balliol College, Oxford.

 

But this is how we met. Long ago, so long I can’t recall the date. I agreed to discuss the drugs issue with him at a fringe meeting of the National Union of Students conference, one winter's night in Blackpool. This took place in one of the side rooms of the vast, ornate Winter Gardens there. A lot of people had come to hear Howard. Soon after we had begun, someone in the audience (or perhaps not) spread a false story that I had said from the platform that I was a ‘racist’. The person involved later withdrew and apologised for this slur.

 

I had no idea that this storm was quietly growing as I spoke. Since it wasn't true, I couldn't have known the story was circulating. There was a certain amount of muttering from a part of the audience, but that’s not unusual at such meetings.

 

Then  ( and I have to say the meeting was going rather well, with plenty of repartee, humour and audience engagement) a senior official of the National Union of Students marched up on to the platform and told me that I must immediately cease speaking and leave. When I asked why (totally amazed by this behaviour) he told me that I ought to know, and that I must know why. I said I had no idea, and protested quite loudly. The microphones were then turned off. Some sort of protest group had meanwhile assembled and were shouting. I can speak without a microphone, and proceeded to do so. The NUS official then said ‘In that case, I must ask you to leave the platform’.

 

At this point, Howard declared ‘Well, if he’s going, I’m going too’. What’s more, he put his arm firmly round my shoulder as we walked through the shouting protest group.

 

I was then asked to sit in a side-room, where, to my even greater astonishment, I was approached by a  police officer who offered to escort me to the railway station for my own safety. Never having been run out of town before, and being (as an ex-Trotskyist) very unscared of Trotyskyist mini-mobs, I urged him not to worry.  I would leave under my own power, and spend the night in Blackpool as planned, thanks all the same.

 

Very cleverly, the officer pointed out  (accurately) that the Winter Gardens are full of glass. The place is terribly breakable. If I left without an escort, he said, who knows what might happen to the ornate glass panels and lamps we saw all round us. And of course, if they were damaged, he, the police officer, would be held responsible for having failed to keep the peace. Surely I didn’t want that.

 

So, seething in fury, but outmanoeuvred, I agreed to be escorted to a back entrance like a fugitive, though not to the station. Nothing of any kind happened to me. I didn’t see Howard again for some time, but I was deeply impressed by his instinctive revulsion at the way I was treated, and his readiness to stand literally shoulder to shoulder if it had come to trouble. Every time I've met him since has also been a pleasure, though we'll never agree. Not many people are like this, and more should be. I am very sorry he is so ill, and send him my very best wishes at this bad time.

OK, smoking is risky - but starting wars can seriously damage your health...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Is there anyone left alive who does not know that the Blair creature and his political commissar, Alastair Campbell, fooled Britain into war in Iraq? Of course it’s ridiculous that the Chilcot Report (which may just confirm this blazingly obvious truth) is jammed in some Whitehall sump.

But the real question is why so many people allowed themselves to be misled by this pair, who had the strategic grasp of Noddy and Big Ears.

I can say this because I was clearly against the war at the time and laughed at the absurd pretexts given for it. Almost everyone in the media or politics, and many others besides, now also claim to have been against it when they weren’t.

I can recall listening with amazement as people I previously thought of as intelligent began mouthing the Government’s slogans, as if they’d been given some sort of political equivalent of Rohypnol.

Worst of all were Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, whose relentless support for war after war after war has been far more obscene than The Sun’s teenage, catchpenny display of female nipples.

Now everyone claims to have been against it. Many actually believe they were, when they weren’t.

But I know, because I recall how lonely it was to be anti-war – unless you were on the pacifist Left, which opposes all wars, good or bad, except when they are attacks on Israel.

I still remember being assailed by normally supportive readers for opposing the Kosovo war, the dress rehearsal for Iraq in which ‘our’ side bombed Belgrade and killed (among other civilians) Jelica Munitlak, 27, the make-up lady at Serbian TV. The Blair creature shamelessly said this attack was ‘entirely justified’.

Now, as pressure builds for a war with Russia, I am once again feeling lonely. All the same techniques are being used. Vladimir Putin (like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, not to mention Bashar Assad of Syria) is being ludicrously compared to Hitler. The BBC has lost all sense of proportion and utterly forgotten its duty to be impartial. Those who oppose the conflict are falsely accused of being apologists of the many undoubtedly bad features of the Putin government.

And if you try (as I have done) to oppose this conformist tide in open debate, people look at you blankly, as if you have stated the world is flat. Why is this? Because brainwashing works. Modern techniques of propaganda are far cleverer than those used by Joseph Goebbels or Stalin’s brilliant spin doctor Willi Muenzenberg.

Edward Bernays (nephew of the pioneering psychiatrist Sigmund Freud) wrote the brainwashers’ handbook ‘Propaganda’ in 1928.

His main technique was known as ‘engineering consent’, subtly pushing people into agreeing to things they would never otherwise put up with. He persuaded women to start smoking by getting them to believe the habit was liberating and their cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’.

In the book he explained how ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society’. He said there was an ‘invisible government’ which ‘pulls the wires which control the public mind’.

And so there is. It’s working on you now. You oughtn’t to need the Chilcot Report to realise that. Perhaps, in future, we could have a rule that war, like cigarettes, should only be sold in plain packets.

Alicia's got the looks, but that's not enough

How I wish I had liked the new film of Vera Brittain’s moving memoir Testament Of Youth.

Alicia Vikander, as Vera, is very beautiful. But I just don’t think modern young actors can begin to understand the depth and scale of the convulsion that war caused in Britain in 1914.

Uniforms, trains, clothes are as usual carefully recreated – but not the way people actually talked or thought.

Alicia Vikander plays Vera in the moving film Testament of Youth, but can an actress as young as her understand the effect the First World War had on Britain?

Christian nurse Victoria Wasteney, 37, claims she was sacked after praying for a Muslim colleague

Christianity's hidden enemies

The louder they squawk about ‘Islamism’ and ‘radicalisation’, the more the British state seek to crush Christianity in this country. And once it’s crushed, what do you think will take its place?

