Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 228

More Reviews (by normal people) of Short Breaks in Mordor

Here are some more unsolicited (five-star)reviews of my new e-book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’, this time from the American Amazon site,  amazon.com

 

I don’t know either of these people, but I’m guessing they also don’t work for British left-wing publications.

 

Deep and Beautifully Written Reports of the Dark Side of the Earth, July 7, 2014

By Manu Olesya -  

Verified Purchase

This review is from: Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler's Life (Kindle Edition)

Peter Hitchens' book, so far available only in electronic form, is a compendium of his writings for different publications as a reporter from the less traveled roads of the world. It is in a word, outstanding. The reader can expect to have their comfortable cliches about every single one of these countries challenged and punctured on virtually every page. You may have your disagreements with Mr. Hitchens' take on things, from the Israel-Palestine issues, to Russia and Ukraine, but he puts together formidable arguments for his positions and writes breathtakingly beautiful accounts of these strange lands that will draw you to read them over and over again. It is true that these are troubled, dangerous parts of the world, so no happy endings over tinkling glasses, instead the lingering suspense of Mordor pervades these pages from Cairo to Tokyo. The author has visited, researched and written about more countries than some people have heard of, let alone visited and his deep historical frame and experience fill these accounts with an unerring instinct for the dark shadows beneath the shiny facades. Forget the flashing signs and hyper colors of Tokyo, Mr. Hitchens shines an incisive light on the scores of homeless and destitute in parks living off an unofficial can recycling economy, and the strange plight of Brazilian repatriates. That's just one of countless fascinating and deeply informative reports from this excellent book. The best thing I can say about Mr. Hitchens' writing is that reading these frequently disturbing accounts of countless horrors mixed occasionally and faintly with hope, nevertheless left me with a deep desire to visit these distant and dangerous lands and see these things with my own eyes. I found this to be an unforgettable book with a persistent ring of truth.

 

 

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific writing as usual from Mr Hitchens, July 2, 2014

By Rebecca  

Verified Purchase.

This review is from: Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler's Life (Kindle Edition)

Terrific writing as usual from Mr Hitchens, as well as fascinating insights into some of the world's most frightening and intriguing countries. Mr Hitchens spent time in Iraq shortly after the ill-fated invasion by the West; has bowed to the statue of the Great Leader in North Korea; seen the horror of the mines in the Congo; and enjoyed the surprisingly cosmopolitan atmosphere of Iran.

 

You can get the book at

 

 

http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK)

 

 

 

 

 

and

 

 

 

 

 

http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)

 

 

 

Keeping Things in Proportion - the Presumption of Innocence is Vital

May I just begin by saying that I am unequivocally against child abuse, and think its perpetrators should be severely punished; and that I am also against terrorism, and think its perpetrators should be severely punished. Actually, when it comes to terrorism, I am considerably stricter than my own government, or the US government, both of whom have taken part in actions which have led to the freeing of imprisoned, convicted terrorists, and to sordid deals made with terrorists or their representatives. As a result, both governments are now on cordial terms with persons and movements which derive much of their power and standing from their willingness, in the past,  to murder innocent people.

 

I opposed at the time, and continue to condemn,  these agreements and concessions, and believe they have encouraged terrorism around the world. As for child abuse, it would be hard to more against it than I am. What more can I say? And yet, can any such statement protect me or anyone else from the current weird mood, in which it seems the entire country is under suspicion?

 

In the current strange atmosphere, it is necessary to make such statements of the blindingly obvious before expressing any further opinion. So there, I have done so. 

 

Two apparently unrelated events this week perplex me greatly. One is the latest introduction of wildly disproportionate checks on air travellers, supposedly to guard against a mysterious and unspecified new danger from terrorists. I suppose it is possible that these checks might one day save a life, though it will be very hard to establish this if so, because they only realistic way they could do so would be by persuading the would-be murderers not to try to smuggle a bomb on board an aeroplane disguised as a mobile phone, e-reader, tablet, laptop or hair-straightener.

 

The visible effect of such deterrence (much like the visible effect of the similar campaigns against honey, makeup, shampoo and shaving foam) will be exactly the same as it would have been if these things had in fact never been dangerous at all. This may well be the case. I have sought in vain for convincing proof that the supposed liquid bombs which were intended to be made in the lavatories of airliners, could ever actually have been successfully created in real life.

 

And then there are all the Swiss Army knives, corkscrews, knitting needles, scissors, nailfiles and so forth, confiscated in mountains during the past dozen years on the off-chance that a knitting granny has in fact secretly been trained in an Afghan fastness to hijack a plane, even though the flight-deck door is locked and never opened in flight (the single, simple precaution which, if properly observed, will ever afterwards prevent any repeat of September 11).

 

Then there are all the millions of pairs of shoes removed by total innocents at the unblinking command of ‘security’ personnel.  Thanks to the failed underpants bomb, not detonated in 2009 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, I remain permanently surprised that we do not also have to routinely remove our underwear too, and cannot rule out some such development, sooner or later. To some extent the intrusive bodyscanners to be found at some airports *are* such a development. 

 

I’d add that if anyone ever tried to hijack a plane I’m on, with needles, nailfiles, scissors or Swiss Army knives, wouldn’t it be a good idea if several dozen law-abiding passengers were also armed with such things, and could despatch or at least disable the hijacker with them? I’m often asked if I’d be happy to board a plane without the checks we currently have to undergo. My answer is a firm and unequivocal ‘Yes’.

