Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 232

A Whitsun Address

I thought it possible that some readers might like to see an address I gave last evening during Evensong at St Hugh's College, Oxford: 

 

Here we are on the first of the great Christian festivals to have been abolished by the British secular state. Until 50 years ago, Whitsun - which everyone called it then - was a national holiday. Pentecost was a technical term, explained to me in the Scripture classes we still had in those days.

 

Tomorrow would have been a holiday, and not just tomorrow.  The big industrial towns would have held what they called ‘Whit Weeks’, when mines and factories would shut completely. It was the time of year when the poor would traditionally buy new clothes. Christenings and weddings (with much wearing of white, hence ‘Whitsun’) were especially common, which is why there were Whitsun Weddings for Philip Larkin (I’m coming to him) to write about.

 

Like all the really great Christian festivals, the ones that catch on and are part of people’s lives, it probably started as a pagan feast, possibly Beltane. I’ve never understood why Atheists think it so devastating to point this out.

 

Once you begin to realize what paganism was like when it was in charge, especially its many unpleasant sacrifices, you become even more pleased that Christianity blotted out its bloodstained and often abandoned debauches, with its own restrained but majestic ceremonies. 

 

But even 50 years ago, while Richard Dawkins was a mere research student, and this College still reinforced blatant sexism by refusing to admit… men, and Lincoln College library was still the City Church of Oxford, Christianity’s grip on England’s culture and calendar was already enfeebled. Whitsun, after the usual progressive ‘experiment’ (these, as you will find, are always successful), was replaced, with barely a squawk of dissent, by the unpoetic ‘Late Spring Bank Holiday’.

 

From Whitsunday, the great feast of the Holy Ghost, of a rushing mighty wind and tongues of fire to…a ‘Bank Holiday’. What could be more secular than a bank?

 

And I suspect it’s only a matter of time before Good Friday goes the same way. Good Friday was in my own memory still the most solemn day of the year, a day of sober quiet and reverence, and of, at least,  respect from unbelievers. It is now a raucous fairground of shopping, betting and boozing.

 

Christmas will be last to go, but go it will. The secular world is slowly overwhelming Western Christianity, and when it has done so, will the pagans come back, or something even worse, perhaps a vast reductionist indifference to eternity?

 

Which brings me to my first text for this evening, from the great religious poet, Philip Larkin. Larkin is religious precisely because he very much did not mean to be, but he was. He was of God’s party without knowing it.

 

I can think of few more profoundly religious lines than these ‘The trees are coming into leaf, like something almost being said’.

Almost? He knows perfectly well that something is being said, and has – I suspect – a pretty good idea of what it is. 

 

He shoves in a cautious ‘almost’, too, in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ ‘Our almost-instinct, almost true: What will survive of us is love’.

 

But in either case do you recall the hesitant ‘almost’ - or the unqualified and beautiful statement?

 

 

There’s plenty more. Once you’ve noticed how very worried Larkin is about death and eternity, you see it all the time.

 

The ‘awkward reverence’ of his poem ‘Church Going’ resulted, we now know, from Larkin seeing, in Ireland, an Anglican church actually derelict and ruined, and finding he was not comforted by the sight.

 

He concluded, honestly but reluctantly after a later visit to a reassuringly well-maintained English church:

 

‘It pleases me to stand in silence here.

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,’

 

In some ways his most serious poem of all is ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ which he wrote in 1955 when the old ancient power of Whitsun still drew couples to be married on that day, not out of open piety but because normal time had not yet fallen so completely out of step with the eternal as it has today. All of life was full of little reminders of God and his angels. Aunties still knew the Bible by heart, and the Pilgrim’s Progress too, and the background music of many people’s lives was still shaped by hymns and psalms.

 

Apart from being the best railway poem since Adlestrop, so evocative you can smell the cushions and the soot, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is very serious and full of the mysterious power of the unseen.

 

Of the gathered wedding parties at every station, he wrote these extraordinary, disturbing lines, hinting at the continuation, in each one of a string of banal English industrial towns, of something very old and very mysterious

‘The women shared /The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared

At a religious wounding.’

 

But that’s nothing to the ending of this ‘frail travelling coincidence’.

 

‘…what it held

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.’

 

‘To be loosed with all the power that being changed can give’

 

All the power that being changed can give?

 

That’s a good line.

 

Well, and there we are, back at Whitsun, that day of powerful change, on what I have always pictured (since I first heard it so long ago) as happening on one of those blazing Mediterranean mornings where the light reflecting off the stones hurts the eyes, but in a cool whitewashed room with high windows.

 

And here we have the poetry not of Philip Larkin but of the Authorized Version of the Bible (and a Bible with no poetry is like a river without water, for how can God possibly speak in or through lifeless, toneless modern bureaucratic prose?).

 

‘And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind’

 

‘A rushing mighty wind,

 

How, and for what purpose, would anyone abandon that unforgettably simple, thrilling, fearsome phrase for the leaden alternatives -  ‘the blowing of a mighty wind (NIV) ,or ‘a strong wind blowing (Good News)’

 

Is the meaning clearer? No, it is less clear, because the poetry has been all cut out.

 

Without the poetry, you cannot get at the sheer ferocity of the occasion - a storm of fire and truth descending on mankind, once again in the form of the Word of God, the word that was in the beginning the language, which distinguishes men from beasts and heard ‘by every man in his own tongue, wherein he was born,’

 

The word which is in us, and in the DNA of all life (for DNA is itself a language, the principal evidence of the existence of mind).

 

And in every pattern and structure of the universe, the actual Mind of God is expressed in everything from men to mountain ranges.

 

‘There appeared unto them cloven tongues, like as of fire’

 

 

But what did the tongues say, as the Spirit gave them utterance? Well, we can read St Peter’s sermon given immediately afterwards.  It was better than mine.

 

But there was then, and is now, the perpetual problem of how we judge between what comes from God and what comes from ourselves, and which we then try to attribute to God.

 

And that is one of the reasons why you have also heard this evening from the Epistle of James, that most haunting, disturbing piece of scripture – especially for people such as me, who win their bread by writing where many read, and speaking where many listen.

 

Martin Luther did not like it, presumably because of its clever, subtle questioning of justification by faith alone, almost as if it had seen him coming hundreds of years before he was born. He once called it ‘The Epistle of Straw’. But my concern with it is that it contains a warning of great severity.

 

Those of us who think that evil deeds are done only with hands and weapons will here find out how wrong they are.  

 

‘Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth!

‘Even so, the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity

 

‘So is the tongue among our members,  that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell’

 

And in case you thought this did not apply to you, it is careful to add:

 

‘Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing’.

 

And if that’s not true of most if not all of you, as it is of me, I should be very much surprised.

 

But to me it’s also a warning that what you say may not have the effect that you intended.

 

Some years ago, as I marvelled at the fact that I seemed, after decades of shovelling coal in the stokeholds of Fleet Street, to have obtained an audience, and that some people seemed interested in listening to what I might say, I also began to understand that I needed a reason for every word I wrote or spoke.

 

I found very rapidly that it was pointless to strive for effect. It is not that I let some higher power guide my fingers at the keyboard, more that I only received a true response when I simply followed what I might loosely call my instincts. 

 

I concluded that I had been given a gift. This sounds vain, and in the assumption that I have been selected as the recipient I suppose it is, but that is too bad. In my case it is the opposite of self-praise.

 

I generally don’t know why people like what I write, when they do.

 

(By contrast it is usually refreshingly easy to see why some people don’t like anything I write at all. I have come almost to enjoy being howled down by large audiences, a near-infallible confirmation that you are in the right).

 

The one of my five books which has brought me by far the most kindness and response from readers is one called ‘The Rage Against God’, which I very much did not wish to write, with which I was very unhappy while I wrote it and after it was finished,  and which I several times sought to abandon.

 

Which is really what I came here to say. That there really were tongues of fire, that there is truth in the universe, that even people such as you and me can discover it, though it may take us  most of our lives to do so.

 

And that an increasingly secular world will often be furiously hostile to the truth even being expressed.

 

And also that when we do discover it, it is most likely that we shall do so reluctantly, unwillingly and even diffidently; that those who most confidently proclaim themselves to be hand in hand with the Holy Ghost may well not be.

 

And in the end I have less and less to say, until the day will come when all I wish to communicate will be the glowing core of the First Collect at Morning Prayer ‘ O God,  who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life,  whose service is perfect freedom…’

 

I’d add that this, our Church of England, in its modesty and reasonableness, its unmilitant poetic vagueness, what Larkin didn’t quite call ‘that vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to proclaim we never die’, seems to me to offer the best answer available to the certain fury of the atheist and the worldly utopian. You’ll know this, from the Four Quartets:

 

‘Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

 between two waves of the sea.