A Christian JP is suspended and ordered to undergo re-education after daring to speak in favour of traditional Christian marriage. A Christian nurse is accused of ‘bullying and harassment’ for praying for a Muslim colleague. And now, in a development that seems quite scandalous to me, that horrible Stalinist organisation Ofsted (which permits the continued existence of hundreds of the worst schools in the advanced world) has turned its fury on, yes, a Christian school in Sunderland.

You know the one, where Ofsted apparatchiks asked puzzled children what lesbians did. Well, it’s much worse than that.

Soon after the inspection (on November 26 and 27 last year), and well before the resulting report was published, Grindon Hall Christian School’s head, Chris Gray, wrote to Ofsted. He complained that the tenor of the inspection was negative and hostile at every stage, ‘as if the data collected had to fit a pre-determined outcome’.

He referred to ‘intrusive and deeply personal questioning of children’. Positive comments by children were ignored. One sixth-former complained the inspector ‘seemed very negative’, adding: ‘Most of the questions that were asked were related to bullying/homophobia/racism/extremism… She seemed to have the view that since we are a Christian school we don’t respect other religions and views.’

And a few weeks later, out came the report which, as Mr Gray described it, ‘grades the best performing secondary state-funded school in Sunderland (latest published GCSE results) as the worst’.

All of this material, as well as the report, is displayed on the school’s website. All I can say is that, while the Home Secretary claims to be defending us against Islamist extremism, another equally dangerous anti-Christian extremism has infiltrated much of the British state, where it rules unchallenged.

It’s odd that bishops, so vocal on the welfare state and other Leftist topics, do not seem interested in defending their faith against this sort of thing.

BBC spend a fortune making Mantel book look interesting

Hilary Mantel is now a sort of Leftist saint thanks to her trivial short story about a middle-class woman helping an IRA killer murder Margaret Thatcher. Her very putdownable book about the horrible Thomas Cromwell (I couldn’t pick it up again) is praised and bought (though not, I suspect, read) all over Guardianland.

And now the BBC have spent a fortune on brocade, furniture and fine actors, trying to make this stuff look interesting. It made me laugh. The Duke of Norfolk and Duke of Suffolk burst into Cardinal Wolsey’s home (this is meant to be 1529) and shout ‘You’re out!’ at the Prince of the Church. I half expected them to add: ‘Get yer trousers on! You’re nicked!’

They needn’t have bothered with all the Shakespearean thespians. Ray Winstone would have done just as well, especially for the usual gratuitous use of the F-word.

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A Question of Privilege. Reflections after a visit to a North London Sixth Form College

I spent a large part of Thursday travelling to and from, and speaking at, a selective state school.  It is a ‘Sixth Form College', a type of school which is of course allowed to select on ability at 16 , though it is against the law to do so at 11, when the life-chances of the young are already hardening and becoming fixed. As it happens it is on the site of a former grammar school.

 

We were in the outer territories of North London, where the Underground isn’t in fact underground and the suburban roads sprawl in every direction, the sort of place where the upward curve of demand meets the downward curve of supply and most of us end up with the scruffy lawn and the stunted trees and the vista of other people’s back gardens, still dreaming of the Wisteria-hung Old Rectory, or the moated Jacobean manor-house surrounded by ancient beeches and cedars.

 

We’d given the talk the provocative title of ‘Why I hate the 60s’, but I think the 60 or 70-odd people who came were mostly there to glimpse (and perhaps tweak the tail of) the fabulous monster known as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’. I’m reliably informed that various persons had boasted that they were going to throw rubbish at me (none did ) or that they were going to ‘rinse’ me (I’m told this workaday word currently means ‘triumph in argument over’) . If any did, I didn't observe it. 

 

One pupil, or rather ‘student’ at the school had already Tweeted in protest at my planned appearance. Another later gave me a backhanded compliment, first calling me a rude name and then complimenting me for braving the ‘most liberal school in North London’.

 

It went reasonably well. A quick poll at the beginning revealed a large number of ‘Guardian’ readers and no readers of the ‘Daily Mail’ (I decided not to ask about their Sunday reading habits). I explained the reasons for disapproving of the 60s, and – to forestall the usual false claims that I am a nostalgist - offered a 100-rouble banknote as a prize (unclaimed) for anyone who could show that I had at any stage described the 1950s as a ‘golden age’. I more or less reprised the chapter in my ‘Abolition of Britain’, in which I imagine a young woman of the late 1990s being transported back to the urban England of 1965, and all the changes she would note.

 

The passage baffled a lot of reviewers who were convinced the book was nostalgic and couldn’t square this with my evocation of grime, incessant smoking, horrible food, traffic fumes and chilblains.

 

I think I probably also baffled a lot of my audience, especially when I said I very much approved of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which ended the stupid persecution of homosexuals.

 

What I noticed (or thought I noticed)  in our exchanges about divorce, sex-education, abortion, the death penalty etc. was an almost total incomprehension of the moral and political concepts which underlie my position. While I know perfectly well that school sixth-formers think what they do about these things, and why they think them, they were more shocked by the fact that I dared to say these things than by the ideas themselves, which they immediately placed on the shelf marked ‘archaic’.

 

If there were any more conservative pupils present, they didn’t make themselves obvious.

 

I said to one questioner (most of the questions seemed to be about my view of divorce, interestingly, and many seemed based on the bizarre assumption that violent abuse of women only takes place within marriage)  that of course my moral positions were archaic. But that didn’t make them wrong.

 

After the meeting was officially over, a dozen or so people stayed behind to carry on questioning me (in the end , the room was needed for something else and we had to be chivvied out of it by a teacher, if that is what teachers are called in such places). At one stage I was upbraided for being privileged. I countered by asking in what way I was privileged.

 

This wasn’t a rejection of the suggestion in itself. I’m well aware of my good fortune in life.  I just genuinely wanted to know what the person meant, and what assumptions she had about me. Rather than answering, my questioner flounced away, pretending to be amused,  as if the answer were too obvious to be worth discussing.

 

But then again, am I any more privileged than my questioner - who attends one of the best state schools in the country and so is practically guaranteed entry to a good university if she works hard enough?   