 

Not merely do I think the chances of experiencing a hijacking or other terror incident incredibly remote compared with the other greater risks I face daily or weekly on (for instance) our terrifying roads. As I have often stated, there is just as much risk that an eagle may drop a tortoise on my head, or some asteroid or burned-out satellite squashes me as I stand waiting for a train. No 'security' is proof against that.

 

I think the lesson of United 93, oddly ignored, is that passengers can fight back, and, as long as the flight deck is safely locked, they (and the cabin crew) now have a huge and overpowering reason to do so.  Since 2001, hijackers no longer have their only real weapon against passenger resistance, the possibility that if the passengers submit quietly the hijackers will eventually let some or all of those passengers go. Robbed of that hope and blackmail, as they now are, passengers have a huge motivation to be utterly ruthless and courageous in the aggressive defence of the plane on which they fly. I would greatly fear to be a hijacker faced with such passengers, especially if they had steel cutlery with which to fight.

 

As it is, if I fly, I must endure the ceaseless presumption of guilt, submit like a slaughterhouse cow to being herded, forced to wait then ordered about and compelled to perform laughably useless rituals, even forced to expose my naked body(via scanners) to total strangers, forbidden above all to laugh at this procedure. Jokes about ‘security’ are most unwise, and one major airport in the USA certainly used to broadcast repeated warnings against making jokes about security over its PA system, threatening such joke-makers with penalties of law, and flight bans. This is because those who impose the system know it (in their hearts) to be ludicrous and fear above all that anyone should publicly draw attention to this. George Orwell said something similar about the goose-step, pointing out that inhabitants of tyrannies were forced to observe this absurd march without laughing, as part of their servitude.

 

A sense of humour (as Robert Donat long ago pointed out in the first and infinitely better of the two films of ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’) is more or less the same thing as a sense of proportion.

 

I think we have also lost a sense of proportion over the supposed lost dossier on paedophilia at high levels in government.   Central to this is a document handed to the Home Office by the late Geoffrey Dickens.

 

Readers might benefit from the following refreshingly cool analysis of this event by David Mellor who, though much-mocked for a certain incident , is an intelligent and an honest man, with a pretty good sense of proportion(made all the keener by what Max Clifford – remember him- put him through);

 

Take a look at it

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/no-home-office-cover-up-over-geoffrey-dickens-dossier

 

 

Note that Mr Mellor is extremely fair to Mr Dickens, which in my view much strengthens his point. Even so, many who were around when Mr Dickens (God rest his soul) was still among us,  might be a bit less generous. Mr Dickens was not exactly a  figure of weight and moment in the councils of the nation.  Read also these recollections from Steve Richards, one of the most astute political commentators in the business:

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/i-recall-the-rumours-of-child-abuse-in-westminster-in-the-1980s-they-werent-taken-very-seriously-9590617.html

 

And these, from another distinguished veteran reporter of Westminster, Andy McSmith

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/westminsters-dark-secret-adultery-homosexuality-sadomasochism-and-abuse-of-children-were-all-seemingly-lumped-together-9593131.html

 

I think these recollections all help to get the matter into proportion. Crimes should be detected and, where people are properly found guilty of them in calm, properly-conducted jury trials, they should be punished, but this must be kept within a clear, cool insistence that we stick to the rule of law and the presumption of innocence.

 

If you presume guilt, you destroy trust, and without trust there will be nothing to keep order except power and fear. 

Were the Cambridge Spies just a Noisy Diversion from the Real Operation?

The famous Cambridge Spies – two of whom are once again exposed as unreliable drunks in accounts from the interesting Mitrokhin Archives published today - are, in my view a complete diversion, and one of the KGB’s most successful operations precisely because they are a diversion.

 

On and on we go about these louche old boozers. National Treasure Alan Bennett even managed to write a sympathetic and much-praised play about one of them which still seems to me to be quite revolting. How would a sympathetic TV play about defectors to the Third Reich  – such as John Amery or ‘Lord Haw Haw’, William Joyce (yes, I know his British nationality is open to question) – have gone down with the critics,  who laughed along with a drama that made Guy Burgess likeable, highighted his isolation and loneliness etc, and rather skated around the minor fact that he took the side of a monstrous, murderous secret-police tyranny?  I’m told that John Amery and William Joyce both had redeeming features, but so what, given whose side they took? And wasn’t there a stupid BBC series about the Cambridge lot, which was needlessly kind to their supposedly tortured consciences?

 

I greatly doubt that Philby, Burgess and Maclean ever supplied much that was of any real use to the KGB, or even that they provided anything that the KGB hadn’t already got from someone else. It may be that their main KGB purpose was to provide noisy cover for the real (and discreet)  spies and traitors who remain undetected to this day.

 

They did love showing them off. When I was in Moscow at the end of the Communist era, it was clear that the KGB loved parading them . I and other British reporters were actually invited into the KGB Club, a brown, high-ceilinged marble annexe to the Lubiyanka, for the unveiling of a Philby exhibit in the KGB museum, which I suspect had been created solely for us.  

 

They also displayed to us the special, ultra-macabre funeral wreath which had been wrought for the KGB’s founder, the sinister Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. It was fashioned out of bayonets and was rather like the Iron Throne in ‘Game of Thrones’, made of swords. Philby was buried prominently in a fashionable elite Moscow cemetery. They even put his corrupt face on a (rather low value)  postage stamp . I sent several letters stamped with twenty or so of these portraits of Philby to friends in England who foolishly didn’t keep them. I still wish I’d held on to them for myself. They would have made a good wallpaper pattern or perhaps a mug design.  I suspect that the less –trumpeted, soberer Melita Norwood,  ‘The Spy who came in from the Co-op’ , and the nuclear spies Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, between them did far more damage.

