Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 210

'Mike B' , Where Are You?

Three days ago I devoted most of a posting to the comments made on the Russo-German conflict by a contributor ''Mike B'. There are, it is true,  quite a lot of people called 'B' who contribute to this site, but I think I have the right 'B' in this instance.

Yet, despite commenting two days ago on an unrelated matter, Mr 'B' has apparently not responded to my challenges. Can he possibly not have noticed that I had devoted an entire post to him? Or does this mean he now accepts my arguments? Or is he planning a grand remonstrance of great power and length (if so he will of course be free to exceed the usual word limit)?

Whatever the answer, I would like to know. 

Is Bob Dylan a poet?

Watching this extraordinarily evocative film of an obviously nervous and glamour-free Bob Dylan singing most of his song ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in 1964

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeP4FFr88SQ

 

I was struck by several things. First was the extraordinary familiarity of the face and voice, and my near total-recall of the lyrics, though it’s been more than 40 years since I paid much attention to Dylan and 30 years since I got rid of my old vinyl LPs in some intercontinental move or other.

 

Second was the instant feeling of familiarity with that odd moment, the early 1960s, when the storm of cultural revolution was gathering, and the first gusts of the coming gale thudding against the windows, but we had no idea of what was going to hit us. For some reason I feel sure that the film was shot on a Saturday afternoon – but this is an English view, and probably isn’t true. In England in 1964, Saturday afternoon and evening were the one time in our workful Protestant routines when most people felt free of obligation (Plenty of us still worked on Saturday mornings, and by Sunday, most things were shut, giving a sombre air to the world, and in any case Monday was crowding close again).

 

Third is to recall how safe we all felt then. The world, for the moment,was settled. I never believe the people who claim they were perpetually terrified of a nuclear holocaust. We were all pretty sure nobody would risk it, and we were right.

 

I think it  was that feeling of safety, that this was just a game we were playing, that made us so receptive to the beguiling new music of such people, though, try as I may, I can’t think of any single person as interesting and significant as Dylan then was. Someone told you ‘you must listen to this’, you heard him for the first time and knew it mattered, though not why. Some people say it’s poetry. I’m not qualified to give an opinion. All I know is that it somehow gets past your defences  and colonises your memory, and that you wonder ever afterwards if it is profound or just hypnotic. ‘Evening’s empire has returned into sand’ (though requiring a very odd stress on the first syllable of the word ‘returned’, for it to be sung or recited properly) is a sentence so rich with evocations of crumbling pyramids and deserted ruined cities among blown dunes that you can never get rid of it once you have heard of it.

 

The fourth thing is the faces of the audience, some indifferent, one or two actually wandering off,  some captivated - yet none of them understanding that they are witnesses to the beginning of a fame and power so great that it cannot really ever be measured.

 

The fifth thing is the strange way in which the film comes to life when you can see the wind blowing, flapping a backdrop on the stage, lifting people’s hair and shaking the trees. I have never understood this, but it has always been true for me that the sight of wind blowing in some film of a far-off time makes it seem hugely immediate. You can imagine yourself there.

 

And then, a second later, it comes to you that this real moment is utterly dead, cannot be reassembled, and can only be dimly imagined at this great distance.  What you have just seen was alive and is dead.

 

Is this perhaps because of the Bible’s habit of warning of the impermanence of all things with those pitiless words ‘and the wind shall blow over it, and the place of it shall know it no more’? Possibly.

 

 

Some readers may remark that it is odd that I rather like a song which has often been said to be about drugs. Is it about drugs? Dylan denies it, and the alleged references are ambiguous at most. I hope not. If it is, then it quickly shrivels down into something much less interesting.

 

How on earth did I come to be listening to this? A series of accidents. Slothful after watching ‘University Challenge’ on Wednesday evening I went on to watch the film ‘The Help’  (about the American south in the Civil Rights era) which I had sort of meant to go and see when it came out, and hadn’t. Now the BBC was bringing it to me at home. 

 

It has some merits, and some faults, which I won't go into now. But towards the end, it features a clip of Dylan’s mournful, self-pitying little song of rejection ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ (NB *not* ‘Alright’, a stupid formulation nearly as annoying as the wholly moronic and pointless use of ‘ ‘til’ instead of ‘until’ or ‘till’).

 

Gosh, that took me back. I remembered every word, and quite a lot of how I'd felt the last time I'd heard it, decades before.  I searched for it on the web, and found it (attached to a curious little film set in a wintry 1960s London which is moving without being in any way nostalgia-inducing). And then I thought I'd look for ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ as well.

 

Meanwhile, I have finished Richard Pipes’s ‘Russian Revolution’  (the complicity of Germany in this ghastly event is far greater than even I had imagined) and obtained an English translation of Friedrich Naumann’s ‘Mitteleuropa’. And in weeks to come I hope to have a bit to say about the American novelists Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson.

Notes on Mr Navalny

This may become important in the troubled months which lie ahead, so I’ll say it now. The Russian politician Alexei Navalny has long been viewed by Western media,  and presumably by others interested in such things,  as the possible leader of some sort of anti-Putin movement in Russia. So he may well be. But let’s not get carried away.

