Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 209

What Did he Actually Say? A Puzzle from Berlin

What are we to make of this? I’d be grateful for any help from native speakers of Ukrainian and/or German.  Russian readers (who cannot be assumed to be neutral in this)  have drawn to my attention an interview given to the German TV station ARD by the Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk (Jazenjuk in German).

 

 

They argue that Mr Yatsenyuk says (it’s about 21 minutes into this link) 

http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/sendung/tt-3413.html

 

that the Soviet Union invaded Germany and Ukraine. 

 

It was, of course, the other way round. While The USSR did grab a large chunk of what had been Poland, and incorporate part of that  in the then Soviet Republic of Ukraine, as part of the Stalin Hitler Pact,  Moscow already possessed Ukraine in 1940.  Germany invaded the USSR, via Ukraine, in 1941, unless you describe the Soviet counter-offensive as an ‘invasion’. Or I suppose he could be referring to the Bolshevik reconquest of Ukraine in 1919, though technically the Soviet Union did not exist until 1922. 

 

I am told this is an accurate transcript of the German translation broadcast by ARD (I am assuming, and hoping, that a Ukrainian version exists).

 

‘Wir können uns alle sehr gut auf den sowjetischen Anmarsch in (?) die Ukraine und nach Deutschland erinnern. Das muss man vermeiden und keiner hat das Recht, die Ergebnisse des zweiten Weltkrieges neu zu schreiben’

 

 

 

A disinterested German journalist kindly provided me with this translation:

 

"We can remember very well the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany.

We have to make sure that this doesn`t happen again. No one has the right to redraw the post war map of Europe."

 

Translation is always a matter of subtleties, of course, so I am not presenting this as a way of closing the argument, only as a reason for pursuing the issue. What did he actually say? What did he mean? Linguists are very welcome to offer their versions, especially any who have access to the Ukrainian original, which must be the authentic text, and can translate it into English.

 

Much may depend on how the word ‘anmarsch’ is translated, or whether it was perhaps the very similar-sounding ‘einmarsch’, which is less ambiguous.

In the broadcast, the Ukrainian is mostly obscured by a more-or-less simultaneous German translation. 

Russian-based websites are having some fun with it, as here

 

http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150109/1016706636.html

 

But I've not seen any German newspapers remarking on it.  

A Wholly Inadequate response from Ben Goldacre (and my reply)

With great reluctance, I publish the following 'response' from Dr Ben Goldacre to my posting yesterday. I do not believe it even addresses the points I made. It dissipates the respect I formerly had for him. That is why I begged him, on Twitter last night, to try again. The response has been silence.

 

'Hi Peter,

 

I’m working on the ward today so not able to reply immediately to your dozen tweets in response to mine. Big fan of your writing, as I’ve said before, tho clearly we disagree on a lot.

 

I don’t think my tweet can be construed as misleading anyone about your words, since the entirety of your text that worried me was in the screengrab posted in my tweet, and your entire column was linked to in the tweet. I tweeted it (yesterday?) because that’s when someone tweeted it at me.

 

I think your suggestion that terrorist atrocities can be prevented by widespread pre-emptive incarceration of people with mental health problems is disproportionate, offensive to those with mental health problems (who make a tiny contribution to the total amount of violence in society), and unjust.

 

I also think it would be unlikely to work, for the reasons I set out in the piece linked below, which is on the difficulties of accurately predicting the risk of rare events (such as individual acts of terrorist violence) in large populations:

 

http://www.badscience.net/2006/12/crystal-balls-and-positive-predictive-values/

 

The key quote – last paragraph - is pasted below, but the whole piece is needed as background to the maths really:

 

Now let’s look at violence. The best predictive tool for psychiatric violence has a “sensitivity” of 0.75, and a “specificity” of 0.75. Accuracy is tougher, predicting an event in humans, with human minds, and changing human lives. Let’s say 5% of patients seen by a community mental health team will be involved in a violent event in a year. Using the same maths as we did for the HIV tests, your “0.75” predictive tool would be wrong 86 times out of 100. For serious violence, occurring at 1% a year, with our best “0.75” tool, you inaccurately finger your potential perpetrator 97 times out of a hundred. Will you preventively detain 97 people to prevent three events? And for murder, the extremely rare crime in question, occurring at one in 10,000 a year among patients with psychosis? The false positive rate is so high that the best test is almost entirely useless. I’m just giving you the maths on rare events. What you do with it is a matter for you.

 

I didn’t know about the Rigby killer’s mental health history, thanks for that, was just discussing it with a forensic psychiatry colleague at lunch, will have a read around if I get a chance. But this fact doesn’t change the concerns set out above with your proposals for massive pre-emptive incarceration of mental health patients on a national scale.

 

I hope we get to meet one day.

 

Ben'

 

I replied to this as follows:

 

Dear Ben,

 

I do urge you to rethink this rather complacent  response.  It has been ‘misconstrued’ or perhaps correctly construed as the damaging smear it was from the start. Did you (or your correspondent) not know that the Paris murders had happened at the time you posted that tweet?  You claim an interest in my writing, but did not respond to this at the time it was written, or for weeks afterwards. Did it not occur to you that immediately after the Paris atrocity  it would be seen as a comment on that event and its implications? Others did, and have posted  ‘Peter Hitchens blames care in the community for terrorist attacks’. Another has posted ‘Some days I think Peter Hitchens is a reasonably intelligent guy with whom I happen to disagree. Then I see this’, ‘This’ being a reproduction of your extract from my December article, which of course most people will read without following the link which provides the rather different context. (as it happens, for what it’s worth, we now know that one of the Paris suspects is a known heavy cannabis user).  Another has posted ‘A thoroughly deranged assessment of modern terrorism from Peter Hitchens’ (also reproducing your extract).

 

Your summary ‘Peter Hitchens believes terrorists are on drugs and in the 1980s would’ve been in asylums. Jesus’ is (as I have demonstrated) misleading and inaccurate. To try to turn an attack on securocrat spending and a call for higher health spending into some sort of attack on the mentally ill is ridiculous, and I think you know it. I didn’t say anything about the number of mentally ill people who commit violent crimes, though I did examine this topic here in May 2013 http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/05/dont-care-in-the-community.html

 

I repeatedly make the point in these and other articles that we may not know about these cases, because nobody is actually asking the questions which would enable us to. I make no claims of knowledge that I don’t possess. It doesn’t fit the conformist narrative,  which was why you ‘didn’t know’ about the Rigby killer’s mental health history. You hadn’t looked. It’s not hard to find if you do.

