Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 227

A Visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo goes wrong

'At the end of this highway was a scene so intensely shocking that I can recall it instantly by closing my eyes. Picture a great, uneven pit, the result of decades of energetic and inconsiderate mining, a gang rape of the earth’s surface perhaps a quarter of a mile across, under a brassy sun. Then notice that in dozens of small excavations, bowed black figures are hacking and dragging and pulling small objects from the earth. It is ominously quiet apart from the crunching, tinkling noise of hard labour. Every couple of minutes, another of these despairing figures emerges from the bottom of the pit with a laden bicycle and plods toward town. It is like something from before the Middle Ages. One of the Brueghels, or perhaps Hieronymus Bosch, might have painted the scene, only they would have shown it in darkness, lit up by a red glow.

'We approached the fat cop, sheltering under a shady awning, who seemed to be in charge. He wasn’t. He was plainly deferring to a dead-eyed boss man, with one badly chewed ear, sitting to the side. We explained that I wished to write about the mine and that we needed to take some photographs. The cop riffled through our many official permissions and said we needed yet more paperwork. I took this to mean that he needed some paper money, but our Congolese fixer refused to consider this possibility. We went back to Likasi to a series of offices. I am not even sure if we got the necessary chit.

'It wouldn’t have mattered. As we bounced and squeaked down the miserable track once more, I noticed that the procession of laden bicycles had inexplicably stopped. Then we passed a small group of miners, including a boy of about 12 who snarled at me with an expression of pure hatred such as I had not seen before that day, would shortly see once more, and which I hope not to see again. My white colleagues, one African-born and the other with years of experience in the more worrying corners of the continent, also noticed strange signs—large stones on the road and men running uphill away from us.

'None of us realized just how much danger we were in... '

 

You can find out what happened next in 'Short Breaks in Mordor', my new e-book, which you don't even need an e-reader to read. As it isn't an ultra-feminist rant, or a biography of a member of the Marx family, or a misery memoir crammed with rude words, it's not going to be published as a three-dimensional book, or reviewed in the respectable media. That's why I'm publicizing it here:

 

You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:

See here : 

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You can find the book here:  

 

 

http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK) 

 

 

 

and 

 

 

 

http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)

 

The Desire for Liberty is not Nostalgia

First can I reassure Mr Djilo that I in no way resent being compared to Groucho Marx? I’ve never found the Marx brothers very funny myself, but I assume the fault is in me, and know that many others, whose taste I respect,  do think they’re funny,  – so  I’d still say that Groucho has contributed far more to human happiness than his Trier-born namesake. Not that Karl was humourless, he had a good line in heavy-handed sarcasm.

 

But I do rather resent what Michael Kenny writes: ‘The point about ID cards is that we live in an ever shrinking world in which we have an ever greater number of people willing and able to commit atrocities on an almost apocalyptic scale. The means for private individuals and groups to carry out clandestine 9/11 style attacks wasn't really an issue in horse & cart ye olde englande, and that is why the quaint liberties and freedoms Peter romanticises over were the standard of the day. The present day predicament is further exacerbated by lax immigration controls and the multiculturalism our three party state subscribes to. That means ever increasing numbers of foreign peoples moving about various countries about whom we know little or nothing. In short, the kind of societal and cultural chaos which prevails in the West today needs the necessary safeguards in place to ensure that that chaos doesn't result in catastrophe of one or another. I'm no more in favour of ID cards (etc) than the next person. But I have to concede that as a nation we have (unfortunately) fundamentally altered the make-up of our society, and as such a price will have to be paid.’

 

Because my response has to be ‘So what?’

 

I must mention here the old question of ‘What does the ‘D’ stand for in ‘ID cards’, which  I think important because the use of this strange non-acronym is a symptom of the general thoughtlessness of so many when discussing these things.

 

There is nothing ‘quaint’ about restraints on power. They are as valid now as they ever were, and the behaviour of the Western powers after September 11 2011 (Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, waterboarding, vastly increased surveillance, ‘Homeland Security’, the Civil Contingencies Act, catch-all laws against ‘glorifying terrorism’) would have been immensely worse had they not been restrained by Bills of Rights whose provisions are as modern as the Internet – framed as they were by men who knew well the universal, timeless character of power, and its tendency to corrupt those who wield it.