 

I was struck this morning by the description of him in the Murdoch ‘Times’ newspaper as a ‘ dissident’. Under the headline ‘Moscow shows its true colours in trying to silence a dissident’, my old adversary Michael Binyon (some of you may recall our clash earlier this year in a debate organised by ‘Standpoint’ magazine) wrote : ‘Alexei Navalny is a classic Soviet-style dissident — inflexible, uncompromising, daring the state to do its worst while sabotaging any face-saving formula that could blunt western criticism of the Kremlin.’

 

 

Gosh. This reminded me of earlier attempts to compare the trial of the fashionable  ‘Pussy Riot’ group to that of the dissident writers Daniel and Synyavsky under the Brezhnev regime, in 1965, also in ‘The Times’ in a leading article on 18th August 2012.

 

Both comparisons are ludicrous. The Pussy Riot trial was held in the open, and the defendants were charged with an offence which would be met with prosecution in many countries, namely disrespectful and disruptive behaviour in a sacred place, or one believed by Christians to be sacred, as the BBC would these days put it.

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

 

 

Daniel and Synyavsky’s trial was closed to the foreign press (and, so far as I can recall, to the defendants’ own families) and was for an ‘offence’ (publishing their works abroad ) which was not and should not be subject to prosecution in a free country.

 

 

I have argued that the Pussy Riot group would have got into trouble in plenty of other places for what they did – raucous protests in major places of worship being generally frowned on, but that prison was both harsh and unjustified, and not a fitting punishment for what they did. See here : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/08/pussy-riot-and-selective-outrage-1.html (note the predictions of a new Cold War, whose proponents have been seeking one for years and now have it).

 

But is Mr Navalny a ‘dissident’, to be classed alongside Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Koryagin (whose hand I am proud to have shaken,  now largely forgotten, though his battle against the abuse of psychiatry was particularly courageous and costly to him, so much so that his own wife could not recognise him when she was eventually allowed to visit him in prison) , or their equivalents in the Soviet Empire, the forgotten Robert Havemann , Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa?

 

 

Mr Navalny is a master of publicity and knows how to use the internet.  But is he to be compared with such figures? Is the fact that some people *do* compare him with such figures a lesson to us? When will we understand that modern Russia is not the old USSR? When will we grasp that, since the death of Lenin’s Party, Russia simply does not contain the clear moral battle between good and evil which a tiny few very courageous people were able to fight during that era? (Most of us would certainly have done as most Russians did, and learned to live with the disgusting thing).

 

I have noticed that liberally-inclined  Westerners tend to accept Alexei Navalny’s claim that a creepy video (I think this is the one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVNJiO10SWw )

, in which he used the word ‘cockroaches’ to refer to terrorists from the Caucasus, is a joke. (Some joke. While actual cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says in the 2007 recording, ‘for humans I recommend a pistol’.

 

Can this be the hero of the ‘Guardian’ and, in the view of ‘The Times’  the modern-day equivalent of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mstislav Rostropovich?  

 

Things *have* changed, if so.

 

Very few seem to know of Mr Navalny’s past associations with Russian nationalism, a political position which makes UKIP (which the ‘Guardian’ regards as appalling, and  ‘The Times’ never ceases to condemn and harry)  look like the vanguard of political correctness.

 

This association is said by some Russians to have led to his exclusion from the liberal Yabloko (Apple) political party of which he was once a prominent member,  to which event I have found just one glancing reference in the Western press (The Financial Times of 14th May 2011), which says he ‘left’ the party ‘after being accused of being a nationalist’ but also notes that his ‘hardline stance on guns and immigration grates with Moscow’s smug liberal elite’.  Do the ‘Times’ and the ‘Guardian’, flagships of London’s liberal elite, know about this stuff?

 

I should have thought it certain that two prosecutions of Mr Navalny (and one of his brother Oleg) on criminal charges are politically-motivated. It is also interesting that Mr Navalny has not actually been imprisoned (though his brother now has been) despite being convicted of charges under which he might have been locked up. Do the authorities want to keep him in circulation, while restricting his movements and blackmailing him?  

But I'd still like to see it shown beyond doubt. British coverage of his trials seems more or less to assume that the charges are politically-motivated. Doubtless it is so, but I should myself like to see some analysis of the evidence that has actually been presented against him and his rebuttal of it.

 

To indulge in my own unsuitable parallel (as Mr Navalny is in no way comparable to the Bolshevik old guard murdered by Stalin in the late 1930s)  the greatest damage done to Stalin’s appalling Moscow Trials in the 1930s was effected when it was proved beyond doubt by the Dewey Commission that various defendants could not possibly have been in the places where their acts  of treachery had been said to have taken place, see especially the case of Yuri Pyatakov, who couldn’t have flown to the airport he was accused of using because the flight he was alleged to have taken didn’t exist.  It’s all very well assuming that tyrants lie. It’s much more effective to show that they are doing so. Perhaps if the all-pervasive prejudice against Vladimir Putin’s Russia were absent, this would happen because journalists and reporters would see it was necessary to persuade rather than just to conform.

 

It is interesting that the same metropolitan intellectual classes which were so inclined to apologise for Soviet tyranny are those who now most fiercely condemn the Putin tyranny. Can it be that it's not the tyranny that troubles them, but something else? And if so, what? 