 

But more interesting even than these are the scores, probably hundreds of agents who, by my guess,  worked throughout the British establishment for long undetected decades. They weren’t so much spies as people who made sure that the interests of Communism and of revolution were constantly served, in the civil service, in the military, in politics, in the academy, why, perhaps even in the Church and presumably in the broadcasting, newspaper and publishing industries.  Evelyn Waugh hints at their prevalence and power in wartime Britain in his autobiographical ‘Men at Arms’ series, most especially the final volume ‘Unconditional Surrender’.  One shadowy but prominent establishment character in that book always reminds me so strongly of Anthony Blunt that I sometimes wonder if Waugh knew about him all along.

 

We know from Peter Hennessy’s book 'The Secret State’ that Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, told Communist students in Cambridge (in the late 1940s) *not* to join the CPGB but to work themselves into positions of influence in the establishment.  We can assume that he made similar speeches in other places.  This one happens to have been picked up. It often seems to me that this might well explain the near-suicidal policies adopted and followed by this country in the subsequent 70 years, that they were actually being directed by KGB agents. But what did they all do after 1990? Become Eurocommunists and join New Labour?

 

 

Not Interesting Enough for You?

Experience post-invasion Baghdad at dusk as the power fails yet again. Travel to Iraq’s Shia shrines and witness the uncovering of a mass grave of Saddam Hussein's victims.  Try to visit a bar and a bowling-alley in Pyongyang (and fail). Travel on the Mandalay-Rangoon express through the secret city of Naypyidaw. Run from the wild dogs on the prairies of what used to be Detroit. Penetrate to the heart of a Shia shrine in Iran, and meet a Mullah in the Holy City of Qom. Find out what it’s really like to be an both an Arab and an Israeli. Meet the state’s thugs in Cairo. Find out why the people of Sevastopol didn’t like being Ukrainian, and visit a town in Ukraine (now in turmoil)  that’s twinned with Barnsley . Visit Spain’s Gibraltar, a rocky colony on the edge of Africa. Experience the power of Shanghai, meet a Chinese caveman and cough and splutter in China’s most polluted city. Enter the shanty towns of Caracas, and visit the spot in Havana where Che Guevara supervised mass executions of Castro’s opponents.  Meet the students at India’s strangest university. Mourn as TV is introduced to beautiful, serene Bhutan. Enter the sinister mining zones of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

 

All this, and much more, is to be found in 'Short Breaks in Mordor', my new e-book, not available as a conventional book because conventional publishers didn’t think it was interesting enough. Prove them wrong.

 

It’s available at

http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK)

 

 

and

 

 

http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)

 

 

 

 

Some Thoughts on the Use of the Word 'Palestinian'

What follows is a slightly extended version of a comment I placed on the ‘Prince Charles’ thread over the weekend. I think it is an important example of the significance of words in debate, a significance of which their users are often unconscious. Knowing the inflamed passions which this subject arouses, I would ask any contributors to respond to what I actually say here, rather than to imagine statements I have not made, or meanings which cannot be simply deduced from what I have actually written. The only hope for innocent people in this dispute is through reasonable compromise rather than utopian 'solutions'. It;s my belief that knowledge fosters such calm reason:

 

 

I am instructed to 'admit' that the Arabs of the region in and around Israel are 'Palestinians'. This designation is not a fact, but an opinion with political implications. Therefore to 'admit' it would be to concede to an opinion I do not hold, and which has a propaganda purpose with which I do not agree.

 

The name ‘Palestine’ returned to political usage after more than a thousand years of disuse, in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, which promised the ‘establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people’. (note, not a ‘state’, or a country, but a ‘national home’, an ambiguous formulation).

 

The choice of this word is itself very telling. Arthur Balfour, like most of the British governing classes at the time, had been raised in the Christian scriptures, was familiar with Old and New Testaments of the Bible,  and knew that much of the region had been under Jewish rule for much of its history. He knew who the Philistines were.

 

But he had also been through an education (see also below) which was principally classical, and viewed the ancient world very much through a Graeco-Roman prism. Those who had experienced this schooling tended to regard the British empire as heir to its Roman forerunner, and would have instinctively resorted to Roman terminology for this area.

 

There may have been other reasons, and I’d be grateful if any reader has actual knowledge about this). It is possible that the Colonial Office, even at that date, was simply anxious to avoid a clear commitment of support for Zionist objectives, and even hoping to wriggle out of the commitment made by Arthur Balfour, and so chose a ‘neutral’ Roman name rather than the Biblical ‘Judaea’, which would obviously have been clearly biased towards the Zionists (who themselves would eventually choose ‘Israel’ when they had the power to do so). Perhaps the formula was similar in intent to the official name of Switzerland ‘Confoederatio Helvetica’ (as used in the ‘CH’ plate on Swiss cars and the ‘CHF’ international designation of the Swiss Franc) so as to avoid giving preference to any of that country’s four official languages. Perhaps not.

 

 'Palestinian' between 1922 and 1948 meant any inhabitant of the Palestine Mandate,  including Jews. At that time, for instance, the principal English-language newspaper published in Jerusalem was 'The Palestine Post', which now survives as 'the Jerusalem Post'. When the Mandate ended in 1948, 'Palestine' was eventually carved up, by force of arms, into three entities, making the term (once again) a bit homeless. The three inheritors of Mandate Palestine were Israel, recognized by the UN but not by the Arab world, which contained Jews (Zionist and non-Zionist, secular and religious, some of them descendants of forebears resident in the region for many centuries)but also large numbers of Christian and Muslim Arabs; Gaza, seized by Egypt but not actually annexed by it, which was wholly Arab and predominantly Muslim; and what is now known as the 'West Bank',  including much of Jerusalem, which was inhabited by Muslim and Christian Arabs; this area was seized in 1948 by, and then annexed by, Transjordan - which then renamed itself Jordan.

