Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 231

In which (amongst other things) I urge the Blair Creature to consider the monastic life

A bit of general commentary on foreign affairs. First, because it hasn’t gone away, a few words on Ukraine. I have many times said that this is an accidental state, and not really a serious country capable of maintaining its integrity without so much help from others that it cannot claim to be sovereign.

 

Readers of this weblog , especially in recent days, will know that this is not some conceited and superior position. Britain, since 1940, has not truly had sovereignty either. Our defeat in that year, and the accompanying national bankruptcy and dependence on the USA, become increasingly plain as it becomes possible to examine the full historical record.

 

Key events, such as the destroyer-for-bases deal which actually gave the USA sovereignty over former British Empire territory (not least in Newfoundland, where the US Navy acquired a base at Argentia, handy for the Placentia Bay meeting of 1941 between Roosevelt and Churchill ), the shipment of gold and securities to North America, the placing of British forces under supreme American command, the shepherding of Britain into a German-dominated European Union,  US endorsement of a violent challenge to British sovereignty over Northern Ireland, make the true position absolutely plain. At the very moment at which we were told we were experiencing our ‘finest hour’ we were in fact ceding our self-government in return for being rescued from a war we’d started and then predictably lost, though thanks to the Channel we had mercifully escaped occupation and surrender.

 

I’d add of course (for the benefit of Mr ’P’ who still seems to think our involvement in the 1939 war was morally driven, despite the total lack of evidence for this claim)  our shameful but unavoidable handover of Cossacks and others to Stalin, in whose hands we knew perfectly well they faced certain death; and our shameful turning of a blind eye to the vast and cruel ethnic cleaning under the Potsdam Agreement, and our acquiescence to the subjugation of much of Europe under Stalinist secret-police tyranny . This last was an arrangement we believed to be permanent. WE had no reason in those days to think it would last ’only’  44 years, a period in which many people in these regions were born, oppressed and died without any hope of liberation.

 

Anyway, back to Kiev, where so far as I know we have yet to establish where the tanks, alleged to have crossed the border from Russia, actually did come from. If anyone has seen clear proof, please let me know, but I have seen none, though I have noticed that some reporters are beginning to assume this is true.  

 

I note Ukrainian forces have also recaptured Mariupol from rebels for the umpteenth time (they seem to do this whenever things are going badly elsewhere, thus requiring the rebels to take it back in what must be a wearisome process, every time they recapture it. How long can this go on? Would it make a good opera? ) , and that rebels have shot down (with horrible loss of life, so much so that I am shocked at how low-key the coverage has been) a large Ukrainian transport plane.

 

I also note that Ukrainian diplomacy has sunk to a depth not usually allowed among nations which call themselves civilized. Kiev’s acting Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsia, in the course of very properly defending the Russian Embassy in that city from an angry mob, sought also to ingratiate himself with that mob.

 

He referred to the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, using language fit only for a lavatory wall or a conclave of drunkards.  I won’t repeat it in Russian, or attempt to translate it into English. I think the most common English translation (which can easily be found on the web if you wish)  underplays the power of such words in Russian culture, and so trivializes the offence. My Russian teachers always warned me very strongly against using words of this force, especially referring to the male sex organ, as this one does.

 

My principal instructor, a woman, wouldn’t even discuss them, and sent me to a male colleague to brief me on what they both thought was a necessary area of knowledge for a British journalist living in Russia.  They said I could quite easily get myself killed or badly injured if I miscalculated, and they taught me one (relatively) mild phrase which they said I could expect to hear quite often directed more or less humorously against me, and could use myself with reasonable safety.

 

Even more than here, Russian swearing is about power. It is a form of arrogant swaggering – I can say this to you, and you can do nothing.  You can only risk using such insults as Mr Deshchytsia aimed at Mr Putin, if you have reason to think your victim is too fearful or weak to punish you for it. What interests me is whether Mr Deshchytsia is correctly assessing the situation. Have the USA given such strong assurances to the new Kiev government that they are right in thinking they can taunt Moscow in this way? Or is Kiev in the hands of political children, who posture to please the mob?

 

As this matter is far from being resolved, and as it could yet get much, much worse, I suppose we shall all just have to wait and see.

 

Now to Baghdad, and the pitiful self-excusals of the Blair creature. There is one very important part of the new ISIS crisis, which commentators (with few exceptions) seem strangely unwilling to explore.  And that is that the ISIS is largely formed out of the very people we (‘the West’) narrowly escaped helping to conquer Syria a few months ago. These truly are the people we were going to help, urged on to do so by the Blair creature, whose understanding of the Middle East has actually grown less acute (if this is possible) than it was in 2003. Hasn’t he got a disinfectant factory to open somewhere?  On that subject, at least, it is reasonably safe to let him speak in public.