 

I had what I regarded (and still regard) as a happy, safe and comfortable childhood. I never went cold or hungry, nor was I neglected in any way.  But privileged?  By what standard? My father was the son of a council-school teacher (who eventually became a headmaster) and the grandson of a dockyard labourer. Naval Commanders were never especially well-paid, and retired naval officers even less so.  We spent much of my childhood moving from one rented house to another.  Our most ambitious family holiday was a week in the Channel Islands. Mostly we went to the Isle of Wight, or the Sussex or Cornish coasts. My private schooling, which ended when I sabotaged my own education at the age of 15, wasn’t especially distinguished by the standards of the time. I doubt that my parents (who had foregone much to pay my brother’s school fees) could have afforded it had I not won a scholarship.  Though I now recognise that some of my teachers were extraordinarily good, I do not think that such teachers were particularly rare in the state schools of the time.

 

I suspect that I would have done as well academically, if not better , had I gone to a state grammar school (I passed the 11+). I would probably have stayed at school, too.

 

I got to University from a College of Further Education, working on my own for the final year of ‘A’ levels. In my teens I did what were then the normal temporary jobs that most of us did to raise some extra money, from lifting potatoes to mucking out pigs to rolling barrels and slinging crates in a brewery.  I did get a maintenance grant, but lived within my means for those three years. I did my indentured apprenticeship on a provincial newspaper, living off small wages, and moved to another provincial paper for a small increase.  During all that time I met all my own needs from my own pay, and stayed solvent. When I got my first Fleet Street job in 1977 I thought I was rich on an annual salary of £5,500, which is something in the region of £35,000 in today’s money. And so I was. In those days, before the house-price lunacy was in full cry,  you could still live reasonably cheaply not far from the heart of London, a pleasure today’s young will never know.

 

I had been working at my trade for more than 20 years (including two stints as a foreign correspondent) before I became a columnist. I don’t deny or decry my great good fortune, but I do think I worked for quite a bit of it. I can’t really be said to have inherited it. And there are plenty of people in my rather democratic trade who have done as well and better without any boarding-school or university education.  There’d be more of the grammar schools hadn’t been abolished.

 

Obviously, and who should know this better than I, who have been in the shanty-towns of Caracas,  the slums of Bombay, the longtangs of Shanghai, the desperate industrial cities of the USSR and the townships of Africa, any person from a  rich western country is hugely privileged compared with them. But that’s just a statement of the obvious.

 

I’m not sure my life could be described as especially ‘privileged’ in terms of English hierarchies.  And if mine can be so described, then so can the lives of those to whom I spoke yesterday.     

Breakfast with Peter Hitchens

Some of you may enjoy this conversation I had a few weeks ago with an American evangelical Christian, from Birmingham, Alabama, Larry Taunton. Some of you may not.

 

http://fixedpointfix.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Breakfast-with-Peter-Hitchens.mp3

 

 

The 'Medical Cannabis' Red Herring Again

I was recently in the extraordinary full-size TV studio at the University of Westminster campus in Harrow, unable to resist yet another chance to argue with my old adversary Peter Reynolds, advocate of the weakening of the cannabis laws. Here is the result. By the way, , before anyone points it out to me, I know the machine-gun analogy is no good. My mind went blank. There are so many other things that have been doing harm to humans for thousands of years.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiVKb9A1y0o

 

 

From the archives. What I said about Churchill's funeral ten years ago

Following the response to my thoughts on the 50th anniversary of the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill (It is a moment has long fascinated me. A comparison of this event with the funeral of Princess Diana formed the basis of a central chapter of my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’) , I thought some readers might like to see a slightly longer article I wrote ten years ago about the Churchill funeral, which will be shown again on the BBC Parliamentary Channel(on a full screen this time) on the 30th January, beginning at exactly 9.15, as the actual event did. It will be a number of BBC programmes marking the date (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2014/churchills-state-funeral ).

 

There are several close similarities between phrases in the two articles. I can only say that, when I wrote the later one, I had not looked again at its forerunner.  But I had watched the whole funeral again, this time on a full-sized screen.

 

 

How  strange that 40 years after the death of Winston Churchill, the BBC did not show so much as the edited highlights of his astonishing, overpowering funeral; a moment as pivotal in the memories of many British people as the death of John F. Kennedy is to Americans.

 

Churchill, unlike Kennedy, died in peace and full of years. But his life's end marked an irreversible change in the way people lived their lives here, just as JFK's murder did in the United States.

 

Many must have sat down in front of their televisions that morning, with a pot of tea and plate of sandwiches, expecting an enjoyable wallow in nostalgia, the rich heavy tones of Richard Dimbleby, a good parade and some fine music.

 

They would switch off, dry-eyed and tired, four hours later, realising bleakly that something important and irreplaceable had gone out of their lives, and out of this country, forever. It was a potent and significant moment, marked and recorded by the BBC in the days when the Corporation was still a trusted friend for the whole British people. Surely it was worth bringing it up from the archives 40 years on?

 

Well, actually, the BBC did show it, which is evidence that it recognised it might be a good idea to mark the moment. But it did so in a shamefaced and surreptitious way, as if it did not really want to.

 

You needed the skills of Sherlock Holmes to discover this fact, hidden in the schedules of the Corporation's modest Parliament Channel. And you might then have needed Holmes's magnifying glass to watch, for this worthy digital station is so underpowered that, on Freeview, its pictures fill only one quarter of a normal TV screen. I am not making this up. I thought there was a fault and rang BBC headquarters to check.

 

In a way, that made the experience more like the first time, when millions of us gazed, rapt, at small black and-white 405-line sets; the sort that took a minute or two to warm up, with tiny loudspeakers and a tendency to fizz and blink. Black and white isn't right, actually. It was really a series of different shades of grey. You still had to use your imagination to make sense of the pictures.

 

Would those accustomed to today's huge, clear colour screens and perfect sound be able to cope?

 

You had to concentrate so hard that you forgot the rest of what was going on around you. And as I watched, it began to dawn on me why the Corporation might have decided to miss such an opportunity.