 

This annexation was achieved by the British-trained forces of Transjordan in the war of 1948, and was not (how shall I say?) unwelcome to the government in London. Interestingly it, was never recognized by anyone apart from Britain and Pakistan, though it was also not much condemned or denounced, as the subsequent Israeli occupation of the area has been. This raises interesting questions about the legality of the later Israeli occupation of the same area after 1967. Why? Because under international law it had originally been designated (under the League of Nations Mandate) for 'close Jewish settlement'. That designation has never been superseded by any other internationally agreed convention. So whose is it now? In what way are the Jewish settlements now in it 'illegal', as is invariably stated? The more you find out, the more complex it gets. Before the foundation of the Mandate the term 'Palestine' had only a (rather complicated) historical or Biblical significance, dating back to the Romans' rather spiteful use of the word.

 

For the word ‘Palestine’ actually refers to the Philistines, the ancient enemies of the Israelites (‘The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!’) , a usage the Romans adopted to convey to the Jews that they were thoroughly beaten. As Wikipedia explains : ‘After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Roman Emperor Hadrian applied the name Syria Palestina to the entire region, that had formerly included Iudaea Province. Hadrian probably chose a name that revived the ancient name of Philistia (Palestine), combining it with that of the neighboring province of Syria, in an attempt to suppress Jewish connection to the land.’ Hadrian also renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina, crammed it with Roman temples and banned Jews from so much as entering it.

 

The Philistines themselves had long ago disappeared from history, during the repeated conquest and reconquest of this region before Roman times. The use of their name had no basis in reality. The Ottoman empire, which held the region for long centuries before the creation of the Palestine Mandate, recognized no such entity or nationality in recent times, and none of its sanjaks or vilayets (administrative divisions) bore that name or had any congruence with the 1922 borders of Mandate Palestine or its successor states. The last time it was used in any political sense was after the Arab Muslim conquest of the region (until then largely populated by Christians) in the seventh century AD. A military district of the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphate, a small sub-province, was called ‘Jund Filastin’ or ‘Military District of Palestine’. This was itself probably a survival from Byzantine usage - the Byzantine empire is known to have referred to the area as ‘Palaestina’ in the Fifth Century AD. After the Crusades the later takeover by the Ottomans, the term disappeared. Its last previous poitical use, 14 centuries ago was itself no more than a survival, probably through inertia,  from Roman times. It is, I think, significant, that all these uses before 1917 commemorate the dispossession by force of the Jews in the area.

 

The whole story illustrates the huge complexity (often discussed here) of who (if anyone) has secure title to any piece of land anywhere on the planet. The more ancient the evidence of human settlement, the more claimants there will be. In this case there is a long list of expellees, as well as a long list of invaders.  The one thing of which we can be certain is that the Philistines themselves are no longer claimants to the land, for they are not to be found. One can only shudder to imagine why that might be, but in a region so afflicted with ruthless invaders, it is not hard for a small people to be wiped off the map. 

 

One has to assume that Colonial Office classicists such as Ronald Storrs, came up with the name (rather than, say , 'Judaea') for the Mandate in their usual jaundiced, witty, not necessarily philo-Semitic but probably cynical way.

 

Before 1948, the usage 'Palestinian' was not common among the Arabs of the region when referring to themselves. Their leading body during the Mandate styled itself the 'Arab Higher Committee'. I think the same is true of the Arab revolt (mainly a successful campaign to halt Jewish immigration) in Mandate Palestine in the late 1930s, a revolt which was never described at the time as 'Palestinian'. In fact the term 'Palestinian' in the current propaganda sense did not come into widespread use anywhere until after 1948, and very rarely until after the defeat of the Arab conventional forces in the war of 1967.  The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, but did not really come to prominence until after Israel’s 1967 defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in conventional battle, and particularly until after the seizure of the West Bank by Israel after that war. The term also became important in the (largely forgotten) Black September episode (1970-71), in which the PLO battled against the King of Jordan in an extraordinarily bloody struggle for control of that country.

 

Since then it has suited Arab propaganda to challenge the Zionist claim of national identity and entitlement with a matching 'Palestinian' nationalism. This goes with unyielding use of a map of ‘Palestine’, displayed universally in PLO propaganda, which  shows ‘Palestine’ as a single Arab country, with pre-1967 Israel entirely expunged from it, and suggesting that there was at some time an Arab country of that name dispossessed by Israeli conquest, when the truth is immensely more complex. I find many British people who take strong positions on this subject actually believe that this was so, that there was an Arab nation of ‘Palestine’ which was invaded and colonised by Israel. Historical knowledge of the dispute is rare among noisier partisans on either side.

 

There are several problems with this, not least in explaining how citizens of Jordan (originally part of Mandate Palestine) are not 'Palestinians', and in claiming as 'Palestinians' (as is increasingly done nowadays, though it was not until a few years ago)  the Israeli Arabs who (despite the many and undoubted disadvantages under which they live) are privately quite glad to be under Israeli rather than Arab rule.