 

I don’t care if you disagree with me. But I think you of all people should do it in a civil, thoughtful fashion.  If you’re not even slightly abashed at your behaviour over this, then my opinion of you has fallen sharply.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Peter Hitchens

 

I'd add here, on reflection, that to characterise my article as a 'suggestion that terrorist atrocities can be prevented by widespread pre-emptive incarceration of people with mental health problems' is a ludicrous caricature of what I actually said.

 

This (I remind readers) came after a description of the plainly irrational behaviour of several violent murderers, whose crimes are undoubted and who exhibited multiple examoples of irrayional behaviour long before they committed these crimes. It was as follows: '...in the days before ‘care in the community’ they would not have been able to kill because they would have been in mental hospitals. Such hospitals would be a much better use for all the money we currently pour into grandiose ‘security services’.

 

1.It's mainly a statement about the past. There is no 'call for widespread pre-emptive incarceration of people with mental health problems'. the word 'widespread' is nt used, nor anything resembling it, nor anyting that could truthfully be interpreted to mean 'widespread' or 'incarceration'.  

 

Does Dr Goldacre object to the use of sectioning and the detntion of somke menatlly ill people in locked wards today, as is regrettably common? Does he think that such actions are in some way a defamatory reflection all people classifed as 'mentally ill', and does he argue against thenm on those grounds.

 

The article expresses a specific concern that violently unhinged people who should be hospitalised (and would have been before the cheapskate modern policy of closing hospitals took hold) are left free to roam about. The article to which I link above demonstrates that for several British people the outcome of this policy has been horribly fatal.

It also objects to something which I believe Dr Goldacre objects to, the ever-tightening surveillance society created on the pretext of fighting terrorism. 

 

I believe a serious person of any political persuasion could find a lot to agree with in this article, and might write to me personally to express any disgareements. Instead, I received a public smear adorned with a blasphemy. 

 

Dr Goldacre's behaviour, and his unwillingness to retreat or apologise when shown up, contrast sharply with his image as the Knight Errant of rigorous truth.  

Bad Language - A Simple Test

My automatic critics, who support Dr Goldacre on this matter, are asked to take the following test:

Dr Goldacre says I call for: ' 'widespread pre-emptive incarceration of people with mental health problems' .

Please produce any quotation that supports this specific claim. It will need most particularly to justify the words 'widespread' and 'pre-emptive'

Are we on the Road to a Grand Coalition between Tory and Labour Blairites?

I have thought for some time that the only establishment solution to a jaundiced and disenchanted electorate is for the two twin parties to combine against the voters in a grand coalition, much as often happens in Germany.

 

I tended to think that the trigger for this would be the unavoidable economic crisis which is hurtling towards us as I write but whose existence will be denied by everyone until after the polls close on May 7 (and ceaselessly called in aid after that moment).

 

So I was intrigued by this article in last Saturday's 'Guardian’ newspaper by Ian Birrell, who, I believe,  is quite well-informed about the upper reaches of the Tory Party.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/02/tory-labour-unity-7-may-national-government-constitutional-crisis

 

Neither of the two big parties wants to be in sole charge in the coming five years, and neither of them, in any case,  is in much danger of *being* in sole charge, given the state of the polls.  A defeat at the polls, plus a wipeout in Scotland, would give Labour’s Blairites the chance to stage a putsch against Ed Miliband, who might well not wait to be overthrown in any case.   

 

And, with the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act in place, both parties would pretty much hold each other hostage for the next five years. What follows then, of course, is an unfathomable mystery. But don’t be surprised if this happens.

Some Reflections on the Novels of Marilynne Robinson

My two years in the USA went in fairly deep. I travelled as much as I could, as often as possible by train, and so gained a sense of the vast beauty and terrifying loneliness of North America. The trains plunge through the raw, gut parts of the cities, as well as through the remotest deserts and canyons, and take you much closer to the real place than the modern Interstate highways.

 

I also felt the justified sourness and resentment caused by the colour bar (still very much in existence, though not usually acknowledged -  and enforced by custom rather than by law). Unlike white Americans, I felt fairly free to cross it, as a non-combatant in the unending combat over slavery and segregation and what followed, for which there is no simple name. I was more than once made very welcome in Black churches, an extremely moving experience of what can only be called grace. I am not sure a black Englishman, equally neutral, would have met with the same generosity in White churches.

 

As a churchgoing Christian I was also more at ease with my American neighbours than many English temporary residents, whose casual Godlessness amazes Americans of almost every class. I learned that religion was important to an understanding of the country.

 

But I only began to get to grips with its complexities. My own Anglican tradition, for instance, is just one among many strands, and generally identified with wealth and –these days –liberalism, though not necessarily so in the South.

 

Religion is mainly and plainly Calvinist Protestantism, stripped clean of the lingering Catholic and ritualist remnants which cling to Anglicanism as ivy does to an ancient tree.

 

It suits these.  the most American of Americans, the plain, dutiful multitudes who inhabit the ‘Flyover States’ (because everyone else just flies over them), the overpoweringly spacious prairie regions which open up a few hours West of Chicago, on the far side of the Mississippi.

 

It’s not surprising. The land they inhabit has a fierce, biblical character missing from our damp well-watered hill, mild, misty skies, soft winds and sheltered, temperate valleys.

 

On the great plains, man is obviously a trespasser in a region not meant for settlement. Go far enough and you will find genuine homicidal deserts and real, jagged mountains you could die while trying to cross.

 

I’ve never forgotten the summer evening I rolled across the Great Father of Waters on a tremendous double-decker train bound for New Mexico. It took about 20 minutes to trundle across the river, and dusk had fallen thickly by the time we reached the other side. The next day, I watched from the dining car as antelope fled from the train.  At this point, as if to emphasize you’re somewhere else, radio station call signs begin with ‘K’ instead of the ‘W’ you get in the Europeanized east. 