 

Otherwise, a person who thinks the ‘Arab Spring’ would have happened without his and President Bush’s  invasion of Iraq in 2003, and who still cannot grasp that, since the fall of the Ottomans, ‘Western’ foreign policy in the Middle East has been by its nature utterly devoid of principle, entirely self-interested, repeatedly ready to support and foster tyranny, really should never even have been charge  of a small outpost of the British Council, let alone Prime Minister.

 

 

How can a man of such Olympic dimness ever been elevated to a position of such authority?  As to the next question – why did so many people worship and fawn on him for so many years you need only observe the same people now to know that there is a class of person which is born to fawn, and that somehow, such people have entered the trade of journalism in large numbers.  

 

Now, by a hilarious reversal of fortune, at which I feel quite entitled to laugh, ‘we’ in the West are seeking the aid of the Iranians, until recently supposed to be a satanic, unspeakable force suspected of a (mad and suicidal) plot to drop atom bombs on Israel. Well, if I were the Ayatollahs, I’d say that it would be a lot easier to save Baghdad from, ISIS if Iran were not currently preoccupied with saving Damascus from the same people. So if Washington wouldn’t mind calling off its various dogs in that fight (and they know who they are) perhaps we might get somewhere?

 

Alas, having aligned ourselves with Saudi Arabia in the great Shia-Sunni split (for reasons about which we can but innocently speculate), this is not going to be that simple. It’ll certainly be too complicated for the Blair Creature. The danger is that he will still speak out about it.  I’ve urged him before to consider the monastic life, in the most silent order he can find. I still think it’s a jolly good idea. 

My new e-book 'Short Breaks in Mordor' now available

Those of you who have e-book readers will (I hope) be pleased to learn that my new book 'Short Breaks in Mordor' is now available via Amazon.co.uk

http://amzn.to/1uyxt0Y

The book, which begins with an essay on the joys of borders, is a compilation of many of my reports from foreign countries, over several years, including North Korea, China, Iran, Israel, Bhutan, Russia,Iraq,  Ukraine, The Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Egypt, and many others. In some cases I have published despatches for the 'Mail on Sunday' and later articles on the same journeys written for the 'American Spectator'. I am very grateful to both publications for allowing me to put this material in a book.

 

The book is only available in electronic form.

 

"Blast the Hell Out of Them" - some thoughts on the 'Special Relationship'

This article appeared in the Mail on Sunday of 14th June 2014

 

Britain and the USA have come far closer to open armed combat with each other in modern times than most people realize. In many ways, this was the biggest war in modern history that never happened.

 

Tired of being told about a ‘special relationship’ that didn’t seem to me to exist – and which nobody in Washington DC has ever heard of -  I decided to look into what really went on between our two countries.

 

And I found plenty of things which will shock anyone used to the standard ‘shoulder to shoulder’ sentimental view of the links between London and Washington.

 

And, as I researched the subject for a BBC Radio 4 programme (‘The Special Relationship : Uncovered’, to be transmitted at 8.00 p.m. on Monday 23rd June) I came across a rare and long-hidden sound archive that will, I think, surprise all who listen to it.

 

In the silence of a library at Princeton University, the ancient tape-recording begins to play, and the gruff voice of Admiral Arleigh Burke speaks from beyond the grave. I and the librarian, are the first people to have listened to it since it was made in January 1966, almost 50 years ago.

 

Burke, one of the US Navy’s greatest fighting sailors, is recalling a conversation with John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

 

Dulles has just wondered out loud if there is any way to stop Britain’s Fleet from launching its attack on Suez in 1956.

 

Admiral Burke describes his reply: ‘And I said,  “Mr Secretary, there is only one way to stop them. We can stop them. But we will blast the hell out of them”.

 

‘He [Dulles] said “Can’t you stop them some other way?”

‘I said “No. if we’re going to threaten, if we’re going to turn on them, then you’ve got to be ready to shoot. I can’t give these people orders to do something. They can’t do it in the first place – no matter who gives them orders – to demand and then get laughed at. The only way you can stop them is to shoot. And we can do that. We can defeat them – the British and the French and the Egyptians and the Israelis – the whole goddam works of them we can knock off, if you want. But that’s the only way to do it’

 

He then sent orders to the Admiral in charge of the US Sixth Fleet, Cat Brown, “I gave him orders to go to sea, to be prepared for anything, to have his bombs up, to be checked out, so that we would be ready to fight either another naval force or against land targets – and to make sure of all his targeting data - a little cautionary dispatch - but it ended up to be prepared for any war eventuality.’

