Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 248

A Clouded Sky

Here is a partial version of the discussion about Cannabis on Sky News which I mentioned yesterday. I'm afraid Professor Curran's opening remarks (which I recall as being quite long and entirely uninterrupted and unchallenged) are not part of it. If that segment were included, I think the viewer might get a different impression. I don't know how these things are edited or selected, but I would wecome a full version. In the menatime, here's what a kind reader has found for me.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SePmi9qqcnU

Intellectually Brilliant and Impossible to Dislike - What the Guardian thinks about me. Or does it?

I had the best belly-laugh I’ve had for months on Monday, courtesy of The Guardian.  My Mail on Sunday Colleague had written an article for the left-wing daily, attacking my views on ‘addiction’.

 

You can read it here, but before you do, you should know that this online version is interestingly different from the one that was published in the newspaper itself (where I first read it, on my Monday morning train to London).

 

Here’s the link  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/05/drinking-habits-collective-denial-alcoholism

 

As I composed a letter in response ( published here http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/06/fashionable-fiction-addiction-as-disease ) I turned to the online version to check a quote.

 

And as I did so I was struck  (who wouldn’t be, if they were me?) by Melissa’s paragraph beginning: ‘It was infuriating to witness an intellectually brilliant man like Hitchens insisting that addiction is not an illness when our streets are full of men and women who have drunk so much they can no longer walk.’ I have rather naughtily emphasised the words which were in the online version,but not in the paper.

 

It wasn’t Melissa’s logic I liked (it’s not very good) but it warmed my heart to be called ‘Intellectually brilliant’, in The Guardian!  Next thing I know they’ll renationalise the railways and reintroduce grammar schools all over the country.

 

I wondered how I could not have noticed this flattering passage when I had read the print version.  Normally I can spot my name in a page of print from 400 paces, however small the type. Well, I hadn’t noticed it because it wasn’t there. There are a number of other minor changes in the printed text, all of which are plainly matters of length and minor editing. The only difference between the print and the online version that radically alters the meaning of the original is the removal of the words ‘an intellectually brilliant man like’, just before the word ‘Hitchens’.

 

The curious contradiction interested the London Evening Standard, which yesterday printed this diary item

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/the-two-sides-to-peter-hitchens-9044184.html

 

 

Actually, I’m inclined to agree with the Guardian, on the simple matter of fact. I would never describe myself as an intellectual, and once specifically disowned the appellation 'intellectual' ('private' or ‘Public’) in the introduction to a book (‘The Rage Against God’).

 

I’d rather read Tintin than the Times Literary Supplement, I am foxed by academic economics and by most philosophy, can’t see the point of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,  greatly prefer Dickens to Thackeray, let alone Thomas Hardy, can’t bear Jane Austen at all and share H.G. Wells’s view of Henry James , that ‘he chewed more than he bit off’. I play chess badly, and am hopeless at cryptic crosswords.  I even like quite a lot of Kipling and Tennyson.  I’m not particularly well-educated, judged by my own standards, and my school and academic records after I went off the rails (by my own wilfulness), aged 15,  were poor. I’m still amazed that the University of York gave me a degree, after three years spent on the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism (in which I was not examined). My 37 years in remedial classes at the University of Fleet Street (a  fine school) have taught me a lot, but I still can’t stand English Linguistic Philosophy or literary criticism . I think suburbs are a good thing. As for being ‘brilliant’, I think that’s a bit much, really.

 

But that’s not the point here. The point is that Melissa Kite wrote that as her honest opinion, in a  piece that was mostly hostile to my beliefs. This was a civilised thing to do, and something that broad-minded and thoughtful people often do when they are attacking someone’s ideas – to make it plain that the attack is not personal, and that they believe disagreement need not involve enmity.

 

Aged about 11, I realised that this wonderful state of mind was possible – to disagree without being hostile or angry. The quarrels I’d seen (and taken part in) until then had been personally bitter. I have never got over the sense of pure joy I experienced when I grasped that the bitterness wasn’t necessary. At last, one could have the pleasure of debate without the anger and resentment.

 

So the words were an integral part of her argument, and strengthened it. If she’d just been another of the people dismissing me as a stupid thoughtless oaf, then her disagreements with me would have mattered less. Cutting it out was, in my view, wrong. Leaving the other (presumably original)  version online was worse. It was a mistake.

 

I hope eventually to find out who took it out. And I’d love to know what their justification for doing so will be.

 

Hilariously, the online comments on the online version  contain many objections from Guardian online readers, perhaps the meanest-minded Internet ‘Community’ you could find, jabbering and shouting in rage and incredulity that such a thing could be said about me.

 

Something similar happened when Decca Aitkenhead unwisely remarked , in an article about me, that she found me ‘impossible to dislike’ after our long lunch in the Groucho Club. They wrote in, in large numbers, to say that they (not having met me, and so no doubt better qualified than Decca, who had) did not suffer from this problem.  One day I shall recount another experience I had with the ‘Guardian’, which illustrated rather well the severe tension between its intellectual (?) desire to be fair and inclusive to persons of all opinions, and the feral rage which some members of its staff feel towards ‘Rightwingers’ (their expression) such as me. It’s quite sweet, really.