 

 

 

And here, or somewhere near it, is the world of Marilynne Robinson, the much-garlanded American novelist much beloved of liberals and disliked (to my knowledge) by some religious conservatives.  Her world is the cornfields of Iowa, though she comes from much further west, Sandpoint, a small town which now possesses the only passenger rail station in the whole of Idaho, and which I must have passed through, all unknowing, on my way from Portland to Chicago in the middle of a June night many years ago.

 

 

 

You will either greatly like or be utterly unmoved by her poetic, almost Biblical style of writing, which flows like clear cold water and is full of quiet power while remaining oddly conversational.

 

Her memory is plainly full of Shakespeare and the Authorised (King James)Version of the Bible, from which I suspect she can quote at will.  Her first novel ‘Housekeeping’ , a (to my mind) extremely strange account of the wildly eccentric upbringing of two very different sisters by a succession or more or less unhinged female relatives in a collapsing and chaotic old house, may possibly be autobiographical. If it is, then it is yet more proof that writers of fiction probably need to have unconventional childhoods. A happy, secure, contented normality would atrophy the muscles of the imagination

 

It is the next three (‘Gilead’, ‘Home’ and ‘Lila’) which first attracted my attention. They are all different aspects of the same story, of the same people in the same small Iowa town, each told by different characters.  I have seen other explanations of them, but to me they are an unending struggle to work out why things happen as they do, and how to be good when all, or most hope is gone.

 

The three lives are each full of desperate sadness. The old and dying Calvinist pastor’s young wife and baby die, leaving him bereft for years. His own childhood had been haunted by his parents’ grief at the death of almost all his siblings in a diphtheria epidemic.

 

‘And then he began to tell her about the brother and sisters who had died before he was born, and how his mother said once that the stairs were scuffed by the children’s shoes because she never could keep them from running in the house. And when she found a scrawl in a book she said ‘”One of the children must have done it.” There was a kind of fondness and sadness in her voice that he heard only when she mentioned them’. And if that doesn’t grasp at your heart, then these books probably won’t do anything for you.

 

But the person to whom he is telling this story, Lila,  has a far worse tale of her own, which is slowly revealed to us and which concerns her years on the very rough edges of American life where civilisation brushes up against starvation and feral cruelty. She has heard people howling for loss and grief, and done it herself, much worse than the mild tears and cries of the settled folk, and sometimes wonders if she, by certain acts, could cause her benefactors in the town of Gilead to discover the same sort of grief in themselves, and to cry out in voices of pain, voices they do not yet know that they possess. 

 

There is another character, Jack, the scapegrace son of the town’s other Protestant minister. As far as I can see, nothing anyone could have said or done would have made this man’s life contented or normal. The question of whether his many bad deeds are his own fault is asked but not truly answered. The question of whether he can be or will be forgiven is not answered either. There is not much balm in this Gilead.

 

From his childhood he has had some part of himself missing, the part that wishes to please and conform, and in its place is a wild desire to taunt to hurt and upset, combined (as it often is) with a winning charm. 

 

Among Calvinists, with their terrifying belief in predestination, by which some are unalterably damned, such a person might feel that he was cut off from all hope from a very early age. This belief is regularly used to torture Calvinists. I am told that Marilynne Robinson retorts, when asked about this,  that most modern secular beliefs are even more determinist, especially those which attribute our behaviour to unalterable DNA patterns.

 

It is not just Jack who is stalked by this unease. Lila, who owes her life (literally)  to the selfless kindness of unbaptized and rackety people, is perplexed by the possibility that, even despite their sacrificial acts of goodness to her, they cannot possibly be saved.

 

And yet this young man Jack has received a pretty large portion of grace, undeserved, unearned favour. For in his sordid and often wicked life he has come into contact with an African-American family  (I won’t say how) and with an African-American Pastor so appalled by the treatment of those with his skin colour that he has concluded that white people must, despite their protestations of faith, be atheists.

 

I have to say that revelation in the book tolled like a great bell, suddenly swung in a high tower, uncomfortably close,  when I wasn’t expecting any sound at all.

 

All these things happen in the presence of recent, fierce history – including living memories of a severe and violent grandfather who believed he had seen Jesus Christ in chains, his wrists galled with the iron, and so set out with a gun in his hand to fight for Abolition of Slavery in the Civil War, returning with one eye and a series of frightening eccentricities. But in those times Iowa had been an Abolitionist stronghold.

 

 

And they happen in a country of mystical sunsets, abandoned shacks, storms that could have come out of the Book of Job, snowstorms that can take your life within a few feet of your own front door, and wild rivers in which one can be baptized. I said Marilynne Robinson’s prose was like clear, cold water and so it is – and sometimes it is about water too - you are never far from its cleansing, chilly power, or from the mysterious rush of the wind, sounding like the ocean in regions impossibly far from any sea. 

 

Many things happen. Much is explained. Much is hinted at, sometimes so cautiously that I often almost missed some huge event, referred to in such a brief phrase that you could easily have misunderstood its importance.

 

But I think it is full of the belief that eternity is all around us, that God is real and that our unending discovery of Him and His will must always be our main purpose . One passage reminded me of a favourite snatch from one of G.K.Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, in which the little priest warns that we often completely misunderstand the nature of what we experience, like people looking the wrong side of the tapestry, but convincing ourselves that it is the right side.

 

Pastor Ames ponders in a sermon:

 

‘Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed’.’

 

 

And:

 

‘This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing.

   

 

‘Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in his eternal, freely given constancy.’

 

And earlier: ‘My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one’s faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same. Even though we are to do everything we can to put an end to poverty and suffering.

 

‘I have struggled with this my whole life’

 

 

People say they love these books, and I can see why.  Quite how they can do so without discerning within them a serious, deep, patient but modest defence of the Christian proposition, I do not know.

An Open Letter to Dr Ben Goldacre

I have a lot of time for Dr Ben Goldacre, who has helped to raise the standards of science journalism by mercilessly exposing the mistaken exaggerated or plain wrong use of scientific research. But is he adhering to his own high standards in a recent attack on me on'Twitter'?