 

‘Cat Brown sent back: “Who’s the enemy?”

 

And I sent back “Don’t take any guff from anybody”

 

History records (though few know this either) that America’s  Sixth Fleet duly stalked our ships, fouling our sonar and radar, shining their searchlights at French and British ships by night.

 

Admiral Sir Robin Durnford-Slater, second-in-command of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, complained to his superiors ‘We have already twice intercepted US aircraft and there is constant danger of an incident. Have been continually menaced during past eight hours by US aircraft approaching low down as close as 4000 yards and on two occasions flying over ships’.

 

General Sir Charles Keightley, Commander of Middle East land forces, wrote afterwards ‘It was the action of the US which really defeated us in attaining our object. He complained that the movements of the US Sixth Fleet ‘endangered the whole of our relations with that country’.

 

Washington, in the end, pulled the plug on our Suez invasion by threatening a run on the Pound Sterling. But the naval clashes are barely known to the British or American public.

 

There is a wry footnote to this. Arleigh Burke himself was honoured by having an entire class of Destroyers named after him. And one of these – the USS Winston S. Churchill – flies the British White Ensign alongside the Stars and Stripes, and usually carries a Royal Navy officer on her bridge.

 

We are so used to seeing those two flags flying side by side, that we forget that they have not always done so. The USA’s national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled banner’ actually describes a British bombardment of Baltimore in 1813, and one of its less-frequently sung verses uses the words ‘their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution’. To refer to us, the British invader.

 

Ancient history? Not really. Tough rivalry has been at the core of our relationships from the start. Border disputes about Canada and clashes in the Caribbean troubled both sides. After we built a commerce raider for the Confederates during the Civil War, the victorious North was so furious that it demanded the whole of Canada as recompense (settling in the end for the equivalent of several billion pounds).

 

In the years after World War One, Britain was forced by a series of treaties to accept that the US Navy was catching up in size, power and global reach.  

 

But in many ways the low-point came in the 1930s. Many Americans, and most American politicians, mistrusted and disliked Britain as snobbish, untrustworthy and colonialist. They thought we had misled them into joining the First World War. They were also angry that we had defaulted on our war debts.

 

If we wanted to fight another European war, they said, we would have to pay for it ourselves – and they were not joining in. This was not – as it is now portrayed – the view of a minority of pro-German Nazi sympathizers in the isolationist mid-west.

 

In fact it began among liberal-minded college students at Yale. Two future presidents – John F.Kennedy and Gerald Ford – were supporters of the ‘America First’ movement which campaigned for America to stay out and leave us to stew in our own juice. So was Kingman Brewster, who would one day be American ambassador to London.

 

Oddly enough, Americans know all this – it is all described in a powerful book by Lynne Olson, well-entitled ‘Those Angry Days’ , which was on US bestseller lists for months but is unknown here.

 

But not as unknown as the he secret drama which resulted from America’s cold indifference to Britain’s solitary plight in 1939 and 1940.

 

This amazing episode is left out of all major histories. It concerns the transfer of the British Empire’s entire life savings to North America, in a series of secret and increasingly frantic convoys.

 

The money was not just payment for war supplies. In the end, this huge handover of wealth, in Gold and securities, was first used to get round Congressional rules forbidding us to buy war material on credit. The first ultra-secret shipment of gold actually went in the warships which accompanied George VI and Queen Elizabeth on their tour of Canada in the USA a few months before war broke out.

 

But later the increasingly heavy payments (most of which are still in US vaults in Fort Knox) were used to persuade a bitter and unsentimental US Congress that Britain was so broke that if Congress did not support lend-Lease, Hitler would win and the Americans would face an untamed Germany across the Atlantic.

 

Semi-secret records, uncovered in the 1970s by the veteran journalist Alfred Draper, record the rapidly increasing tonnage of gold, usually carried by heavily-armoured warships in small fast convoys, being hurried to the USA via Canada. We may never know how much of this gold was sent to the USA – at least £500,000,000 at 1940 prices, an immense sum by any calculation of today’s values. But by handing it to the USA we completely altered the balance of wealth between the old world and the new, forever.

 

One particularly bitter incident caused Churchill to rage privately that America was acting like a bailiff seizing the goods of a bankrupt.  Britain was brusquely ordered by Franklin Roosevelt to hand over all the gold we had gathered in South Africa. The American cruiser Louisville was despatched to collect it, carefully floodlighting her neutral flag as she made her way across the South Atlantic.