But gullible westerners, who know little or nothing about the history of the region or the history of the dispute there, are beguiled by the term and use it without thought for its implications, this highly questionable claim that there once existed an actual historical, cultural independent national entity (rather than an arbitrary British colony) called 'Palestine' which has a superior claim to the whole territory of Israel, to that of Israel itself. No reasonable compromise can be reached if this argument is accepted. I think that is the best reason for informed persons to steer clear of this designation. 

Readers recommend 'Short Breaks in Mordor'

Alas, I cannot arrange to have my new book ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’ insulted and traduced in the left-wing press by people who have not read it. They do not do favours such as these to mere e-books. Thus an important part of Britain’s cultural calendar is missing this year.

 

But I can reproduce the unsolicited reviews (none of them by me, or by relatives or otherwise compromised allies of mine) which it has received on Amazon.

 

There are six so far on Amazon.co.uk, some pseudonymous,  some under real names:

‘A nice work to dive into in bite sized pieces for a quick dose of mind expansion. The analysis of the speed, breadth and power of the development of Shanghai was particularly frightening’.

*

‘I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was fascinating to read original, well-written accounts of such interesting countries. I also felt that I learned a lot from reading it. My only complaints are that I would have liked to have been able to read a physical copy and it also gave me serious wander lust...’

*

‘This is a wonderful collection of articles. Hitchens's writing is clear and lucid, and the articles are both interesting and informative.’

*

‘Captivating and evocative. A pleasure to read such eloquent, insightful prose. Makes one want to dust off the passport and start travelling again.’

*

‘Peter Hitchens is one of the most intelligent and readable commentators currently writing. Other journalists parrot the received view; his independence of mind and clear-sighted approach to politics and culture are refreshing. He is sceptical but never cynical; sees the problems of the present without wallowing in nostalgia for the past; and is frequently proved correct in his predictions about the future.

This book is a collection of his travel writing, though if that phrase conjures visions of Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux, forget it: Mr Hitchens is interested more in the intersection of totalitarian government and the people who have to endure it. He has also been a working journalist all his professional life, and the essays in this book were mainly written for newspapers of magazines: it's fascinating to compare two pieces on the same place designed for different outlets.

I can't recommend this book highly enough: it's an engrossing read, and a book which turns many of one's preconceptions (though by no means all) upside down.’

*

‘This a fine collection of writing from the most misunderstood and wilfully misrepresented journalist in Britain. Peter Hitchens offers a captivating insight into some of the most curious, interesting and dangerous locations in the world. He really makes you think and feel as if you are broadening your horizons simply by sharing his intriguing perspective on the places he has visited, the people he has met and the things he has seen. I highly recommend this, from North Korea, to Burma, India and Iran, this is a though provoking collection of travel writing that had me turn the pages late into the night.’

 

And one on Amazon.com

 

‘Terrific writing as usual from Mr Hitchens, as well as fascinating insights into some of the world's most frightening and intriguing countries. Mr Hitchens spent time in Iraq shortly after the ill-fated invasion by the West; has bowed to the statue of the Great Leader in North Korea; seen the horror of the mines in the Congo; and enjoyed the surprisingly cosmopolitan atmosphere of Iran.

I particularly liked his entries about Iran. Iran is so demonised by the West - the only time Iran is covered in an Australian paper, for example, is in a story about Islamic extremism, nuclear weapons, Israel etc etc. Hitchens provides a more well rounded depiction of ordinary Iranians, who are far more liberal and cultured than popular representations suggest.

I read this in a single sitting - that's how interesting it was. I'm not always a fan of Mr Hitchens' political views but he is a fine writer. This is some of the best material I've read of his so far.’

 

All, so far, give it five stars. 

You can see the Amazon displays at

 

http://amzn.to/1lCF9OM (UK)

 

 

and

 

 

http://amzn.to/T6wyZJ (USA)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Charles passed the grammar school test - and Blunkett flunked it

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

What a pity that Prince Charles did not try to send his sons to state grammar schools instead of to Eton, a school everyone associates with money and privilege.

Yes, I can see the difficulties, but it would have been a beautiful way of skewering the socialist hypocrites who claim to be the friends of the poor.

In one action, he could have put the Crown clearly on the side of the people against a bone-headed and unfeeling government – which is where the Monarchy should always be.

And he could have given enormous help to a cause that will, in my view, one day triumph – the noble battle (now raging for almost 50 years) to make good education available once again to the sons and daughters of the poor.

In the meantime, the disclosure that the Prince tried to lobby the Labour Education Secretary, David Blunkett, on this issue is very heartening.

What is not heartening is Mr Blunkett’s smug, superior reply, confident that the Westminster spin machine’s power over public opinion makes him (actually a militant Leftist) hugely more influential than the Prince, even when he is wrong and the Prince is right.

David Blunkett is an attractive person, with a history of personal courage and resilience. What a pity it is that he  is so utterly mistaken on most major issues.

After Charles tried to interest him in rebuilding grammar schools, the then Education Secretary responded: ‘Our policy was not to expand grammar schools.’ He said that the Prince ‘didn’t like’ his reply.

But why should he have liked it? It’s a stupid policy. Actually, New Labour’s policy was even worse than that. Their ‘School Standards’ Act of 1998 actually banned – by law – the opening of any new grammar schools. This Stalinist clause still stands, four years after New Labour fell from office.

Mr Blunkett added that Charles ‘was very keen that we should go back to a different era where youngsters had what he would have seen as the opportunity to escape from their background, whereas I wanted to change their background’.

Challenged to explain this alleged change, Mr Blunkett referred to ‘a transformation over the past 20 years both in attainment levels and opportunity, affording youngsters higher education, apprenticeships and the life chances that many of us take for granted’.