 

While the occasion does not seem all that long ago to me, it turned out to be a shocking and painful journey into an almost entirely foreign country, lost and gone for ever. I remember, as a child, watching the immensely remote films of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, or the buses and taxis of Paris heading out towards the Marne.

 

Suddenly my own childhood looked like that; a vast parade of ghosts, legions of the dead, marching, singing, yelling commands, then in the full vigour of their prime, now elderly or gone, or living in exile in their own country.

 

Even the sound on the doddering recording was sometimes distorted, adding to the feeling that the whole thing was being transmitted from light years away, irrecoverable, impossibly distant.

 

And you could sense that many of those taking part knew perfectly well that it was not just Winston Churchill they were burying, but Britain as she had been and could no longer afford to be. As the BBC camera mounted on the dome of St Paul's swung round the London skyline, you could see that the great city was already horribly disfigured by the brutal concrete architecture which has now all but obliterated it. The modern world was waiting, just on the edge, ready to take over completely once this Edwardian ritual was finished.

 

But just on this occasion, and for one last time, the forces of the past had the streets to themselves to parade in a final farewell to pride and Empire. And they did. There were real giants here, still alive and walking: Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Alexander and General Ismay, Lord Portal, Clement Attlee, Dwight Eisenhower, Sir Robert Menzies; men who had commanded fleets and armies beyond the imagination of modern defence ministries, men beside whom our breed of politicians would look like the pygmies they are.

 

And the ordinary soldiers and sailors were still imbued with the traditions of Waterloo and Trafalgar.

 

They knew, as their grandchildren would not, who had fought at these battles, why, and where and when.

 

The faces of the men were not padded and plumped by burgers and milkshakes, and untouched by weather as they are now, but hollow-cheeked, wind-burned old-fashioned English faces. Their uniforms – unmodernised – were well-known and understood to all, because in those days before the IRA, military and naval uniforms were often seen on the streets, in trains and pubs and on buses.

 

Perhaps that explains the damn-your-eyes, Hearts of Oak ebullience and confidence of them, quite unlike the marching troops of any other nation. You could imagine Patricia Hewitt, and people like her, pursing their lips hard as they watched, and muttering: 'How inappropriate, how archaic, how non-inclusive.' And they would have been right.

 

Classless multiculturalist feminists would have fainted at the sight, if such people were allowed to faint.

 

The noble, aristocratic banner of the Spencer-Churchill family was borne in the parade as if nobility, title, heredity and ancestry mattered. Male members of the Churchill family actually wore black silk top hats as they made their way to the cathedral, which must have been the last time anyone dared to do such a thing in public in London. The women were veiled in mourning as none are any more.

 

As for the funeral itself, it was the Church of England taking one last opportunity to show itself off in its full, dark, chilly 17th Century majesty. No soupy nonsense here about the dead having just gone into the next room, but raw, earthy heartbreaking prose about worms and corruption accompanied by cold, echoing chants to freeze the bones.

 

Even the hymns were different.

 

The Battle Hymn Of The Republic had not been watered down in those days. They sang Julia Ward Howe's original words: 'As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.' Nowadays this is rendered as 'let us live to make men free', a thoroughly different wish. They also roared out John Bunyan's original ‘Who Would True Valour See’, complete-with its hobgoblins and foul fiends, not Percy Dearmer's milksop goblin-free version. And no bad thing, given that if any man truly confronted hobgoblins and foul fiends coming across the fields to meet him, Churchill had done so.

 

And at the end, after having to find their way through the concrete dust and hoardings of the half-built South Bank to Waterloo Station, they all departed by train, a proper train hauled by a steam locomotive rescued from the scrapheap, out of a Sixties London already suffering the plagues of modernity, past the people standing silently on the windswept embankments, out into the vanishing world of wayside stations and branch lines where on a good day you might still just find a whisper of what disappeared that cold, windy morning four decades ago. No, I don't suppose it would have done much for the ratings.

 

Does Johann Hari Agree with me that 'Addiction' is a Fiction? This may surprise you

I’m watching with interest the largely positive reviews which Johann Hari’s new book on drugs ('Chasing the Scream')is collecting, compared with the near-universal silence (tempered with personal abuse) which my own rather different book (‘The War We Never Fought’) on the same subject received.

 

I’m due to discuss it with him at the Hay Festival in May (this event, the funky Glastonbury of the book world, two years ago invited me to discuss my book, then abruptly disinvited me. It'll be nice to get in again, even if I only do so in Mr Hari's baggage rather than in my own right.).

 

I’m actually quite glad to see Mr Hari’s success. I’ve never disliked him, have always found him charming in person,  and regarded his terrible fall from grace (over plagiarism and various other misdeeds) as a sad and embarrassing matter rather than an opportunity to say rude things about him

 

But I do think the comparison between the treatment of the two books is telling. They share  the same publisher, are about the same very interesting and current subject, and in both cases the author  is reasonably prominent but not especially beloved.

 

Even more fascinating is the fact that Mr Hari comes very close indeed to committing the same heresy which I commit, to howls of execration – suggesting that ‘addiction’, as a physical phenomenon, does not in fact exist. In fact, he may actually commit it. See for yourselves what you think. But there are no howls, there is no execration, for him.

 

Mr Hari has kindly sent me a copy of his book as published (until now I was working from proofs which of course are not final or definitive).

 

The first thing I checked was a passage beginning on page 170. This is in a chapter about Bruce Alexander, a Canadian academic .

 

Now read on

‘There were big chunks of time in the 1970s in which the Canadian police managed to blockade the port of Vancouver so successfully that no heroin was getting into the city at all. We know this because the police tested the “heroin” being sold on the streets and found it actually contained zero percent of the drug.: it was all filler and contaminants. So the war on drugs was, for some significant stretches being won here.

‘It is obvious what should have happened during these heroin droughts. The heroin addicts should all have been plunged into physical withdrawal, writhing in agony, and then, weeks later they should have woken up to find they were freed from their physical dependency.