 

Dear Dr Goldacre,

 

You recently Tweeted that ‘Peter Hitchens says terrorists are on drugs and in the 1980s would’ve been in asylums’ adding the word ‘Jesus’, which you presumably intended as an expression of shocked disbelief, a sensation you assumed your readers would share.

 

I had the impression that you stood out for accuracy and careful evaluation, and rather admire you for doing so. Have you held to your own standards here?

 

Here are the ways in which your Tweet  is inaccurate and/or misleading:

 

First, the timing. By the use of the present tense ‘says’ you imply (and in my view either intend your readers to believe, or don’t care if they do believe)  that I am referring to Wednesday’s murders in Paris. You know perfectly well that I was not.

 

The blog posting (and column) to which you link http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/forget-evil-putin-were-the-bloodthirsty-warmongers.html date from 21st December 2014. They have nothing to do with the Paris attack, on which I have yet to comment because I lack sufficient knowledge.

 

Secondly, the failure to read with any care what I actually said:

The article  refers quite specifically to three named so-called ‘lone wolf’ attacks. I have not heard or read anyone describing the Paris murders in this fashion.

 

The attacks I referred to were in Woolwich, Ottawa and Sydney. I accurately described the killers as ‘deranged maniacs’ ( see below) and said that ‘in most cases’ (the Sydney case is unclear) those involved were out of their minds on drugs. This is is a matter of record (see below).

 

Thirdly, you made something up.  I said nothing about the 1980s, and the argument for which you attack me, and blaspheme about, is one which you would very probably support were it made by an ally of yours.

 

I said that in the days before ‘care in the community’ ( a policy dating back well before the 1980s, originating in the 1950s and particularly pursued when Enoch Powell was Minister of Health),such people would have been locked up in mental asylums. I think the 'Care in the Community' policy was a grave error, and believe better mental health services, including many more residential hospitals,  would be a better and more effective use of our money than grandiose security services. Like you, I deplore the attempts to use terrorist outrages to strengthen the surveillance state (I see you rightly attack ‘The Sun’ for this in a Tweet today).

 

 

On the mental state of the Woolwich killers, I refer you to any good cuttings library, but there is a  good summary of the position here in my column of 30th November:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/11/theresas-right-we-do-face-a-dire-new-threat-from-people-like-her-.html

 

To save you too much trouble, here is the key passage (in what is mainly an attack on Mrs Theresa May’s authoritarian tendencies, with which I imagine you would agree):

 

‘Now, because the drug-crazed killer Michael Adebowale made an unhinged threat on Facebook, we are asked to support the secret-police surveillance of the internet.

On the same logic, we might as well allow MI5 to open all our letters, listen to all our telephone calls and bug our bedrooms, and for this creepy snooping to be allowed in evidence in court.

I don’t see how this differs from the powers given to the East German Stasi.

Not merely is this response crass and wrong, it is based on a total, wilful misunderstanding of the murder of Lee Rigby. We are looking in entirely the wrong direction, and so not seeing the blazing, illuminated signs which show what is actually going on.

Adebowale was obviously crazy when he committed his crime. An eyewitness, Cheralee Armstrong, told police he ‘looked mad, like he’d escaped from a mental hospital’.

During the trial of Adebowale, and of his accomplice Michael Adebolajo, newspapers received a very unusual warning from the judge that they must not report ‘the demeanour of the defendants’ on the video link from prison. What was it about their behaviour that prompted this strange instruction?

It wouldn’t be odd if they had behaved weirdly. Both killers were habitual users of cannabis, a drug increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, especially in young users. It was after Adebolajo began smoking the drug in his teens that his character wholly changed. Many sad parents of ruined teenagers will know about this process.

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’.

Most people don’t even know this, as it doesn’t fit the ‘Al Qaeda plot’ storyline and has barely been reported.

Yet how can these gibbering, chaotic husks have been part of a disciplined, intricate terror organisation?’

 

The case of Michael Zehaf Bibeau, the Ottawa killer, is similar. I wrote on 23rd October, here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/10/once-again-nobody-cares-that-a-killer-took-illegal-drugs.html

 

:

 

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, as he called himself after changing his name,  twice came up against the law on marijuana charges .

See here  http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/10/23/alleged_gunman_michael_zehafbibeau_had_long_list_of_runins_with_the_law.html

He must have been pretty persistent to have this experience, given the reluctance of modern police forces to bother with this drug unless it is smoked under their noses (and not always then). Nothing of any significance happened to him as a result, of course ( despite the alleged draconian ‘War on Drugs’ under whose brutal dictates we supposedly groan).

Though not ill enough to be detained (since the Western world shut its mental hospitals by the dozen, preferring  the neglect known as ‘ care in the community’ this is nowadays a very high bar, and few are) , his behaviour was clearly ‘erratic’, and the mosque he chose to attend didn’t seem very keen on him.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/suspected-killer-in-ottawa-shootings-had-a-disturbing-side/article21252419

 

The case of Man Haron Monis, the Sydney murderer is equally clearly that of a severely mentally ill person, a serial fantasist, exhibitionist, persecution maniac and writer of distressing letters to the relatives of dead soldiers, who had threatened to shoot his wife. I have seen no information about his drug use. Media tend not to seek such details actively, since the correlation between the use of mind-altering drugs and such crimes, though strong, has yet to trouble the world’s newsrooms.  Even so, my point is perfectly reasonable and fact based.

 

I think you owe me a public apology, and intend to post this letter on my blog where others may see it.  I am more than happy to publish any reply you care to send in the same place.

 

Yours most sincerely,

 

 

Peter Hitchens

Your Starter for Ten

Wearied of treading the worn circle of the Russo-German conflict (amazingly, some people think there isn’t one, a position so beyond belief that I can’t be bothered to contest it – one might as well try to prove that water was wet to someone who said it wasn’t) , and the other equally worn circle of the ‘war on drugs’, I thought I’d try to answer the question ‘What is general knowledge?’ which came up recently in a discussion of the TV programme ‘University Challenge’, one of the few things I actually watch nowadays.

 

I think the answer is ‘Anything a well-rounded person ought to be at least slightly ashamed of not knowing’.