 

In any case, I wonder what sort of Russia would emerge were Mr Navalny to be propelled into the Kremlin by western-backed mobs, as some doubtless hope. I’m sure I wouldn’t want to be a cockroach, or a ‘cockroach’, under his rule.  As for his famous attacks on corruption, this is of course easy for those seeking power.  Russian friends commented on this to me that Boris Yeltsin had made his political name by being the loudest enemy of corruption, even riding (as Communist Party chiefs never did) in Moscow trolleybuses. ‘And look at what happened to him’, they add, pointedly. 

A Plea to Mr 'B' to read before he writes

I posted this as a comment on an earlier thread. But it raises a broader question:

I beg Mr 'B' to try a bit harder to read what is here before he writes. He writes this time: 'I have to confess, Mr Hitchens, that, no matter how often I try, I cannot understand the phrase "post- modern". '

All right then, let me just say 'an old thing in a new guise, using techniques only possible in the age of the Internet, rolling TV news and social media'. Does that help?

He says :' I do not accept, in this instance, the differentiation between the people and the elite when it comes to referendums. I recall a holiday I took in Slovenia in about 1997 and the anxiety of people whom I met to join the EU.'
'Anxiety' is an interesting word. Of course, the position for supposed sovereign nations such as Slovenia (actually a former part of Austria-Hungary, then a province of Federal Yugoslavia, was always that its supposed independence was a polite fiction. It was separated from Yugoslavia precisely *so that* it could be absorbed in to the EU.

Had Mr 'B' even tried to read my many postings about von Kuehlmann's 'Federative Imperialism' he would understand immediately what was taking place here. The province of a former power (in this case Yugoslavia) had been seduced from its former allegiance, as a way of breaking up that empire and absorbing its constituent parts into the rival power's rule and governance.

I can't really see why anyone in Slovenia should have been 'anxious'. As a former Austro-Hungarian territory, its entry into the EU was guaranteed.Though any serious attempt to maintain its existence as if it were a sovereign nation, with a real currency, enforced borders, armed forces etc, would indeed have been pretty anxious.No such fate was even remotely likely. How can this obvious process be mistaken for anything other than it is? A process for transferring territory from one power to another.

He asks 'Do you think that, in the case of Norway, the elite of that country just happened to be on the same side as the people - twice? '. No, as I understand it, the Norwegian elite were anxious to join but were frustrated by unusually well-informed popular resistance.

Mr 'B': 'The fact is that the peoples of twenty two countries have voted, either through referendums or through their representatives, to join the EU and that is not indicative of imperial power. '

I do not see the logic of this. If the imperial power has willing collaborators in the elites of the states involved, why shouldn't such votes indicate the strength and influence of the imperial power? Many of these states have never been truly independent in modern times, and fear the costs and dangers of genuine independence. Isn't it at all interesting that so many countries supposedly so grateful for their freedom from the USSR were so quick to hand over their laws, finances, currencies, borders, defence and foreign policy to the EU?

Having been cut loose from their former connections and markets, they also feared the EU's power to exclude their people and goods. The trade terms made by such countries as Poland for EU membership were very harsh indeed, hardly the actions of free states making a free choice between independence and dependence.

Mr B:'Those who have not wanted to join, or have wished to leave have been permitted to follow their wishes without impediment from the EU.'
An interesting statement. But which of the East European states has actually sought genuine independence and now maintains its own borders, laws and foreign policy? (see above for reasons)

Mr B' I doubt that many of even the elite of Germany or any other EU member state is familiar with Herr von Kuehlmann'

Who am I to say? I hope he is wrong.I would be surprised if he is right. Any student of German history will be aware of this episode, and certainly any properly educated diplomat or politician or will know of von Kuehlmann, as his British equivalent will know of Edward Grey or Arthur Balfour. AS for Friedrich Naumann, he is still revered by the German Liberal Party.

Mr B 'I would contend that you are placing far too much emphasis on events and personalities from a century ago. You talk as though World War II changed nothing, not even the German outlook on its neighbours. Germans whom I have met are obsessed by their recent history and their determination not to repeat it. '

How can anyone *be* so blazingly unresponsive? I have repeatedly explained precisely this point, that WW2 made it impossible for Germany to pursue these aims *openly*, as Germany. That is exactly why these objectives have now passed into the hands of the EU and are pursued in the name of 'Europe' rather than in the name of Germany.

But what is this Europe? Why, a German-dominated politico-economic bloc which exactly shares the century-old ambitions of Germany. .But German needs - markets, raw materials, food, land, labour and strategic territory reaching the Black Sea have not changed since 1914, and will exist as long as Germany exists as a people and a nation.

 

I posted it in response to this comment from Mr @Mike B':

I have to confess, Mr Hitchens, that, no matter how often I try, I cannot understand the phrase "post- modern". To my mind, it means "future", but perhaps I am being a little too literal. I do not accept, in this instance, the differentiation between the people and the elite when it comes to referendums. I recall a holiday I took in Slovenia in about 1997 and the anxiety of people whom I met to join the EU. (I assure you that I do not mix with the elite of any country which I visit.) Do you think that, in the case of Norway, the elite of that country just happened to be on the same side as the people - twice? The fact is that the peoples of twenty two countries have voted, either through referendums or through their representatives, to join the EU and that is not indicative of imperial power. Those who have not wanted to join, or have wished to leave have been permitted to follow their wishes without impediment from the EU. I doubt that many of even the elite of Germany or any other EU member state is familiar with Herr von Kuehlmann and I would contend that you are placing far too much emphasis on events and personalities from a century ago. You talk as though World War II changed nothing, not even the German outlook on its neighbours. Germans whom I have met are obsessed by their recent history and their determination not to repeat it.