Modern politics is great at producing such statistics. But no figures show how many girls and boys, talented and hardworking, turn away sadly from school and learning every year.

They do so because the only schools they can get into are chaotic, ill-disciplined places where it is dangerous to be seen as academically bright, and where hope and encouragement are absent.

There are other schools. But they are for the children of the well-off, the privileged and  the sharp-elbowed (like the cunning Labour and Tory front-benchers, so skilled in working the system to their advantage). Talent counts for little or nothing in their secret, winding selection process.

It makes me furious to think about it. Yet I think the mood  is shifting. When I first started campaigning on this, I was told it was futile and finished.

Now  I think we may be on the verge of a rethink, once the latest gimmicks of ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’ have failed, as they will.

Captivating proof that there IS hope for the Middle East

Last week’s miserable news from Israel – the deaths  of young men from both sides of the divide – has restarted silly talk of a ‘cycle of violence’, as if this is a force of nature.

No such thing is necessary. BBC2’s excellent  new series The Honourable Woman, starring the captivating Maggie Gyllenhaal, shows very clearly that Jewish Israelis are not the callous, thoughtless occupiers of crude Arab propaganda.

And the Arabs of the region are not the terrorists and rioters of crude Zionist propaganda.

Most normal people are sick of the violence and, even if they don’t especially like their neighbours, they are ready to get on with them.

True, perfect peace, a final border, and a neat solution are crazy impossibilities. No Arab leader, and no Israeli leader, could agree to the terms of such a deal and survive the fury of his own side.

But just leave things alone, stop dragging them to peace conferences, and concentrate on prosperity and justice in small matters, and there’s a good chance of a workable, unofficial compromise.

Weedy truth about our 'tough EU hero'

Amazingly, some poor, deluded Tory loyalists still think David Cameron  is a hero, for failing to prevent the unimportant appointment of an EU bureaucrat.

Apart from the ‘so what?’ nature of this non-victory, might I ask them to pay attention to the Prime Minister’s other  EU activities?

Far from being a critic of the EU, he called in a recent speech for it be expanded to the edge of Siberia, a wild ambition that probably cannot be achieved without an actual war.

That’s hardly the view of a ‘sceptic’,  let alone of someone who wants to get Britain out of it.

And, if he wants to get power back from Brussels so much, why does he refuse to do so when the chance lies within his grasp? Thanks to what can only be  called a legal freak, Britain is now free to opt out of the European Arrest Warrant, an outrageous EU intrusion into our  legal system.

The warrant is not necessary (as EU fanatics claim) for us to have sensible extradition deals with other EU countries. Even if it were, it would be too high a price for an independent nation to pay.

But the ‘heroic’ Mr Cameron plans meekly to opt back in to the European Arrest Warrant, plus dozens of other  EU inroads into our justice system.

I wonder why the electricity company npower wants to demolish the mighty cooling towers of Didcot ‘A’ power station in the middle of the night, between 3am and 5am on Sunday, July 27.

Didcot ‘A’ has been shut to satisfy EU rules against coal-fired power stations, themselves driven by unproven fantasies about man-made global warming. Even if this were true, it would be futile. As Didcot falls, China will no doubt be opening two or three coal-powered stations.

The company says the pre-dawn demolition is to ensure ‘safety’ and ‘minimal disruption’. But could they be influenced by the fact that film of the levelling of a perfectly viable power station might become a lasting symbol of our insane energy policies – the deliberate, dogma-driven destruction of scarce generating capacity just as we face a severe risk of power cuts?

Once, you could X-ray your feet in shoe  shops. Now, my dentist and his nurse  scamper urgently from the room when they  X-ray my jaw, and there’s a radiation warning  on the door.

What do we do now that we’ll think is madly dangerous 20 years hence?

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

Anatomy of a Big Fat Lie

Last night on the BBC’s 'Question Time' I faced two attempts to smear me. One came from a member of the audience who accused me of ‘blaming immigrants’ for the housing crisis. The other was from Labour’s Alan Johnson, who said;  ‘I heard Peter’s arguments when I was a kid in Notting Hill and when people were coming over from the West Indies to work in our NHS, to drive our buses,  to work in the Post Office.  And we heard the same things then . I’m not associating you with this Peter…’

I interrupted him at this point: 

PH: ‘Yes you are. It’s a straightforward smear. I think you should  (sound is unclear here) back off from it .’

he continued:

Alan Johnson ‘ We had Mosley on the street corner saying exactly the same thing and it was always “blame the immigrants” ’ .

 

You had Mosley saying exactly the same thing as what, Mr Johnson? Exactly the same as me?  Where and when? This is a serious charge if so, and I should like to see his evidence. I have now written to him, asking for it.

 

These sort of attacks, which are a commonplace experience for anyone who criticizes this country’s migration policies, are based on the repeated, obvious untruth that those who oppose mass *immigration* are condemning the *immigrants*. At no point did I do so. At no point do I do so.

 

On the contrary, as someone who has uprooted his life and family and moved countries twice (though I did it in ideal circumstances, far easier than they will have encountered).  I am filled with admiration for the courage and resolution of those who leave their homes and go to foreign countries to better themselves. See what I said recently here about this  in another context :

 

‘I admire the migrants’ bravery and determination. Nobody can blame them for wanting to leave their blasted war zones. ‘

 

You can see the context here : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/mass-immigration/

 

 

But back to the smears:  

In what appears to be a BBC tweet (describing me incorrectly as a ‘Daily Mail columnist’)

 

I am quoted as follows:

 

 

“The reason for our housing crisis is quite simply this that we have had (… ) the greatest wave of mass immigration in our history”

 

And then as follows .