 

You should have a broad idea of what happened in history, first in Britain, then in Europe, then in the Anglosphere and the in the world. of the shape of our planet, of the histories of exploration and scientific discovery. You should have read a reasonable amount of literature and poetry and at least be able to have a stab at identifying quotations. You should have a broad knowledge of the great classical composers, who they were, when they lived, the style in which they composed.  Similarly with the great painters, sculptors and architects. You should be familiar with the names and rough dates of major political, literary , philosophical and religious figures.

 

This list isn’t complete, nor is it entirely self-serving. I know nothing about the great operas, and am pretty much resigned to dying in ignorance of the difference between Aida and Rigoletto, though I might just be able to pick out something from the Magic Flute or Cosi fan Tutte, thanks to a long-ago attempt to set this problem right (which ended when I realised I was never going to like the interruption of what is often very powerful  music by incessant, repetitive warbling and weird melodramatics.   Once you get away from Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Bach and Handel, about whom I am quite capable of being wrong,  I would struggle to identify any composer. Likewise I can easily mistake Tennyson for Longfellow, and  have never really been able to cope with Thomas Hardy in prose or verse, having been  reduced to a heap of despondency by ‘Jude the Obscure’. But if pressed I admit I ought to know.

 

I don’t feel the need to know exact dates of reigns, Wars of the Roses battles (I never understood that war)  or inventions but I can tell you instantly that Simon de Montfort’s first Parliament was in 1265, that the Gunpowder plot was in 1605, that Trafalgar was on 21st October 1805 . I would rather floss my teeth than ever undergo another Shakespeare comedy (the tragedies and histories are a different matter) , and my brain glazes over when asked to identify characters or quotations from these works. But I know I should do better, and hate it when I can’t do it for the tragedies and histories.

 

I don’t recall the periodic table, having had nothing to do with it since I was 15, and I am completely baffled by most of the scientific questions on ‘University Challenge, (as are most of the contestants and, it seems to me, the question master) . (This really doesn’t worry me, whereas I would be distressed if I hadn’t heard of Ernest Rutherford or Louis Pasteur or Crick and Watson, and didn’t know what they had done, which I do think is general knowledge)  I think they are there to distract us from the growing ease of the rest of the questions, and the inability of many of the students to answer them even so. I don’t think anyone should be embarrassed to know nothing about popular music or sport, especially football, and I understand there are hours of special programmes for people interested in these things.  I’m not sure that a knowledge of who won what Oscars matters much either, as they are so eccentrically awarded. Knowing the names and rough dates of great films, and who played in them, on the other hand, seems to me to be important.

 

On an average Monday evening, I can be found shouting at the screen trying to tell whatever team it is the answers to what I regard as simple questions. Most of the time, I’m right, when they’re either wrong or dumb.  Unlike most such sad cases, I know that important knowledge can desert you at the crucial moment, and that , if you don’t hit the buzzer fast enough, nobody will ever know or care that you knew the answer to that particular starter for ten.

 

This is because, back in 1998, I took part in what I believe was the first non-student edition of ‘University Challenge’ , to be followed later by special editions of ‘professionals’ and (this Christmas) former students reunited in their late middle age. This link  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00g07p4

confirms its existence. It was called  ‘Tabloids versus Broadsheets’, a name that now couldn’t apply, since almost all newspapers are now tabloids, but for some reason you cannot watch it. The teams were: Broadsheets: Richard Ingrams, Alexander ‘Boris’  Johnson, Libby Purves and Decca Aitkenhead. The Tabloids were Tony Parsons, Jane Moore, Anne Leslie and me. The score (I find from cuttings) was 210 to the Tabloids, 165 to the Broadsheets. I can only recall getting one starter(surely there were others) which was about Lenin’s birthplace and earned me a patronising remark about my Trotskyist past from Mr Paxman . I can also remember being amazed that my team captain didn’t seem to have heard of Woodrow Wilson, as I dinned his name into her ear, and very nearly  lost us the point by almost saying something else. But perhaps she had just had the sort of meltdown that can overtake anyone.  

 

I wrote about the experience some years ago here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/10/university-challenge-blues.html

 

I still haven’t got over Tony Parsons’s amazing speed on the buzzer, combined with confident knowledge. He won it for us, though I played my small part.

 

 

Thus, when ‘University Challenge’ assembled teams of old boys and girls from several universities, including York, where I went, I had hoped for an invitation to do it again. But for some reason the York team  was mainly made up of postgraduates, undoubtedly distinguished, but who had done their first degrees elsewhere (one at University College, London, one at Imperial College, London, another at Merton College Oxford .  Only one actually did his first degree at York) .This seems odd to me. If people ask you where you went to university, you generally name the one where you did your first degree. But perhaps there really aren’t enough former undergraduates to form a team, and perhaps you’re only ever allowed one go. Even so, I reckoned that if I’d been on the team I’d have won it a net gain of 35 points. I won’t say who I fantasized about replacing.  I’ll be shouting at the screen again tonight.

Here's absolute proof mothers are better off staying at home

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

In our increasingly mad and dogma-driven country, most political slogans mean the opposite of what they seem to say. The best example of this is the phrase ‘family-friendly’. This describes measures to ensure that most parents hardly ever see their children, who are instead brought up by paid strangers.
One ‘family-friendly’ policy is taxpayer subsidies for the network of day orphanages where abandoned children are detained without trial for long hours, while their mothers are chained to desks miles away.
Yes, I’m laying it on a bit thick here, but nothing like as much as my opponents, who claim that mothers who stay at home to raise their own children are ‘chained to the kitchen sink’.
This stupid expression is at the heart of a long and furious propaganda campaign against real family life, waged by weirdo revolutionaries since the 1960s. Originally doomed to failure, it suddenly succeeded when big business realised that female staff were cheaper and more reliable than men.
But our near-totalitarian propaganda machine, which pushes its views in school PSHE classes, TV and radio soap operas and countless advice columns, has succeeded brilliantly in making young mothers feel ashamed of being at home with their small children.
And here is the absolute proof of that. A significant number of homes – four per cent – lose money by having both parents at work. Many – ten per cent – gain nothing from this arrangement. Yet they still do it. Many more gain so little that it is barely worth the bother.
The most amazing statistic of the past year (produced by insurance company Aviva) shows that thousands of mothers who go out to work are, in effect, working for nothing. The cost of day orphanages, travel and other work expenses cancels out everything they earn.
Many more barely make a profit on the arrangement. One in four families has a parent who brings home less than £100 a month after all the costs of work have been met.
How strange. When people ignore their own material best interests, it is a clear sign that they have been deluded by propaganda or fashion, or both.
How much better it would be for everyone involved if these mothers stayed with their children. Both generations would be immensely happier, the children would be better brought-up, neighbourhoods, often deserted by day, would revive. Yet, because of a cynical alliance between Germaine Greer and the Fat Cats of the Corporations, and because almost all women in politics are furious believers in nationalised childhood, we spurn this wise policy, even if it costs us money.