 

Tyranny can arise amidst modern technology and buildings, and has done so many times in the past century. Imprisonment without trial, torture chambers, arbitrary execution have all flourished in the age of radio, TV,  the computer and the jet engine. And so safeguards against these things are just as necessary in such times. The need to defend liberty will never be out of date.

The September 11 2001 attacks were carried out by persons legally in the United States with valid visas and identity documents. So far as I know the same is true of the culprits of the 7th July 2005 bombings in London.

 

I fail to see how obliging law-abiding British subjects to carry identity cards would in any way overcome ‘ever increasing numbers of foreign peoples moving about various countries about whom we know little or nothing. In short, the kind of societal and cultural chaos which prevails in the West’.  

 

The solution to that is to control your own borders. If you do not (and we do not),  then registration of the law-abiding lawful residents will in no way inhibit the behaviour of the unregistered, unrecorded non-residents, who will by definition be spared from the need to carry such cards.

 

Registration of existing residents is a wholly illogical response to the problem Mr Kenny cites. In any case, what use are such documents. A resident person, born and brought up here and properly registered, could perfectly easily decide to pursue a criminal terrorist course. How exactly would compelling him to carry such a card inhibit him? On the contrary, anyone who placed any value on such things would therefore be obliged to let such a person pass. He has an ‘ID’ card. Therefore he is assumed ( as were the September 11 murderers) to be legitimate.

 

The problems of whether ‘ID’ cards can be forged, manipulated – and the problem of what they actually declare - are not addressed. They cannot be. Such cards are useless in combating terror or crime Such a card merely says that the authorities (if they issued the card) believe the bearer to be who the card says he is. The police officer who takes this on trust may well be making the biggest mistake of his life. They are not merely useless against real terror, which is very well-organized and always has perfect documentation. They provide dangerous false reassurance to the bureaucratic mind.  

 

Their only use is to allow the state to have more power over the law-abiding, and more information about the law-abiding than it could normally gather. And, as I say, to reverse the proper relation between state and individual.

 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn yearned for left-wing western intellectuals to be granted a brief stay in the Gulag, and to hear the guards bawl at them, as they marched meekly off to their slave-work in the dawn twilight, the words ‘Ruki Nazad!’ (Hands behind your backs!), and to realise that they would actually have to adopt this humiliating, defenceless posture or be beaten until they did. He reckoned it might cure them of their fellow-travelling.

 

In the same spirit I do wish all these ‘ID card’ merchants could be transported back to the days of the Warsaw Pact, and find out what it is like to be in a country where the police can stop anyone when they feel like it and demand ‘Dokumenti, pajalsta!’. Once you’ve actually seen and felt what it’s like to be a state serf, perhaps you’ll value your freedom  bit more. In the meantime, trust me. It’s important, and nothing to do with ‘Ye Olde England’. Shame on you. 

We're queuing meekly in security, clutching a one-way ticket to disaster...

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

We have become a nation of suspects. The last wisps of British liberty are being stripped away and, as usual, this is happening with the keen support of millions.

First we have a scandal, entirely without hard evidence so far, which supposedly affects the whole of Parliament.

Scandals of this kind – vague, general and fed by rumour – are a feature of societies on the eve of regime change.

They discredit ancient institutions and make troublemakers look virtuous. The charge of child sex abuse is so horrible that anyone who is accused of  it is automatically presumed guilty and shunned by all, so it is more or less unstoppable once it has been launched.

Then there are the comical new ordeals travellers must face if they are foolish enough to want to go anywhere by plane. At least they would be comical if we were allowed to laugh at them, but even to joke about ‘security’ in the hearing of some grim-jawed official is to risk detention and a flight ban.

There’s an odd thing about this. We are constantly told that our vast, sour-faced and costly ‘security’ services, and various ‘British FBIs’ and ‘British KGBs’ are fully on top of the terror threat, and ceaselessly halting plots.

How is it then that they claim not to know if harmless aunties from Cleethorpes or Worthing are planning to manufacture an airborne bomb with the ingredients of a make-up bag?

Just in case such a person is  a jihadi sleeper agent, she, and thousands of other innocents, must be treated as criminal suspects. Like newly registered convicts, they must stand in humble queues, meek before arbitrary power.