 

Which was in response to this comment form me:

 

Mr 'B' says : 'The thing about empires is that their constituent parts tend not to have applied for membership'. Is it? The EU is a pioneer in imperialism, compelled to adopt post-modern methods because its ruling power is not permitted openly to exert or state its authority, while even so dominating the whole thing. Part of this arises from Richard von Kuehlmann's 'Federative Empire' scheme of 1917, under which Germany posed as the liberator of Poland, Ukraine etc so that it could take over Russia's eastern European empire. Part of it arises from the post-Hitler inability of Germany to make any kind of open assertion of interests or territorial demands, combined with the fact that Germany's needs continue to exist and still need to be fulfilled. I have explained this so many times here ('EU Eum?', 'The continuation of Germany by other means'. etc etc. ). If Mr 'B' hasn't been paying attention, could he please desist from commenting until he has caught up? If he disagrees with my assessment, could he be kind enough to explain precisely why he does so? But to repeat , without elaboration, the very assertion which I have striven for months to rebut in deep detail, verges on bad manners. I might add that, like his fellows in so many of these arguments, Mr 'B' is confusing a country's elite (which is quite likely to contain willing collaborators with the would-be coloniser) with its people and a referendum (rigged by party and media bias) with genuine public opinion. In the modern 'democratic' world, 'democratic' forms are indeed adopted when annexations are made. But this does not mean there was any real choice, or that they represented a genuine popular will. See Britain's own Common Market referendum, in which the leadership lied to the electorate about what was at stake.

 

A contributor says that I am suggesting an equivalence between  the EU and Russia. This recalls the argument about the 'false equivalence of opposites' which was often assumed by the left in arguments about the Cold War. 

 

The equivalence was false because of the nature of the Soviet and Communist governments on the 'other side'.

 

In this case there's no comparable ideological divide between the competing blocs. There are differences, but there are also similarities. The further east you go (whichever bloc you are in) the less liberty and the more corruption you will find.

 

But I am not asking anyone to take sides. on the contrary, i am saying it is utterly foolsih to ennoble a squalid struggle for territory ( as the Western media do) into a battle between good and evil.

 

Once you see that it is a squalid struggle for territory, you can also identify the actual aggressor, through the simple use of geography and mathematics (whose frontier is expanding? Who controls more territory after the event than they controlled before? In which direction has Ukraine gone after it removed the brake of 'non-alignmnent?); also by calling things by their proper names .

 

Thus 'foreign interference in Ukrainian politics ' is foreign interference in Ukrainian politics', 'a violent mob' is 'a violent mob' and 'an unconstitutional, lawless putsch against a legitimate elected government' is ' an unconstitutional, lawless putsch against an elected government'.

 

A good test of the validity of such language is to ask yourself this. What would you have called such actions and events if your enemies were behind them, and their outcome suited your enemies? 

If the description of your own side's actions is different from the description you would apply to identical actions by your foes, then you have deceived yourself .

The Slaughter of the Innocents Goes On and On

Precisely because almost everyone has forgotten it, I wanted to point out that today (the 28th of December) is the day on which we are supposed to remember innocent children who have been martyred by adult wickedness (even my small village Church did not feature the Collect for Holy Innocents’ Day today).

 

The explanation for this melancholy commemoration falling so soon after Christmas is obvious to anyone who knows the Gospels, but since many nowadays do not, it refers to the massacre of male children in Bethlehem by Herod who (told by the Wise Men of the birth of Christ) sought to kill a possible threat to his power before the child was old enough to defend himself.

 

But the Holy Family had by this time fled to Egypt, and so the massacre was futile as well as cruel.

 

Perhaps the most profoundly disturbing artistic representation of this event was made by the great Flemish painter Peter Bruegel

 

See it here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1127262/The-wider-view-Haunting-picture-conceals-silent-massacre-goes-display.html

 

The picture (as I explain in the link) was also a reference to what were then modern events, and so it has been crudely censored. Most generations are repelled by Herod, and cannot see that they have anything in common with him, or deny it when it is pointed out.

 

This is definitely true today of those who actively promote, or complacently ignore, the daily massacre of innocents which takes place in the abortion factories of our self-styled ‘advanced’ world , 180,000 a year in this country alone.  Many of them nowadays are girls , not boys, victims of the frightful gendercide perpetrated by cultures which regard female babies as disasters, and can now kill them in  the womb thanks to the universal availability of cheap scanning machines.  This is particularly evident in China, see here:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/gendercide-chinas-shameful-massacre-of-unborn-girls-means-there-will-soon-be-30m-more-men-than-women.html

 

But it is by no means confined to that country.

 

We should surely reflect on  this, and how we can permit it to continue and regard ourselves as civilised.

 

One of the most beautiful of all carols (the saddest are always the most moving), the Coventry Carol’,  is a lament (from an ancient mystery play, the Coventry Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant) for the lost children.

 

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay"?