The midnight train to disaster

The ridiculous scenes on the railways over Christmas were in fact the result of 60 years of official hatred of rail transport.
The ‘major engineering works’ involved are being done in a rush, decades too late, as overcrowding forces even Britain’s train-loathing rulers to modernise a decrepit system. 
Passenger railways in this country survive only because so many people continue to prefer them to roads, despite the painful fares and crammed coaches. The Treasury, the Transport Department and the mighty roads lobby would have killed them off if they could have done, as has almost happened in the USA.
Huge and powerful interests – oil, construction, car manufacturers, domestic airlines – have always seen efficient, affordable railways as an obstacle to their growth.
I’m always amused by the way everyone remembers the piffling Profumo affair, in which nothing actually happened. But the far greater scandal of Transport Minister Ernest Marples is virtually unknown.
Marples ran a company that built roads. While he was Transport Minister, he continued to own shares in this firm until public outrage forced him to sell them – to his wife.
This charmer, who was really responsible for the smashing up of railways usually blamed on Lord Beeching, ended up by fleeing the country on a midnight train (of all things – it’s assumed he couldn’t have got so many of his possessions into a car or on to a plane) bound for Monaco.
Marples’s 1975 moonlight flit was a successful bid to escape a gigantic tax bill. He lived out his remaining years among vineyards in Beaujolais. Hardly anyone knows this.

So how  much did dinner with  Claudia cost, you Dave?

How much did we spend on David Cameron’s Chequers dinner with Claudia Schiffer, right,  that titan of global politics? We shall never know.  The British Government  – usually profligate with your money and mine – finds one activity too expensive. Oddly enough, the thing that is too costly is telling us how much we have paid for hospitality  at Chequers, the Premier’s official country house. Perhaps they could tell us what it would cost to compile the information? Something tells me it would be a lot less than the Chequers drinks bill.

Putin's foe is not our friend

THE supposedly serious Times newspaper describes Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny as a ‘dissident’, so putting him in the same class as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov or Vaclav Havel. Mr Navalny is in fact a pretty pungent Russian nationalist, whose views on migrants to Russia from the Caucasus make Nigel Farage look like Nick Clegg.
The Times – like so much of the Western media – is so wildly, simple-mindedly prejudiced against the Putin government that it garlands a man it would despise and attack if he were British, just because he’s an enemy of President Putin. One misjudgment has led to another. Mr Putin is not Hitler or even Brezhnev.
And Mr Navalny is not Solzhenitsyn either.

********

Cabinet files reveal the pitiful excuses Margaret Thatcher gave for introducing the GCSE exam, a dismal cocktail of hard slog and compulsory ignorance which has made secondary education such a futile misery for so many. Apparently, she didn’t want to upset poor old Keith Joseph, who was keen on it.
Well, Sir Keith was a tortured soul, but I’d still rather upset him than ruin the education of millions.
Then she didn’t want to look weak in the face of union protests. Again, couldn’t she stand a bit of loss of face in a good cause? I am amazed her ‘Iron Lady’ reputation still endures. The more we learn about her, the less it is justified.

********

I think that we could save a lot of honours heartache on New Year’s morning, as those who think they are great and good mutter in fury at the awards given to others and not to them. Let’s have a comprehensive, mixed-ability honours system.
Give a bauble to everyone, but reserve the best ones for those who can pay, or who live in nice postcodes. Our elite is happy to have this daft system in our schools, so how can they object to it in the giving of honours?

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

Hitchens versus Hari - the alleged 'War on Drugs'

Johann Hari, the controversial left-wing commentator, recently asked me to take part in an argumnet with him about his new book on drugs 'Chasing the Scream'.

 

I agreed to do so.

 

Here is an edited version of the xchange, which appeared in the 'Mail on Sunday' today, Sunday 4th January 2015. It opens with Mr Hari's first letter to me:

 

Dear Peter,

As you know, for the past three years I've been travelling 30,000 miles to discover the real story of the war on drugs. Late in my journey, shortly after spending some time in prisons in Arizona, I read your book The War We Never Fought. Although I disagree with most of it, it struck me as the most clear and lucid argument for the prohibitionist case in decades.

[But] I believe that if you had come on this journey with me – to see why drug prohibition really started, the victims it claims today, and how well the alternatives work – you may well have come to a similar conclusion to mine.

I think you make essentially five core arguments in your book:

 

 

1. Intoxication is immoral

You argue that when an individual gets intoxicated, he or she is seeking 'sensual pleasure sought for its own sake, separated from any effort or responsibility'. They are voluntarily entering a world of selfish indulgence, where only their own egos matter.

People should, you argue, be stopped from getting intoxicated because 'we should not reject the great gifts of the senses given to us… We should not try to muffle justified discontent by blurring our minds with drugs'.

2. There is no such thing as addiction

You point out that many addicts stop using their drugs without external support. This shows that they could have stopped at any time, if they had enough willpower. The people usually described as 'addicts' are in fact people who are excessively hedonistic, and by showing them too much sympathy, we keep them in their dangerous condition.

We should regard an addict instead as 'a greedy person with poor self-control'. Our compassion for addicts should be directed towards punishing their drug use at as early a stage as possible, to prevent them from spiralling into further use.