 

British businesses in the USA, including the very profitable American Viscose, were sold off at knock-down prices.

 

Churchill, who described these actions as ‘harsh and painful’,  wrote later ‘I had a feeling that these steps were taken to emphasize the hardship of our position and raise feeling against the Opponents of Lend-Lease’. But at the time British diplomats in Washington had to use all their skill persuade the premier to tear up a letter of great bitterness and reproach which he wanted to send to the President.

 

The Canadian-born Lord Beaverbrook, then Minister of Aircraft Production and Churchill’s close friend,  wrote to the Prime Minister ‘They [The Americans] have conceded nothing. They have exacted payment to the uttermost for all they have done for us. They have taken our bases without valuable consideration. They have been given our secrets and offered us a  thoroughly inadequate service in return’.

 

All this was the background to the very moving meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941. The BBC was able to find very rare sound archives of sailors from both American and British navies, singing the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’,  as part of a joint service held on the decks of mighty warships from both nations.

 

But the seeming unity was a fake. Churchill once again was frustrated and disappointed by the meeting. The ‘Atlantic Charter’ which resulted threatened Britain’s empire and its naval dominance. And the USA still would not join the war.  In the end, in one of modern history’s most awkward and unexpected facts,  it would be Hitler who declared war on the USA, rather than the other way round.

 

This bleak, cold unsentimentality was not accidental or isolated. It continued throughout the war and beyond.

 

The Bretton Woods conference, in 1944, made it clear that the USA would usurp Britan’s economic dominance once the war was over. Britain’s Maynard Keynes fought hard to save something from the wreck but the USA’s negotiator, Harry Dexter White, is now known to have been a secret Soviet agent who had no interest in helping Britain recover her former glory.

 

The interesting question is whether White would have behaved any less brutally if he hadn’t been working for Stalin as well as Roosevelt.

 

The USA accepted our vital help with developing the Atom Bomb, then abruptly shut us out of its own post-war nuclear secrets, claiming it could not find a co-operation agreement made by Roosevelt and Churchill at FDR’s Hyde Park country home.

Peter Hitchens's programme on the 'Special Relationship' will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 qt 8.00 pm on Monday 23rd June.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can we Tolerate Intolerance?

Some readers may be interested in an edition of the BBC TV programme, the Big Questions, in which I took part on Sunday morning. The discussion, which lasted an hour and had quite a large panel of contributors,  was about the alleged  takeover of state schools by supposedly extremist Muslims, and  the implications of this event for tolerance and its limits.

 

The programme is available on BBC iplayer here http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b047hg6y/the-big-questions-series-7-episode-21

 

PETER HITCHENS: It's not a Muslim issue. In our modern nation you're an extremist, too

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I think we would be a happier country if we had never encouraged mass immigration in the post-war era. The fact that it is almost taboo to say this simple thing is an example of the problems it has caused.

But I also grasp that the immigration has happened, that we have new neighbours, and that it is our absolute duty to get on with them and befriend them as best as we can.

And this is why I am so scornful of the windbags and panic-spreaders who now seek to make an issue out of the supposed takeover of some state schools by Muslims. 

What twaddle this is. The Government quite rightly allows Christian schools in the state system – not least because it was the churches who took  on the job of educating poor children when politicians couldn’t be bothered to do so.

Well, now we have a large number of Muslim parents, how can we reasonably deny them the same?

I have a lot of quarrels with Islam, but I, and many traditional British Christians like me, have a lot in common with Muslims.

We dislike the pressure on teenage girls to dress as sluts and get drunk, and the pressure on teenage boys to be oafish copies of football stars. We think it’s time the old were respected and cared for, not dumped and abandoned.

We’d much rather our children went on religious pilgrimages than to a Britney Spears concert.

We see nothing shocking in the idea of boys and girls being taught separately – many  people pay good money for  single-sex education because they think it better, and because state schools mostly refuse to provide it any more.

We don’t especially want schoolteachers to undermine our views on marriage and child-rearing in politically radical ‘sex-education’ classes. Not everyone shares the liberal elite’s views of these matters.

We believe – because we’re British and we’ve heard of Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus – in freedom of speech and religion. So when we’re told that this is ‘extremism’, then we tend to think that in that case we, too, are ‘extremists’. The word means nothing except ‘person holding unfashionable views’. It means even less than the foggy, squelchy ‘British values’ Michael Gove says we must espouse.

Both Mr Gove and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, have in practice supported the transformation of this country into  a borderless, multicultural, multi-faith zone. Much of what was left of Christian teaching in state schools was stripped out of them years ago by secular radicals, so that our national faith is now taught as a sort of eccentric tribal cult, practised by other people, especially old people, if it is mentioned at all.