Quick, now, here, now, always –

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

What I think about World War Two

I notice that my old friend John Rentoul and others are speculating (not always accurately) on my remarks about D-Day, and why we should revere those who took part, but not the foolish politicians whose irresponsible decisions ( especially the Polish guarantee of April 1939)  made it necessary for us to send young men on to those terrible beaches, to reconquer territory we need never (in my view) have lost in the first place.

This response to a comment by Mr O' Vinny may help them:

 

Mr O’ Vinny has written (in a  comment on another thread): ‘Having corresponded with PH direct about his view of WW11, I know what he hasn't said in today's article. I understand he believes we should not have intervened (not the same as appeasement). 

 

It is a pity that, despite the correspondence, he still doesn’t understand my perfectly simple and easily grasped position.

 

It is this. I do not believe we should not have intervened. I believe that we should not have intervened when we did.

As the whole course of events in Europe and Asia was violently skewed by our more or less clinically insane 1939  foreign policy, it is difficult to speculate now on when an intervention might have been justified. All I can say with certainty is that the 1939 intervention very nearly cost us our existence, and did cost us our life savings, our national sovereignty, our unique culture and laws and our empire. In all but one respect (our presence on the winning side, as a useful appendage to the USA) we resembled a defeated country in 1945 and have behaved like one ever since.

 

What we did next would and should have depended on what Hitler and Stalin did. The fundamental conflict in Europe (and therefore the hinge of the balance of power) was then as it is now the conflict between Germany and Russia over who dominates Eastern and Central Europe. The Franco-German conflict, now neutralised by the EU, was a subsidiary of the Russo-German one, thanks to France’s alliances or attempted alliances with Moscow, and Germany’s wish to fight a war on one front at a time.

 

 

Britain’s guarantee to Poland in April 1939 was mistaken (in that Britain had no interest in preventing the cession of Danzig to Germany, a demand a good deal more reasonable and justified than Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland) ), and in that our action’s main effect was to encourage intransigence on the part of Colonel Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, so preventing  a negotiated compromise between Poland and Germany, who were in fact allies bound by a treaty at that stage.

 

That Britain’s guarantee to Poland in April 1939 was dishonest, in that we knew when we made it that we had no intention of taking any material action to enforce it, and that we couldn’t have done if we had wanted to, as our armed forces (on the modernisation of which we had nearly bankrupted ourselves by 1938) were designed to defend the Empire overseas, and our home islands - but not equipped or configured for a continental land war. We also knew that the Germans were fully aware of our military weakness, in continental land forces,  and likewise did not take our guarantee seriously.

 

Similar criticisms apply to France which, though it maintained a large land army, was also configured, prepared, equipped and trained  for a defensive rather than an offensive war (and, as it happened, not very well-prepared even for that, as it had neglected to complete the Maginot line in the most crucial sector, along the Belgian frontier - a route of attack which would hardly have been a surprise to any French general or politician).

 

Whatever view either country might have taken in April 1939, by the way, it was utterly transformed by the Stalin-Hitler Pact, which (by giving Germany free land-based access to raw materials and fuel from the USSR), instantly negated one of Britain’s most powerful weapons, which had effectively won the war for us in 1914,  the threat of naval blockade.

 

All I ask is that people think. Silly misrepesentation is the reflex of the person who does not wish to think, and so seeks to pretend that I am saying something quite different from what I am actually saying. 

The Word "Extremism" Does not Mean Anything

The word ’extremism’ does not mean anything. I confess, abjectly, to having used it in the past. But for some years now I have been trying very hard not to do so.

 

To the extent that it can be said to have any meaning at all, it is ‘opinion not fashionable, not approved of by mainstream at time under discussion’.

 

Anyone who has been paying attention to the status of various opinions, about morality and politics, over the past 40 years, will easily be able to see that opinions which were ‘extremist’ half a century ago are now in many cases mainstream and almost obligatory, and vice versa. The issue of whether they are correct or not, or just or not, cannot be decided by how modish or unfashionable they happen to be.

 

 

So , as you study the fuss about supposedly extremist-dominated schools in Birmingham and elsewhere, please bear that in mind.

 

The facts about these schools are disputed and hard to pin down.  The original ‘Trojan Horse’ letter on which the whole row is founded does seem, by general agreement, to have been a hoax.

 

Not everyone involved may be telling the whole truth. I am quite prepared to believe some of the more worrying things we have heard about what some children have been taught or told in some of the schools involved. But I am also ready to believe some of  the quite impressive declarations of innocence we have also heard.

 

The real problem we face is that we are still, officially a country which believes in freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, and specifically in freedom of religion. Indeed, I believe these were among the Four Freedoms, so charmingly depicted by Norman Rockwell,  which Franklin Roosevelt recognized as the war aims of the allies in the Second World War.

 

More than that, we are a society which has an established Church, the Christian Church of England, and a country in which the churches, especially the C of E and the Roman Catholics, did much to set up schools for the children of the poor. They did this when the state was more or less uninterested in doing so. Thanks to various treaties between church and state, in which the Churches were in a strong position because of the work they had done, the state conceded large freedoms to the churches, especially the freedom to continue to maintain schools in the state system, which had a religious character and which are allowed to choose many of their pupils on a religious test.

 

In my view the Church of England were diddled, because the promise they extracted in return for ceding control of many schools, that all state schools would have a ‘broadly Christian’ daily act of worship, and that the national faith would be taught as such in schools, has been comprehensively broken. I use the word ‘comprehensive'deliberately,. The creation of vast new American-style high schools has made  it far easier for these obligations to be shelved, forgotten or bureaucratically obstructed .'We just don’t have a hall big enough. We can’t fit it in to the timetable. We don’t have the qualified teachers', etc.

 

I’d be very interested in a survey of how many non-RC state schools actually deal with the Christianity question. I think it would show that most pupils could get through their school careers without ever encountering anything resembling organized Christianity ,as a living faith.

 

Now, one of the things I really like about Muslims is that they are not having any of that. They value their faith, they believe in it, and they see it is one of their main duties in life to pass it on, undiluted, to their sons and daughters.

 

And, since we allow Christians to have state schools, and since we have freedom of conscience, how exactly are we to deny them the freedom to do so, now that there are so many Muslim parents and children living in our country?

I simply cannot see how, without conscious, gross and blatant injustice, this could be done.

 

Now, the neo-conservatives who get into the most frenzied state of mind about alleged ‘extremism’ in schools are also keen supporters of the ‘open border’ and ‘free movement of labour’ policies which have led to the establishment in this and many other European countries of large and thriving Muslim communities.

 

Such policies are an essential part of their belief in global free trade and the downgrading of national sovereignty to a vestige, which all their policies and actions support.  

 

This is an odd contradiction, far too seldom challenged.

 

The fact is that most religious views, examined coldly by those who don’t believe in them, can be portrayed as ‘extreme’. (There's a fine illustration of this in George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman at the Charge’, in which Flashman, posing as a Sepoy, listens to a Sepoy sergeant’s incredulous, scornful  translation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, one of the most beautiful stories in Christian scripture but here portrayed as a description of a more or less mad person).

 

I wonder how many of the firm beliefs of many of my more Calvinist or Romish friends, described in cold and unsympathetic prose, or even some of the sentiments in some quite popular hymns,  could be made to seem like sinister and cultish absurdities, from which the young should be protected, with a little propaganda skill. Western atheists who bother to read Christian scripture are quite good at this sort of thing.

 

What also makes me pause before condemning too vigorously is that many of the Islamic opinions about or drunkenness and general sexual abandon, about which we purse our lips in horror, are more or less exactly what the average Anglican parson, Methodist minister or Roman Catholic priest would have felt (and said openly) in this country before 1914, and in some cases a good deal more recently than that.

 

Women in Europe and the Americas, who since the 1920s have dressed in ways that would have profoundly shocked all previous generations are amazingly unaware (as they trip merrily around the Muslim world)  of how viscerally shocking their appearance and behaviour is to both men and women.

 

It is hard to think of any way of illustrating this, though perhaps if we started getting high-value tourism from alien planets (so high-value that we preferred not to turn it away) , whose female inhabitants wore nothing at all, or dressed as if for pornographic films, and engaged in adventurously unconventional sex in the streets and squares, we might be as shocked as much of  the Arab and Muslim world is by our behaviour. We would, as they do, put up with it and pretend not to notice, but I suspect there might be moments of deep misunderstanding, even so. There would also be resentment.

 

These are the problems of multiculturalism, which encourages the creation of large solitudes next door to each other, of people who don’t necessarily want to integrate with each other, see no good reason to do so and often see several good reasons not to. It’s a tribute to the basic tolerance,  patience and good nature of so many of those involved that we have got into such a mess, in our crowded cities,  with so few open clashes.

 

Now, there is a special difficulty between Islam and Christianity. Islam believes that it is the final revelation, and that it has rendered previous Abrahamic religions obsolete. Christianity it is true, takes the same view of Judaism, or did so, but has now reined itself in. The old C of E Collect for Good Friday, which prayed for the conversion of ‘Jews, Turks, infidels and hereticks ’ has been quietly retired , and Pope John Paul II put a stop to similar trends in the RC Church, both by his personal diplomacy, transparently friendly to Jews and Judaism,  and by movingly referring to the Jews as ‘the elder brothers of our faith’.

 

Islam, it seems to me, hasn’t made this adaptation and shows little sign of doing so. Suggestions that children were urged to join in chants against Christmas are perhaps the most disturbing of the claims (and I stress these are claims)  about Muslim schools which have been made. It is hard to think of any Christian school, however fervent, asking it children to take part in chants dismissing Eid or Ramadan.

 

On the other hand, it’s no rumour that my late brother (though he allowed a plastic Christmas tree in his home) had a strong dislike of the feast,  liked to sing Tom Lehrer’s mordant song about Christmas ( ‘… Drag out the Dickens, Kill the turkeys,  ducks and chickens, deck the halls with hunks of holly, disapproval would be folly, Brother! Here we go again! Etc etc) to anyone who would listen, and this is recorded and available on Youtube, as far as I know.

 

Of course the real worry is that ’extremist’ Islamist teaching will produce graduates of these schools who put into severe practice the idea that they are taught.

 

I know of no way of predicting this. What we know of many who have taken to real terror is that they have been initially poor adherents of the Muslim faith, often hanging around in delinquent groups, before having some sort of late revelation and suddenly turning into zealots; or that they have been disarmingly normal schoolboys, regarded as such by all who knew them, who have later rather inexplicably turned to plots and bombs. And also in some cases that they have overthrown their reason with cannabis, as I believe may well have been the case with the killers of Lee Rigby.  

 

Anyway, English law’s quite simple, or was, and ought to be again.  You’re punished for what you do, not for what you might do, or for what you think about doing, or even for what you talk about.  I think that’s reasonable,  because the gap between idle chatter and action is a very large one, and if people talk openly then we will have much more warning that things are brewing than if they don’t. You can’t prevent all terror, by any amount of laws, however stringent. I suspect that if you do want to detect its gestation, then freedom of speech and a willingness to tolerate ‘extremist’ political groups will make it easier to do so.

 

Incitement to violence is a crime, as it ought to be. But on the bogeyman pretext of terrorism, terrorism which is far more effective than it otherwise would be because both politicians and journalists so readily react and over-react to it, we have begun to whittle away such sensible rules.

 

The Blair creature, back in 2006, insisted on shoving a provision against ‘glorifying’ terrorism (which sounds like something out of the old USSR penal code) in to his Terrorism Act, though wise heads in the House of Lords, seeing the possible difficulties of such a law in a free country, had thrown it out by a large majority. A pity, in my view.

 

But in general, it seems to me that you can’t, in a free country, welcome large numbers of adherents of a certain religion, and then get alarmed and panicky because members of that religion preach doctrines which,  they genuinely believe flow from their faith.  Actions are one thing. Expressions of opinion are quite another. Islam's view of the world is not new to us. We encountered it in the Crusades, in our own empire, especially in India and the Middle East, in our dealings with the Ottomans.  Now it is here, and in some strength.  We are going to have to get used to it.

 

For me, as a Christian who prefers Christianity to Islam, though I necessarily find much to admire in Islam's adherents (especially an undoubted love for God, and a great deal of serious devotion, a good deal of personal and moral courage,  not to mention charity) I am concerned that our approach is so secular, that we seem to think that our expensive weapons, our consumer goods and our technology make it unnecessary for us to offer any other arguments on our own behalf.

 

If only we would be more Christian ourselves, I think we would get on better, and we would also have more persuasive power, not perhaps to convert, but to bring about a coexistence in which Muslims more often recognized the virtues in our faith, and we recognized virtues in theirs, and both sought to emulate the best in the other.  

So When Should We Have Gone to War Against Hitler, Then, Eh?

I'm being asked, yet again, when we should have gone to war against National Socialist Germany, if not in September 1939?

 

How could I possibly say? Those who ask this simply do not understand just how momentous the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland was.

 

1. It committed two reluctant nations, ill-equipped for such a struggle, to go to war pretty much when Poland told them to. Thus it bound Britain to France, and both to Poland. 

2.This was profoundly futile, as it did no good, and could not possibly do any good. Why not? Neither Britain nor France had the forces to fulfuil their promise. Nor did they have the slightest intention of doing so. They knew this. Their military commanders knew this, and made sure the politicians knew that they knew. Equally important, the Germans, being well aware of our military capacity, or rather non-capacity,  also knew it and were not in any way deterred from putting pressure on Poland for concessions over Danzig.

3. This was positively dangerous, as it was clear then (and is clear from documents) that the Poles *did* believe it. Indeed, they expected material help from us right up till the end. 

And thus, while it did not prevent German pressure, initially friendly, to negotiate over Danzig, it led directly to Poland's refusal to renew (as offered by Berlin) its 1934 non-aggression treaty with Germany; to Poland's subsequent refusal to negotiate over Danzig and the corridor, and so to Germany's agreement with the USSR, which was a direct consequence of Poland's refusal to negotiate. 

 

So, no guarantee, no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, no Polish partition, no British or French declaration of war, no advance of German forces to the Bug, no guarantee of Soviet oil and raw materials to the Third Reich (so negating our ability to blockade). No Norway fiasco, No Fall of Chamberlain, no fall of France, no Dunkirk, no invasion of the Low Countries, no Battle of Britain, no lend-lease.

 

What happens next? German pressure on Romania? A Soviet invasion of Finland and the Baltic States?  Who knows? I don't, any more than Roosevelt knew when he was going to be drawn into a European war. The Polish guarantee changed everything. It is the hinge of the whole crisis. Begin there, and you'll begin to see what I'm on about. Begin at September 1939, or at May 1940, and you'll miss the whole point of the argument. 

 

Who knows what conditions might have combined to bring us into war had we not given the guarantee to Poland? I don't.  Who could? 

 

One point, however. It is being argued by some that our intervention in 1939 in some way helped to save European Jews from Hitler's mass murder programme. I cannot see how.

 

Before the guarantee, the Jews of Poland, though they suffered severe anti-semitism from their own state, were beyond Hitler's reach. So were the Jews of France, Norway, Denmark and the Low Countries, and many Jewish refugees from Hitler in those countries. The declaration of war, and the subsequent defeat, put all those Jews under Hitler's control. 

Those Jews still in Hitler's power, who were being robbed, persecuted and sometimes attacked and killed but not subjected to the later campaign of systematic mass murder,  could still leave Germany until September 1939, if they could find anyone to take them in ( a major problem at that time was that they could not find such refuge, though some Jewish children could find homes abroad through the Kindertransport scheme, which ended as soon as Britain and France declared war ).

The National Socialists' official extermination programme did not begin in 1939, when official policy was still severe harassment, lawless brutality and deportation (about which we had done more or less nothing) . Systematic mass murder began with the Wannsee Conference of 1942. The unofficial and informal mass murders of Jews can be said to have begun with the partition of Poland in 1939, and then to have intensified with the German invasion of the USSR. 

 

 

 

 

If This School is so Good, Why Doesn't Michael Gove Send his Daughter to it?

Journalists who care about education have grown weary of the pieties of Education Secretaries and other politicians (notably Jim Callaghan and Anthony Blair, but David Cameron and Lady Thatcher can also be included in this list) who have promised to put right the mess they have made of the schools, but refuse to address the real issue.

 

How many times have we been promised literacy, numeracy,  discipline, etc, by people who refuse to allow us the selection and the restoration of adult authority without which these things will never happen?

 

Currently, these promises issue forth from the mouth of Michael Gove,  though they might as well be dribbling from the lips of Mr Blair or Mr Blunkett, for all the good they will do, or all the difference they will make to those who most need help.

 

Note the redoubled calls to force Oxbridge to take more state school pupils who haven’t been educated well enough to benefit from them (so excluding private pupils who have) , a mad Procrustean scheme, but typical of the education establishment’s absolute refusal, at any cost,  to admit that the comprehensive experiment was a cataclysm.

 

Mr Gove’s latest oration can be found appended to this article

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/06/michael-goves-moral-mission/

 

Needless to say, I don’t share the author’s assessment of it( as explained above).

 

But I feel the need to comment on the sheer blazing nerve of the following passage :

 

‘Take one of my favourite schools – Burlington Danes Academy. If you want to see a model of autonomy and strong leadership in operation observe the head teacher Dame Sally Coates in action.

Every half term children are assessed across subject areas and also graded for their level of application, social contribution and sporting performance. They are told how well they’ve done. And they know that their performance at the end of the term will be re-assessed and published for every student and every parent to see. This rank order system is hugely popular with parents – and also with students. Both are given objective measures of performance – and clear goals to aim for. Parents who were in the past assured in vague airy and amiable terms that their child was a nice lad and doing perfectly well now have hard data to help them support their child’s performance. They know if their child is under-performing expectations, and in what way. Students also know which teachers are most likely to help them climb the rank order system and clamour to be taught by the most gifted professionals.

What Sally Coates has done is replace the harmful competitiveness of street culture – the contest over who is coolest, whose trainers are smartest, whose attitude is hardest, whose backchat is the most fly, with the competitiveness of academic culture – the competitiveness which will help these children win out in later life – who is hardest working, who is the most community-minded, who is most eager to learn, who is most determined to improve.

What Sally has done in Burlington Danes is not unique and incapable of replication – indeed she’s written a brilliant guide which outlines how to match her performance.’

 

Now, I have in the past pointed out that Mr Gove used to praise this school a lot.  I have pointed out that it is a very short walk indeed from Mr Gove’s modest London home. I have noted that it also suits his religious needs (he is a churchgoer, at a C of E church) ,  as it is a Church of England school.  And I have wondered why in that case his daughter will not be going there this autumn, but instead to the highly selective (though not of course by ability, that would never do) Grey Coat Hospital School, a single-sex former grammar school many miles from Mr Gove’s home.

 

Answer came there none (perhaps because so much of the media lazily accepted the spin that Mr Gove was the first Tory Education secretary to send a child to a state secondary, which missed the point that hardly any state secondaries are like Grey Coat Hospital, and in any case wasn’t actually correct (Gillian Shephard sent her children to a state secondary long years ago) . I wondered if perhaps Mr Gove had in some way gone off Burlington Danes. But no, here he is again praising it  and pointing out that the work of the head - Dame Sally Coates – is ‘not unique and incapable of replication’.  So we needn’t worry about what might happen if she leaves for another post, as I believe she plans to do.

 

I am sorry, but I think he needs to be asked until he answers, if Burlington Danes is so wonderful, why then does he not follow his own advice?  Should parents with children his daughter’s age do as Mr Gove says or do as he does? And will they in fact be able to do as he does?

The desperate, brave faces of Europe's secret crisis

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

We are ignoring a European crisis that is going to change all our lives irreversibly and for ever. It is the huge, tragic surge of African migrants across the Mediterranean.

Once inside the borderless European Union, these newcomers can and will settle anywhere. There is no law or power that can stop them.

I first became aware of this when I went to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa. I had gone to tease Spain for moaning about Gibraltar,  while it had its own Gibraltar  in Morocco.

But much more serious was the virtual siege of Ceuta (and its nearby twin, Melilla) by migrants, immense numbers of them, crowding up against the 20ft fences which are all that separate this little piece of Spain from Africa.
They climbed. They swam round or paddled past the barricade in makeshift rafts. It was impossible to stop all of them getting through. They walk thousands of miles from all the many famines, massacres and civil wars (often started by us) which beset that tragic continent.

Following the building of an effective fence between Greece and Turkey, migrants from Asia and the Middle East who used to come through Greece are now also coming to Europe by sea alongside countless Africans.

This problem has grown much worse since we madly overthrew Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi (who tried to stop the refugees) and turned that country into a failed state with no control over its own coastline.

Official figures, probably severe underestimates, say 31,000 crossed from Africa to Europe in 2013. Some 42,000 have tried to reach Italy alone this year. Hundreds drown in the attempt.

It reminds me of how the US-Mexican border used to be 20 years ago, when they simply could not cope with the multitudes of economic migrants hurrying across the muddy dribble that is the Rio Grande. For in summer, the Mediterranean, like the Rio Grande, is no real barrier. If they can reach the north coast of Africa, they can reach Italy, Greece or Spain. And then they can get to Calais.

That vast illegal migration from Mexico helped to transform the USA into the bilingual, multicultural nation it has since become. Something similar may be in store for Europe.

Actually I admire the migrants’ bravery and determination. Nobody can blame them for wanting to leave their blasted war zones. Nobody, in turn, could blame the nations of Europe if they said they could not cope with them (for they cannot) and took serious steps to stop them coming.

As it is, the political leaders of the Continent prefer not to face the problem at all, leaving the worst-affected states to do what they can and hoping the problem will go away, while it gets bigger all the time. It would be a good start if we admitted that this is actually happening.

We MUST ask: What was their heroism for?

Since I first blundered  on to the edge of war, and saw what bullets do to human flesh and bone, I have given daily thanks that my generation never had to fight. These days, when I watch old films of D-Day, I imagine myself, trembling and gibbering with fear and cold, turning tail and running rather than face the German guns.

I still don’t know how they did it, soft human flesh running head on into hard, cruel metal.

And I also wonder, more and more, how it came about that young men found themselves having to do this horrible thing. And so, while I honour them for it, and understand why they had to do it, I do not honour those politicians whose vanity and stupidity made it necessary.

If we are serious about revering these men, and I am very serious about it, hasn’t the time come to look once again at the 1939 war, and how it came about, and whether it was as good a war as it is cracked up to be?

For if we don’t, how will we avoid the same thing happening again? In my experience, most of my generation still have a glamorised, idealised view of the Second World War that has little to do with what really took place.

Those who actually fought in it generally shut up about the horrid details. The only D-Day veteran I ever knew, asked to describe what it was like to step ashore at Arromanches that morning, would only say: ‘There seemed to be rather a lot of sand flies about.’

An equally eloquent silence is to be found in the war cemetery at Bayeux, where the terse and hopelessly sad inscriptions on the graves of all those 18-year-olds will reduce anyone to helpless tears in less than a minute.
Guns aren’t the real mass killers

Guns aren't the real mass killers

Here are two reasons to wonder if  ‘more gun laws’ is the right response to the increasingly frequent rampage killings  that seem to be happening almost everywhere, even though guns are no more common than they used to be.

One: According to the American news network ABC, Santa Barbara mass killer Elliot Rodger had been taking the mind-altering drug Alprazolam, a benzodiazepine. A large number of mass killers have been found – when investigated – to have been using legal or illegal mind-altering drugs.  In many cases the authorities have not bothered to find out, so the correlation might be even stronger.

Two: Canada already has tighter gun laws, yet there has just been a rampage shooting  in the quiet Canadian city of Moncton. Finland, as strict as Canada, and Germany, which has even tighter gun controls, have also been affected.

Could we for once actually think about this, instead of just reacting?

------------------

President Barack Obama tells us we must stay in the EU to suit the needs of the USA.

And he tells Scotland it must stay in the UK for the same reason. Which part of ‘national sovereignty’ does this President not understand?

I wouldn’t blame Scots for voting ‘Yes’ just to make it clear that foreign politicians should stay out of their  business. For the rest of us it’s more complicated.
 The USA has been trying to cram us into a federal Europe  since the 1940s, for its own benefit, not ours.

But wasn’t it American  pressure that forced us to give in to the IRA in 1998, in an agreement that will lead, in the end, to Northern Ireland leaving the UK? Does one hand know what the other’s doing?

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

Theresa May - is she the new Maggie Thatcher or the new Harriet Harman?

Politics loves some people and hates others. It’s usually reasonably obvious why particular MPs prosper, and others don’t, especially if you meet them first by seeing them on a TV programme, as most of us do.

 

These days, you absolutely have to look and sound good on TV,  above all other things. This has created a new type of politician, one who often looks odd and seems odd off screen, but is touched with magic on it. Anthony Blair is one such. Youth is usually important or at least the appearance of being youthful, so fat, ugly or even awkward people, or intense and thoughtful people, or people with big eyes, or people who don’t smile all the time, are cursed with disadvantages before they even begin.

 

Looking back at the political figures of my own youth, most of whom looked either like tortoises or like sausages, it is hard to imagine any of them rising to prominence now.

 

And looking at the politicians of today, often barely out of their teens, in most cases unable to deliver a speech with force or elegance, Olympically ignorant of history, geography and morals (they have an obsession with man-made global warming where their morals ought to be) , untouched by hard experience, it is impossible to see any of them even being MPs in, say, 1955.

 

Mrs Theresa May doesn’t quite fit in with this pattern. Born in 1956, she’s of an older generation than David Cameron (born 1966) than George Osborne (born 1971), Michael Gove (born 1967) and even of William Hague (born 1961). I can’t offhand recall the names or faces of any other Cabinet members, though I’m sure that with an effort I could do so. I find it easier to remember the names of the Duke of Marlborough’s four great victories (Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, since you ask).

 

And it’s a significant gap. Someone born in 1956 would have grown up at last partly in pre-revolutionary Britain, consciously living in a world before supermarkets, ring roads and colour TV were universal, and before modern music, with its unending drumbeat and guitar jangle, had become the default background noise of life. She’s a clergyman’s daughter, so quite possibly her upbringing was untypically old-fashioned.

 

But there’s no sign of intellectual ferment. Asked to choose (in one of those website quizzes) between Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ and a novel by Louise Bagshawe (now Mensch), she said she wouldn’t read either of them, adding ‘sorry’. She won her way to Oxford in the mid-1970s, from a grammar school which she tends to describe as a comprehensive (which it became after she had been there some time). That betokens some cleverness. But her subject of choice was Geography, not the politician’s degree of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I know I often say that politicians don’t know any geography, but I think most readers will know that by that I mean they don’t know historical geography, the faultlines of power.

 

Even so there are clear signs, early on, of political ambition, a desire (confessed by her) to be a Tory MP from the age of 12, membership of the Oxford University Conservative Association, (through which she met her husband, an investment banker of whom we know pretty much nothing at all),  a willingness to stand in hopeless seats(Durham NW 1992 and Barking in a 1994 by-election).

 

Then there was a long zone of non-excitement working for the Association for Payment Clearing Services, a name so unglamorous that you might almost suspect it of being an MI6 front,  from 1985 to 1997, and a councillor in the London borough of Merton from 1986 to 1994.

 

She’s a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She lists among her interests education, disability and local government, and her recreations as walking and cooking.

 

Everyone knows about her famous ‘nasty party’ speech, which paced her firmly on the side of those who wanted to deconservatize the Tory Party in the Hague, IDS and Michael Howard eras. This is the faction now very much in charge. Now she’s supposed to be engaged in a punch-up with Michael Gove. This is to some sort of contest to see who’s tougher on ‘Islamist militants’. Those favourite bogeypersons of our age. Being ‘tough’ on these bearded persons is a useful distraction when you have entirely lost control of the national borders, and of crime.

 

 

 

She recently had a well-publicized brawl with everybody’s  least favourite pressure group, the Police Federation, which apparently impressed many of my fellow scribblers, though it left me quietly muttering the word ‘triangulation’ to myself.

 

I’ve written before (in March 2013) about the attempt to turn her into the New Iron Lady. I thought this might be a good moment to reproduce that article. I’m told she’s the new Maggie Thatcher. I’m no admirer of Lady Thatcher, who doesn’t seem to me to have been especially conservative in practice,  but this still seems to me to be more or less delusionary.  

 

You might just as well call her the new Shirley Williams, or the new Harriet Harman, it seems to me. :

 

The Mystery of Theresa May

 

 

Now that the Cameron Delusion has exploded in a miniature mushroom cloud of dead ducks, rusty wind farms, broken promises,  and the bristling moustaches of infuriated activists , the doomed Tory Party are once again looking for a new false hope. They have got the sticky-backed plastic and the old washing-up bottles out, plus a few bowls of papier-mache, and are trying to construct a new hope out of the Rt Hon Theresa May MP. The media voices that once told us that Mr Cameron could lead the Tories out of the Wilderness of Zimmer, or wherever it is they have been wandering since the fall of Mrs Thatcher, are now proposing Mrs May as the New Mrs Thatcher. This would be very funny if it were not also very sad. 

 

I suspect this has a lot to do with Mrs May’s attractive, resourceful and hard-working special adviser, Fiona Cunningham, who in my limited experience is a good deal more animated and adventurous than the Home Secretary.  I have noticed Ms Cunningham appearing recently in news pictures with her boss. This is a development frowned upon in the civil service. Officials who get into the picture generally have to buy cakes all round for the whole private office. But I applaud it.  We should know more about these important figures. Special advisers (Spads for short) are often hugely significant people, whose influence is often forgotten. They are also, in many cases, the Cabinet Ministers of the day after tomorrow. This is partly because they are often the main link between senior politicians and the national media and so understand very well the important relation between these two elites, explored in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ but largely unknown to the public. 

 

I cannot say if this is the case with Ms Cunningham, since I have not made any great efforts to ( as the phrase goes) 'get alongside' .  I have the impression Mrs May doesn’t much like me, and I can quite understand why that might be so. Fortunately, I have no great desire to be liked by politicians. 

 

I have often pointed out that Mrs May is in fact hugely politically correct. I have compared her to Labour’s Harriet Harman, and pointed out that the two women got on rather well during the passage of Labour’s Equality Act, which Mrs May was meant to be opposing. The Act pretty much set in concrete European Union directives on ‘Equality and Diversity’ which have turned this slogan (a polite expression for Political Correctness) into Britain’s official ideology. This profound change has led very quickly to the official dethroning of Christianity in English law, as the ultimate source of law, and the ultimate test of good. 

 

 

It is not just me saying this. In ‘The Times’ of 24th November 2011, we read (in an article by Anushka Asthana) :

 

‘Britain's equality chief has praised Theresa May, the Tory Home Secretary, arguing that she fights just as hard for women's rights as Labour's fiercest advocates on the issue.’ 

 

The article said that Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, had (like me) compared Mrs May to Harriet Harman . It recounted ‘But Mr Phillips said that he was just as impressed by the Tories' most senior female figure. “Theresa May, in my opinion, is just as aggressive as Harriet Harman was on women's equality,” he said. “Equality is an issue that can transcend politics, and we should judge people not on their political label but what they are doing and what they deliver.” Mr Phillips is also recorded as having praised Mrs May for resisting pressure to do a U-turn on the Equality Act and fighting off attempts to remove workplace protections for women.’

 

 

Somehow or other this person is now being portrayed as a ‘New Iron Lady’, because of some neo-liberal stuff on privatising health and education (which, whatever it is, is not conservative) and because she is making promises (on which she must be pretty sure she will never be tested ) to repeal the Human Rights Act.

 

 

 

Is this credible?  Back in December 2009, Mrs May was puffed by the Guardian in an admiring interview, during which she let slip that she now favoured all-women shortlists for the selection of Tory candidates This was the same Mrs May who, in an earlier incarnation, had said (in 2002): ‘: 'I'm totally opposed to Labour's idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I've competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.' 

 

I would also like to harp on here about Mrs May’s curious portrayal of her own education.  She repeatedly says in official reference books that she went to Wheatley Park Comprehensive School, a reasonably well-regarded rural comp, based on an old manor house outside the small town or large village of Wheatley, a few miles to the East of Oxford. 

 

Actually, it is not quite that simple. She attended a private convent school till she was 13. Then in 1969, she went (presumably after passing a selective exam) to Holton Park, a girls’ grammar school. In 1971, two years later, this was merged with Shotover School, a nearby mixed sex secondary modern, and became Wheatley Park Comprehensive. It was normal practice, during such mergers, for the existing grammar school pupils to continue in a ‘grammar stream’ until the end of their education.  I cannot say for certain that it was the case during Mrs May’s schooling, but it is highly likely. 

 

Now, I know of at least one former Labour MP who described his school (in reference books)  as a ‘comprehensive’ even though the city in which he was educated had no comprehensive schools at the time, and the school involved was a secondary modern. He was so keen to emphasise that he had undergone this egalitarian baptism, that he overcame this little detail (and in truth there’s not much difference between most comps and most secondary moderns). I can see why a committed socialist might want to blur the boundaries. 

 

But why would a Conservative MP, in describing her schooling, choose to describe it so? The Tories say emphatically that they won't build any new grammar schools, but they sort of acknowledge they were a good thing and won't (for now) destroy the few remaining ones.  I think it is at least interesting, and not very encouraging to those who fancy that Mrs May is some sort of  saviour from the right.

 

 

 

Then of course there is her description of the Tories in 2002 as ‘The Nasty Party’. Few doubted that she intended to strike at those who were resisting the moral,  social and cultural revolution launched by New Labour, then very much under way. As for the praise she gets for avoiding the political traps into which previous Home Secretaries have fallen, let us note here that the main source of those traps was always the old Home Department’s responsibility for prisons , Judges and courts – which has now been handed over to the Ministry of Justice. (Just as all countries which have Ministries of Culture tend to be cultural deserts, countries with Justice Ministries tend to be pretty short of justice, but that’s a discussion for another time).  

 

Now, what has such a person got against the Human Rights Act, or the Court? In my view, I can’t see why she should quarrel with it on any principle. 

 

What did she actually say? I haven’t so far been able to obtain a full copy of her speech. But this is one key passage : ‘We need to stop human rights legislation interfering with our ability to fight crime and control immigration. That's why, as our last manifesto promised, the next Conservative government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and it's why we should also consider very carefully our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights and the Convention it enforces. When Strasbourg constantly moves the goalposts and prevents the deportation of dangerous men like Abu Qatada, we have to ask ourselves, to what end are we signatories to the convention? Are we really limiting human rights abuses in other countries? I'm sceptical.’ 

 

She also said : ‘By 2015 we'll need a plan for dealing with the European Court of Human Rights. And yes, I want to be clear that all options - including leaving the Convention altogether - should be on the table.’ 

 

Now, those who were diddled by Mr Slippery’s ‘pledge’ of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty should recall how important the detailed language turned out to be. The Slippery Team managed to argue that Mr Cameron’s pledge was annulled by the fact that the Treaty had been ratified (I always note here the very interesting fact that this ratification was not achieved until after the Tory conference of that year, so sparing the Slippery Team from having to make this rather tattered defence in front of a hall full of actual Tory Party members). 

 

Now, Mrs May here speaks of ‘The next Conservative Government’. Well, when will that be, say the Bells of Old Bailey? Even if Mr Nigel Farage is silly enough to offer the Tories some kind of pledge in 2015 (and if he does this he will drive his party straight over a cliff), the Tories cannot win the next election (or the one after, or the one after that). As I have been pointing out now for at least seven years, the Tories will never again form a majority in a United Kingdom Parliament. So pledges of this kind are not just post-dated cheques. They are cheques signed in invisible ink, drawn on a non-existent account. We all know what happened to Mr Cameron’s ‘British Bill of Rights’ (he seems not to know we already have one) and the commission set up to look into it. Mrs May’s pledge is from the same dodgy shop, the sort which, when you take your wonky goods back a week later, has whitewash smeared on the window and a sign saying ‘Closed!’ upon the door. 

 

As for the ‘option’ of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, an option is presumably a choice. Thus, what she has actually said is that a *choice* of leaving or not leaving the ECHR (in which she might take the choice of staying in) will be *on the table* (which does not mean that it would be adopted, or that she would adopt it, or that it couldn’t also be snatched *off* the table at a later stage) and all this would only happen  *if the Tories win the next election*, which of course they will not do. 

 

My goodness, this is not tough talk. Cloud Cuckoo Land, or the summit of Kanchenjunga, seem accessible by comparison with these remote and unattainable conditions, as does a nice slice of Pie in the Sky, and an attractive  holiday in a Castle in the Air (paid for in full, in advance).  Anyone who is taken in by it deserves everything he gets. 

 

We are back with my favourite derisive rhymes – ‘With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between’,  and ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’. Indeed we could.  I think it is best summed up by pointing out that, if Mrs May were a verb, she would be no more definite or reliable than her pledges. Why do people take this sort of thing seriously? For the same reason people believe all kinds of daft things – because they want to.  Why do they want to ? Because they’d rather not realise how bad things really are.  And so on. Thus universal suffrage democracy marches onward to the cliff-edge, singing as it goes.

Some Recent Exchanges

I placed the following responses to readers on the ‘Steinbeck’ thread last night, but thought they deserved greater prominence. I have also added further responses to them.

 

1.

Michael Kenny writes :'Peter Hitchens seems to completely disregard the fact that a sizeable portion of the native people of Northern Ireland identify themselves as Irish and not British and want reunion with the south.' Twaddle. I have never 'disregarded' this in my life. It is blazingly obvious, and one would have to be a complete idiot not to be aware of it. The trouble is, and it has bedevilled the issue for more than a century, that it is equally obvious to all but idiots that a similarly large number do not agree. Thus one must either override one in favour of the other, which appears to be Mr Kenny's choice, or find a civilized compromise, which is mine. I am uninterested in which is technically the majority or the minority. I just think it a grave mistake to let either community dominate the other, as happened under Stormont (which I have many times said here I think should never have been set up), and as will, I fear, happen under Dublin. Hence my preference for non-sectarian direct rule from London, with no local government unit in the six counties greater than a city or county council, and no Parliament save at Westminster. Unlike Leinster House or Stormont, the Westminster Parliament can be (and was under direct rule) genuinely neutral between the two communities. Mr Kenny continues: 'What is more, the majority status of those who do regard themselves as British is increasingly slipping.' Once again, I am perfectly well aware of it, and have many times said so here. That is why this weblog has an archive and an index, so that people can look at what I have said, before telling me that I have, or have not, expressed certain opinions, or have or have not discussed certain issues. Mr Kenny asks : 'Does Peter seriously think that his proposed direct' London rule' is the answer to this?' No, as I have said here many times, I cannot 'seriously think' that, as it is now legally, militarily and diplomatically impossible. Britain's national defeat at the hands of the IRA, and under American pressure, ratified by two referenda (one of them in my view held under deeply unfair conditions) cannot and will not be undone. The 1998 surrender to the IRA ended all such hopes. I merely point out, when challenged (as people of Mr Kenny's general persuasion are always doing) to say what I would have done instead of surrendering to terrorist gangsters of both sorts, that this would have been a better option.

 

Mr Kenny has since posted a reply in which he seems to think that Northern Ireland (entirely unviable as a sovereign state) can somehow achieve an ‘autonomy’ with ‘connections and ties to both Dublin and London’.

 

Even assuming such a thing were possible, no such provision is contained in the 1998 Belfast Agreement, which permits either the status quo, ultimate British sovereignty, or a transfer to Irish sovereignty.

 

Nor could it be, in my opinion. Sovereignty is by its nature ultimate and absolute, and answers in all cases the question rightly posed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and central to any discussion of actual power,  ‘Who Whom?’.

 

Mr Kenny then asks ‘if Peter considers that direct rule from London is the antidote for resolving the differences between NI'S two principle native communities, then why not propose having the same sort of governance over the six counties emanating out of Dublin instead?’

 

Because this is a false equivalence. Despite its use of ‘British’ symbols (though it also uses Scottish ones) Ulster Unionism is far more exclusively Protestant, Scottish and indeed Calvinist than is Britain as a whole. British governments have not, for many decades been particularly sympathetic to this strand of religious or political opinion, and used the period of direct rule to dismantle many of the advantages Loyalists had taken for granted, though they also see no need to try to suppress or discourage it. (By the way, I must repeat here that I don't think direct rule has been a realistic possibility since the 1998 surrender. I am merely respondiong to squawks of 'what would you have done then?' from supportyers of the 1998 capitulation). 

 

Dublin, on the other hand entirely shares the strong Irish patriotism of the (perhaps) ‘minority’ in Northern Ireland. Roman Catholicism has suffered a major decline, but strong nationalist sentiment has not, and the cross-border strength of Sinn Fein illustrates this very well. Government from Dublin would not, could not, with the best will in the world (which cannot necessarily be expected from SF), be even-handed towards Unionists whose whole cause would be defeated and humiliated by the absorption of their home into a 32-county Republic.

 

In short, direct Dublin rule will place the whole force of the state behind one part of the population. Direct rule from London demonstrably did not, and would not.

 

He then says :’ And I wasn't surprised to see Peter (once again) spitting venom about the Provisional IRA... 'surrender' 'terrorist' etc etc. In that regard he is little different to dissident Irish Republicans who spout similar rhetoric about Sinn Fein.’

 

Don’t be silly. The 1998 agreement is clearly an instrument of surrender, as one side gives everything and the other side takes everything, and also because one side has stopped deploying force, and the other side (see below) continues with impunity to deploy – and use - force. The Provisional IRA was and is a terrorist organisation. To describe it as such is not ‘venom’. It is a statement of fact. The ‘venom’ emerges from the IRA’s explosives and bullets and its gangs of bully-boys who beat and maim.

 

If these ‘dissident’ Republicans are truly so at odds with their leadership then why has there been no instance of any of them being physically attacked or otherwise disciplined for their ‘dissent’? Why, even disputes about cigarette smuggling have led to lethal violence among ‘Republicans’, and IRA supporters have been accused of involvement in the apparently non-political murder of Robert McCartney.

The Republican movement, either in the days of Michael Collins or in the days of the conflict between different parts of the IRA, or INLA, has never been backward in using violence against ‘dissidents’ (an outrageous misuse of an honourable word, once applied to peaceful dissenters against Soviet power).  

 

These people are merely a deniable operation of the Provisional IRA, who have not actually disarmed, of whose alleged disarmament there has never been a shred of independently verifiable objective evidence, and whose ‘permanent cessation of hostilities’ deserves as much credence as Adolf Hitler’s statements about having 'no further territorial ambitions.’

 

The fiction of ‘dissidents’ is convenient both to the victors, who are thereby enable to nudge matters along whenever the vanquished drag their feet, and to the vanquished, who can pretend that these outrages are unconnected with the people to whom they have surrendered, in return for a false pledge of non-violence which they are too feeble and beaten to enforce.

 

Thus the whimpering repetition of the words ‘This must not be allowed to derail the peace process’, every time there is a terrorist attack . Why must it not be allowed to do so?  Generally, when people break the terms of a treaty with violence, the conflict resumes. It is because the surrender is irreversible, and our gvernment, which naturally does nto wish to appear as weak and carven as it actually is,  must pretend to the public that it is not a surrender.

 

He asks ‘Have the British government declared a permanent demilitarisation of the six counties?’

I don’t believe so, but actions speak louder than words. The British Army presence in Northern Ireland (you’d struggle to find any evidence they were there at all)  is almost entirely gone, and will of course cease, completely and demonstrably, once sovereignty is handed over in, perhaps, 2022.

 

He talks of meeting people halfway. Yes, I’m happy to meet *people* halfway, but I won’t meet gangsters, kidnappers and murderers halfway, for in doing so you become what you behold. It was because I believed in meeting people halfway that I favoured permanent direct rule.

 

2. Dealing with Mr Martin is like playing one of those fairground games you cannot win. Now he says he has 'an assumption that all journalism is to some extent biased'. No he doesn't. He should recall that he began this exchange by declaring that a Private Eye report on my argument with the BBC (which I have since demonstrated to be far from unbiased) was 'factual'. As for his wearisome cliche about how I supposedly 'see things in black and white', what does he mean? I defend Vladimir Putin, yet say he is a sinister tyrant.I defend UKIP against BBC attacks, yet criticize it as a 'Dad's Army' and attack its leader for his position on drugs. I am opposed to the Labour Party and all its works, but defend its leader against puerile attacks. I love the USA and like Americans, but am a stringent critic of American foreign policy. Come to that I am an incessant critic of the BBC, yet I defend the licence fee. I could go on. What is 'black and white' about any of this?

 

3. Terence Courtnadge said:

' if the State hadn't destroyed the State school system between 1965 and 1975'. And who was (Conservative) Secretary of State for Education from 1970 to 1974?

 

I answered : ‘Does Mr Courtnadge (who has been contributing here at least since 2011) really think I am a Thatcherite? Can anyone help him?’

 

And Mr Courtnadge then replied:’ You have made abundantly clear on more than one occasion that you are most certainly not what you seem to assume what I was suggesting. I wasn't ; I was dropping a hint that there was still abundant time and opportunity in those (almost) four years, to reverse the disastrous decline in education standards (including the scrapping of Grammar schools) started, as you say, in 1965. That opportunity was squandered. I was emphasising the irony that the Education Minister from 1970 to 1974 was of course the future Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.’

 

To which I reply, in that case, what on earth is the point of saying this? All my articles on the grammar school issue (not to mention the chapter on the subject in ‘The Cameron Delusion’) are fiercely critical of the ‘Conservative’ Party for its failure to defend or reinstate academic selection. There is no ‘irony’ in this at all, unless you still suffer from the strange belief that the ‘Conservative’ party is in any way conservative.

Welcome to the International Festival of Hypocrisy

Well, the unpopular newspapers and the airwaves are crammed, this week , with condemnations of the ‘elections’  being held in Syria, and cartoons showing President Assad as a bloodstained killer. Up to a point, this can’t be wrong. Who doubts that the Syrian government - for to call it a ‘regime’ is surely to endorse its equally bloodstained foes - is a nasty secret police state?

 

 

Those foes, by the way, appear recently to have crucified two of their prisoners in the town of Raqqa – independent checks are obviously impossible.

 

Who doubts that Mr Assad has killed a lot of people while defending his state against a foreign-inspired and well-armed rebellion? Who thinks that the elections are fair or free? Nobody.

 

But the good old question of selectivity pops up again here.  I don’t seem to have seen anything like the same sort of savage coverage for the Egyptian elections, held beneath a dark, stinking blanket of repression, censorship, unmitigated state propaganda, mass arrests, shootings of crowds and imprisonment of opponents.

 

Egypt’s poll is a transparent attempt to legitimize a military putsch. No principled democrat or supporter of the rule of law could view it as anything other than a repellent fraud.

 

There is also an almost total silence from those who endorsed the ‘Arab Spring’ and urged on the crowds who overthrew the Mubarak state, which now seems like a model of gentle benevolence compared with what has (in my view rather predictably) replaced it.

 

I might add here that the endorsers of the Arab Spring (whose disastrous consequences in Libya have included the use of anti-aircraft guns against crowds) were almost man for man and woman for woman the same people as those who enthused about the Kiev mob.

 

Yet, as that adventure too turns nasty, the level of coverage (as in Libya) has tailed off abruptly.  For instance, on the bottom of page four of today’s International New York Times one may read about recent events in Luhansk/Lugansk in eastern Ukraine.

 

For instance that ‘information on a mysterious explosion at the regional administration building on Monday that killed eight people,  pointed to fire from aircraft as the culprit.

 

‘Mr [Valery] Bolotov, the pro-Russian leader, asserted that an analysis of shrapnel and pieces of rocket casings showed that they were from an S-8 rocket that is typically fired from an SU-25 fighter jet. A string of at least 13 large holes had been torn into the ground that formed a raw line from a small park near a jungle gym to the front of the building, where a fourth-floor window and wall had been blown out. The Ukrainian military has denied attacking the building.’

 

However:

 

‘The explosion seemed to harden even those residents inclined to think the best of Kiev.

 

“This isn’t an anti-terror operation”, said Roman Semkalo, 43, who said he had watched the planes from his kitchen window on Monday and had seen one fire, after letting off a round of protective flares. “It’s a terror operation against their own people.”

‘The rounds killed five women who were standing in a group in front of the building. And three men’.

 

At the bottom of page 28 of today’s London Times, a more graphic report (behind a paywall) noted that ‘flowers covered the blood-spattered spots where people died, ripped open by an attack’. The attack is said to have come without warning, in the middle of the afternoon in the centre of a major city.  Among the debris were two kitten-heeled shoes.

The report (which I strongly recommend you to obtain in full ) quotes Douglas Barrie, a  senior fellow of the highly authoritative International Institute for Strategic Studies as saying that the likely weapon was ‘not a precision weapon’ but one with ‘ripple fire’ which creates ‘a spread’.

 

‘You wouldn’t see a Western air force use it in built-up area where there is a risk of collateral  damage’.  

 

Now, what would we have been reading, and watching, and hearing, and where would it have been in the papers, had President Assad’s air force done such a thing? But it appears to have been the work of our nice new democratic friends.  So not too much fuss.  

 

I might add a couple of other things. This is, as many of you will have noticed, the 25th anniversary of the frightful massacre of unarmed pro-freedom protesters by the Chinese ’People’s Liberation Army’ in Peking, using armoured vehicles and machine guns against unprotected human flesh.  This was followed by a wave of severe and unapologetic repression which still continues, and the truth about this occasion is largely suppressed by effective and punitive censorship in China.

 

Yet the ‘West’, which currently refuses to have dealings with Russia’s President Putin, and has haughtily disinvited him from a current summit, is quite happy to have the widest and freest dealings with the Peking state. So un-outraged were we, morally, by the Tiananmen Square slaughter, that this country subsequently handed over Hong Kong to the care of this demonstrably brutal, violent,  intolerant and repressive empire.

 

I can quite see why we might behave in this way. We are too weak and poor to do otherwise. But in that case our objections to what goes on in Syria are mere gestures, empty of moral content. We do not really object to this sort of thing so much. I am at a loss to see on what basis we can do all this lofty preaching. We plainly do not really care, just pretend to do so selectively when it suits other purposes we may have.

 

Oh, and the idea that a country can hold a presidential election in the middle of a Civil War in which huge numbers cannot vote, is derided especially by Americans. I call their attention to the US presidential election of Tuesday 8th November 1864, in which Abraham Lincoln triumphed over General George B. McLellan (though with a surprisingly small majority) . Lincoln had recently relieved the General of his command over the Union army. The 11 Confederate States played no part in the poll.

 

No , of course I am not comparing Assad to Lincoln, or the other way round, just saying that there’s nothing intrinsically absurd about holding an election in the middle of a Civil War (and the US Civil war was very bloody indeed, and often very hard on civilians, too, especially during Sherman’s march to the sea) , and Americans, of all people, should surely know it.

 

One of the greatest speeches ever made, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which Americans used to learn, and which is carved on one of the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC,  makes it clear that war is continuing as it is being made : ‘Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

 

‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’

 

Perhaps if today’s politicians were as educated, as torn with self-doubt and as morally literate as Lincoln was, we wouldn’t be in half the messes in which we now find ourselves.

A Saint Among Nations? A Critical History of Czechoslovakia

This is a review of 

Czechoslovakia - The State that Failed, by Mary Heimann, Yale University Press, 2009:

 

We have a way of giving countries characters. Many educated, liberal-minded  English people, for instance, admire France as a country of high culture, sexual jollity, good food and wine and supposedly enlightened politics. Poland has managed to get itself a reputation as a ‘Christ among nations’, a suffering and oppressed victim. Germany and Russia we think we know about, and if as it happens you know different (Germans aren’t humourless, Russians aren’t dour),  don’t bother trying to tell anyone.

 

Most of these supposed national characters are based on at least partial truth, but they also mislead. There are still plenty of British people who have a strong dislike for France and the French, and there is an alternative view of France as unreliable ally, ruthless pursuer of self-interest, seen as aggressive nationalist force and cynical commercial and colonial competitor.

 

For me these things are almost entirely useless.  There is no such thing as an angelic or diabolical country, though it may sometimes seem as if this is so. The truth is invariably far more complicated. But I must confess to having been misled quite seriously about Czechoslovakia.

 

In the great drama of the 20th century, Czechoslovakia is the beautiful upright maiden of democracy , repeatedly abducted, and worse, by her evil neighbours – and repeatedly betrayed by her supposed friends and relations. This impression is strongly reinforced, for those who visit, by the unique beauty of Prague, a city which appears at first sight to be too lovely, too delicate,  too old and too mysterious to be real.  Here we are -especially on a Spring evening , as I first saw it, the prospect softened by the polluted air that Communism always provided -  on the borders of legend, a place where ideals might actually come true.

 

One of the great puzzles of our age is that, having been created out of the evil of World War One, raped and then rescued in World War Two, raped again in 1948 and rescued again in 1989, this shining example to all humanity,  the Central European Switzerland, the exemplar of democracy in eastern Europe, has now actually ceased to exist.

 

If Czechoslovakia was so good, and if we really ought to have gone to war for her integrity in 1938, and must ever afterwards be ashamed of not having done so (and likewise be ashamed of standing by as Warsaw Pact troops crushed her flickering liberation in 1968), then how come that at the end of all this, with the evil empires all gone and the world freed and justice restored, Czechoslovakia has vanished from the map?

 

Is it possible that it wasn’t a very good idea in the first place? Have we completely misunderstood one of the central events of our age?

 

I rather think we have.  The words that follow, by the way, are entirely my own opinions. But they have been stimulated by reading (more or less during every available moment for the past week) an excellent history of that country by Mary Heimann. I should mention here that she is English  - as her book ‘Czechoslovakia – The State that Failed’ received a pretty savage initial reception , some of it based on the misconception that she was German and that therefore she would think that, wouldn’t she? Scholars have since recognized that it is a serious and even-handed work.

 

Her description of the founding of the state is thoughtfully sceptical. Czech nationalism, by no means cruelly stamped out under the Habsburgs, simply did not envisage, before 1914, the sort of state which came into being, especially a state with a huge German-speaking minority. Reasonable autonomy was all that they desired.

 

But 1914 created an opportunity, and opportunities create opportunists, just as wars create propaganda and dislocation, and provide ways for cynical outsiders to destabilize existing empires, and for ambitious insiders to help them.  I’ve often wondered if, had they been able to see even 20 years into the future, let alone 50, the statesmen of Versailles would have been so anxious to bring an end to the Austro-Hungarian empire.

 

But President Woodrow Wilson (after whom Bratislava was nearly named Wilsonova) wanted national self-determination for its own sake. And France, in its endless, futile struggle to suppress Germany and prevent it dominating Europe, wanted allies encircling Germany. And Thomas Masaryk (the 'President-Liberator’) was a brilliant promoter, myth-maker, diplomat and fixer, who managed to persuade the allies to recognize frontiers for his new-country which were almost wholly unhinged. Heimann notes that this bright new era began with what was, in effect, a military dictatorship.

 

No wonder. The country was hard to govern from the start, as it was anything but homogeneous. The inclusion of a chunk of what is now Ukraine (lost in 1938 and never returned) , plus the absorption of large slices of Hungary, were bad enough. But the swallowing of a huge German-speaking minority which had little interest in being part of a new Slavic state would lead in time to two great tragedies , one the Munich crisis and all its attendant miseries and spite, and the other the Potsdam agreement and the unspeakable mass expulsions of Germans from their ancestral homes, discussed at length elsewhere on this blog - see here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html

 

 

Czechoslovakia’s democracy, though certainly superior to the systems of its neighbours, was far from perfect. A fictional ‘Czechoslovak’ nationality was invented, pretending that there were not deep and significant differences between Czechs and Slovaks, to conceal the size and significance of the huge German minority, and to ensure that it could be outvoted and outmanoeuvred in the formation of coalitions. The treatment of the German minority thereafter was by no means totally liberal. Impartial observers recorded plenty of petty discrimination in such things as state appointments.

 

 It probably couldn’t have been that liberal, if the state was to survive in its original form. Multinational empires can and do exist. But multinational countries are almost invariably a contradiction in terms, and the immense care with which Switzerland’s Cantonal system was created was never attempted in Czechoslovakia, and probably wouldn’t have worked if it had been.

 

The ghastly ‘solution’ to such problems is almost always the same – ethnic cleansing.

 

Meanwhile the Slovaks, distinct in many ways from the Czechs, and not doing so well economically, grew more and more distant , so that when Hitler destroyed the original state, they were in many cases more than willing to set up on their own as an independent Slovakia, leaving the Czechs as a sort of German province.

 I should mention here that neither Czechs nor Slovaks come out as having behaved impeccably during the German mass-murder of the Jews. Mind you, few people did (the Bulgarians and the Danes being shining exceptions).

Was Hitler’s 1938 assault on Czechoslovakia inevitable, as all events in the past now seem to be?  Or was it a capricious act of vengeful spite? It is possible to wonder. Heimann is also one of the few people who bothers to mention the so called ‘May Crisis’ of 1938, which brought Europe almost to war over false intelligence (from Prague’s notoriously useless spy service) that Germany was about to invade. The resulting futile and unsettling panic made Hitler livid, but also infuriated France (which told the Czechs angrily it had no wish to go to war on their behalf) , and Britain.

 

As for Czechoslovakia having been able to fight a serious war with Germany while the Allies mobilized, The Czech Defence Minister Jan Syrovy, and the Chef of Staff, Ludvik Krejci, told the cabinet that defences on the German border were incomplete and that even if the USSR came to Prague’s aid (by no means certain), it would come too late. All the assumptions of Czech military planning – that France and Poland would fight on their side, that the Austrian border would not need defending that that Poland and Romania would both allow the Russians to send troops across their land – were invalid. Only one general wanted to fight.

 

 

Another powerful point in the book concerns the post-war government, in the era between liberation and the February 1948 Communist putsch. Heimann points out that the ‘democratic’ politicians were themselves so badly compromised by the lawlessness and violence of the ethnic cleansing they had encouraged or permitted that they were not well-placed to oppose the even dirtier methods of the Communists when the crucial moment came.  She is also scathing about Edvard Benes and Jan Masaryk, both credited by most commentators with having opposed the takeover when in fact they did little to prevent it and could even be said to have been complicit in it.

 

The description of the country’s miserable plunge into the slime-pool of Stalinism should be read by anyone who doubts that civilized people can be terrorized into almost anything, and that very few will stand up to it when it comes. There's an interesting point at which Zdenek Mlynar explains to westerners that life in Communist Czechoslovakia was not quite like '1984', in that you only had to pretend to love Big Brother. But she also provides a fine quotation from Vaclav Havel about the subtle, pervasive corruption of Communism, which implicated all its victims in lies, leaving only a few saints untouched.

 

Her analysis of the ‘Prague Spring’ is (to me) entirely new and very interesting, and she also makes the important point that 1968 gave birth to Eurocommunism, through which the European left shook off the grey mantle of Stalinism and re-invented itself in what ended up, in Britain, as Blairism (that bit is my interpretation, not hers).

 

Her account of 1989, and the eventual fall of Communism is once again illuminating though, having witnessed quite a bit of it, I would have liked more, not least about the very strange episode of the student demonstration in which one student was wrongly said to have been killed, and in which Secret Police agents seems to have acted as provocateurs.

 

She also explains how and why the ‘Velvet Divorce’ (so-called) between the Czechs and the Slovaks came about and that it was not always that gentle.

 

My conclusions are what readers here might expect – that it would have been a good deal better for everyone, especially the inhabitants of what was to become Czechoslovakia,  if Austria-Hungary had survived; that the creation and encouragement of shiny new nations in this difficult part of the world is seldom as straightforward as it looks and is often a cover for aggressive diplomacy by someone or other; and that in the end  reality will triumph over artificial borders (or as Louis MacNeice put it in Bagpipe Music’  ‘If you break the b****y glass, you won’t hold up the weather’).

 

And also to note that the end of it all, if this is the end, is that Czechoslovakia has now been cut up much as it was cut up in 1938-40, and lies under the domination of a revived and non-militaristic Germany which, happily, has at last found peaceful means of establishing its hegemony ovar Mitteleuropa.

 

Now, if only the EU would admit to being Germany by other means, and if only it would stop vainly classifying its eastward expansion s some sort of idealistic crusade against corruption and oligarchs, and recognise it for what it is, then we might all learn something from a century of misery: that is, that where great powers clash, compromise is invariably better than war, and stability better than radical, adventurous utopian change. 

 

I'll say it again and again until it catches on:

 

Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually get there.