3. Advocates of drug legalisation believe drug use is a good thing and would like to see more of it  

You argue that advocates of ending the drug war celebrate drug use and endorse it and 'are campaigning, in effect, for more people to use drugs'.

4. Cannabis is especially dangerous

You describe cannabis as 'one of the most dangerous drugs known to man', and a primary driver of psychosis and schizophrenia. You cite the work of our mutual friend [the foreign correspondent] Patrick Cockburn, whose son Henry developed psychosis after using a lot of cannabis, and has bravely written about it.

5. Britain has never fought a war on drugs

You argue that drugs are already effectively decriminalised in Britain. If Britain did fight a drug war – rather than surrendering in 1970 – there would be significantly lower drug use and drug addiction than today.

I hope that seems like a fair summary.

Best wishes, Johann

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Johann,

You and I are arguing from different premises. You approach drug abusers from the point of view of someone who accepts that they already exist, and appears to regard their existence as inevitable. You also make no distinction between individual human kindness and public policy, apparently unable to accept that law must sometimes be harsh to be effective.

I think a properly enforced law against possession would have kept most current abusers away from the drugs to which they are now habituated. Your book is also profoundly contradictory. In much of the earlier sections, you write of 'addiction' as if it is an uncontentious fact. Then, you rather courageously acknowledge the evidence that 'addiction' is not an objective chemical process, and the truth that the myth of severe 'withdrawal symptoms' is just that: a myth. I get into immense trouble for daring to make these points. Somehow, I think you will get away with it.

If this is the case (and it is), why do society and law treat 'addiction' as a form of compulsion so powerful that drug abusers said to be 'addicted' are classified as sick rather than as criminals (though they have undoubtedly broken the law), and are offered 'treatment' rather than punishment

 

And why does so much of your book treat drug abusers as pitiable victims in need of love, whom it is wise to indulge by providing them with free needles with which to injure themselves, and free drugs with which to poison themselves?

Surely all these people would be better off if they had never resorted to drugs in the first place? Giving them free poison, and the means to administer it, is a breach of the Hippocratic Oath and a dereliction of the duty of any government.

Finally, have you really absorbed the implications of your own account of the contradictory campaigns for marijuana legalisation in Colorado and Washington State?

The Washington campaign admits that the argument that marijuana is safer than alcohol is a stupid one, and untrue. You yourself would prefer your nephews to drink beer than to smoke dope. Very wise. The Colorado campaign claimed that marijuana was less dangerous than alcohol.

 

 

These can't both be true, and in fact neither of them is true. Legal access to alcohol and cigarettes simply makes them easier to market and to buy. It doesn't make people use them more wisely and, since using them at all is bad for you, the claim that 'regulation' makes them safer is an obvious absurdity.

The falsehood is spread that drug abuse is a victimless crime. You know better than that, as do horrifying numbers of parents, siblings, uncles and grandparents in modern Britain. The principal victims of drug abuse (apart from the abusers themselves) are their families, who are in many cases condemned to look after the ruined husks of human beings, wrecked by drugs they thought were a harmless pleasure, for the rest of their lives.

Yours, PH

 

 

 

Dear Peter,

In the abstract, I might find many parts of your letter persuasive. But then I think of the hundreds of people I met whose lives have been ruined by this policy you support.

[Take] Chino Hardin. At 13, he became a crack dealer. I know Chino to be a compassionate person, but in the middle of a drug war he had to be trained to attack people and whip them and threaten to kill them.

When you are selling a product but have no recourse to the law, you have to be violent. It is the only way to defend your property, and in a dirt-poor place like the Brownsville district of Brooklyn, New York, drugs were the only valuable property Chino ever had a chance of owning.

As the late writer Charles Bowden put it, the war on drugs creates a war for drugs. If you criminalise a popular substance for which there is a significant market, it doesn't vanish – it is transferred to criminal gangs who will go to war over it.

And it is happening in Britain today. It is true that Britain does not round up drug users and put them on chain gangs and force them to go out and dig graves, as they do in the prison I went to in Arizona.

But we do imprison many people for drug offences – and, even more importantly, our drug trade is 100 per cent in the hands of criminals. They are fighting over it the whole time. How many of the stabbings we read of in the papers are drug gangs fighting over control of a turf?

Best wishes, Johann

 

 

 

 

Dear Johann,

What I'm in favour of is the clear, consistent enforcement of a 43-year-old law, which has fallen into disuse because politicians, judges and police officers have decided they prefer not to enforce it.

I do not imagine my preferred policy would end or solve the problem. I do, however, believe that it would greatly reduce it.

If people insist on breaking known and enforced laws, they must, for the sake of justice and fairness, be punished accordingly. This may well be tragic for them, but their examples will, in my view, save many others from much worse fates.

Thousands have campaigned to legalise cannabis in Britain over the past few years and Johann Hari argued that continuing the 'war on drugs' actually makes the problem worse

Regarding drug abuse as a sickness rather than a human failing has been tried in this country since 1971. This is the whole point of my book, that the most ambitious experiment in drug decriminalisation in the advanced world – far more widespread than Portugal – has been under way in Britain now for four decades.

Unless you regard our very high levels of drug abuse, our enormous cannabis-growing industry and our army of methadone users as a success, then you must grant that the decriminalisation you advocate has failed terribly.

I am tired of being told that the only way to show compassion is to indulge wrongdoing. It is, and always has been, necessary, in many cases, to be cruel to be truly kind.

The misery of Colombia and Mexico is caused, quite directly, by the selfishness of rich and self-indulgent young people in the West who (having no fear of the law and no moral objection to self-stupefaction) pour their dollars, pounds and euros into the drug trade. If these selfish people were scared away from these drugs, by effective prosecution of possession, the trade would die.

Sincerely, PH

 

 

 

Dear Peter,

I've broken [things] down to a few key questions where we differ:

1. Is intoxication immoral?

I keep thinking of a man I interviewed called Professor Ronald K. Siegel, an adviser to two US Presidents and the World Health Organisation, who spent his career studying the ways in which animals use drugs.

What he discovered was striking. He wrote in his book Intoxication: 'Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic 'pleasure' plants, then play with imaginary objects.

'Snacks on 'magic mushrooms' cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin's Thinker.'