The ‘Conservative’ party, true to its long record of cowardice and retreat, never did anything to stop this. Now it seeks to appear concerned by blurring the border between religious fervour and terrorist crime.How dare either, or both, of these politicians now seek to advance their political careers by posing as the foes of ‘Islamic extremism’? If there is such a thing, their party brought it here and encouraged its growth.

The main thing to note about this pair is their behaviour proves the Tory Party doesn’t believe its own propaganda about winning in 2015.

They know there’ll be a vacancy for Leader of the Opposition next May, when a defeated David Cameron quits. That’s what they’re really fighting about.

Your wars cause rape, Mr Hague

Wars turn men into barbarians, and bring rape. This is a simple, cruel fact known to the many peoples who have had to endure invasion, occupation and subjugation, not to mention ethnic cleansing, in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Just ask all women of a certain age in Berlin what happened to them at the hands of our gallant Soviet Allies in 1945.

Angelina Jolie is an actress and can be pardoned for not knowing very much about the hard, real world.

But William Hague is a historian and politician.  He has no excuse for his fatuous parading about, pretending that bits of noble prose can change the way men act in war.

If Mr Hague wants to see less rape, then he should stop prancing about, fulminating bombastically about Libya, Syria and Ukraine, trying to start wars, which seems to be his main diversion these days.

It is as simple as that. There must be some other way he can get his picture taken next to Angelina. Talk about politics being showbusiness for ugly people.

A fearless force we cannot control

As one who opposed the Iraq War at the time, I must confess to getting some satisfaction from reminding people about it now, as the result of our stupid, predictably ruinous intervention descends from disaster to cataclysm.

Even now, various warmongers are scuttling around urging the futile use of airpower and drones against this great and furious force (which we have aroused) of embittered Sunni Muslim fanaticism.

Face it, we have lost any influence over this part of the world, for many years to come.

When are we going to grow up and realise that we have neither the right nor the power to go round invading other countries and telling them how to run their affairs?

What exactly is it that we have to offer them anyway? Lady Gaga, Facebook, Britain’s Got Talent and Game Of Thrones, plus mass divorce and abortion, legalised dope and Jägerbombs? Oh, yes, and our miraculous multi-party democracy, in which all the parties are the same? And our secret courts, lying statistics and unpayable debts?

If it weren’t for the fact that we are (so far) better-equipped for war, they’d have us by the throat. As Churchill wrote in 1899 after praising Muslims as ‘brave and loyal soldiers’ who ‘know how to die’: Islam ‘is a militant and proselytizing faith.

It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome’.

I don’t agree with that bit about Christianity struggling against science. It’s not true. But the rest of it is so.

We have relied too much on what Kipling called ‘reeking tube and iron shard’ in his great, prophetic warning  of the end of Empire, the poem Recessional.

Now the world is rapidly passing into the control of others, and we had better hope they are kinder to us than we have been to them.

***

When I make jokes, people think I’m being serious. When I’m being serious, they think I’m joking.

For example, people laugh when I say that our governing class don’t believe in prisons and only keep them going for fear of public opinion.

Well, now it’s been revealed that almost 90 criminals (some very violent) have quietly vanished from Ford Open Prison and are living undetected among us, please don’t laugh.

It is deadly serious, and a sign of a much deeper, well-hidden problem.

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

How to Do Good - some moderately sarcastic thoughts

Will any lessons be learned from the disaster now unfolding in what used to be Iraq? I doubt it. The interventionists still seem quite unable to see that it was their intervention that brought this about, and that their utopia, like all others, can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and then you never get there.

 

Such people will continue to scan the world, looking for places in which to do good, in which they will actually, quite unintentionally, end up by doing the most terrible harm . What motivates this desire? Why does it go so wrong?

 

I think it’s obviously a sort of displacement, and a good impulse, denied its proper course searching to find a way out.

 

We know that we ought to try to do some sort of good in our lives, even to try to be good. But the old devotional and pious approaches to this, personal self-examination, confession of our own misdeeds, self-control and self-reproach, all underpinned by ideas of God, sin, repentance and grace, are now regarded as completely absurd. They are so unfashionable and outmoded that even to attempt them is to court mockery, or dismissal as some sort of eccentric survival, a human coelacanth swimming on alone in the depths, living on long past its proper time, with no shoal to call its own.