‘But Bruce was seeing something really weird instead. There was no heroin in the city – but all the heroin addicts were carrying on almost exactly as before. They were still scrambling desperately to raise the money – robbing or prostituting – to buy this empty cocktail. They weren’t in agonizing withdrawal. They weren’t getting gut-wrenchingly sick. They thought the “heroin” they were buying was weak, to be sure, and they were topping it up with heavier drinking or more Valium. But the core of their addiction didn’t seem to be affected. Nothing had changed’.

 

Mr Hari goes to state that this was not a freak event but was replicated in several American cities.

 

He goes on ‘Bruce saw addicts in withdrawal all the time - and their symptoms were often minor: at worst, like a bad flu. This is so contrary to what we are told that it seems impossible, but doctors now very broadly agree it is the case. The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.’

 

Of course, it’s partly because it’s padded with undisproveable, unproveable psychobabble like that last sentence that Mr Hari can get away with this . The facts he recounts here are almost identical to what Theodore Dalyrmple, the former English prison doctor, has said about ‘withdrawal’.  And it is indeed ‘contrary to all we are told’ especially in films such as ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘French Connection 2’.

 

Well, could that be because ‘everything we are told’,is in fact twaddle, widely believed by people who want to believe it and have never examined the matter because, thanks to conventional wisdom, they think they know something they don't?

Mr Hari goes on (p.171) to quote the medical researchers John Ball and Carl Chambers who, he says, studied medical literature from 1875 to 1968, and found that nobody had died from heroin withdrawal *alone* in that time. ‘The only people who are killed by withdrawal’’, Mr Hari says ‘ are people who are already very weak’.

 

There’s a brief diversion after this about an experiment called ‘rat park’ which suggests that heroin abuse has more to do with unhappiness than physical compulsion, which you can take or leave depending on how similar you think humans are to rats, and whether rats feel,’ unhappiness’ in a way that is remotely comparable to human emotions.

 

If we leave such concepts as ‘happiness’ out of the calculation and concede (which is obvious) that euphoria-inducing drugs are bound to appeal to some (but not all) people who cannot physically escape from unpleasant, unwanted circumstances; and if you accept that the fact they are bound to appeal does not in any way mean that the decision to take such drugs is anything other than a matter of voluntary choice which some may view as wrong and immoral, …

 

…in that case, there’s some very interesting material on page 173 of Mr Hari’s book..

According to research cited by Mr Hari, from ‘The Archives of General Pyschiatry’, some 20 per cent of US soldiers serving in Vietnam (where, you will recall, they were almost all conscripts) had ‘become addicted to’ heroin while there.

 

The study showed that 95% of these men had stopped using heroin within a year of returning home. ’Treatment’ and ‘rehabilitation’ made no difference to this outcome.

 

As Mr Hari writes ‘If you believe the theory that drugs hijack your brain and turn you into a chemical slave  – the theory on which the war on drugs has been based since [Harry] Anslinger [head of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the 1930s, cited by Mr Hari as one of the originators of the war on drugs’]- then this makes no sense’.

 

Indeed it doesn’t, and I have frequent disputes with my allies in the anti-legalisation movement, about their too ready and ultimately self-weakening acceptance of the concept of ‘addiction’. I think the use of the term by drug opponents is lazy,  contradictory and morally confusing and eventually puts them in a  false position.  That’s why I’d rather risk the opprobrium and abuse that comes my way for agreeing with Mr Hari that the classic concept of ‘addiction’ is logically and scientifically untenable.

 

My conclusions from this are quite different from his. He excuses drugtaking as a response to bad conditions and so rejects the punishment of possession . But that is because our fundamental moral positions are opposed. This argument has always been far more about morals than about anything else. And what Mr Hari has written in his book makes that even plainer. I wonder why his sympathetic reviewers who(unsurprisingly) tend to be in favur of relaxing the drug laws, haven't fastened on this passage, as they would undoubtedly have done had I written it. 

Scorn for One - Quivering Obsequiousness to the other

On Sunday I noted that the heavy-handed enforcement of ‘religious tolerance’ (so-called) in this country by Mrs May’s planned new Strong State would not in fact favour Christianity. I argued that it would instead work on the side of the very Islam whose ‘extremist’ branches we claim to be trying to combat with surveillance and speech restrictions.

 

I wrote: ’Given authority’s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice’. 

Oh, my prophetic soul. Before the day was out, two stories had erupted into the newspapers. The first, in my own paper, the Mail on Sunday, concerned a Christian magistrate who   remarked that he thought a child would be better brought up in a traditional family than by a same-sex couple.

 

Whatever opinion you hold on this, Richard Page’s opinion is legitimate and based upon Christian teaching, until quite recently the basis of this country’s morality and system of government, and ostensibly its Established Church, to this day.

 

 

Mr Page was then reported, suspended, found guilty of ‘serious misconduct’ (by a supposedly Conservative minister) and sent on an ‘equality course’, to get his mind right . He was found to have been ‘influenced by his religious beliefs rather than by the evidence’.  This was defined as ‘serious misconduct'.

 

Is it not possible that those who disagreed with him were influenced by their political and moral beliefs, rather than by the evidence?

 

It is only necessary to imagine the reaction to this event in the Britain of even 30 years ago, to grasp that this country has in fact undergone a vast moral and cultural revolution in that period, in which Christian beliefs have been entirely dethroned, without the population fully understanding that this was taking place and certainly without any such plan being openly avowed in the manifesto of any major political party.

Is it wild speculation to suggest that the old beliefs have not been replaced by nothing, or by a commitment to view matters entirely on the evidence without any consideration of moral attitudes? 

Might it be that magistrates are now expected to be guided by an alternative and radically different set of beliefs, beliefs which 50 years ago were held only by social revolutionaries (and not even by all of them),   best summed up in the phrase ‘Equality and Diversity’?  

 

(What, in any case, is the impartial science-based evidence on this matter which might be seen as actual unbiased evidence in this matter? It seems unlikely to me that same-sex parental couples have existed long enough or in sufficient numbers for any serious and balanced research to have been completed into the comparative outcomes, but I’m always ready to listen to evidence.)   