Herod the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day

His men of might in his own sight

All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee

And ever mourn and may

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay."

 

The Gospel for the Day, from St Matthew’s second chapter, ends with that terrible quotation from Jeremiah: ‘In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.’

An apology! Rejoice!

The author of the post below

https://thewinnower.com/papers/which-is-more-injurious-alcohol-or-cannabis

concedes that I did not say that cannabis is more injurious than alcohol, and apologises for suggesting that I had. Given his earlier very strong insistence that I had said this, this must have taken some courage.

 

For reasons I don't understand, he seems to have had some difficulty in posting on this blog, so I am glad to provide this link. (**NB they were unaccountably trapped in the spam filter, which does sometimes happen for no good reason,I have now posted them) 

 

I might add that I disagree with several points in his article, principally about the impossibility of quantifying or ordering the dangers of differnt drugs, whose threats to us are entirely different in nature. I can see no purpose in trying to confect such an order, except to soften the image of cannabis in comparison to other drugs. A person afflicted with lifelong mental illness can hardly be said to be better off in any important sense than the victims of the various physical or mental illnesses associated with alcohol, heroin etc. His life is irrevocably wrecked,  as is that of his close family. 

 

Given the current state of scientific knowledge, I doubt very much that we shall, in my lifetime or his, have any better guide to the mental health dangers of cannabis than correlation. That correlation would, in my view, be clearer if it were more thoroughly and actively studied.

That should not prevent or delay us from acting accordingly, any more than a similar difficulty should have prevented or delayed (as, alas, it did) action to safeguard humanity from the dangers of cigarettes. It should certainly prevent us from being rushed into weakening the laws against cannabis, an irrevocable act quite unthinkable in our current state of ignorance. 

 

After all,  it would be no more surprising to find that a powerful mind-altering drug affected the mental health of its users, than it was to find that sucking toxic gases and burning matter into the lungs led to cancer of those organs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few responses

A few responses to points from readers:

 

Some readers seem to have misunderstood my plea for fewer, less hideous and less blazing streetlights as a general call for all such lights to be permanently turned off. I suppose such an interpretation is just possible, but I should have thought my use of phrases such as ‘ludicrously excessive’, or ‘turning night into blazing day’   and adjectives such as ‘glaring’, plus my praise for the ‘beautifully-lit’ Kensington Palace Gardens would suggest that what I in fact desire is fewer, better-designed lights which provide a reasonable illumination without driving away the stars.

 

Anyway, that is what I think.  I do not know what has happened to Mrs B’s area. But I should have thought the problem with many modern housing developments is that the absence of police and order means that crimes can be committed there (and are) in broad daylight, and are not much affected by streetlamps.

 

My unavoidable point, that we were safer when lamps were fewer and dimmer, and when police patrolled on foot, remains the same.  Our modern force, absent or whizzing past or above in cars and aircraft, unbacked by courts which hesitate to punish,  is not taken seriously by wrongdoers. If you’re not afraid of being seen or caught at all, the absence of streetlamps won’t influence your behaviour. I note our resident Griffin fan‘s point about a rape and murder near him. But I’d need to know more about this crime before I or anyone else could conclude that the absence of lighting was the cause of the tragedy, or even *a* cause of it.   Perhaps it was. But it is not necessarily so. Crime and disorder, violence and robbery happen regularly in well-lit places.

 

Mr Kenny says he hasn’t read my book on drugs (‘The War We Never Fought’ ) had he done so he would know that I there discuss the different sorts of argument that can be advanced against drug legalisation, and my confession that I know perfectly well that appeals to religious belief will not make much impact on my readers. So, as with the death penalty, I tend to concentrate on the utilitarian case. This is not difficult. It is interesting but (to me) unsurprising that courses of action supported by sound Christian doctrine tend to have beneficial effects in the temporal world.  

 

I’m told that Roman Catholics all mark Holy Innocents’ Day. But RCs of my acquaintance thought the 28th was the Feast of the Holy Family, so I’m not sure that’s correct. I am aware that the RC Church( and the tougher evangelicals) hold out against abortion when everyone else has given in.  But I am by no means sure that the RC Church is going to hold the line on such things for much longer.  All human institutions face immense pressure to conform to the Spirit of the Age.  If many RC clergy and worshippers want to fit in with the modern world  (and I think they do, judging by what one hears of senior RC clergy in this country) how long can the hierarchy resist?

 

Mr Jaremko asks : ‘Will Peter Hitchens condemn those in the Kremlin who openly advocate mass violence against Ukraine or even outright mass genocide against Ukrainians ? ( I have deleted some names from this as I have no means of checking his allegations reliably) .

 

Yes, of course I condemn such calls and those who make them.  Why wouldn’t I?

Good Picture, but no argument. A disappointing riposte.

My almost-interesting left-wing critic Mr J.T. White has responded here  http://livinginphilistia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/a-response-to-peter-hitchens.html?spref=fb

 

Making full use of the August 1969 picture which I shared with readers here some months ago to my earlier post responding to him http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/left-wing-person-nearly-says-something-interesting.html

 

Here’s his original article http://livinginphilistia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/why-i-respect-peter-hitchens.html

 

 As it’s Christmas, let’s pursue this a bit (but not too much):

 

He retreats from his nostalgia accusation, saying it was aimed at something called ‘the reactionary press in general’ (whatever that may be, such a construct would have been out of date in 1965, let alone now. Does he actually *read* the papers?). It looked pretty specific to me, but I’ll always take surrendered ground when offered, and not fuss too much about the face-saving words  which the retreating person sometimes feels the need to say .