 

Also dismissed by modern thought is the idea of man as a created being, with a special purpose. He has been replaced by a malleable, reformable being who has no unchanging nature. So he can (in theory, though of course not in practice, as we saw yet again in the 'Arab Spring')  be changed by vast utopian projects, whether Trotskyist or (Trotskyism's close cousin) neoconservative. And with the destruction of that kind of man has come the destruction of what used to be viewed as common sense, so that the more radically in conflict an idea may be with common sense, the more it is respected.

 

And so has come the idea of the social conscience - of doing good not in minute particulars,  for which we have no time and which are too small when set against the vast size of such problems as ‘child poverty’ or ‘colonialism’ or ‘exploitation’ or ‘racism’:  but in grandiose gestures, often involving other people’s money (which we spend) and other people’s children (whom we send out to kill, or arrange to have killed) .

 

And then of course there are all the disappointed sixties revolutionaries, whose great cause evaporated  amid unexpected prosperity and the computer revolution, and the disappointed Cold Warriors, who have no threat from which to defend us now that the Evil Empire has gone.

 

They too need a place in which to store their noble impulses.

 

And gosh, look, an attractive and terribly committed young woman on the television is telling us of woe and injustice in some corner of the world we’d never heard of an hour ago, have never visited and never will visit. And it becomes a moral imperative to intervene, and do good. And all those who oppose such intervention are callous and heartless.

 

And we do do good, a lot of good, to ourselves and our unquiet consciences. Or, if we don’t do any actual good, we feel as if we have.

 

And that’s what matters, isn’t it? How we feel? After all, what other measure could there possibly be?

'Stopping German Expansionism'

Now that some doubt has been cast on the strange idea that Britain entered the war in 1939 to prevent a Holocaust ( a Holocaust we didn't know about and which hadn't begun, directed against Jews to whom we had largely refused asylum either in our own country or in our Palestine colony; a Holocaust which, when it had begun, and we did know about it, we did nothing to halt or hamper) , we are now told that we declared war in September 1939 to 'stop German expansionism'. 

 

This claim is made despite the fact that we made no serious military attack on Germany while it invaded and crushed Poland, for whom we had supposedly gone to war. 

 

Well, if we went to war to 'stop German expansionism', then that wasn't much of a success either, was it?

Leaving aside the fact that if you go to war to stop someone doing something, it is usually politic to possess armed forces capable of enforcing your wishes, and to use them to do so, examine the result of this intervention:

Result of 1939-40 war (France and Britain v.Germany) , in which we were defeated and driven from continental Europe, but not occupied (though the French were occupied) : Germany expands to the River Bug in the East, occupies France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, brings Italy into wartime alliance. Expansionism not halted, wouldn't you say? 

Result of 1941-45 war (USA and USSR, plus Britain vs Germany, Japan and Italy) , in which Britain is not a  principal actor in war or diplomacy, but an increasingly subservient partner of the USA and USSR, and a bankrupt and dependent pensioner of the USA: After defeat of Germany, USA creates new Western European reality in which all major countries (Britain very much included) come under pressure to join what will become the EU. Germany dominates this EU, which (USSR having collapsed) proceeds to expand into Balkans, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Baltic states,(Having already absorbed Austria, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark , Netherlands, UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Greece, Cyprus, Malta) nachste, Ukraine and Georgia. German Expansionism not just not halted, but taken to limits not dreamed of before. 

 

So, if the war's principal purpose was to rein in German expansionism, it failed both in the short and the long term.

 

As for German expansionism in the medium term (1941-44) let's not even think about it. 

 

Where now for an excuse? 

Audio Version of 'The Rage Against God'

I have been asked several times if there are audio versions of any of my books. I am working on several, and recently completed a recording of 'The Cameron Delusion'.

Some time ago, I also recorded 'The Rage Against God', but was unable to locate it through normal searching.

I have now found that it can be obtained through this address, if anyone is interested. 

http://www.amazon.com/Rage-Against-Go...

 

 

 

I might as well try one more time

Mr ‘P’ makes the following odd offer : ‘The fact is that Nazism in Europe ended in the spring of 1945 after going to war in 1939, and its horrors brought to an end with it. I am perfectly prepared to agree to all Mr Hitchens says if he can present compelling evidence that his timescale for allied intervention would not have delayed the end of the war beyond the spring of 1945.’

 

This sort of thing tempts me to follow the advice of the contributor who advised me to give up on the topic, as so many people simply aren’t capable of grasping my simple proposition.

 

Of course the whole war cult is a semi-religious one, and some people simply won’t ever be able to let go of their beliefs about it, which guide them in much, if not all, of their view of the world. These are the sort of people who think that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein Slobodan Milosevic and the others are all new Hitlers. For them there is nothing I can say. Many of us long to have things divided into simple good and simple evil, and dislike it when we’re told it’s not so.  I understand the urge. I'm opften wrongly accused of suffering from it. But it’s mistaken.