They must remove clothing, allow strangers to peer at  their nakedness in scanning machines, permit inspections of their private possessions and answer stupid questions with  a straight face. They must be compelled to accept this treatment without protest or complaint. In fact, when we enter an airport these days, we enter a prototype totalitarian state, a glimpse of how it will eventually be everywhere if we do  not find a way of resisting this horrible change.

This week Parliament will be panicked into passing measures allowing the State to know more than it ought to about our emails. It will not stop there.

It is not true that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

The State – which last week said it had ‘lost’ crucial records about its involvement in the totalitarian practice  of extraordinary rendition – makes horrible mistakes all the time.

If one of these happens to you, you will be whisked into a world of powerless terror.

It was to protect against these things that our forebears fought like tigers against arbitrary power, for the presumption of innocence, for independent juries, and for Habeas Corpus.  It is why they tried to ensure that our police forces never got too big for their boots.

They had seen what happened on the European continent where such safeguards were neglected. They wanted a state that was beneath our feet, not over our heads.

Now, piece by piece, we are losing that. Each piece is so small that most won’t believe it matters, but they slowly pile up into a tremendous threat.

It may be possible to defend our freedom, and even regain it, but not if we allow ourselves to be manipulated by scandal and state-sponsored fear.

The 60s rebel who saw sense

How the world changes, and in such a short time. A clever colleague recently found this long-buried 1969 photograph of me as a teenage revolutionary – actual proof that I was there in the 1960s, and can remember them too.

In those odd times, the ideas  I then supported were rightly considered crazy by most people. For instance, a publication called The Little Red Schoolbook was prosecuted for obscenity and condemned by clergymen.

Then, its ideas about sex and drugs were shocking. Now they  are pretty much standard-issue in PSHE classes in British schools  – and the Bishop of Oxford says  we might as well give up pretending to have compulsory school  religious assemblies.

The book itself is now a quaint antique and is to be published again (almost certainly with no fuss) later this year.

It’s strange that, in my days of donkey jackets, red shirts and big hair, I eventually learned that revolutions mainly destroy  good things, and replace them with bad ones – and so gave  all that up.

But the rest of my student generation, who now run  the world, stuck with the revolution. They only changed their clothes and their coiffure. Underneath they’re still in the 1960s.

Cutting slices from our hard-won liberty

I don’t care about same-sex marriage.  It doesn’t matter. It’s the collapse of heterosexual marriage that’s important.  But it does matter when triumphalist sexual revolutionaries force their opponents to act against their consciences.

So please note this bit of the row about the Belfast Christian bakers who declined to bake a gay-themed cake, whose icing would have proclaimed support for  same-sex nuptials. Another baker, by  the way, happily complied with the order.

But that’s not enough. The Christian bakers may now be pursued through the courts. I cannot see how this can be called a free country if the law has any say in such matters.

If you can be forced by law to publish a view you disagree with on a cake, then presumably you can be forced to do so in  a book, a newspaper or a TV programme.

I don’t especially mind a statue of Gandhi in London. He was a remarkable and courageous man, though often wrong. What I object to is the reason for it – commercial grovelling. 

On the same principle, we will end up with a 30ft image of the mass murderer Mao Tse-Tung in Parliament Square. And what if North Korea one day turns into a big export market?

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

I Lose my Biggest Fan - Plus Other Mishaps, Ripostes and Encounters

A Mr Spencer says he may have ceased to be my ‘biggest fan’, apparently because I am prepared to listen to, and see good qualities in, some of my opponents. If he regards this as a fault, then I shall be pleased to lose him as a fan of any size.

 

Mr Bunker, that man of mystery still prevented by unnamed forces from even considering the possibility that God might exist, nonetheless has no difficulty with carrying a compulsory state-issued card, and registering himself with the authorities. That, I’m afraid, is a reflection upon him, and perhaps on what he is used to in Germany. The states which make up modern Germany were almost all despotisms in which the inhabitant was the unquestioning servant of that state. If the state accuses you of a crime in such jurisdictions, your guilt is presumed in practice (though in modern times lip service may be paid to the presumption of innocence) and you may be confined almost indefinitely while you await a trial in which all those who rule on your guilt will be employees of the state. You will be expected to co-operate with your own prosecution. In all matters you must acount for yourself to the state, rather than the other way round. 