 

What particularly struck me was that Mr Page was accused of breaking his oath, which required him to ‘do right to all manner of people’, ‘without fear or favour, affection or ill will’. For a religious believer, such an accusation is very painful, as oaths are promises made before God.  I cannot for the life of me see how his concern breaks that oath, especially since, as he points out, the oath ends with the words ‘So help me God’.

 

No doubt those words won’t feature much in future, indeed I shouldn’t wonder if we don’t see a proposal to ban them pretty soon (just as those subversive terms  ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ were erased from many official documents recently).

 

But they were a permissible part of the oath when he swore it, and the God worshipped in this country by its Established Church, whose Supreme Governor is the Monarch, crowned in an explicitly Christian ceremony, is the Christian one. This is also a country whose Parliament opens its sessions with Christian prayers.

 

That Christian God seems to me to have been fairly clear in thinking that marriage was between a man and a woman. The Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service, still legally (by Act of Parliament) the basic standard of the rules and nature of marriage in England, and still a legally recognised form of marriage not requiring any endorsement by any other body,  is quite clear on this.

 

The new idea about marriage comes from a different tradition. If we are, as Mrs May claims, committed to ‘mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths’  Mr Page is surely entitled to the ‘respect and tolerance’ of his fellow magistrates.

 

According to paragraph 5 of Mrs May’s horrible guidelines (read them here https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/388934/45584_Prevent_duty_guidance-a_consultation_Web_Accessible.pdf )

 ’vocal and active opposition’ to ‘mutual respect and tolerance’ is ‘extremism’.  Well, can you get much more ‘vocal and active’ in ‘opposition’ to another faith than by reporting an adherent of a religion you don’t like to the authorities, for expressing his sincere opinion, in such a way that he is suspended from his duties and compelled to be ‘re-educated?

 

Please grasp that I am not here seeking to enter a debate about whether Mr Page was right or wrong. This discussion has been had to the point of tedium, and will presumably continue for ever. People don’t agree. Generally, this is because they adhere to different moral system. They’re not going to persuade each other.

 

What interests me is that the non-Christian side no longer *has* to persuade its opponents.  It can simply use the state to crush them. The force of law (in my view stretched to the limits of its meaning)  is now being used to silence people in the judiciary who hold Mr Page’s view. This has been done by an allegedly ‘Conservative’ minister.  How long before the law is used to silence private citizens for doing so?

 

So that’s the bit that deals with the state’s ‘general scorn for conservative Christianity’, as I mentioned. Now, what about its ‘quivering obsequiousness’ to Islam?

 

Well, first of all I ask you to wonder if a Muslim magistrate, expressing the same opinion, would be in the same sort of trouble?  You only need to ask, to know.

 

Of course, such a  non-event, in which somebody was not reported, not suspended and not sent for re-education would not be recorded and we would not know anything about it (The Mail on Sunday had to fight hard to report the case of Mr Page, in which several recordable events did take place) .

 

But lo! The sun had hardly begun to climb into the Sunday sky before this story emerged:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915253/Christian-nurse-37-says-sacked-harassment-bullying-praying-Muslim-colleague.html

 

A Christian nurse has been disciplined for alleged ‘bullying and harassment’ . Again, can anyone really imagine a case in which a Muslim nurse gets into trouble for praying for a Christian colleague, inviting her to visit events at her mosque and for giving her a book about a Christian who converted to Islam?

 

Under ‘Equality and Diversity’ all religions are equal.  What people don’t seem to grasp is that this is, in effect, the downgrading and disestablishment of Christianity. For if Christianity in Britain is ‘equal’ to Islam, or any other religion (and that has been the explicit law since 2010) , then it is no longer entitled to the standing it once had.

 

This is a simple matter of fact. And of course, in the early years of the cultural revolution, that will involve repeated slapdowns for Christians, until they stop imagining they have any special claim on government or the courts, and at last learn their new and very humble place in multicultural Britain.  

 

Meanwhile, we all know that Islam won’t put up with being treated like that.

 

And Mrs May’s daft ‘anti-Islamist’ laws will end up  strengthening the power of Islam in our country, laws, society and government. You wait and see. 

The Funeral of the British Empire - a memory of 50 years ago

What a strange thing it is to see my own memories harden into history, and what is, for me, a vivid and living experience, turn into a blurred and fading piece of film.

 

Half a century ago, at my strict-regime boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, we were let off our normal Saturday-morning lessons of Latin grammar, French vocabulary, rivers and capitals of South America, mostly taught by fierce, bristling gents with military or naval ranks.

 

Instead, we were instructed to sit in rows on hard chairs as the school’s one small black-and white TV set was hoisted on to a high shelf. And for three utterly memorable hours, we watched in silence as the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill passed slowly through London.

 

Outside (and no opportunity was normally missed to make us go outside) it was a freezing day of steely skies and pitiless winds, no small matter if you were forced to wear short trousers, as we all were.  Inside, in the comparative warmth, most of us were, I think, mesmerised, so that we forgot we were watching on a screen not much bigger than a breadboard. I certainly saw and remembered the event as a huge panorama.

 

Afterwards, we knew, quite simply, that something important had passed from the earth forever, and that our small country was diminished and bereft. Nobody who came afterwards would be as we had been before we watched it. By comparison, the assassination of President Kennedy is nothing in my recollections.

 

This week, I managed to watch a rare, hard-to-find recording of Sir Winston’s funeral. It is the wrong shape for a modern TV screen, and sometimes the picture swims or blurs. It is , of course, in black and white, but that only increases the feeling that you are watching something impossibly long ago.

 

The London of January 1965 is almost as distant from me now as the outbreak of the First World War was from us then. Most of the people who appear in the film are now dead, or impossibly old.

 

The actual procession looks, at many moments, like one of those jerky old films from the Austro-Hungarian empire that they show to illustrate how hopelessly old-fashioned the pre-1914 world is.

 

Bluejackets in the sort of uniforms they wore at Jutland pull the gun carriage on which the heavy coffin rests (a tradition in state funerals since the army’s horses kicked over the traces at Queen Victoria’s obsequies, and sailors ran forward to take over the task).