 

But perhaps there are others, mere witnesses to these clashes, who might pick up something.

 

Mr P seems to think that the duration of the war is some sort of fixed quantity, and that if it started in 1939, it was bound to end in 1945 . From this he seems to deduce that, if it started in, say, 1941, it was bound to have lasted until 1947.

 

I think this is absurd. For a start, as I have said here before, the huge French Army and the large French economy were eliminated from the anti-German side of the war almost totally in 1940, and only partially returned towards the end. The British army, having been driven from the European continent in 1940,  was not in contact with the main body of the enemy from 1940 to 1944.

 

Half my point here is that this was not the only possible outcome, though it was a reasonable outcome of the peculiar strategy adopted by Britain and France in April 1939, which allowed Germany to fight them on one front and so defeat them quite easily, without even needing a pretext to start a war, as they’d already declared it.

 

As it happened, Britain and France were very nearly eliminated from the First World War in the autumn of 1914 but, largely because Germany was fighting a war on two fronts, and spread its army too thin, they were not. It was a close-run thing, though, as such events always are. Anglo-French policy in 1914 was pretty foolish, but it was nothing like as daft as their policy in 1939.

 

Can I just get Mr ’P’ (or anyone else) to think a bit here?

The hinge of decision is not May 1940. It is April 1939.Without April 1939, and the empty, dishonest guarantee to Poland, which only Poland believed,  there would have been no September 1939 invasion of Poland, no May 1940 invasion of the Low Countries and France, as we know it.

 

Without the Polish guarantee, a whole series of events Mr ‘P’ takes for granted would almost certainly not have happened.

 

My guess is that Poland would have renewed its non-aggression pact with Germany, that Poland would have ceded Danzig to Germany, and permitted the construction of German roads and rail lines across the corridor.  No agreement on the partition of Poland would have been attempted or reached between Germany and the USSR, hence no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  

Hitler was an opportunist. We don’t know what he would have done next. But without the promise of a neutral, even friendly USSR, and with a heavily-armed France sat on his Western frontier, he would have had much less freedom of action.

 

Mr ‘P’ also needs to understand that , while the government of Germany was a National Socialist (‘Nazi’) dictatorship, Hitler was following classical liberal German foreign policy dating back to 1915, namely Friedrich Naumann’s policy of ‘Mitteleuropa’ , or German domination of central and eastern Europe, not necessarily through direct political control. The allies were not fighting ‘The Nazis’. They were fighting Germany, which might well have followed equally aggressive policies under a different government. The allies were not fighting ‘Nazism’. They had tolerated it and dealt with it willingly for six years.

 

He must also grasp the fact, repeatedly pointed out by me,  that a) Hitler did not adopt the policy of mass extermination of Jews until well after the war had begun c) that it was only his eastern conquests, and his invasion of the Low Countries,  followed by his defeat of Britain and France in May 1940, which placed most of Europe’s Jews in his grasp, and c) that the allies never lifted a finger to prevent that extermination, long after they had reliable information that it was going on. Would he perhaps just say that he has taken this fact in? So few of my opponents on this matter ever do. It would save so much trouble, and it is a demonstrable and undisputed fact.

 

So, for the ninetieth time, to characterise World War Two as a war to stop the Holocaust is simply incorrect. Our side didn’t fight it for that purpose.

 

As for the victory of the allies ending the Holocaust, that is undoubtedly the case, and axiomatic. But it is also possible that the rate and speed of the mass murder may have been accelerated by Hitler’s knowledge of approaching defeat. I don’t think we can know, not least because there is so little surviving documentation and most of those involved who were caught lied about what they were up to. Either way, it can’t really be made an issue in this discussion.

 

By the way, the horrors of World War two did not, alas, end with the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. The ghastly ethnic cleansing of the Potsdam agreement, many times described here, brought misery and death to multitudes of innocent women and children. The Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe was bloody and cruel on a colossal scale.

 

I can guarantee nothing about a past which never happened. But I can say that it seems to me to be quite possible that, by remaining in a state of strong and increasingly armed neutrality, Britain and France might well have achieved a better result than the one they did achieve – namely, the end of both of them as major powers, the alliance between Hitler and Stalin, the utter destruction of Poland and its imprisonment under foreign rule for the next 50 years,  the invasion, rape and occupation of the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway and France, and the near-defeat of the USSR by surprise attack in 1941. The USA didn’t suffer by staying out, and is not reviled for it. Nor, except by a very few who know the details, is Russia reviled for her cynical behaviour between 1939 and 1941.