 

But this was not my ‘main problem’ with what he wrote. It was his evasion of the problem of the left, that they cannot possibly have meant to foul up our society so completely, yet will never attribute any of the disasters they have caused to their own ideas.

 

After following the link , I still don’t think he addresses this. Perhaps he would care to.  I do very much recommend that he actually finds out what I think first. There are a number of books which he may read, starting with ‘The Abolition of Britain’, which may help. But he needs to grasp that I am not a Thatcherite or any kind of economic liberal,  and that I loathe the Tory Party, probably more than he does.

The street lamps are going out all over Britain? Rejoice

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I do hope that more councils will be switching off their horrible street lamps. George Osborne’s economic crisis (known bizarrely as a ‘recovery’) is as good an excuse as any for this.

Modern street lamps, like petrol stations, all seem to have been designed especially to offend and outrage the eye, as brutal and unsuited to their surroundings as can possibly be managed. A not-very-busy road near me is adorned with 30ft monstrosities that look as if they were the brainchild of the East German Stasi.

Bare, overbearing and deliberately hideous, they vomit a cloud of unpleasant light which can be seen from half a mile away. Ideal as they might be for spotting escapers to the West, they are ludicrously excessive for the place in which they stand. You can (I’ve done it) read the small print on an insurance policy by their bile-coloured glow.

You can imagine the conversations in the design studios, where the boss rips up each drawing, grunting, ‘Not ugly enough, Hermann!’ until they attain the desired standard of offensive, arrogant hideousness.

Evidence that glaring street lamps reduce crime is, to put it mildly, inconclusive. And the most affluent and privileged street in Britain, the lovely Kensington Palace Gardens, is beautifully lit by lovely Victorian gas lamps, of the kind that most of us wish had never been uprooted from our own streets. If its rich and powerful residents believed that such lamps put them at risk, they wouldn’t be there.

What they have, of course, is the police presence that was withdrawn from the rest of us nearly 50 years ago, without a word being spoken in an election or in Parliament.

It’s not just the nastiness of the modern street lamps. The diseased light which pours from them blots out the stars. And people who never or seldom see the stars begin to have an exaggerated idea of their own importance, which is one of the main problems of modern life.

It is now a rare privilege to escape them. The overpowering, humbling blaze of the constellations in the desert sky over West Texas is almost physically shocking to a victim of British urban planning.

But this delight is also available in rather surprising, less romantic places. I’ve seen the beauty of Baghdad’s palm-shaded streets by starlight, thanks to the absence of electricity following our moronic invasion.

And I’ve seen the serenity of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, so broke that its despots cannot afford to leave the lights on at night. I was confused. Why, in this dreadful place, did I feel so unexpectedly serene? It was because I could see the forgotten beauty of the night.

Don’t listen to the lobbyists for turning night into blazing artificial day. It is their money, not your safety, that really worries them.

A master in the art of proper policing 

Since I grew up, I have hated the crude and menacing scribblings pretentiously known as ‘graffiti’. When they first appeared on the street nameplates in the London district where I lived in the late Seventies, I used to go out on Sundays and clean them off.

It was a losing battle. They multiplied like dandelions. And when the Marxoid local council began holding classes for ‘graffiti artists’ at ratepayers’ expense, I realised it was a lost battle. Since then, most of the affluent world has got used to this selfish, spiteful and disturbing display on every available wall and train.

So this Christmas I think we should all rejoice at the diligent labours of Detective Constable Colin Saysell, now of the British Transport Police.

I have little time for the modern police, who have forgotten who pays them or what they are for. But I make an exception for Mr Saysell.

He grasps that the appearance of this ugliness in a neighbourhood is the first step along the road to disorder, and he fights it like a terrier.

He would arrest the celebrated Banksy if the property owner objected and reported him. And why not? If Banksy wants to paint on a wall, let him ask permission. Artists, be they never so great, buy their own canvases.

Perhaps it’s Mr Saysell’s choice, but it’s interesting that this devoted officer remains a constable after three decades, when ‘diversity and equality’ enthusiasts and sociology graduates with grandiose theories about ‘offender management’ and restorative justice rise to become chiefs covered in silver braid. For 30 years now he has been tracking these people and catching them.

He bases his commitment on the proven ‘Broken Windows’ theory, which says that when authority neglects the little things – litter, illegal cycling, vandalism – much worse disorder follows.

He says his targets are ‘bullies – they are imposing their will, their views on everyone else’.

‘It leads to other forms of urban decay and it creates a climate of fear,’ he adds.

I wish him a happy Christmas and a successful 2015, and I invite you to ask our political class why police officers like him have become so rare.

I have been waiting for someone to condemn the notices put up by police in London’s Covent Garden, warning in Romanian that plainclothes detectives are on the lookout for pickpockets. 

Surely if anyone from Ukip had done something similar, it would have been denounced on a dozen front pages and the BBC as ‘racist’? 