 

The cortege moves at a mesmerizing slow pace, swaying strangely to the music of a dozen military bands, thumping out dirges - occasionally interrupted by those uniquely British parade-ground yells, echoing for miles in the freezing air, as sergeant-majors keep their men in line.

 

The male members of the Churchill family walk behind the coffin, wearing what must surely be the last black silk top hats seen in London, like a Bolshevik caricature of greedy capitalists. Lady Churchill, vastly veiled in black, rides in an enormous, sombre coach (lent by the Royal Family but not from their better-known fleet of gilded and pretty carriages).

 

The coachman riding atop it is cloaked and muffled like something out of the Pickwick Papers, reaching back into a past that some of those present would still just have remembered. From even further back come the Heralds of the College of Arms, most of them ancient men on sticks, looking a little like animated playing-cards in their mediaeval tabards. 

 

A huge drum-horse, loaded with war-drums, leads the bands as its ancestor must have done at Blenheim and Waterloo. The dead man’s orders and medals, borne on cushions, are carried behind  him and arrayed by his coffin when it reaches St Paul’s Cathedral, where it is greeted by a man holding up the City of London’s mighty, ancient, black Sword of Mourning. 

 

It is all so old that it was archaic in 1965, and I doubt it could be done now with a straight face. Yet it would have been as normal in Winston Churchill’s youth as it is outlandish now.

 

The sense of a last moment of something  that is passing is emphasized by the figure of the Queen, not as he is now, the nation’s favourite grandmother, but a woman coming to the end of her youth, worn by cares and powerfully moved by the heavy  panoply and drapery of death on display. Beside her, Prince Charles is still an awkward schoolboy.

 

But in one way the most moving faces are those in the crowds – of men and women then young, now pensioners, and above all, those of the soldiers in the bearer party who struggle, with increasing strain and tension, to lift, carry and lay down the immense weight of the leadlined oaken coffin. 

 

These are the days before pizza, milkshakes and sugary drinks fattened and blurred all our features into a bland and puffy sameness. They all look so British, in a hollow, hungry, wartime way, that it almost breaks the heart to see them. The country they and grew up in has entirely ceased to exist. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Do We Know About the Paris Outrages?

I thought I would try to tot up what we know about the Paris murderers. We know what they did. We presume  we know why they did it. But are we right to treat Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly as a co-ordinated unit? And if not, what did motivate them?

 

I would stress that I do not claim to know. What follows is simply interested speculation, informed by my own known views on this subject. I offer it for discussion and examination, not as a solution. Our knowledge is imperfect, and may always remain so, since the main actors in this horror are dead.

 

Their own various claims seem to me to mean little. Why should such people be assumed to be telling the truth about themselves, in the middle of a crime?  Claims of membership made either by them or by various organisations are uncheckable and could easily be empty boasting.

 

And are we right to treat them as highly-organised and trained jihadis? And what about Hayat Boumedienne, wife of Coulibaly, niqab-clad crossbow-wielder etc? She is now reported to have been in Turkey, presumed to be on her way to Syria, before the outrage took place.  Reuters have reported :’The suspected female accomplice of Islamist militants behind attacks in Paris was in Turkey five days before the killings and crossed into Syria on January 8th, [Turkish]Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was cited on Monday by the state-run Anatolian News Agency as saying.’

 

Those dates would put Boumedienne in Turkey before the violence in Paris began, leaving for Syria while the attackers were still on the loose.

 

 

In the first days of any event such as this, reporters struggle to get hard information, rumours and unconfirmed reports rush through the air. It is very difficult to get reliable facts. I understand this.  The first proper acccounts of the Septeebr 11th 2001 massacre did not emerge for a long time after the event. Much is still secret or 'redacted, nearly 14 years later.

 

But there’s also, it seems to me,  a bit of a desire to find a pattern, one which makes the events fit the idea (common in governments, security services and newsrooms) that we face a co-ordinated Islamist conspiracy against our ‘way of life’, wich can be countered by increased surveillance, restrictions on liberty, and greater so-called 'security'. 

 

The alternative, that most European capitals now contain an underclass of chaotic mentally unstable drifters, drug abusers and petty criminals, sometimes employed in dead-end jobs such as pizza delivery, sometimes not, whose empty lives can, alas, be given meaning by Islamic utopianism, is less explored.  It’s less exciting.  It gives much less support to lobbies for ‘tough’ laws, ‘crackdowns’ and surveillance. I think it should be considered. Careful, attentive  policing of these parts of society might yield more than any amount of crackdowns and surveillance on the rest of us.

 

This, by the way is *not* precisely the same argument which I apply to the ‘lone wolf’ attacks of Woolwich, Sydney and Ottawa. 

 

The Paris murderers can more properly be referred to as ‘terrorists’, though Coulibaly less so than the others, because his initial crime – the random shooting of a jogger at Fontenay-aux-Roses - was so utterly wanton.  His later murders of hostages were likewise acts of utter stupid cruelty, not even explicable by the fanatics’ own perverted code. (Note to would-be twisters and misrepresentation merchants: I am not, by saying this, excusing or condoning more politically purposeful murders. I am simply making a distinction between different types of despicable, indefensible crime, because I think that distinction may one day help us prevent similar outrages).

 

When Coulibaly murdered a policewoman at Montrouge, which might in his twisted mind have had a political or religious purpose, he also shot a roadsweeper in the face, leaving him critically injured (I have been unable to learn more details of his fate) . That action (like the shooting of the jogger, linked to Coulibaly by bullet casings found at the scene (though the victim says his assailant wasn’t Coulibaly) is inexplicable by any political or religious creed, and cannot have been connected to or ‘synchronised with’ the Charlie Hebdo massacre, nor done in response to alleged ‘orders’ by any supposed terrorist High Command.  

 

It is just random, moronic, inexcusable,cruel violence. Given the unending possibility of my being misrepresented by my critics,  I must point out once more, quite explicitly,  that my selection of these crimes for special mention is not aimed at in any way excusing or lessening the condemnation of the more obviously political crimes against journalists or Jews.