 

The simplest way of making the point remains A.J.P. Taylor’s bitter question. ‘In 1940, would you rather have been a ‘betrayed’ Czech, or a ‘saved’ Pole?’ The contrast between the rhetoric and the facts of life is the thing to bear in mind. Talk of honour as much as you like but if your ‘honour’ means someone else’s home being burned to the ground, while he and his family are marched off to slavery or death, it doesn’t seem to me to be worth all that much.

 

An honest self-interested policy of defending one’s own national interests seems to me to be preferable to this sort of exalted, pseudo-noble palaver, in which ‘doing the right thing’ and feeling good about yourself happens to involve death and misery for lots of other people, not to mention the diminution of your own national independence for all future time.

Banging On

I will select 'Geraint' as being the most blatant of those commenting here who have so completely misunderstood what I say that they actually misrepresent it back to me. they do this, I believe, so as to avoid actually thinking about it.

 

'Geraint' writes: 'Peter Hitchens declares that we were not in contact with the enemy until 44. That would be a surprise to those in North Africa/Crete/Malta and Italy. That's not even including against the Japanese at Malaya and Burma. Indeed it is the surrender at Singapore that did more to lose our Empire than the Nazis.

 

But I didn't write that we were 'not in contact with the enemy until 44'. Such a  statement is obviously absurd. I wrote 'The British army, having been driven from the European continent in 1940,  was not in contact with the main body of the enemy from 1940 to 1944.' The difference between the two is enormous. Yet 'Geraint' is quite  happy to put at least half his name to this total untruth.

 

How can one strive against this sort of thing? How can one deal with the people who think I say that a German-Polish deal in 1939 would have resulted in permanent peace (I don't, and have often speculated on how and where else Hitler might have pursued his eastward drive if he had been at peace with Poland). How can I deal with those who seem to think that May 1940 would have happened anyway even if Britain and France had not declared war on Germany in September 1939. How can I deal with those who can't see that France, undefeated and powerfully defended, would have remained a military problem for Germany, which it was not once it had been defeated and occupied?

 

How can I deal with those who repeatedly ask to me stipulate the exact date and nature of Britain's entry into the war, if not in September 1939, when the question is self-evidently absurd and I have just explained why it is self-evidently absurd?

 

How can I deal with those who seem to think that countries go to war because they disapprove of other people's governments - in which case how could we ever have had the USSR as an ally?

 

How can I deal with those who refuse to acquaint themselves with the actual history of Hitler's treatment of the Jews first of Germany and then of the rest of Europe, and the history of the democracies' failure to do anything about it?  Who cannot distinguish between the persecution of German Jews designed to drive them out of Germany, and the deliberate industrial murder of all the Jews of Europe, which only began after the war (triggered by the Polish Guarantee) had begun. And who still imagine that we went to war in 1939 as an anti-racist crusade? Or indeed that the rescue of Europe's Jews ever formed part of our warlike purpose?

 

How can I deal with those who don't grasp that Britain was actually bankrupted by war by 1940, and never recovered? That she wasn't, and could not afford to be, a major European military power?

 

How can I deal with those who cannot see that taking advantage of the tension between Germany and Russia, complicated by armed Anglo-French neutrality,  would have been a classic balance-of-power policy? Whereas our declaration of war in 1939 *destroyed* that balance?

 

The answer is that I can't. And I can't because the myth of the  'Finest Hour' is as potent in the modern British mind, especially among people of a certain age (mine, mainly), as the great religious stories were in the minds of their forebears. It is a tale of lone heroism, of good triumphing over evil against the odds, of heroic brotherhood with selfless allies . Alas, it is not true. And it leads us, every few years, into folly after folly after folly, in which innocent people die screaming for no good purpose. That's why I keep on and on about it. 

 

How can I deal with those who cannot seen that taking advantage of the tension between Germany and Russia, complicated by armed Anglo-French neutrality,  would have been a classic balance-of-power policy? Whereas our declaration of war in 1939 *destroyed* that balance?

 

The answer is that I can't. And I can't because the myth of the  'Finest Hour' is as potent in the modern British mind, especially among people of a certain age (mine, mainly), as the great religious stories were in the minds of their forebears. It is a tale of lone heroism, of good triumphing over evil against the odds, of heroic brotherhood with selfless allies . Alas, it is not true. And it leads us, every few years, into folly after folly after folly, in which innocent people die screaming for no good purpose. That's why I keep on and on about it.