My fears of war over Ukraine grew greatly last week when I came under attack from David Frum, one of the keenest supporters of the stupid Iraq War in the George W. Bush White House. 

The same people and the same techniques are involved in drumming up this needless, dangerous conflict as were employed in fooling us last time. The big difference is that Russia really does have Weapons of Mass Destruction. 

Jailed, ill treated - but never forgotten 

Some months ago I asked you to write to the Iranian authorities about my friend Jason Rezaian and his wife Yeganeh Salehi, good and gentle people seized and held in nightmare conditions in Iran. Many of you kindly did so, and perhaps this helped secure the welcome release of Yeganeh.

But Jason is still being forced to sleep on the bare concrete floor of his cell in Evin prison, especially disgraceful given that he is far from well, suffering as he does from high blood pressure, a painful groin inflammation and eye infections.

I cannot imagine that any Islamic scripture justifies this treatment. I know that there are many decent people in Iran who loathe their government’s behaviour towards him and seek to have him released. How can we help them? I am not sure.

Most of the time Jason sees nobody but jailers and interrogators. They seek to persuade him that he is forgotten. Of course he is not, and never will be by anyone who has experienced his decency, personal kindness and generosity.

But given where he is, perhaps you could all pray so hard to the God that we share with all Iranians, that he will know he is not forgotten, and those who hold him will also know that God will not forget what they do.

 

********

My fears of war over Ukraine grew greatly last week when I came under personal attack from David Frum, who was one of the keenest supporters of the stupid Iraq War in the George W. Bush White House.  The same people and the same techniques are involved in drumming up this needless, dangerous conflict as were employed in fooling us last time. The big difference is that Russia really does have Weapons of Mass Destruction. 

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No Misrepresentation without Retaliation

Did I ever assert that cannabis was more injurious than alcohol?

What follows is for those who enjoy anatomising quarrels, which I know is a minority pleasure. Even so, on this dark St Stephen’s Day afternoon, it has given me some satisfaction to dissect a recent Twitter argument on the question above. It is important, even if it’s not exciting. And it helps me to organise my thoughts.

 

Everyone’s heard of the American colonists’ snappy slogan  ‘No Taxation without Representation’, though its apparent corollary,  ‘No Representation without Taxation’,  is nothing like as popular. (I can’t think why not).

 

I have my own slogan here. It goes ‘No Misrepresentation without Retaliation’.  I try to follow this rule quite strictly because, if you don’t prominently correct misrepresentations of your views on the Internet,  you will find that these misrepresentations become accepted as true.  That’s why, for instance, I took up so much space on David Frum’s recent attack on me.

 

 

On December 20th a  person I shan’t now name because for some reason (probably my own limited web skills)  I can no longer find all his original Tweets,  wrote to me on Twitter saying that‘…the harms of alcohol greatly exceed those of cannabis’. This summary suffers because of Twitter’s apparently random attitude towards the order of things, so that conversations seem to appear upside down, or even mixed up with each other, rather than as a timed record of the exchange. I'm sorry for this, and beg readers' forgiveness in advance for any resulting confusion.

 

 

I replied to him: ‘Of course they do. [Alcohol is] legal and cannot now be banned. If cannabis were legal, it would do as much if not more harm.’

 

My critic (who I believe to be a doctor and scientist, judging by his self-description on Twitter) responded :’My comment is unrelated to the legal status or prevalence of use of either drug, but rather their effects on human health.’

 

I then retorted :’Ah, so lifelong mental illness is not as bad as the various effects of alcohol? Daft.’

 

He objected to my use of the word ‘daft’ which was intended to describe the postulated idea rather than the person advancing it, but  then I don’t suppose it’s specially enjoyable to be told that your belief is daft, nor (if I am honest) did I intend him to enjoy it.

 

The odd thing is that this person seems to be nearly as sceptical as I am about the use of some legal drugs, though his interest is mainly in the opioids, which he sensibly regards as very risk for their users. I share this concern, but also have grave worries about ‘antidepressants’ and the amphetamines and amphetamine mimics which are prescribed to children (and increasingly adults) supposedly suffering from the fantasy complaint ‘ADHD’.

 

So he ought to be an ally. But mysteriously he has adopted the bizarre belief that alcohol’s harms are greater than those of some illegal drugs, notably cannabis. This belief is generally advanced by those who seek to relax the laws against cannabis rather than by people who seek (as I do) to tighten the restrictions on alcohol. Indeed, I can see no other purpose or use for it.  So I tend to greet the argument , and those who make it, with some contempt and hostility.  The more intelligent and educated they are, the more I think it irresponsible of them to endorse the illegal drug abuser’s most ancient (and feeble) self-serving excuse.

 

After all, it’s very poor logic to say that the existence of one legal poison is in any way an argument for the legalisation of anther poison. I honestly don’t know how a scientifically-trained person could accept it.

 

But then again, people will accept what they want to accept, even if scientifically-trained. This is why I’m always so unimpressed when a scientist or doctor is produced in support of some cause or another. Unless it’s in his own precise field of knowledge, his view is no better than anyone else’s. Even if it *is* in his own precise field of knowledge, a layman is entitled to challenge it on simple questions of fact and logic.