 

In Britain until recently we had a  different tradition, in which the state , in theory and practice, was the servant of the individual. That is why in Britain the police must identify themselves to us, but we do not have to identify ourselves to the police. As recently as the 1950s,we still had enough guts, and enough good judges, to throw off the useless identity card system imposed on us for no good reason during the war. The introduction of identity cards in this country would complete and make irreversible the process by which a free country has, slice by salami slice, been turned into a continental jurisdiction. Such cards are the material embodiment of the presumption of guilt, and of the subservience of the individual to the state. As I’ve often said, those who won’t worship God will usually end up worshipping earthly power instead.

 

‘Rosaleen’ makes the invariable false assumption of Irish nationalist enthusiasts, that opposition to the criminal terror gangs of the IRA and the ‘Loyalist’ equivalents is in some way anti-Irish. On the contrary, it is simply pro-human.(anti-kidnap, anti-abduction, anti burning people to death, anti-blowing people to bits, etc etc) . Does she really think I am either ignorant of, or unmoved by, or unashamed by the Irish famine?  I would urge her to read, at least, this article

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/10/the-dangerous-edge-of-things-a-visit-to-londonderry.html

 

Mr ‘F’ says I ‘never’ criticize the Labour Party. This is simply not true. I have been a newspaper columnist now, with a  small break, since the late 1990s. In that time I have also written several books on public policy, and taken part in numberless broadcasting appearances and debates. In these appearances,   articles, and  books, I think Mr ‘F’ will have no difficulty in finding quite a lot of criticism of the Labour Party, in and out of government.  

What he actually means is that I refuse to join in a partisan campaign to save the Tory party from its deserved fate at the next election. Why should I? I loathe the Tory party for the same reason as I loathe the Labour Party. It is the enemy of Britain. But at least the Labour party offers itself to the public as a left-wing anti-British, pro-EU pro-crime anti-education party that despises the armed forces. The Tories , who are the same in all respects, lie about their aims and purpose and so occupy the seats in Parliament that should be held by a pro-British party. It is a matter of urgency that they are destroyed so that this change can happen.

 

The nature of the government under which we suffer will be identical whoever wins the next election. The nature of the future will be entirely different if the Tories collapse. I do indeed advise principled Conservatives to vote Labour (note the capital ‘C’ – those conservatives who have already abandoned the Tory Party forever have no need to do so). In this way they would achieve the same sort of government they seem to desire, but could also distance themselves from the shameful campaign of personal vilification being directed against Ed Miliband.

 

You do not need an e-reader to get my new book

You do not need any kind of e-reader to read my new e-book, 'Short Breaks in Mordor'

 

You can download it through the Kindle Cloud Reader on to any device:

See here : 

http://amzn.to/1tuzY9f

 

You can find the book here:  

 

 

http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK) 

 

 

 

and 

 

 

 

http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)

 

 

 

The late Christopher Hitchens attacks the EU! Or Does He?

Here  

http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/weekend-press-watch-5-6-july-2014/#

 

you will find what appears to be an official European Commission website, which purports to note and correct ‘myths’ and ‘errors’ about the EU in the British media.

 

What it calls ‘errors’ seem to me to be, in many cases, differences of interpretation or emphasis, disputes over hard-to-quantify figures or objections to reasonable journalistic licence such as Christopher Booker’s reference to Brussels as being the real capital of this country. Of course this is not officially so. But nor is it a ‘strange suggestion’ to anyone other than an EU propagandist. In terms of the origin of our law, the conduct of our trade policy and of much of our foreign policy,  Brussels (along with Luxembourg,  seat of the European Court of Justice) is increasingly the fount of power.

 

A lot of the blog is simply an illustration of exactly why power of any kind should have no influence over newspapers.

 

But I thought it hilarious that, in a blog loftily taking the press to task for errors, the original version read:

 

‘ “Handing policing powers to Brussels” or cooperation to tackle crime?

The Times saw the UK opt-in proposals as “handing policing powers to Brussels”. Of course, this is all about a legal framework for cooperation to tackle criminals, to make sure justice works across borders and to guarantee the right of victims and defendants. This is not “transferring policing powers to Europe” or conversely “clawing back powers from Brussels” in the words of the Daily Mail.