Noah's Ark, it turns out, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night.

The impulse to get intoxicated is universal. All recorded human societies have found a way to do it. The poor Inuit didn't have any intoxicants in their environment – so they would starve themselves until they got an altered head-space. This impulse manifests itself very early: little children will spin round and round, even though they know it makes them sick, because to seek out a moment of altered consciousness is deep in our biology.

Mild intoxication is regarded as a good thing by almost all humans in almost all cultures – for a simple reason: they find it fun. Occasional fun is one of the reasons we are alive. These days, I get my highs from running on a treadmill. I haven't had any alcohol or drugs in years – but that dopamine hit is a real intoxicant for me.

Other people like a glass of wine, or a spliff, or a line of coke, or a tab of ecstasy. They are not bad people.

The question then is this: is it sensible to wage a global war that kills hundreds of thousands of people, and ruins millions, to try to prevent people expressing their innate natures, in a way that harms very few of them? I don't think so.

2. What causes addiction?

Many people will be reading this and thinking: 'Yes, but drug use risks addiction.' Until the 1970s, there were basically two theories of addiction – and they still dominate the debate. The first theory is the one you express – that addiction is a moral failing caused by people who partied too hard. The second is that addiction is a disease, where chemicals hijack a person's brain.

I discovered that there is a third theory. Here's how I have summarised a small part of it [in my book].

One of the ways the disease theory was established is through rat experiments. The experiment is simple: put a rat in a cage, alone. It has two water bottles. One is just water, the other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water and keep coming back for more until it kills itself.

An advert for the Partnership For A Drug-Free America explains: 'Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.'

But in the 1970s, Bruce Alexander, a professor of psychology in Vancouver, Canada, noticed something odd. The rat is put in the cage alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. So Alexander built Rat Park – a lush cage where the rats would have coloured balls and the best rat food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends. In Rat Park, all the rats tried both water bottles. But what happened next was startling. The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. All the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the Right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you, it's your cage.

Isolated and miserable humans will use large amounts of drugs; connected humans with a happy environment won't.

3. Does cannabis cause psychosis?

You believe cannabis causes psychosis and schizophrenia. [According to] Professor David Nutt, the UK's former chief scientific adviser on drugs, cannabis use has increased about 40-fold in the UK since the early 1960s, but rates of psychosis and schizophrenia have remained the same. If your theory were right, that wouldn't make sense.

Best wishes, Johann

 

 

 

Dear Johann,

1. Is intoxication immoral?

What does it matter if other creatures become intoxicated? Other creatures eat their own young, devour their sexual partners in mid-intercourse and commit serial rape. When humans do such things, or similar things, we do not excuse them because animals do them too.

It may well be that the impulse to get intoxicated is universal. It's certainly timeless (see Proverbs, Chapter 23). But we have the power to resist it. In my view, the readiness to resist some of our most pressing impulses is the foundation of civilisation.

As for intoxication, no doubt it is wise to allow a bit of it, if only so that people can discover about hangovers. Even the Amish allow their teenagers a period away from the strictness of their rules, and the Jewish festival of Purim more or less requires Jewish males to drink too much once a year.

But while such occasional events are funny, anyone with any direct experience of a drunkard in the family knows that drunks are not funny at all. So the wise society discourages too much drinking, with high prices and strict licensing laws.

You keep going on about a 'global war'. You could send the entire US Navy to try to stop supply, but if you do nothing to curb demand, it will fail, and fail painfully. Western governments use this 'war' as a substitute for the real, politically awkward battle they ought to fight, to impose their own laws on their own citizens.

2. What causes addiction?

As you know, this is an empty question, as there is no such thing as physical 'addiction'. 'Withdrawal symptoms', actually a form of hangover, are absurdly exaggerated, especially by films such as Trainspotting. You acknowledge this fact on page 170 of your book. Well, if it has no physical existence, how can it be said to have this mysterious power to compel free people?

Your new argument doesn't solve this question. There are many possible responses to living in grim conditions. I think it's time we stopped pretending that 'suffering' is any sort of excuse for drug taking. It's insulting to the truly poor. My solution is to apply the law as it is written, and impose the penalties allowed by it in an exemplary and consistent fashion.

The possession of illegal drugs would be met first by a genuine warning, and on a second occasion by imprisonment, increasing on each further conviction. Possession of drugs in prison, and smuggling them into prison, would likewise be consistently and severely detected and punished, as they are not now.

Effectively applied laws change behaviour, or why do most people wear seatbelts when they drive cars? Ineffectively enforced laws don't, or why do millions of people continue to use mobile phones while driving? Enforcement is all.

3. Does cannabis cause psychosis?

I believe that the correlation between the use of cannabis and mental illness is so strong that, until and unless we can establish that the link is not causative, we must take seriously the possibility that cannabis causes mental illness.

Most police officers know that cannabis use was [effectively] decriminalised in this country decades ago. I think my book was excoriated and abused mainly because the wide dissemination of the simple fact – that decriminalisation has already happened here and the ills we see are the results of that – is hugely subversive to a wealthy and selfish campaign for greedy and wicked change.

Yours, PH

 

 

Chasing The Scream, by Johann Hari, is published by Bloomsbury on January 15, priced £18.99. To get a 20 per cent discount with free p&p, visit mailbookshop.co.uk. 

 

Readers can also get 20 per cent off The War We Never Fought, by Peter Hitchens, paying £13.59 with free p&p. The offers end on January 18.

 

 

 

A (dissident?) French View of Germany and the EU

For the many readers (such as Mr ‘B’) who continue to believe that there is no conflict between Germany and Russia, or that the European Union is a happy voluntary club of equal nations dancing round in a circle and singing joyful songs in dappled sunlight, breaking off occasionally to eat free cakes, I provide this link to a translation (provided for me by a kind reader) of a recent article by the French historian and commentator Emmanuel Todd. It may prove illuminating, especially as it comes from a French source, when so many people assume that France has long ago surrendered its whole heart and mind to the European project.  Mind you, given the desire of many to avoid illumination, it may not.

 

 

http://en.youscribe.com/catalogue/tous/germany-s-fast-hold-on-the-european-continent-2518158