 

 

I’m not blaming immigrants. To say that I’m blaming immigrants [for the lack of housing] is a big fat lie’

 

 

Now look at what I actually said, without the excisions:

. “The reason for our housing crisis is quite simply this that we have had *thanks to our open borders imposed on us by the European Union* the greatest wave of mass immigration in our national history”

 

The direction of the blame is clear: 'Thanks to our open borders imposed on us by the European Union.'

 

So I am including in the blame the Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat Parties, alongside the EU. This is also quite clear from a fuller transcript. 

For after ‘history’, I continued with the words ‘begun under Labour continued under the Coalition and that’s why there aren’t enough houses'.

Now, at round about this point, a voice from the audience said something along the lines of :‘You’re blaming immigrants!’. That is certainly how I heard it, on the platform.

 

I replied :'I am absolutely not blaming immigrants. The people who came here were perfectly reasonable to come here, they were encouraged to come here by governments. They came to better themselves. I don’t blame them in the slightest. What I blame…'

(Interruption)

 ‘To say that I am blaming immigrants is a straightforward big fat lie. It is a lie and I reject it. It is nothing to do with the immigrants it is to do with the politicians. They did it, they opened the borders and they made it happen and we’re going to have to find some accommodation with it, but I do not think they should escape the blame. I think when we realise that our country, much of our country is going to have to be concreted over because of this we should always remember who made that happen’

 

I rest my case. 

 

 

 

An Interview with Australia's Radio National

Here (and the best way to listen is to click on  ‘download audio’ ) is an interview I gave recently to ABC Radio National’s Andrew West, about religion and the First World War.

 

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/religionandethicsreport/the-great-war3a-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-christianity-in-t/5566866

 

Pictures of the powerfully moving ANZAC war memorial in Hyde Park in Sydney, to which we refer at the start, can be found here. 

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1024&bih=683&q=war+memorial+sydney+hyde+park&oq=war+memorial+sydney+hyde+park&gs_l=img.12...1769.5830.0.8042.29.16.0.13.13.0.116.1024.15j1.16.0....0...1ac.1.48.img..9.20.1036.BBhgMyJ-SKw

 

 

 

 

Upstairs at the Party

Here are some thoughts about Linda Grant’s new novel ‘Upstairs at the Party’ , published this week,  in the writing of which I played a small part (mentioned in the acknowledgements). 

 

It is about what happened to a group of people who (like me) attended a certain new University in the early 1970s, and how they were troubled all their lives by one rather horrible event.

 

At some point in my teens a large part of the population of Britain went mad, me included. It was as if they had put something in the water which affected everyone between the age of about 15 and 29. Of course, it wasn’t really everyone, just a privileged layer of which I was a part. I can remember a lot of it all too clearly. I have done what I can to track down and destroy any photographic proof –but my clever colleague Nikki Sutherland has managed to find a picture of me from 1969 which I didn’t even know existed, and which has a story behind it that I’ll tell some other time. 

 

 

Funnily enough it seemed to me to be a pleasant time, if not a happy one. I enjoyed a lot of it, from the point of view of pure self-indulgence. I did pretty much what I wanted, though the great pity is that most of what I wanted wasn’t really worth having and many of the things I did led to actual harm, for me and others.

 

Unlike my childhood, which in memory is crammed with rain and clouds, ice, sleet, drizzle and wild winds, plus a few sunny intervals, my teens and early twenties are full of sun, that pure, clean, cool early-morning sunshine which is a sort of essence of being young. 

 

Sunniest of all must be the rather wicked and very selfish years I spent, lazing on the lawns of my plate-glass university,  living heedlessly on the taxes of the poor, as we students did then, and thinking we were entitled to do it.  

 

If I go back there now, as I sometimes do to harangue public meetings, or belatedly to return the cutlery I ‘borrowed’ in 1973, it feels both familiar and very, very strange. Here among these now-sagging, faded buildings (which then were new, modern and bright) I dwelt in the future.

 

The drug-permeated, marriage-free, sexually omnivorous,  amoral, lazily left-wing society in which we all now live was already flourishing then, next to our plastic-bottomed lake and among the prefabricated blocks in which we smugly roosted behind a wall of subsidies.

 

As Linda writes  ‘There were no rules… apart from attending tutorials and handing in some essays, we were left alone to do much as we liked, which of course we did, and some followed their own self-destructive impulses to hell and others survived’.

 

Beyond its borders lay a glummer, safer and more workful world, where (and how I wish I could summon it back) you could still find England before it was abolished and Europeanized. Policemen patrolled on foot in helmets, buses had conductors, pounds were divided into shillings and pence, and also into ounces, and miles into yards, feet and inches. Twenty degrees was freezing cold, shops shut on Sundays and Wednesday afternoons, men went out to work, often on bicycles, and kept families on their wages, grammar schools still survived and a largely unraped countryside was divided into familiar counties

 

But we, in our special youth colony, were already dwelling in the 21st century, though we didn’t realize it. Until this year, I have always tended to think of this as a recent part of my life, despite my bus pass and my winter fuel payment and the other less agreeable signs of late middle-age which now crowd into my life. 

 

 

Now I don’t. Linda Grant’s book  has made me think of this era as a sealed-off piece of the past, far more worrying and dangerous than I ever realised at the time. I was walking on the edge of a precipice in thick fog, and never knew how close I came to falling.