In the Mail on Sunday, meanwhile, two star columnists took rather different views of the EAW. On p27 Christopher Hitchens calls it “an outrageous EU intrusion into our legal system” a rather odd view given that it has only ever applied because the UK and other Member States wanted it and will only apply in the UK now if the government opts in to it.’

 

Christopher Hitchens!  Did he now? My late brother, alas,  has not been writing for anyone since December 2011, and never did so for the Mail on Sunday. Had he done so, he would have been supportive, not critical of the EU (many of his admirers do not realise how keen he was on the project).

 

So the authors of this blog taking others to task for their mistakes, manage to confuse a deceased American Marxist internationalist with a (so far) living British conservative patriot. Initially, when I pointed this out to them, they just changed it. I said this was really a bit off,  given the nature of the blog (you can see our correspondence at the bottom of the page, but you’ll have to negotiate a fairly laborious registration to join in). I thought they should prominently admit their error. So now it as it is, which is better than it was, but still not very good. We all make mistakes. Even I do so. But if I ran a whole blog devoted to attacking others for making mistakes, I like to think I’d be careful to keep it error free. 

Another Generous Opponent

Many readers here will recall my exchange with ‘Citizen Sane’ on the subject of ‘addiction’ (you may read it here http://bit.ly/GzI61T

 

Now I have received a letter from a person who got in touch with me some months ago to give me a piece of his mind on the same subject.

 

He wrote:

 

‘A while back I wrote to you about your opinion on the "fantasy" of addiction (and even wrote my own little piece on it). I've been doing some thinking on my opposition to your views on addiction and have come to the conclusion that I may have been wrong on some of the points I made. You've no reason to remember the initial correspondence and you've no reason to care what I think now, but I thought I'd get in touch to show that some people do actually go away and think about their opinions and possibly re-evaluate them.

 

‘On Newsnight with Matthew Perry the point was made - one that he disagreed with - that if what he was saying was true, that addiction is an illness that cannot be controlled one little bit, then people would never get off drugs or stop drinking (he almost went on to contradict himself to say that he is in control while denying that people are in control... perhaps a bit confused). I feel a little bit stupid for only just agreeing with your point now because when I think about it now it just seems terribly obvious to me.

 

‘I also now agree with other points you've made in different discussions on, for example the so-called "soft" drug cannabis, that it doesn't just do harm to the individual abusing themself, but also to the people around them who have to put up with them and also to countries where gangsters are profiting massively from this due to, as I think you put it, "rich selfish western kids" or something to that effect. For many, on the face of it, it sounds awful, heartless and a bit rash to not give any sympathy to the person abusing himself with poisons and think only about the family and friends picking up the pieces, but does the idiot deserve the sympathy? Probably not.

 

‘When I initially sent you the e-mail on addiction I did describe myself politically at the time as a libertarian, which is probably why I came across as a bit naive and perhaps immature. I'm sure as I get older and read more I'm getting more conservative (small-c).

 

‘As I say, I just thought I'd let you know some people do actually re-evaluate their thoughts instead of spitting their dummy out when someone disagrees with them.’

 

 

Originally, he had written: ‘ I’m writing this because of [your] extraordinary claim that addiction to a substance is not a real condition and is merely a matter of a lack of willpower and a lack of personal responsibility. As Perry put it, his claim that addiction is non-existent is as ludicrous as saying that Peter Pan is real. Dr. Ellie Cannon wrote a response to [you] in the Mail on Sunday pointing out that while willpower is very much the biggest factor in a person’s recovery from addiction, addiction is a real illness that many normal people suffer from, to which [you] have also responded. In it [you have] given the formula to which a person should respond to [your] claim that addiction is fiction.

 

“*Define* the thing you say exists. *Describe* it. Show how we can detect its presence in an *objective, measurable and testable* way.”

 

Before I attempt to respond to [your] claim, I want to explain a few things first as I believe that his formula oversimplifies a very complex issue.

 

 

 

‘First though, why do I care what some columnist thinks about addiction? How does it remotely affect me? Surely there are better things I can spend my time writing about? Well, there are better things I could be writing about. At the end of the day we’re all entitled to our view, no matter how many people may agree or disagree with us, no matter how informed or uninformed it is. But this is an issue that’s very close to me. I’ve lost family members and friends due to addiction of alcohol. But why did they end up addicted to alcohol in the first place?

 

 

 

‘People don’t make a conscious decision to become addicted to something. An addict doesn’t wake up one day and say “you know what, I think I’m going to get myself hooked on alcohol today” because an addict often doesn’t even realise they’re addicted. Take someone suffering from severe depression from example. They may take the idea that alcohol drowns your sorrows a little too seriously and try it out and at first they will probably feel like it’s working. Problem solved! Until those feelings that drove them to drink come back. What do you think they do then? Do they realise that the drink isn’t a viable solution? No. It requires rational thought to realise that and often the person isn’t able to think rationally about things. So they drink. How do I know this? Because after a couple of breakdowns that I’ve recently had I’ve realised it’s what I’ve been doing. And I realise that, although I’m only just coming to terms with it, my issue with drink is not a recent one and has been building up over the course of the last year.

 

 

 

‘You may say “well that’s just silly.” “Drink won’t help you!” “Go to a doctor, you’re not helping yourself!” Those statements are all correct. To think that drink can help is a silly one, it doesn’t help you and the best course of action is to see a doctor. But as I say, it requires rational thought to come to that logical conclusion. A person in a depressive episode often isn’t able to think that logically and that rationally so they self-medicate on something that they think will numb the feelings. That cycle of getting into a rut only to turn to drink is what causes addiction. We are creatures of habit and you can look at addiction as a harmful and extreme habit. It’s an automatic reaction to something, often feelings, emotions and sensations. How to really understand addiction and the cause of addiction is not to ask why someone is drinking or taking medication they don’t need or any of those things but to find out what event, what mood, what emotion, what feeling and what sensation makes the person think they need it. Alcohol is a crutch for an alcoholic, one that is hard to put down.

 

 

 

‘Now I’ll go back to [your] simplistic formula for a response to [your] statement, I’ll quote it here again and then respond to it.

 

*Define* the thing you say exists. *Describe* it. Show how we can detect its presence in an *objective, measurable and testable* way.

The Oxford English Dictionary has “addiction” down as “the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance or activity“, which I have to say, in this case, isn’t an overly helpful definition and would only go to make Hitchens’ point for him, so here I will attempt to offer a better definition than that. Addiction is the state of being reliant on substance or an activity, it’s the irrational belief that one must consume a particular substance or partake in a particular activity in order to function. To describe it, if we take my example above of alcohol dealing with depressive thoughts, it’s the idea that drinking alcohol will drown out the depressive thoughts that plague the person’s mind. When this perceived need isn’t met, a person can suffer severe distress, heightened irritability and worse and worse feelings and emotions. I describe it as a perceived need because we can all agree that the person doesn’t need alcohol, it’s the irrational thought that makes the person think that they need alcohol. I have to admit, the last part of the formula is the hardest. Schizophrenia can cause a person to hear voices that aren’t there and it is accepted that this is a genuine illness, but how do we objectively say that a person can hear them, how do we measure the voices that the person can hear and how do we test whether or not the person can hear voices? Psychological illness, as addiction is, can really only be gauged by the information given by the patient so it’s hard to objectively measure and test it like a broken bone. It starts with the person admitting that they have a problem and need medical help with it (family and friends can seek help for the person but at the end of the day, psychological help can never be given until the person admits to them self that they have a problem and is ready to accept help). The test of a person’s addiction goes hand in hand with how to measure a person’s level of addiction, this comes during treatment. How long can a person go without the substance or activity they’re addicted to compared to when they first started treatment? That’s how to measure it.

 

 

 

I hope my response to [your] formula for responding to his statement is good enough and I hope that, if not, [you’ll] respond to it and tell me exactly why not. I do believe addiction exists and I believe to say it doesn’t is like saying depression and a whole host of other mental illnesses don’t exist. It is shameful for me to admit that I have a drink problem and it’s hard to admit. To admit you have a problem is the first step and the hardest step to getting better. Yes, I know that willpower is one of the biggest factors of curing addiction. But to have someone lecture me and tell me that my struggles are nothing to do with illness and all to do with a failure of willpower and personal responsibility is completely demeaning, unfounded and unnecessary. Addiction really is not fiction.’