 

None of this would matter at all except that on the 23rd, the same person wrote, sort of out of the blue though perhaps jolted into action by my simultaneous twitter skirmish with David Frum,  ‘How about your baseless assertion that cannabis is more injurious than alcohol?’

 

I replied asking when and where I had said this. I supposed it was possible that, long ago, in my salad days when I was green in judgement,  I might have made such a claim. If I did I here retract it, for the reasons set out below.

 

But I was pretty sure I hadn’t done so for many years,  if at all, and if confronted with any such quotation I would there and then have regretted my mistake and retracted the words. Leaving aside any other question, I have good reason to avoid doing anything to promote alcohol, or minimise its dangers. I have seen what it can do.

 

Since I wrote my book 'The War We Never Fought' and learned (as a result) much more about this debate, I have been keenly conscious that the available objective facts on drugs and their effects are very limited. That’s why (for instance) I no longer have any opinion on whether cannabis should be classed ‘B’ or ‘C’ in the schedules of the Misuse of Drugs Act. I used to, but I was wrong to do so and wish I hadn't made this mistake.

 

The point of these classifications is not to reflect a researched and objective difference between the dangers of Heroin, LSD, Cocaine and Cannabis. It is to separate cannabis from Heroin and Cocaine, in the public mind and in law, so giving the false idea that cannabis is somehow less dangerous than other illegal drugs. There should in fact be one class: ‘Illegal’, and there should be no distinction in law between possession and sale.

 

The dangers of these drugs are different.  All, in various ways, can lead to terrible tragedies, as can alcohol and tobacco. All can in their different ways shorten or wreck lives. Some can be directly blamed for the deaths of users. But there are also living deaths which, for the person involved and those who love him, seem to me to be as terrible as death, lifelong mental illness being one of them. Who can say that the worst extremes of cocaine or heroin abuse or LSD are more or less dangerous than the lifelong irreversible mental illness which is increasingly correlated with cannabis? What measure can objectively say which is worse? Some exercise of individual opinion or judgement must be involved.

 

Attempts to create such an apparently objective measure, some of which I have carefully examined, mix objective hard real science with soft subjective pseudo-sciences such as psychology and sociology. Such things are as strong as their weakest link. The hard scientific material in them is not reinforced by the soft pseudo-scientific wrapping. It is weakened by it.  The soft science is not strengthened by being packed next to hard science. It just damages the hard science.  

 

While such studies also quite rightly point out the appalling dangers of alcohol and tobacco, they do very often seem to have been conducted or promoted by or for people who have for one reason or another swallowed the ‘what about alcohol and tobacco, then?’ non-argument which I have so many times rebutted ( and in my view comprehensively refuted) on this blog.

 

So I would now say that any such statement as ‘alcohol *is* more dangerous than cannabis’ or that  ‘cannabis *is* more dangerous than alcohol’ could not reasonably be made by an informed person.  My statement to Mr X that if cannabis were legal it would do 'as much as if not more' harm than alcohol was clearly connected to the highly likely increase in the numbers of cannabis users which would follow legalisation. It was not a claim about the objective harm of cannabis as compared to the objective harm of alcohol.

 

Mr X clearly understood that,  as he said *his* comment was unrelated to the legal status or prevalence of either drug. I think it fair to say that I can logically infer from this that his view on the dangers of each drug did not depend on the number of people using it, and was an absolute statement about their comparable dangers, as drugs .  As such, it is a statement of the sort I don’t believe an informed person can make.

 

Anyway, when asked when I had said what he alleged I had said, Mr X  replied ‘You implied exactly that [that I believed cannabis was more injurious than alcohol] in the exchange to which I provided a link’  That exchange, you may recall,  was partly reproduced above. (For those who can’t be bothered to go all the way back, the key part of it ran: Mr X‘…the harms of alcohol greatly exceed those of cannabis’

 

Me: ‘Of course they do. [Alcohol is] legal and cannot now be banned. If cannabis were legal, it would do as much if not more harm.’

 

Mr X:’My comment is unrelated to the legal status or prevalence of use of either drug, but rather their effects on human health.’

 

I then retorted :’Ah, so lifelong mental illness is not as bad as the various effects of alcohol? Daft.’)

 

I responded to his claim that I had ‘implied exactly that’  by asking  ‘How does one ‘imply’ something “exactly”?’

 

It seemed to me that an implication, by definition, could not be exact, especially as ‘implications’ so-called so often turn out to be the subjective conclusions drawn by others from imaginative readings or hearings of the writings or sayings of people they don’t like.

 

I then said ‘In my long experience of silly critics, when they use the words “You implied” they mean “I have just made this up”.’ .Which in my long experience, is true.

 

At this point Mr Frum, the Sage of the Bush White House , intervened in our conversation. It would be too complicated to explain how or why. But he did.

 

I then asked Mr X ‘Aren’t you supposed to be a scientist? Devoted to precision and truth?’

 

It then became a bit rude, and has not advanced since. I recognise that this is not a complete account, and would in fact be glad if anyone comes across any additions which aid understanding.

 

But I stick absolutely to my original position, that the claim that I had asserted that cannabis was ‘more injurious than alcohol’ was not proved or even supported by the evidence Mr X adduced. And if he is indeed a scientist, devoted to accuracy and truth, he certainly shouldn’t go round patting himself on the back, as he appeared to be doing when we last communicated.