 

I mention them because , like the Kouachis’ initial attempt to enter the wrong building in their attack on Charlie Hebdo, and their shooting of a maintenance worker when they first entered the building, and their failure (for which we must be grateful) to kill all those they found in the editorial office, they suggest that we are dealing with not-especially-competent or well-trained killers, who have not properly planned their crime  or prepared their escape.

 

We must also be pleased that one of the brothers was so incompetent at terrorist crime that he actually left his identity card in the car they abandoned.  What sort of terrorist ‘training’ would leave someone able to do this, I am not sure. It cannot be very thorough. I do not know how much longer the French authorities would have taken to track them down without this clue. One expects that fingerprints, or CCTV images, or purchase records will eventually allow police to track culprits down. But an actual identity card in the getaway car! This discovery may have saved days. 

 

It is quite clear from the reports that both Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly had been in contact with Islamist preachers of various kinds, and one or both Kouachis travelled at least once to the Yemen though there is less information about what exactly they got up to there.

 

I do get a bit exasperated with all this talk of terrorist ‘training camps’.  Once you’ve mastered the use of a gun (and a distressing number of modern petty criminals have done this quite easily), no particular ‘training’ is required to murder defenceless journalists, or indeed to kill unprepared police officers taken by surprise. Training would be required to confront professional soldiers. But almost any fool can kill a defenceless human being, especially if he has the advantage of surprise, which terrorists almost always do.  

 

You have to be in some kind of abnormal circumstance, eitehr externally imposed or internally driven, to kill a stranger in cold blood. This isn’t at all to excuse such acts. People still know such killings are evil, and that they shouldn’t do them. The question is, how they persuade themselves that, in this particular case, it’s justified. If they’re drug abusers (again, no excuse, this is a voluntary act with known consequences) , their senses may be so dulled and their minds so clouded with hallucinations, persecution mania and phantom voices that they do not fully grasp the horror of what they are doing.

 

Evidence now suggests that this was the case with Michael Adebowale, one of the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby . I have noted before that we know for certain that Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor. A psychiatrist found him 'paranoid and incoherent', and said his symptoms were worsened by 'heavy use of cannabis'.

 

This may have been the case with other terrorist killers in recent incidents, and also with some non-terrorist killers whose crimes, though non-political, were similarly horrific. But a general lack of interest in this aspect, in the police and the media, means that we do not have enough information to say. Hence, in my view, the need for more curiosity about this problem. (Note for Ben Goldacre: by ‘curiosity’ I mean that police and media should routinely inquire into the drug habits of suspects and culprits in cases of violence, terrorist and non-terrorist. And no more).

 

Fanaticism can certainly do this, especially one which allows the killer to think that his victims are not fully human, But some other source of unreason is more than likely. The combination of fanaticism and drug abuse is plainly particularly dangerous. But, given the layers of society, in Britain and France, from which terrorist killers are drawn, fanaticism will in many cases be allied with drug abuse.

 

I have found no reports of previous blatantly irrational or unhinged  behaviour by any of the killers, though some of Coulibaly’s criminal record and his actions during his final murders seem to me to suggest a person not wholly in charge of his own actions.  Again, note that this is not an excuse. His previous life, a very wicked one, had led him to this point and he had chosen that course.

 

Of Cherif Kouachi we know that he was arrested in 2005 on the way to Iraq via Syria.  His lawyer insists that he did not  actually want to go and was glad to be caught. In prison  (where, on the Continental system, he spent more time in pre-trial detention than he did serving his sentence) he met Coulibaly, though no doubt he also met plenty of other people and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the meeting was particularly significant.

 

The ‘radical preacher’ under whose influence he allegedly fell, Farid Benyettou, discouraged him from attacks on Jews saying that France was ‘not a land of jihad’.

 

Court records show Cherif Kouachi said he didn't consider himself a good enough Muslim, and said he had only been to the mosque two or three times before he met Benyettou, and he had been smoking cannabis.

 

Said Kouachi, Cherif’s elder brother,  was in Yemen in 2009, and there shared a flat with Abdulmutallab, attempted bomber of Northwest Flight 253, ‘for one or two weeks’. It is hard to tell whether this is significant.  ‘Intelligence officials’ quoted in various stories say he went to Yemen again in 2011 for terror training. The source is an unnamed US official quoting an unnamed French intelligence source. But the French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told Christiane Amanpour in an on-the-record TV interview that one brother travelled to Yemen in 2005. Oddly, she would not say which one.

 

Here are one or two interesting notes about the culprits.

 

 

‘Orphaned at a young age, they [The Kouachi brothers] drifted into a life of smoking drugs, petty offending and rap music ‘   , Cherif had a ‘minor criminal record’

 

 

Said Kouachi was ‘ …the only one of the three who had not been in prison in France. But he had been questioned by police and released over the Buttes-Chaumont jihadi cell in 2005.  Yemeni security officials confirmed that he had spent several months in the country, was suspected of having fought for al-Qaida and was probably among a group of foreigners deported from Yemen in 2012. Both brothers were on US and UK no-fly lists.

 

 

On Amedy Coulibaly:

He had a criminal record   “The first case was the armed robbery of a sports clothing shop. It stood out because his getaway car was in an accident and rolled off a bridge, but Coulibaly nonetheless got out of the car, badly bruised, and went straight back to school where he just sat down and got on with his class.” This does not suggest a particularly organised or co-ordinated individual.

 

 

A lawyer, Damien Brossier later defended him for an armed bank robbery. “There was a mad-dog element about him,” he said. “He was friendly, he was not unpleasant, he wasn’t hard to talk to, there wasn’t a tension. One created a superficial relationship with him.”

 

Coulibaly served  another prison term for a drugs offence before training to be a television fitter, settling in Grigny, back in the south of Paris. (Times 10/01). He has a record of small drugs and theft offences. One of 10 children and the only boy, Coulibaly became a delinquent at 17 and a repeat offender for petty thefts and drugs crimes

 

 

Coulibaly said at 3pm (to a radio station) that he had already killed four people in his attack on the supermarket - suggesting that the final assault by police was relatively successful. He also said that he had worked "in synchronisation” with the Charlie Hebdo killers. He claimed to be working for Isis. Kouachi said that he was "sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen".