Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 236

Remembrance of Things Past

The recent past is often the most inaccessible period in history. We think we remember it, but we don’t really, or we do so inaccurately. Historians have yet to get to work on it, archives are surprisingly scanty or hard to get into.

 

And it seems to me that if events date from before the explosion of the Internet (which really came after 1995) they often escape the scrutiny of researchers, who have come to rely on search engines, and who have forgotten how to dig into old-fashioned archives.

 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because of a curious coincidence which allows me glimpses of some of my own recent past. The other day, I bought a set of old ‘Inspector Morse’ episodes, having felt a strange urge to revisit a couple of half-remembered programmes. These are set, and partly filmed, in Oxford, where I was living at the time and where I live now.

 

I remember, when they first appeared, a certain amount of local mockery at the strange, even impossible journeys that its heroes took in pursuit of their various murder suspects. And it was obvious to me that a lot of the street-scenes, churches and country houses used were not in or near Oxford at all (wrong building materials and styles).

 

But it does use a lot of genuine Oxford locations. And when I went to live in Moscow in 1990, I would sometimes ask friends to record episodes, which we could watch in our Moscow flat, to remind ourselves of the picturesque Oxfordshire summers in which the episodes were mainly set. In was particularly interested in one episode (’Fat Chance’) because I thought I might appear in it (I don’t). On the June day I’d left for Moscow (by train, via Dover and Ostend) I was delighted to find a string quartet playing in the Oxford station concourse, and quickly realised this was being filmed for ‘Morse’. To this day I’ve no idea why.

 

When one of the crew asked me to repeat my walk across the concourse for the cameras, I was filled with the vain hope that I would be briefly immortalised (which is why I asked for and obtained the name of the episode). As it happened, when I at last came to see the film some years later, in the midst of a Moscow February, there was no trace of the string quartet,  let alone of me. But it added to the moment of departure, a three-day journey of almost impossible romance, during which I was approached by an attractive older woman, working for the KGB, whose personal story turned out in the end to be sadder and more melodramatic than I could possibly have imagined.

 

In those days, thanks perhaps to the old-fashioned ways of the original Morse author Colin Dexter, many episodes involved Oxford railway station (or ‘train station’ as it is called , now that you ‘can’ ‘get’ a ‘Lahtay’ there) . And when the series began, in 1987, that station was utterly different from the way it is now. How oddly shocking it is to see nationalised trains (rather longer and faster than their privatised successors) arriving and everyone actually opening the doors themselves , not an automatic door in sight, and no mass carnage resulting from this dangerous exercise of human freedom. Interesting that the age which decriminalised cannabis was the age which made it impossible to get out of a train unless the staff allow you to do so.

 

It’s not exactly Proust’s Madeleine (the little cake whose remembered taste awakes a great chain of ‘Remembrance of Things Past’) , but is very curious to see again,  in modern colour film, this vanished thing and those vanished, tatty 1970s buildings (an even older station, which I also recall, had been knocked down in the 1970s in a piece of cheapskate modernisation typical of the age). The Oxford of that time still had quite a few greengrocers and butchers ( a tiny few still survive in the protected enclave of the Covered Market, but almost nowhere else) . Quite a lot of undergraduates still called themselves that, and dressed – by today’s standards – quite formally. Brookes University did not then exist, and there were many more second-hand bookshops. The streets were free of people so absorbed in iPhones that they cannot see where they are going.

 

The prices, where mentioned, are astonishing . I think Morse is shown paying one pound and sixty pence in a pub for a single whisky and a soft drink. One mobile phone appears (in ‘Deceived by Flight’) and it is about the size of a single-decker bus.  Non-mobile telephones still ring. There are, to start with, no computers at all, and they gradually appear, huge plastic boxes attached to laborious printers but not to any sort of internet. The accents of the ‘educated’ characters are far more formal than those of today, as are their clothes.  There’s also a constant procession of very fine English actors of the era, many of them now dead, some in the very first rank, others in the very front of the second rank. The great Michael Hordern (whom I am always glad that I saw twice on the London stage, once with Diana Rigg in ‘Jumpers’ and once, solo, in ‘The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold’) features as a retired grammar school headmaster, wearing tweeds so fiercely unfashionable that they would probably trigger a prosecution if worn today.

 

Perhaps most evocative of all is the fact that, in one episode of an ITV drama intended for a mass audience, a large part of the plot revolves around an English don whose special area of knowledge is the poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.  Who would risk such a thing now? In fact the early episodes are crammed with literary references and assume that many viewers will spot them.

 

Waiting over the horizon, though none of us knew it at the time, is a transformation in our lives so great and so wide that we still have not fully begun to understand it. I knew when I set off for Moscow that day that I was likely to see great convulsions and alterations in what was then the USSR, though even I (who longed for the fall of Soviet Communism with every nerve and muscle)  never dared dream they would be so great.

 

But what I did not know was that, by the time I came back home (via the Bering Strait and Washington DC) in 1995, my own placid, comfortable and apparently change-proof home city would itself be a threatened island in a  great stream of revolution, cultural, moral, technical, architectural, linguistic and educational.

 

Nor did it ever occur to me that the summer of 1990 would ever come to seem to be a long time ago. I have learned since that every moment in life, however intensely lived and however immediate it seems at the time, will one day be a long, long time ago. 

Neither Stalin nor Mussolini

Roger Boyes of ‘The Times’ has now returned from Waitrose (whither he went when he was losing an argument with about Ukraine) and has drawn to my attention an article he has written for that newspaper, under the restrained and judicious headline ‘The new Mussolini and his axis of the macho. Europe’s nationalists see Putin as an ally. But, as Ukraine shows, he has no respect for borders’.

 

Lackaday, I cannot link to it for it is behind Mr Rupert Murdoch’s paywall. I can’t even quote any more than small bits of it. But I can mention that it is adorned with a picture of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, posing with fists on hips in a stance of greater-than-usual arrogance. The caption beneath this study runs : ‘Vladimir Putin is a post-fascist, heir to Benito Mussolini, not Joseph Stalin’.

 

How odd. Why would a caption to a picture of Mussolini *begin* with the words ‘Vladimir Putin’? I can’t think of another example of this practice.

 

But then again I suppose we must welcome the open-minded, nay, even-handed thinking which has led Mr Boyes or his editor to concede that Vladimir Putin is not Stalin. This is a major step forward, I suppose. For me, it’s simple.  Mr Putin has not yet opened a vast archipelago of homicidal labour camps, nor crammed millions of his citizens into them, nor launched a great terror on his people under which anyone may be seized without pretext, and tortured into confessing non-existent crimes before being shot in the back of the head or despatched to a living death in Norilsk. Mr Putin has not deliberately caused a gigantic famine in which millions have died. Mr Putin has not murdered many of his close associates. He has not signed an unscrupulous alliance with Hitler, partitioned Poland, or established an iron secret police despotism over the whole of Central Europe. Nor has he persecuted legitimate scientists, nor has he embarked on anti-semitic purges of doctors. Nor has he encourage a pharaonic personality cult, requiring the erection of thousands of images of him. Nor has he encouraged a cult around a boy (Pavlik Morozov) who betrayed his own parents to the secret police, nor has he compelled his own immediate colleagues to endure in silence the cruel imprisonment of their close family members..

 

But many at ‘The Times’ and elsewhere in Murdochworld seem to have bought their political telescopes from some strange Iraq War surplus shop. Viewed through these instruments, almost everyone looks like either Stalin or Hitler (depending on the particular crisis involved) .  And all kinds of other strange objects can also be seen. Readers of M.R. James’s ghost story ‘A View From A Hill’, will be familiar with the idea of a sinister telescope or field glass which shows the user what dead men’s eyes have seen. The Murdochscope, by contrast, shows you what other men’s minds have mistakenly imagined. Far, far off it can also descry weapons of mass destruction somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

 

As for ‘respect for borders’, I’m not sure that the neo-conservative globalist movement is very troubled by borders, or entitled to get hoity-toity about them. Apart from supporting their total abolition in continental Europe through Schengen, what about (here I go again) Kosovo and Cyprus, anyone? Or, come to that, Iraq, now shorn for all intents and purposes of Iraqi Kurdistan, a ‘western’ protectorate. If   airspace counts as a border, Libya also deserves a mention.

 

Mr Putin, as often discussed here, is no paragon. He is indeed a man of many very bad faults, and his state is corrupt and violent. But to mention him in the same breath as Stalin is simply to betray a complete lack of the sense of proportion.

 

And Mr Boyes is intelligent enough not to do that, just as he really ought to know that Moscow has referred to itself as the third Rome for many centuries.  But Mussolini?  According to Mr Boyes, Mr Putin is a ‘post-fascist, an heir to Benito Mussolini’. But apart from using such phrases as ‘right wing’ and such expressions as ‘nationalist’, which thought-free left-wingers employ to win the plaudits of their friends without actually having to explain the assumed wickedness of these positions, there’s really very little to justify either headline or picture. Mussolini and Putin really do not have that much in common and nor (alas for Russia) does Russia have much in common with Italy.

 

Instead, he speaks darkly of meetings between Mr Putin and various nationalist parties of the anti-immigration  sort, which left-wing 1968 types like to call ‘fascist’ long after George Orwell rightly dismissed the word as having no real meaning.  Once again I reproduce his words from ‘Politics and the English Language’ : ‘The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. This is even more true than it was when Orwell first wrote it in 1946, and I am amazed at the number of members of my trade who are either unaware of it (which is shameful), or who ignore it (which is lazy).

 

I agree that this is itself interesting, though I have to say that I personally wouldn’t give the time of day to any of these nationalist formations, and I would add such meetings to my criticism of Mr Putin. But it’s interesting because it does tend to underline my point that what separates Mr Putin from any other major political figure is that he is  a supporter of national sovereignty. It is the single characteristic of the man which separates him from all other major figures in world politics. Others are despots. Others run corrupt states. Others are secretive. None defends sovereignty. And modern euro-politics has turned sovereignty( see below) from a mainstream opinion to an eccentric heresy.

 

This, above and beyond all things, is what really riles the forces of Blairism and Murdochism, in whose newspaper Mr Boyes writes. They are revolutionary internationalists, open-borders enthusiasts, scornful of national sovereignty , of protection of national industries and of immigration control. They search for pretexts to invade and overthrow states of which they do not approve, for whatever reason.

 

That is why (and they never answer this point) they were quite happy to put up with the gross misbehaviour of Boris Yeltsin, from rigged elections to shelling his own parliament to savage war against the Chechens. This of course is because Mr Yeltsin let the ‘West’ plunder his country without restraint, and because he did not get in the way of its various Blairite adventures.

 

But they won’t forgive Vladimir Putin for sins which are in many cases rather smaller. I am told this is ‘whataboutery’ , whatever that is. Well, if it is, then ‘whataboutery’ is a very powerful argument, just as ‘Tu quoque’  (‘You did it too’) has always been. If you claim to act out of principle, and you can be shown not to be doing so, then your claim is destroyed. And a principle, by its nature, applies in all cases. I am sorry I need to explain this, but it seems necessary. If you attack Mr Putin , the questions ‘Why then do you not similarly attack Messrs Yeltsin, Erdogan, Sisi, Xi Jinping for the same faults?’ must be answered. In fact can I put in here a very loud plea for someone to say *something* about Egypt, the last place where all right-minded people naively backed the Utopian mob, so plunging a moderately unhappy country into the pit of misery and hysterical repression where it now wallows, uncriticised by us.

 

 

 

The answer may lie in words written by Zbigniew Brzezinski( Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and the unsung architect of Moscow’s doomed intervention and eventual downfall in Afghanistan. He wrote in his 1997 book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ : ‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

‘However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’

 

I have no doubt that similar words could be found (if we could read them) in the textbooks studied by trainee Russian diplomats, at the great elite MGIMO university on Vernadsky Prospect in Moscow.

 

 

Machine-gunning the Russian President with words such as ‘Faustian’ ‘Far Right’, ‘macho’ and Mussolini is no substitute for a grown-up analysis. Nor does it begin to cope with the problem of Russia, a huge and important country, released from its Soviet prison and trying to find its place in a world utterly different from the one in which it last existed.

 

Remember, when the Russian empire fell, the German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires still existed, not to mention the British and French global empires. But Russia, even without Ukraine, remains one of the biggest land empires in human history. It has a huge task of repair, recovery and rebuilding, moral as well as physical. It will look at the world in ways different from ours a bankrupt empire turned into a client of another empire, and largely ruled by yet another empire.  And who is to say it is wrong to do so?

 

One key to the current problem may be found here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Saudis-offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html

In a little-noticed but fascinating story in which Vladimir Putin resisted both threats and inducements, from the country which has the *real* special relationship with the USA, to drop support for Syria.  One explanation for this behaviour might be, er principle, even if in the end it is a self-serving one (for without sovereignty, Russia can expect to become a globally-run oilfield  and source of cheap labour, much of its territory surrendered de facto to the EU and to China.). But the Putin of the caricature couldn’t possibly possess such a quality, could he?

 

What I find most interesting is that a desire for national sovereignty, which I was brought up to believe was normal, creditable and sensible, even desirable,  has now been relegated to being a disreputable fringe position, held only by dodgy Poujadist parties. By the same principle, patriotism has become a form of bigotry,  and mild social democracy, a mixed economy, reasonably strong trades unions, protection of strategic industries from foreign purchase or competition,  have apparently become comparable with Venezuelan Communism.

It makes no sense to me. I must have been away when they held the briefing, which is why I still don’t think that Mr Putin is a modern Mussolini. He is just what he is, and needs to be understood as such.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Naivety Olympics to Gather in Euphoria, Utopia. Apply Now!

I begin this posting with an official communication from Mr M.T. Vessel, President-for-Life of the International Naivety Olympics Commission: ‘To the gullible and easily-bamboozled of all nations, I today issue this call, that you gather next year, in the month of Thermidor, in Euphoria, capital of Utopia, for the Naivety Olympics of 2015. Don’t worry about travel bookings or hotels.  Accept our assurances that your flights will arrive on time, and your hotels will be ready and waiting. Plans for a new stadium are likewise well-advanced, and the fact that it does not yet exist, and that no work has begun on it, should not put you off. After all, you swallow much bigger unlikelihoods every day.

 

'Not since the Cold War, when the same festival was held permanently in Moscow, and welcomed thousands of western academics and journalists convinced of the greatness of Soviet Communism (though many of them preferred to take part by not actually going there) , has there been such a  strong force for naivety in the world.’

 

 

Nowadays of course the global naivety movement focuses on Ukraine, where the Olympically Naïve heroically contend that Ukraine is subject to mischievous intervention only from one direction, that of Russia. Now, as someone who thinks that Russia has a strong case in this region, I would not for a second deny that Russian intervention is taking place there. Of course it is. Even though there has been scant hard evidence and the Moscow government has absurdly denied it, no grown-up person could fail to recognise that Russian agents and military personnel have been active in stirring up, organising and directing the separatist movement around Donyetsk , and were similarly engaged in the Crimea.

 

This does not mean that they were not blowing on genuine sparks of real feeling. But the use by the separatists of common symbols, flags and slogans, their ability to form into substantial crowds, build effective barricades, locate key buildings, acquire articulate spokesmen , all speak to me of organisation. And it takes little effort to work out where that will have come from. Also the whole thing has been skilfully amplified by sympathetic media coverage from, Russia, which has given great prominence to, and great encouragement to, the crowds.

 

In Crimea, the lawful presence of large Russian forces in and around Sevastopol made the action much simpler. In Eastern Ukraine, it is more complicated. But, as they say in Louisiana, ‘If you find a turtle on top of a fencepost, you know it didn’t get there by accident’.

 

Well and good. The normal deductive powers of any sentient human must lead him to this conclusion. I’m a defender of Russia’s reasonable concerns in this part of the world, but I don’t see why that should lead to me to deny or ignore the obvious truth, or pretend that ‘my’ side has not behaved unscrupulously and dishonestly. In the same way, I don’t make excuses for official Russian lawlessness, or pretend that Vladimir Putin is some sort of liberal democrat. He is a sinister tyrant.

 

 

Yet examine the parallel developments in Western Ukraine and on the Kiev Maidan, and you will find the supporters of the EU quite unable to make the same judgements of what has been happening there. When I was growing up, we used to laugh at the very phrase ‘spontaneous demonstration’ It’s such an obvious oxymoron. You might as well find that a Spontaneous Battleship of 60,000 tons displacement, armed with 12 16" guns had appeared off your coastline.  There is no such thing as a spontaneous demonstration. Demonstrations need a great deal of planning, they need objectives, route plans, timings, common slogans, symbols, banners, speakers, sound equipment, spokesmen and women to deal with the media. Once they become, as did the Maidan, long-term occupations of streets and buildings, they require logistics, food, sanitation, shelter, shift systems, some hierarchy of authority. All these things need money, generally ready cash. They also die without media support , to reflect their own importance back at them, to encourage those already there to stay, and urge new recruits to arrive.

 

This, we are asked to believe, grew out of thin air in Kiev. Nobody planned it, nobody helped it, its symbols and slogans appeared from nowhere, stimulated only by the touching idealism of the Ukrainian people.

 

Over the weekend, I had the chance to put this to Radoslaw (Radek) Sikorski, Foreign Minister of Poland, who started communicating with me on ‘Twaddle’ after I drew attention to his interview in the Washington Post the other day, in which he made it clear (despite the absurd flounderings of Roger Boyes on this subject at last Thursday’s meeting in London, see earlier posts)  that the EU very much desires that Ukraine should join it.

 

From what I can see,  my interlocutor really is the Polish Foreign Minister. If this is an elaborate satire, perhaps someone could tell me so. Mr Boyes having gone off to Waitrose when he began losing the argument with me, I’ve been having it out with Mr Sikorski, on and off, ever since.

 

I began by asking him (about 11.00 am Sunday , BST) ‘Do you seriously maintain that the Maidan protest was not in any way encouraged or assisted by persons from outside Ukraine’ .

 

And despite repeating the question, and teasing him for not answering it, I do not believe I have yet had a definitive reply to this question.

 

I have, of course, had the usual answers one gets in such discussions, to things I have not said, and (hilariously) the suggestion that Nigel Farage addressing a meeting of Eurosceptic Poles in Warsaw is the equivalent to Victoria Nuland (the USA’s Assistant Secretary of State), or Baroness (Catherine) Ashton (The EU High representative for Foreign Affairs) mingling happily with the Maidan demonstrators. If either of these charing ladies has souight to mingle with the demonstrators of Donyetsk or Slavyansk, let alone hand out biscuits to them, I have not heard of it. So i think it reasonable to assume that their appearance was a sign of partialityin an internal Ukrainian quarrel 

 

Ms Nuland, as we know from her leaked phone calls, has gone a good deal further than handing out comestibles.

 

Mr Farage, unlike these people, does not speak for any government, national or supranational, and is not proposing the expansion of EU power into a currently independent country. He is not the High Representative of anything. Mr Sikorski's  parallel, to the extent it exists at all, is exceedingly feeble. But if (say) the Swiss and Norwegian premiers went to Warsaw and began addressing anti-Euro rallies in Nowy Swiat (abolition of the Zloty remains a contentious issue in Poland),  I think Mr Sikorski would be speaking quite sharply to them, their ambassadors and foreign ministers. He would see it (rightly) as an improper breach of Polish national sovereignty. 

 

Mr Sikorski also appears not to have answered my question to him about what the CIA Director was recently doing in Kiev.

 

We have had a number of other exchanges, which subscribers to ‘Twaddle’ may easily access. I was interested to see that this much-lauded spokesman of the New Europe thinks that Britain held a referendum on Common Market membership *before* joining, a schoolboy mistake, especially for a fluent English speaker educated for some time at Oxford.

 

Membership was a fait accompli at the time of the referendum and those who recall it directly (as I do) know that it was shamelessly rigged, with the Wilson government sending out two pamphlets urging a ‘Yes’ vote (The ‘Yes’ campaign’s and the Government’s own, also in favour of continued membership,  though the Cabinet was in fact divided) and only one urging a ‘No’ vote. I might add that not one major newspaper supported the ‘No’ campaign (and you can imagine how the BBC behaved).  

 

If this sort of thing happened in the Russian Federation, Mr Sikorski would of course condemn it, and rightly so.

 

(Personal note: I voted ‘No’,  largely because an executive on the local paper for which I then worked killed a story I had written for the morning of the vote, in which I revealed serious dishonesty and skulduggery by the local ‘Yes’ campaign. Until then, I had been intending to vote ‘yes’, having been put off the ‘No’ campaign by the grotesque fake-Churchillian rhetoric of (of all people) Peter Shore, at a packed pubic meeting in Swindon ).

 

It really is time that those who want a serious discussion of the Ukraine issue recognised that it is what it is, a power struggle between two blocs – Russia, an unchanging historic force in central and eastern Europe, which regards Ukraine as an important part of its defences; and the EU, the modern manifestation of German economic, diplomatic and political power, which likewise sees Ukraine as the key to its continued expansion and prosperity.

 

Neither side is wholly right and neither side is wholly wrong. A compromise, involving permanent Ukrainian neutrality, a good deal of federalism especially on language issues,  and considerable economic aid to that country from both directions, would seem to me to be the best solution for the *people* of that unhappy region.

 

 It is my view that the ‘West’ is taking sides, and pretending falsely that  it is a Good versus Evil contest,  because of Russia’s stance as the defender of national sovereignty, especially since its refusal to take part in the destabilisation of Syria, which Saudi Arabia ( a nation so important it is barely ever discussed in public) wanted and which the United States (I suspect) promised Saudi Arabia it would achieve. A Russian defeat in Ukraine, the 'West' believes,  will lead to the overthrow (by 'people power') of Vladimir Putin and the installation in Moscow of a 'pro-Western' Yeltsin-style government, just as corrupt and repressive as Mr Putin's. but complaisant about the neo-conservative attack on national sovereignty in Syria and elsewhere.

 

As soon as one recognises this, that it is an old-fashioned  contest between two major powers,  the issue is transformed from some kind of ludicrous moral campaign for a ‘free Ukraine’ ( an objective many decades away by any route) into what it actually is, a power struggle in which postmodern weapons, orchestrated mobs,  biased broadcasting, etc, are used to achieve the aims which, before 1939, were sought through naked force. But these postmodern methods are not without risks, nor are they invariably peaceful. On the contrary, they can kill as surely as any tank or bomber can kill.

 

From the beginning of this controversy my main concern has been to try to avoid the horrors which are now emerging. I here reproduce what I wrote near the start of this episode, in the Mail on Sunday of

26th January under the headline ‘Fanning the Flames of Another Nightmare’

 

 ‘NOW that we have reduced Syria to ruins and refugee camps through our noble benevolence, we want to do the same to Ukraine.

Western media and politicians, who do not even understand their own societies, repeatedly descend on foreign countries posing as liberators, encouraging and funding rebellions.

Too late, they find they have called up unstoppable, demonic violence, and lit fires they cannot put out. Ukraine is a prime candidate for a disastrous civil war.

Its people used to live together relatively harmoniously. But the Ukrainian-speaking West is very different from the Russian-speaking East, and the EU's clodhopping intervention in Kiev is encouraging divisions between the two.

The people who backed the rebels in Syria claimed to be surprised when many turned out to be Islamist fanatics of the sort we try to deport from Britain. Maybe they really were surprised, though it was quite predictable that such people would hate Damascus's secular state.

Well, let us spare these geniuses any surprises about Ukraine. Already a sinister faction called 'Pravy Sektor', violent and ugly, has elbowed aside the smiley crowds in Kiev. Nationalism in this much-invaded, blood-steeped part of the world has an especially dark past. Do we really want to revive it?’

 

I stand by every word.

 

 

 

STOP PRESS:

 

Next year’s Naivety Olympics in Utopia have been cancelled, following outbreaks of severe violence in the city of Euphoria, where armed riot police have been battling with crowds equipped with iron bars and Molotov cocktails. The riots are believed to have been sparked by the fury of freedom-loving citizens over the failure of talks about a planned accession agreement between Utopia and the EU. Cloud-Cuckoo Land, Utopia’s powerful neighbour, had offered an alternative deal, supported by many in the East of Utopia, whereas Western Utopians tend to favour the EU route.  The proposed site of the Games has now been set aside for mass graves. ‘We’re used to this sort of thing’ said a Utopian government spokesman. ‘Somehow, nobody ever actually gets here’. Meanwhile the Utopian Parliament discussed plans to adopt a new name for their country - EUtopia

How do You Make Grown Men Weep?

There’s been a lot of publicity for an anthology called ‘Poems that Make Grown Men Cry :  100 men on the words that move them’ . Leafing through it in a bookshop the other day, I was puzzled by most of the choices. In one or two cases, I could see exactly how the displayed verses might trigger tears. But in many,  I got the impression that there was a bit of showing off going on, with people trying to proclaim how well-read they were.

 

I find that the power of verse to make me weep (and like all instinctively cruel men I weep easily) varies with time and conditions. Also it changes with age. There was a time, in my twenties and thirties, when Keats could set me off very easily.  The final line of his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

 

    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

 

 

 

Still seems to me as perfectly true and profound as it was when I first read it. But the poem itself, with its choking evocation of a lost and lovely moment, buried beneath thousands of years of irrecoverable time, no longer brings me to tears as it once did. Nor does the equally potent evocation of autumnal England in his 'Ode to Autumn' trouble my tear-glands any more.

 

I think that’s because Keats is really for adolescents and those not much older.Kingsley Amis once said that many of us would pass through a stage where we thought his poetry was the most beautiful we had ever read or heard, but also suggested that most of us would grow out of it. I was annoyed when I first read this, but now I see what he meant.

 

 I am still completely thrilled, and made unaccountably sad, by the great pealing last lines of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, to which I was introduced at the age of ten by a brilliant teacher, and some parts of this (though alas not the whole poem) are written indelibly on my heart.

 

These words invariably produce a picture (always the same) in my head. It is a very melancholy picture, and as I grow older it is ever more obviously about death, but it has lost any power to make me cry.

 

‘Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

 

I was quite shocked recently to revisit Housman’s lines on the Cherry Tree in a ’A Shropshire Lad’, and remember committing them to memory aged about eight, never guessing that one day I would laugh to read the lines ‘of my threescore years and ten, twenty will not come again’.

 

As for Gray’s Elegy, (from which thousands of us quote each day without even knowing that we do)  I first met it when I was ( as some children are) very worried at the thought that my parents would one day die, and so found distressing the lines

 ‘For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

         Or busy housewife ply her evening care:

No children run to lisp their sire's return,

         Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.’

 

Now the whole thing , apart from its general warning against worldly ambition, seems to me like an enchanted wander through a small surviving piece of 18th-century England, that lost paradise of tranquillity . It feels even more so if you visit Stoke Poges, the Buckinghamshire village where it was famously written, besieged as it is now by traffic and urban sprawl.

 

But no tears. I don’t even get a  twinge any more from Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary Reaper’

 

'Will no one tell me what she sings?—

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago’

Those verses which do trouble me inexplicably tend to be more recently appreciated. I still have no idea why Robert Frost's ‘But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep’ are so unsettlingly moving. But I know that they are.  I’ve discussed small parts of Belloc’s ‘Dedicatory Ode’ and Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ in a short eulogy I wrote for my late brother, so I won't repeat that here. Two war poems continue to have a great power to distress me. There are Housman’s brief lines ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life to be sure, is nothing much to lose, but young men think it is, and we were young’, which is a very bitter cup.  And then there's Edward Thomas’s ‘In Memoriam Easter 1915' :

‘The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood, this Eastertide, call into mind the men, now far from home, who with their sweethearts should have gathered them, and will do never again’.

 

The evocative power concentrated into these brief words, and exploding in the imagination,  is astonishing.

 

Cecil Day-Lewis’s ‘Walking Away’ (dedicated to his son Sean) has a double meaning to me, as I have been both child and parent at boarding-school partings, and I would not expect anyone who hadn’t gone through this odd English experience to know what it meant, but anyway :

‘It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

 

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

 

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

 

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still.  Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.’

 

But increasingly I find the deepest power in the Psalms, as translated by Miles Coverdale (these versions are slightly different from those in the Authorised Version of the Bible, and almost always better. They're in the back of the Prayer Book). They are packed with flashes of gold, some brief,  some quite sustained. I think C.S.Lewis is right to say that the 19th is the greatest of all, and I have been lucky enough to have heard it sung twice in the last week, once by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge and once by the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, in each case so beautifully that it made me tremble to listen to it.

 

But if you have tears to shed, the 128th, which is supposed to be read at weddings but these days seldom is, seems to me to be the most dangerous (especially if you have also just read the 126th and 127th in which the English language reaches some of its very highest moments).  But I expect plenty of readers' eyes will pass over it without any response at all, such is the mystery of poetry and its effect upon us, and our essential loneliness in all things . Here is the 128th in full:

 

‘Blessed are all they that fear the Lord and walk in his ways. For thou shalt eat the labours of thine hands; O well is thee and happy shalt thou be.

Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine: upon the walls of thine house. Thy children like the olive branches: round about thy table.

Lo, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord. The Lord from out of Sion shall so bless thee: that thou shalt see Jerusalem in prosperity all thy life long.

 

Yea, that thou shalt see thy children’s children: and peace upon Israel.’ 

They've killed off marriage - and our hopes of a happy life

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Marriage died last week after a long illness. There will still be weddings, of course. But they won’t mean anything any more. They’ll be like those certificates saying you are ‘Lord of the Manor’ which gullible Americans buy.

The whole point of marriage was that it was binding for life – ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us  do part’.

That is what made it such a fortress against other influences. The State couldn’t break into it. It was a small, private place where we were sovereign over our own lives.

Either you like this or you don’t. I believe that raising children as well as we can is the central purpose of our lives. I also think that lifelong marriage is the best way of doing  it, and of ensuring that we do not run away from it, as many of us are inclined to do.

I also think the greatest test of character most of us will face will come when a husband or wife falls ill and becomes dependent on us. Marriage, by leaving us no choice in this, actually makes it easier.

But in the late 1960s, Britain and most other Western countries introduced divorce laws that  hollowed out the  marriage oath.

Since then, if either spouse wishes to break the solemn marriage promise, the State and the law actively take that spouse’s side.

If the other half of the marriage wishes to stay married, he or she can in the end be removed from the home by force, with the threat of prison.

I am still amazed that this totalitarian change came about with so little protest.

Now the very sharp and influential Sir James Munby, senior judge in the English family courts, has said that couples should be able to end a marriage simply by signing a form at a register office, with no need for lawyers or judges.

And, being smart, he has also urged the next obvious step – that cohabiting couples should be treated as if they are  officially married once they have stayed together for a  couple of years.

After all, why not? There’s no important difference any more. Official forms long ago stopped referring to ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, and those who cling to these archaic terms are frequently told by bureaucrats that they are now in fact ‘partners’.

I think Sir James will get his wish. And everyone will be happy, happy, happy – except the growing multitude of children who have never known domestic security and now never will, and the lonely,  confused old men and women with nowhere to turn but the doubtful comforts of the care home, where their lives can dribble away in a medicated haze, perhaps punctuated by slaps and insults.

Another BBC series that needs subtitles (but this time they have a good excuse)

Since even home-made BBC productions need subtitles these days, I am surprised the Corporation hasn’t been making more of its powerful new German-made mini-series on the Second World War as experienced by ‘normal’ Germans.

By the time you read this, you’ll probably have already missed two episodes of Generation War but it’s well worth catching up on iPlayer, or perhaps they could repeat it soon. It convulsed Germany when it was shown there last year.

It also infuriated Poles, who reasonably thought that it wasn’t for the Germans, of all people, to remind them that quite a lot of Poles had been anti-Semites.

But it’s worth seeing for lots of reasons. First, it is simply good TV, never boring, full of incident, some of it horrible, some of it deeply unlikely, but all of it interesting.

If you think modern Germans have fully confronted the horrors of the Hitler era, this drama will show you how very wrong you are. They’ve barely begun.

This helps to explain Berlin’s continuing desire to advance coyly behind the smokescreen of the European Union rather than under its own flag. You might also notice that the film completely ignores the first two years of the war, and only begins with the invasion of, er, Ukraine.

One simple question will tell us all we need to know about drugs

I see that even the slow learners in the media are at last picking up on the mountains of reputable research which show that ‘antidepressants’ are vastly over-prescribed even on their own terms, often have unpleasant side effects, and may not actually be any more effective against ‘depression’ than sugar pills.

Others all eventually follow where this column has led for years, though, of course, they never admit it.

So here’s a new challenge for the slow learners. I cannot see how anyone can oppose it. Can we please now have a  simple rule for all coroners, magistrates  and judges?

Wherever someone has taken his own life, or wherever someone is accused of taking someone else’s life, or of an act of dangerous violence, the police, doctors and pathologists involved should be required to discover whether that person has ever been a user of mind-altering drugs, whether legally prescribed, or illegal.

I believe that if this question is asked, it will become plain that there is a frightening correlation between such drugs and such acts. Then, at last, we can do something.

Have you noticed how the BBC discusses UKIP as if it is a problem rather than a legitimate party? Have you observed the pathetic attempts of Tory spin-doctors (who can think of nothing to say in favour of their own organisation) to smear UKIP from morn till night?

Have you also noticed the slavish obedience of political journalists, who have spent the past ten years ignoring the biggest issues in British politics – the EU and immigration – but now recycle these trivial slanders in the hope that they can save the old, dying parties which have spoon-fed them all their stories?

This sort of ganging up has not worked on the Scots, who understandably grow fonder of independence with every stupid threat and falsehood. I have a feeling it’s not going to work on the English either – and in case you hadn’t noticed by now, Nigel Farage  is in fact England’s answer to Alex Salmond.

If anyone is charged, tried and convicted for the murder of Jean McConville during the Irish Troubles, what will happen to that person? If I  have correctly understood the 1998 Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act, my belief is that he or she would serve a maximum prison sentence of two years. When I asked the Northern Ireland Office if I was right, they issued a panicky refusal to comment.

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A Debate on Russia

You should be able to watch last night’s debate in London on the Russia-Ukraine problem (if you wish to)

I am the fourth speaker after Ben Judah, Sir Tony Brenton and Roger Boyes. The chairman is Daniel Johnson, editor of ‘Standpoint’.

The hopelessly impatient may wish to know that my contribution begins at about 50 minutes into the recording.

 

 

 

Here http://www.frontlineclub.com/in-hock-to-the-oligarchs/

 

Does the EU want Ukraine to join it?

I have now had time to look into a remarkable statement which Roger Boyes made in the Standpoint debate about Russia and Ukraine.

 

Roger Boyes (1.32)  (I have cut out various blobs of stuff about ‘evil plots’):  ‘I just want to set one thing straight, that there is no European Union plan to swallow up Ukraine that is just an absolute absurd fantasy. …If you’d talked to European Union politicians six months ago they would have fallen off their chairs rather than admit that they wanted Ukraine at any time within the European Union….Nobody actually wanted Ukraine..."

 

Also (approx. 1.39) :  “I don’t like it when the European Union is somehow portrayed as an aggressor in this whole situation which is absolutely bonkers… it is quite clear that the European Union is almost helpless in this situation…”

 

 

Leave out what is in this case the apparently inexplicable presence of Catherine Ashton in Kiev during the attempts to overthrow President Yanukovich, and the mere fact that the ‘Association Agreement’ sought by the EU with Ukraine was a document with an explicitly political character, I ask readers to compare and contrast Mr Boyes’s assertion (and he is after all Diplomatic Editor of Britain’s newspaper of record, so we must take it seriously ) with an interview with Radek Sikorski, Foreign Minister of Poland, in the Washington Post of 18th April, a version of which can be found here :

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/talking-with-polands-foreign-minister-about-the-ukraine-crisis-and-russias-next-moves/2014/04/17/f1811e84-c5ad-11e3-bf7a-be01a9b69cf1_story.html

 

 

Question (from the Post’s Lally Weymouth) You worked hard to make Ukraine an E.U.-associated country, didn’t you?

 

Answer (from Radek Sikorski) :

 

It was under the Polish presidency that the text was agreed, and we had persuaded most of the E.U. to say officially that the association agreement would not be the last step in our collaboration. If Ukraine had carried out the reforms, it would eventually have been able to lodge an application to the E.U.

 

 

My note : I believe that Poland’s presidency was in the second half of 2011.

 

 

 

 

What Politicians Really Think and Do versus What People Believe About Them

As I ran through the most recent comments on this site, I noticed one from  ‘S. Coleman’ who said : ‘I think, for example, Michael Gove is sincere, even passionate, in his beliefs about comprehensive education.

 

I would love to know what Mr Coleman means by this. What are Mr Gove’s ‘sincere’ and ‘passionate’ views on the subject? Has he ever expressed any? If so, where?

 

We know about his assiduous and successful efforts to insert his children into a wholly untypical Church primary miles from his home, and his recent successful insertion of his eldest child into a highly selective (but officially ‘comprehensive' andc certainly not *academically* selective) single-sex Church secondary even further from his home.

 

From this we can justly infer that he understands and accepts that the existence of an ostensibly ‘comprehensive’ system has not created equality among schools. If he believed all schools were equal, surely he would send his children to the local school without a second thought. Yet not merely has he rejected his local primaries, of which I know nothing, he has actually rejected his local Academy School, Burlington Danes - of which we know quite a lot since Mr Gove has publicly praised it and publicly commended its head for their excellence. The reason for his decision to spurn Burlington Danes in favoyur of Grey Coat Hospital School cannot be his desire for his child to attend a church school,  since Burlington Danes, just like Grey Coat Hospital School, is a Church of England school.

 

Looking through the archives, there’s not much sign of any particular passion on the subject from Mr Gove. You might some up his position as a general acceptance of the existence of comprehensives, a disconentent with its effect  but no fundamental rejection of the comprehensive principle, let alone any embrace of its opposite, the academically selective principle.

 

Judged by the Hitchens rule on what really matters, his actions in office have been to leave unchanged the Blunkett ‘Schools Standards’ Act which made it illegal to open any new academically selective secondary schools, and to indulge in various Blunkett-style 'reforms', stunt and gimmicks supposed to mitigate the worst effects of comprehensive schooling, thpugh not really proven to do so, without addressing the demonstrable fact that comprehensive schooling is a fundamentally bad idea.

 

I note that back in 1997 (16/07/1997)Mr Gove described selection by ability as ‘the new Right obsession’, which doesn't sound like an endorsement. In September of the same year, in a sympathetic review of a book on education by Stephen Pollard and Andrew Adonis, he said ‘In their chapter on education, the authors record how egalitarian experiments such as comprehensive schooling and progressive teaching, which dismantled old hierarchies, replaced them with new and harsher inequalities. They quote approvingly the words of the ethical socialist A.H. Halsey: "The essential fact of 20th-century educational history is that egalitarian policies have failed."

 

But he then says a rather astounding thing, which begins gently and then accelerates into what might politely be called boldness.I include it ehre not because it is directly relevant but because it gives  a clue as to the thinking which really drives Mr Gove's policies.  : ‘They have certainly failed in Halsey's terms but there is, of course, nothing wrong per se in ever-greater inequality. The real test of equity, in law and in society, is the process not the outcome. A fair society is one where barriers to progress, not divisions between individuals, are as small as possible. To object to growing disparities in income is, ultimately, immoral, a genuflection to envy. Envy is a prejudice, as ugly as any, which seeks to punish another when no injury has been sustained. Snobbery, which drives man to excel and encourages the cultivation of taste, is, by contrast, a deeply moral impulse.’

 

Then there’s this noncommittal reference from January 2004 ;’ The real reason so few state school students make it to Oxford rather than, say, Wolverhampton, is the shamingly poor quality of state education in England, which leaves hundreds of thousands illiterate and innumerate. The statistics that tell the most important story are not the numbers of state school pupils at Oxbridge but the terrible exam performances of comprehensives relative to grammar and private schools.’ I mean, it’s clear he sees the problem . But it is far from clear that he is prepared to acknowledge the only feasible alternative.

 

Perhaps the clearest statement on the subject can be found in an article of July 2003, in which he attacks Shirley Williams for ‘presiding over the biggest betrayal ever endured by the nation's poor. Comprehensive education.’ (His. Punctuation).(You’ve heard of. The Blair Creature’s. Verbless sentences. I’ve always told. You. That. Michael Gove. Is. A Blairite).

 

He even notes the tiny catchment areas of the alleged comprehensives which ‘uphold standards’. And he notes the way in which this closes such schools to all but the well-off. But he then goes on to say that the best solution to this would be a weird  (and plainly unworkable) ‘scholarship’ scheme ‘Every parent in Britain should be given a scholarship for their child, worth broadly the amount currently wasted by the State on their schooling. This scholarship could then be used to buy a place at schools, which would have to compete for parents' money just as vigorously as airlines now compete for their holiday custom’.

 

Then. In the Sunday Telegraph of 2nd March 2008 (by which time he was Shadow Education Secretary, no less) , there was this : ‘Tomorrow, parents across the country will find out if their children have got into their first-choice school. I vividly remember last year when I, like thousands of other parents, faced a nerve-shredding few weeks to see if my daughter had got into her preferred school. She was lucky and now she's enjoying a superb education at a fine state primary. But the experience reinforced my conviction that parents shouldn't have to endure this anxiety and a good state education shouldn't be a matter of chance. It should be a right.’

 

Followed by a descent into the usual mixture of exhortation and pressure on a system designed to be bad, in the hope that it will occasionally be good, plus various gimmicks, more or less Blairite, under which parents are invited to hurl themselves, in wildly brave individual charges, against the grim-faced drawn-up battle-lines of school bureaucracy and egalitarian dogma, supposedly aided by ‘tools’.   

 

Ah, yes, tools. Yes, those ‘Free Schools’; that have been such a widespread success in our poorer districts. And those ‘Academies’ for whose alleged success there is as yet no evidence and which, given the chance to send his own child to one, Mr Gove himself spurned.

 

And here’s a pretty full answer, on his actual policy, from a Q&A article in the ‘Independent’ of 10th August 2009; Question’As a long time beneficiary of a grammar school education (1950-57) I would ask why any government would wish to abolish such schools. What would you do - specifically - to reverse the decline in academic standards? DR PETER SMEATON CHESTER’.

 

Answer;’ I would emphasise 10 main changes. First, recruiting and retaining the highest quality individuals into the teaching profession. Second, getting Ofqual, the standards watchdog, to fix our exams so they are directly comparable to the world's best. I want our 16 and 17-year-olds to sit exams which are as testing, and as attractive to colleges and employers, as those on offer in Singapore and Taiwan. Third, allowing state school students to sit truly stretching international exams, such as the IGCSE, which currently only private school students have access to. Fourth, ensuring Ofsted focuses on the quality of teaching rather than the zeal with which a school complies with irrelevant bureaucratic diktats. Fifth, reforming the national curriculum to strip out unnecessary accretions and concentrate on providing a stretching academic programme for all pupils to the age of 16. Sixth, giving teachers new powers to keep order in class, including protection from violence and intimidation. Seventh, liberating the weakest schools from local authority control and handing these schools over to organisations with a proven track record of excellence. Eighth, allowing the very best schools to benefit from academy status, and freedoms, providing they use those freedoms to help other, under-performing, schools. Ninth, encouraging new providers into the state system, as they have in Sweden, by allowing parents to transfer the money the state currently spends on their child's education to the sort of school they really want. And tenth, reforming pupil funding to ensure more resources are spent on the very poorest - to help reverse the widening gap in our education system between the fortunate and the forgotten.’

 

There’s no fundamental rejection of comprehensive schooling in there,, though elsewhere in the article he talks about being: ‘a strong believer in setting and streaming within comprehensive schools. More children should be taught by ability in more subjects. And more children, overall, should be pursuing a traditional, "grammar-style" academic education in any case.

 

The above is not and cannot be an , er, comprehensive account of Mr Gove’s views. I'd be grateful for any furtehr contributions. For a trukly full account we must await the biography of Mr Gove which is no doubt in preparation or contemplation somewhere, or jolly well ought to be.

 

But if Michael Gove has managed to give the impression, to Mr Coleman or anyone else, that he is a passionate opponent of comprehensive education, I still think that is an argument for people paying much more attention. Read beyond the headlines. Look at the actions of those involved, both personal (where relevant) and political.

 

Some Reflections on the Botched Execution in Oklahoma

The unpleasant, distressing scenes at the execution of Clayton Lockett in a prison at McAlester, Oklahoma, will of course be used by anti-death penalty propagandists as an argument against execution itself. Are they right to do so? I do not think so. Here are some reasons for my opinion.

 

First, let us do what so few of these reports do, and none do prominently (for that might get in the way of the campaign) , and discuss why Clayton Lockett had been sentenced to death in the first place.  As is usual in American executions, the murder was a long time ago, 15 years, the usual interval. Brace yourselves even so. At any distance in time and space, these events make unhappy reading, as indeed do accounts of Mr Lockett’s death.

 

But one always has to remember the beginning of these stories. How many anti-execution campaigners could name, without a pause for research,  the people who died in the Timothy Evans, James Hanratty or Ruth Ellis cases?  How many of those who tell the story of Ricky Ray Rector, pathetically hoping to finish the dessert of his final meal after his notorious Arkansas execution, know why Mr Rector’s brain was damaged (he shot himself in the head in a botched suicide) , or what he had done immediately before this (he had murdered a police officer in distressing circumstances)  

 

Here is a partial account of Mr Lockett’s undoubted crime (it does not describe the gang rape and the sodomy, though Lockett was also convicted of these crimes) , plus a little about the life he snuffed out, that of Stephanie Neiman. It  was published in the ‘Tulsa World’ and was written by Ziva Branstetter :

 

‘[Stephanie’s] parents had taught the teenager to stand up for "what was her right and for what she believed in."

Neiman was dropping off a friend at a Perry residence on June 3, 1999, the same evening Clayton Lockett and two accomplices decided to pull a home invasion robbery there. Neiman fought Lockett when he tried to take the keys to her truck.

The men beat her and used duct tape to bind her hands and cover her mouth. Even after being kidnapped and driven to a dusty country road, Neiman didn't back down when Lockett asked if she planned to contact police.

The men had also beaten and kidnapped Neiman's friend along with Bobby Bornt, who lived in the residence, and Bornt's 9-month-old baby.

"Right is right and wrong is wrong. Maybe that's what Clayton was so scared of, because Stephanie did stand up for her rights," her parents later wrote to jurors in an impact statement. "She did not blink an eye at him. We raised her to work hard for what she got."

Steve and Susie Neiman asked jurors to give Lockett the death penalty for taking the life of their only child, who had graduated from Perry High School two weeks before her death.

 

‘Lockett later told police "he decided to kill Stephanie because she would not agree to keep quiet," court records state.

Neiman was forced to watch as Lockett's accomplice, Shawn Mathis, spent 20 minutes digging a shallow grave in a ditch beside the road. Her friends saw Neiman standing in the ditch and heard a single shot.

Lockett returned to the truck because the gun had jammed. He later said he could hear Neiman pleading, "Oh God, please, please" as he fixed the shotgun.

The men could be heard "laughing about how tough Stephanie was" before Lockett shot Neiman a second time.

"He ordered Mathis to bury her, despite the fact that Mathis informed him Stephanie was still alive."

Bornt and Neiman's friend "were threatened that if they told anybody about these events, they too would be murdered," court records state.

"Every day we are left with horrific images of what the last hours of Stephanie's life was like," her parents' impact statement says.

"We were left with an empty home full of memories and the deafening silence of the lack of life within its walls. ... We feel that the only thing left to do is let Clayton Lockett serve out the sentence of death that a jury sentenced him to. Anything less is a travesty of justice."

 
Wikipedia records that at his murder trial (14 years ago) both DNA from the dead victim, fingerprints from the duct tape used to bind the victim, and eye-witness testimony led to his murder conviction.   I do not think anybody has ever suggested there was any doubt about his guilt.

 

Obviously, the execution went wrong. Obviously any civilised person must regret that greatly , as I do. The purpose of execution is to kill, not to torture. Torture is absolutely wrong.  

 

 

But why did it go wrong? Not because anyone actively wanted it to, but because of several circumstances, some of them brought about by anti-execution campaigners.

 

 One of the reasons it went wrong so was because of the problems inevitably associated with this method of killing. Lethal injection, though a pseudo-medical procedure, is not generally carried out by practising doctors because it would violate their Hippocratic Oath. Yet it requires medical skills and knowledge.  

 

 

The campaigns of anti-execution partisans have made simpler forms of execution (such as the former British method of hanging)  legally problematic. This is because those partisans have never sought their aim through open, democratic means. But sideways,  by attempting to claim that the US constitution outlaws capital punishment, when it actually doesn’t.

 

(Something equally devious happen in In Britain. Here the anti-execution zealots abolished hanging through a ‘Private Member’s Bill’ which was no such thing , but was in fact guided through Parliament with a great deal of help from the then Labour government, which crucially provided Parliamentary time. Most genuine private members’ bills die for lack of such time.   But this aid was never openly acknowledged, nor did Labour ever mention its plans to act in this way in its 1964 manifesto.

 

And, because the vote was ‘free’, that is to say the party whips gave no instructions on either side of the House, no MP ever had to justify his vote at a General Election, since it was never, before or afterwards, an issue in the Labour or Tory manifestoes, and MPs’ individual voting records seldom play much of a part in general election campaigns. So the vote was ‘free’; in the sense that it was ‘free’ from electoral consequences for the MPs involved).

 

In the USA, anti-execution campaigners knew that  the voters of most states (for the US Congress had no power to tell individual states what to do) would not countenance abolition. Those voters would punish legislators if they voted for it in America’s very different political culture (in which party matters less, the individual matters more and  ‘free’ votes would be found out and proclaimed for what they really were) . So they concentrated their efforts on the third, unelected chamber of the US Congress, the nine-man Supreme Court (the nomination of whose justices if probably the single most important task faced by any President) .

 

Their chosen route was to get the Supreme Court to rule that the death penalty was ‘Unconstitutional’( as they would later rule that the laws against abortion were unconstitutional) so at one stroke undermining the freedom of all death penalty states to take individual decisions on this.  A small minority of states had abolished the death penalty by proper open procedures, as they were free to do. As it happened, executions were already in sharp decline at the time. In the 25 years from 1900 to 1924, US states had executed 2,995 people. In the 25 years between 1925 and 1949, that had risen  to 3,644. Between 1950 and 1972, when the Supreme Court eventually did rule it unconstitutional, there were by comparison 916 executions.  I’d be interested in any researched explanations of this drop, but would suspect that a general growth of social and moral liberalism in that period had something to do with it.

 

Politicians might publicly support the death penalty at election time, and keep it on the books. But lawyers and campaigners sought ( as they still seek) to frustrate it by endless appeals, so causing long delays and preventing many executions (By the way, from 1976 -when the penalty was reconstitutionalised - to 2002, there were 780 executions, broadly comparable with the pre-1972 period, but not with the pre-1950 era).

 

This brings to mind an interesting point in the excellent (because thorough, measured and intelligent) but essentially  inconclusive Royal Commission on Capital Punishment of 1949-53. This  pointed out that, as capital punishment’s abolition usually followed a long period of suspension or reduced use, so direct ‘before and after’ comparisons of crimes supposedly deterred by the death penalty were not easy to make.

 

 

Anyway, when the Supreme Court ruled on Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, it recognised (as Britain’s Parliament never has) that it had gone too far in 1972, especially in believing that execution was outdated. Voters in some states had demonstrated clearly that hey still though it justified and moral, as had several state legislatures. One result of this was the rather laudable system of a two-part trial, in which guilt and innocence were decided at one stage, and the question of execution or some other penalty at a second hearing. But the hangover from 1972 has been the desire to avoid any accusation of cruelty, hence the abandonment in practice, of all methods of execution except injection.  This has led to the welcome (to me) disappearance of electrocution, a method I have witnessed myself, In Georgia, and which might well be extremely painful, though we would never know unless we underwent it ourselves. Though a supporter of the penalty in principle, I think the former British method of hanging, which was very swift, is paradoxically the most humane.

 

 

So the State of Oklahoma was using untried chemicals to achieve what was intended to be a painless death, and certainly wasn’t painless in practice. Why was this?

 

 

At least partly it was because lethal injection was adopted by those US states which wished to restore the death penalty after the US Supreme Court had ruled in 1972 that execution was ‘cruel and unusual’, but later accepted that it was not.  And so at least partly it was because of anti-execution campaigns, which adopted sideways methods because they knew that in a free society they could nto achieve their objective by open, direct legislation. .

 

In 1972, in the case of Furman v. Georgia, the US Supreme Court employed the Bill of Rights prohibition of ‘Cruel and Unusual’ punishment, because it was the only part of the US Constitution which gave them the power to intervene in the matter anyway. None of those ruling that it was ‘cruel and unusual’ appear to have agreed with any of the others about precisely why it was so. Two just said it *was* so, because of the changing times, much as people now seek to end an argument by saying ‘don’t you realise it’s the 21st century?’  

 

Three of the four pro-execution Judges said that the 14th Amendment’s reference to the taking of life as a recognised state power made it clear that the drafters of the Constitution had not seen execution as cruel or unusual or contrary to the principles of that constitution. They also pointed out that the death penalty was part of the Anglo-American legal tradition.

 

But one of the anti-execution Justices, Potter Stewart, came up with this not-very-legal formula ‘These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. For, of all the people convicted of rapes and murders in 1967 and 1968, many just as reprehensible as these, the petitioners are among a capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death has in fact been imposed.’

 

This is in itself interesting, as it contains within it strong evidence that by 1972 the death penalty in the USA was being carried out in an arbitrary, random fashion, as it is now. In a way it could be taken as a plea for *more* executions. The same is true of arguments that not enough white murderers are executed, or not enough rich murderers are executed.

 

(Before 1940, perhaps this was the case. Executions were certainly quicker in the USA of those days. An interesting example of the death penalty’s rather different, and much quicker application in the USA in the age before liberalism is the case of Giuseppe Zangara, who tried to assassinate President Franklin Roosevelt in Miami, Florida, on 15th February 1933. Mainly because he was standing on a wobbly chair 25 feet away  and using a handgun, Zangara missed Roosevelt altogether, but hit Anton Cermak, the Mayor of Chicago.  Cermak died of his wounds 19 days later. Zangara pleaded guilty to Cermak’s murder and was executed (by electrocution) on 20th March.  His last words were ‘Push the button!’ In these times, he would have lived on, on ‘Death Row’, for 15 years)

 

Then of course there is the European Union’s high-minded ban, which began in 2011, on the export to the USA of one of the drugs used in lethal injection. This has compelled death penalty states in the US to seek new and different drugs, as happened in Oklahoma.  Had it not been for this, there is every reason to believe that Mr Lockett’s execution would have gone ahead without problems. Now, it is quite possible to argue that the Oklahoma authorities should then not have gone ahead with the execution at all, since they could not be sure that their substitute drugs( which are being kept secret) would work. I sympathise with this logic , but only up to a point.

 

And that point is this. Is it any business of the European Union (or of some nice liberal-minded person living in a soft part of London where rape and shooting, followed by burial alive in a shallow grave,  is not a strong likelihood), how the State of Oklahoma conducts its criminal justice? In my view, it is no more their business than it is Oklahoma’s business how murderers are treated in Rotterdam or Milan.  If you really, really want to stop executions in Oklahoma, then go there and persuade the voters and legislators of that state to agree with you. And if you fail to do so, accept that opinions can differ on such things. And, if you are really thoughtful, accept that you just might be mistaken. 

Why do You Think What You Think?

I had a small revelation yesterday. No the earth did not shake, nor did voices call out to me from the sky. I just understood something very simple that had eluded me till now.

 

I am always taken by surprise when people attack me by suggesting that I hold my opinions for the sake of it, or to attract attention, or because of some sinister, concealed worldview such as I am from time to time accused.

 

And now I know why. The people who make these accusations do so because they themselves hold opinions for reasons of conformity and convenience, rather than out of conviction. These opinions, as was well-demonstrated last week during BBC3’s ‘Free Speech ‘ programme, have absolutely no bearing on any actual arguments or facts.

 

 

Look at the way I was accused by one audience member of supporting ‘rape culture’ because I defended the presumption of innocence. The idea that anyone accused of rape might conceivably *be* innocent seemed wholly baffling to her.

 

 And then there was the unfortunate person who (as far as I could make out)  simply couldn’t conceive that I might favour the death penalty put of compassion rather than cruelty. If this is your approach to the world, then you will think everyone else is up to the same thing,. If you yourself don’t hold your views out of conviction, but only out of conformity, you will be angry with the person who breaches that conformity. He is making you look like a conformist by doing so. And while many are ready to conform, few like to admit they are doing so.

 

None of my critics will believe me when I say that hold my opinions because they seem true and morally correct to me. And I suppose there may well be commentators who do take positions for effect or career reasons, which makes it easier for them to believe this of me. But there it is, I just hold them because I think them correct. My assailants are the ones who lose by this.  If they  believed that I might be sincere, they would themselves find it easier to argue for their own views. As it is, the simplest logical or factual challenge can usually derail them hopelessly.