 

 

I am impressed by this correspondent’s generosity of spirit and willingness to rethink. I’ve thanked him for taking the trouble to write, and for having the courage to do so. I have his permission to publish all the material above. 

Scandal, Panic and Anomalies

I did think there was something disturbing about some of the posts here demanding, sometimes rather peremptorily,  that I comment on current (unnamed) events. It was as if it was my duty , in the eyes of such people, to join in the creation of a climate of suspicion and assumed guilt.

 

For me, it was been actively unpleasant to listen to news bulletins and read the newspapers for the past few days. It seemed to me that my trade, which used to be trained to doubt what it was told and to question authority, had laid aside all caution and was helping to bring into being a dense miasma of general disquiet.

 

In such a smog, I fear, independent institutions will rot and liberty will quietly choke to death.  

 

As some contributors have rightly pointed out, scandal is often the weapon of those who would destroy an existing order, and put themselves in its place.  I sometimes wonder if the French Revolution would ever have taken place if it had not been for the (empty and meaningless) affair of Marie Antoinette and the diamond necklace. Even if the scandal had been true, what was it compared with the bloody harvest of the Guillotine and the horrors of the September massacres?

 

Rumours of obscene liaisons between Rasputin and members of the Imperial family did much to bring the Bolsheviks to power (and the Empress and her daughters were taunted with these lies by some of their guards in the final weeks before they were murdered). Much such things mattered once the Bolsheviks were in charge.  Be careful when you undermine the existing order with scandal. Scandal will be nothing compared with what you well get once that order has gone.

 

As for scares and security panics, when do they ever cease?

 

Acting on the ancient civil service motto of ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’, authority responds to these horrors, both real and imaginary, by acquiring new powers, powers which in my view do little to prevent future outrages and are out of all proportion to the threat.  

 

And it loves to use the word ‘emergency’, to give us all a thrill of enjoyable fear, and to make us huddle, bleating,  in the sheepfold as the grim-faced shepherd stands over us scanning the horizon for wolves, real or (more probably) imaginary, and the sheepdogs snarl and growl until we are properly, neatly, abjectly bunched together and under control.

 

I am still troubled by the bizarre, but minor things that happened to me on 7th July 2005, as London went into severe state-sponsored panic (later misreported as phlegmatic calm) over the bombings. My mobile phone stopped working (as did most others) . It seemed to me to have nothing to do with the alleged network congestion which was later given as the official reason for this. There were no unobtainable tones or ‘network busy’ messages. The phone just did not work at all.

 

But *before* mobiles stopped working,  the BBC crew with which I was spending the morning received a call. (As I remember, we were filming my BBC4 documentary about Britain and the Common Market, ‘This Sceptic Isle’, and interviewing the refreshingly intelligent Lord (Nigel) Lawson,  just off Piccadilly). The call ,as far as I could make out from various muttered conversations,  instructed them to cease whatever they were doing and to return to TV centre immediately because of a ‘national emergency’.

  

I am sure I read reports in early editions of the London Evening Standard of troops (not ceremonial , but in battledress and with modern weapons)  being deployed in various central London locations. But they were not carried in later editions and I can now find no trace of them. Official accounts do say that important buildings, such as the Houses of Parliament were ‘sealed off’, but do not say who did the sealing, or how. I had the odd feeling that I had glimpsed the outlines of a much more severe response, half-unveiled and then withdrawn when the atrocities turned out to be less extensive than at first feared.

 

A few weeks later, all-party support was obtained for what would become the Terrorism Act, a measure which originally was intended to introduce 90-day detention, and which also created the unEnglish offence of ‘Glorifying Terrorism’ , which has always sounded to me like something out of the Soviet penal code of 1936. In the hands of a tyrant (and of course we will never have a tyrant here, so no need to worry) , the Act’s vague provisions are a severe blunt instrument. Take a look at them, and also at the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act of 2004, under which Parliamentary government and almost all the ancient constitutional protections in our law could be suspended in seconds.

 

How long before we’re back to 90-day detention (the end of Habeas Corpus) or Identity Cards? I don't think it will be that long. 

 

I’m not sure I’ve ever before seen scandal and nervous panic arrive simultaneously, as they did this week. It was distressing to see an outwardly educated person such as the Prime Minister mouth the words he spoke today as he justified what our forebears would have angrily rejected as a tyrannical interference with their privacy.  

 

The consequences of not acting are alleged to be ‘grave’ The need for new laws is ‘urgent’. But we cannot be told in detail why this is so, because of course,  that is a matter of ‘security’. This alone we can trust, the whispered word of some bureaucrat with a huge budget to defend and enormous expenses to justify.

 

Now, a few other responses. I am attacked for being silent on some unpleasant plans attributed to Yvette Cooper, as if this were some sort of deliberate silence. I am silent about them because I had not heard of them till now. I try to be as omniscient as possible, spending hours with the newspapers every day, but I still miss things. It is monstrously wrong to assume that any silence on my part means a reluctance to criticize.

 

I have indeed heard of the excellent book on the safety cult (‘In the Interests of Safety’ by my good friend Michael Hanlon and Tracey Brown) , and commend it to my readers. I have been meaning to write about it at some length.

 

I am also asked  ‘does he (that is, me) genuinely believe that his incessant intransigence and war-mongering over Northern Ireland is shared by anybody else?’

 

I had no idea I was war-mongering. I have long accepted that Britain has surrendered to the IRA and the ‘Loyalist’ murder gangs in Northern Ireland, and I see no possibility of that surrender being rescinded or the battle against lawless terror being resumed. I spoke out against the capitulation before the manipulated plebiscite which endorsed it, but that was the end of any small influence I might have had.

 

I have always regarded intransigence in the face of violent, lawless evil as a virtue, and cannot see how it could be anything other than incessant, if it were to be intransigent. I couldn’t care less if I am the last man living who thinks this. That would not be a reason for ceasing to think it, but rather an added reason to carry on doing so. Why do people so*want* to be in the majority? Truth is truth and right is right,  however few people support them. And indeed they remain right and true if no living human supports them.

 

But it does seem to me that the inflamed moralising of our government, and that of the USA, against the horrors of terrorism is rather undermined, in the eyes of any thinking person,  by their recent open surrender to the successful terrorists of the IRA, and (come to that) their negotiations and good relations with the equally successful terrorists of the PLO.  This is an anomaly, and anomalies are invariably the keys to proper understanding of what is really happening, as opposed to what we are told is happening. 

A Civilized Exchange

Here’s an encouraging development in the often sterile battle between sceptics, such as I, and supporters of unproven concepts such as ‘Dyslexia’ and ‘ADHD’.

 

One of my critics, Dr Harold Levinson, originally gave a wrong impression of my opinions in a blog posting. But when I challenged him, he responded in a reasonable and a civilized fashion and was creditably anxious to put the error right. This is , alas, notable mainly because it is so rare. But it is also a straightforward Good Thing, and deserves to be praised. We will never get anywhere if we cannot keep to the civilized rules of reasoned debate.

 

 You may read an account of our exchange here:

 

 

 

http://www.dyslexiaonline.com/blog/apology-peter-hitchens-dialogue-opportunity-advance/

 

The Joy of Borders

'Here I am again at border control, as a lady with epaulettes, savagely bleached hair and a large peaked cap glares first at me and then at my passport. Then she glares at me again. Then she looks in the angled mirror behind me, to check on the back of my head. I do not know why this is important. Perhaps she wants to make sure I am not wearing a wig. That mirror is always there, at every border crossing in every despotism in all the world. I just happen to have walked into this one, whichever it might be.

 

Probably she is a loving mother of six, but at the moment she is intent on glaring. Glaring is, after all, her job. “Good for you,” I am thinking. “Your country may be a squalid tyranny ruled by a lunatic, but at least you don’t let anyone in without checking their documents. How unlike The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, where anyone can get in these days.

 

With a final glare, she whacks a blurred green entry stamp on my visa and thrusts my European Union passport—there are no British passports any more—back at me under the scratched window of armoured glass. All is in order. Either they haven’t realized what I am up to, or they don’t care. The lock buzzes. I am across. And I am enjoying myself...'

 

Want to read on? You can . It's the opening page of 'Short Breaks in Mordor, my new e-book, which is available at

http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK)

 

 

and

 

 

http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)