 

It is very strange to find part of your own youth described in someone else’s novel, much as I think it might be to see your own tombstone.  It made me feel that times I still thought of as quite recent had suddenly become dead, unreachable and remote. It made me see myself fully from the outside and from a great height, as I had never really done before – though I’m keenly aware of some of faults, and these days plenty of people are only too willing to describe my remaining failings to me.

 

 

I know I am in this novel because last year  its author asked me to talk to her about the strange years, four decades ago when we were both at the University of York, then an almost-new campus, with the cement still wet, born out of 1960s optimism and idealism – which are not as nice they sound.

 

We sat for hours by the Serpentine, as she cleverly probed my memory-banks and subtly noted my mannerisms for later use.

 

Linda is far too good a novelist, and has far too powerful an imagination, to have put me straight into her story. You won’t find an obvious 21-year-old Peter Hitchens in there. But I can see him. Let us say that my personal DNA appears in several characters, none of them heroic, one of them absolutely foul and the others more or less unconsciously frightful.   

 

You might say that will teach me to confess anything to a novelist, but I can still make myself wince and go hot and cold all over when I recall those times, without any help from anyone else.

 

Also present in that strange, foggy yet sunlit  little world was Harriet Harman, though I can’t remember her and (rather provokingly) she can’t remember me, despite my noisy role as the University’s foremost Marxist-Leninist.

 

So was Helen Dunmore, like Linda an accomplished novelist. Did either of these two authors then imagine what would become of them? I had no idea what would become of me, so convinced was I that the world we knew would shortly be swept away by revolution. So it was, but as Linda points out, a wholly different revolution from the one I wanted or expected.

 

Also among us on our Isle of Youth was Greg Dyke, and I can certainly remember him.  He looked like a walking mountain range, and was almost the only member of the Labour Party in the entire university. Had we been told that he would become director-general of the BBC, and Chancellor of the University we would have chortled helplessly.  It was part of our huge good fortune as a pampered generation that most of us would have laughed rather than wept, if we could have seen our futures. I would have sneered, in utter disbelief.

 

Universities, especially ours, were much smaller then. We were not swallowed in vast educational machines, but well-defined individuals, among several hundred young men and women, subjects of a wild social experiment which is still going on. But what a strange moment it was.

 

The old Britain was just ending, we were about to join the Common Market, the old money was being abolished, the old town gas (the sort you could commit suicide with) was being burned off , with great glowing braziers mounted in the streets, and natural gas was flowing through the pipes from the North Sea, and the last of the great generation of working class grammar school boys and girls were leaving school, many of them ending up at our campus.

 

It was deeply old-fashioned in many other ways. Computers were vast and involved great whizzing reels of tape.  There were no mobile phones. None of us had cars. Students still read actual books, arrived at the university familiar with acres of Shakespeare, and there were no tiresome structuralists and deconstructionists. And, as Linda points out, there were still plenty of tough English people  in healthy middle age, who ‘ had a disinclination to expand their consciousness, having already been far too expanded on the Normandy beaches or the Burma railway’

 

Roy Jenkins’s Cultural Revolution was just taking effect. Abortion was legal and more or less available on demand. The death penalty had gone, and with it the old idea that wrongdoers should be punished rather than rehabilitated. Easy divorce had just been introduced, so many of our parents were breaking up, or thinking of it. I suspect that in several cases it was our departures to the semi-adult world of university which set them thinking.

 

 

The age of majority had just been lowered from 21 to 18, so nobody had any power over us. Male and female students were still put in separate corridors, but nobody cared if they strayed into each other’s bedrooms. Drugs were everywhere, if you wanted them (I didn’t), and the police did not come on to the campus to look for them.

 

Counselling and welfare hadn’t been invented, so we were left to make our own stupid mistakes.  It would amaze anyone used to our health and safety culture, just how much we were on our own then and afterwards.  I am genuinely unsure how autobiographical Linda’s book is.  Its central event is a desperately sad, lonely and accidental death, which goes on to affect several lives forever afterwards.

 

Like all good novels, the story contains a mystery about this death which we do not find out until very near the end.

 

Many, many people who were in places like this at times like those never got over it, and now have great influence in our national life. They were formed in that strange, forgotten epoch. As Linda writes:

 

‘In those days the government paid us to spend three years being students, which meant…a way of life suited to Renaissance philosopher-kings, until we were turfed out blinking and unprotected like baby koalas ejected from the womb on to the alien, leafless world of an Antarctic ice-floe’.

 

Not me. I was no baby koala. I was a homicidal Bolshevik, all too unblinking, who had come to university already leathery from years at strict-regime English boarding schools, and from a nasty bout of teenage rebellion. This had included living in a squalid bed-sit and spending two nights in a police cell, and had ended with a bad and rather painful motorbike crash that educated me in hard reality in a way I can’t recommend, but don’t regret. Perhaps that’s why my university fantasies didn’t stay with me as they have stayed with the rest.

 

I got one absolutely good thing out of those campus days, which has lasted me ever since, but that’s too private to discuss. But the rest has slowly fermented in my mind, into a rather sour vintage which tends to set my teeth on edge. It is a bit of a shock  to recognize that all this is now 40 years ago, that the little saplings that dotted our naked campus have now grown to be sizeable trees, and that my own student days are irrecoverable, half-remembered, not even history and that many of those I shared them with are old or dead. But they helped to make history, beguiling a whole generation into a foolish dreamland from which they have yet to wake. 

 

‘Upstairs at the Party’ by Linda Grant is published by Virago, price £14-99.