A small expression of thanks

One small thing that needs to be dealt with. It is a bit personal, but I started it, so I must finish it. I must thank all the kind readers who noticed my mention, in passing,  of a CT scan that I had before Christmas and kindly expressed concern. Since my late brother’s recent death, from a disease which appears to be hereditary in our family,  I have been more watchful about things which would in the past have left me unconcerned. The scan was a precautionary one, more for the purpose of reassurance than because of any real suspicion. I have now had the results and they are indeed reassuring – but thank you again to all those who sent me their kind wishes. They were much appreciated.

Teasing the Guardian

From within the depths of the Guardian bunker at King's Cross in London comes the following explanation of the removal of the words 'intellectually brilliant', from a description of me that appeared in that newspaper.

 

( see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/01/intellectually-brilliant-and-impossible-to-dislike-what-the-guardian-thinks-about-me-or-does-it.html for an earlier discussion of this)

The explanation?

'Reasons of space'.

 

Now, any graduate of the University of Fleet Street knows that this is not an explanation at all. It is a form of words, used to fob off some kindly pensioner whose letter to the editor has, once again, not been printed, or a naive young freelance journalist who probably doesn't much want to know why his offering has been rejected or cut to ribbons.

 

The point is that space is allocated through preference. There's no space for the stuff you don't want to print. So the less you want it, the less space there is for it. 'Reasons of Space' just means' We didn't like it' or, at best 'We liked it less than something else we wanted to put in the same slot'. And in both cases it invites the question 'why?'

I've now gone through the article in both versions. All the other excisions made for the print version are minor edits which don't change the meaning of anything, or deprive the reader of anything new, interesting or surprising. It would be very easy to find a series of small cuts, or even one larger one, which would create as much space as was created by cutting the five words in question.

Until I received that answer, I thought of the episode as a fairly light-hearted matter. But now I'm being asked to believe, by grown adults, that of all the available cuts in that whole article, this was the one which was most obvious and convenient for the purpose of reducing its length by a tiny amount, and it has no other significance at all. Pure accident.

 

I think that's what's called an insult to the intelligence. But I'm not sure that I'm brilliant enough to be sure. Can an intellectual help? 

A Silly Argument Completely Exploded

On Wednesday night I struggled through the flooded railway system to address a small dining club in one of our ancient university cities on the subject of drugs. It was a perfectly pleasant occasion packed with intelligent, nay distinguished, people, and I got a free meal. But I was dreading the moment when I had to speak, because I am now sadly used to the way in which the English middle classes have been brainwashed by the Big Dope lobby.

 

I did  find a number of supporters there, and at least one guest told me that what I said had caused him to think afresh, than which there is no better compliment,  and was glad of it.  But I also encountered a good deal of the standard-issue non-arguments of the Big Dope campaign which have been absorbed as conventional wisdom by much of respectable England, and which are generally quite unshiftable.

 

One actually asked a question containing almost all of the dud points listed below, even though I had just finished rebutting them all in some detail, as if I had not spoken at all . If you were to see this person in the street, you would imagine him to be (and he may well be) a huntin’ and shootin’ rural Tory who keeps black Labradors in a mellow stone Jacobean manor house. Yet it is this part of the population that has, in my experience been most totally penetrated by the Big Dope campaign. That is why I am now seriously contemplating emigration.

 

I was (miraculously) spared ‘wot abaht alcohol and tobacco, then eh? eh? eh?’

 

But I did encounter, in various forms:

Let’s get criminals out of the drug trade by legalising drugs

Surely if it were legal it would be easier to control?

People take drugs because of the thrill of illegality.

What about Portugal and Holland?

A free Englishman can do what he likes with his own body. Who are you to tell me what I can do with mine?

 

I shan’t waste time going round in circles on these. I gave myself quite a bad headache trying to do that on Wednesday night.

 

But I also encountered this one:

 

Your draconian (their term) laws have been tried in the USA and they haven’t worked there.

 

Alas, I generally carry facts and figures about Britain, but not about the USA. I was able to give a general answer on this, pointing out that marijuana possession was not in fact severely punished in the USA, but this was met with incredulity.

 

So this morning I looked up a few things and found a document I’ve never come across before which rebuts this fiction in impressive detail, explaining how the Big Dope campaign misrepresents the US figures to give a wholly false impression. It falls over itself to explain what softies the US authorities actually are.

 

 

https://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/publications/pdf/whos_in_prison_for_marij.pdf

 

 

 

There are, as it happens, very few people in prison in the USA for simple marijuana possession, let alone for a first offence. There are people in prison who have, as it happens, been charged with and sentenced for simple possession, but they are in prison for other reasons, a key difference. Some of those charged with ‘possession’ possessed such large amounts that their offences simply cannot be regarded as minor misdemeanours.  I urge you all to follow this link. Its figures are some years out of date but I have no reason to believe that anything substantial has changed since. I rather suspect it has got soppier. See this rather surprising source on the same subject :

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/lists/top-10-marijuana-myths-and-facts-20120822/myth-prisons-are-full-of-people-in-for-marijuana-possession-19691231

A Secret Drama at the Heart of Power

Contemplating a solitary night in a hotel somewhere deep in the new East End of London, probably accompanied with pouring rain, I needed something exceptional to read. So I did something I had been meaning to do for years. I went to the London Library, membership of which is my greatest single self-indulgence, and hunted down in its haunted, mysterious  Edwardian shelves a copy of C.P. Snow’s  ‘Science and Government’, the text of the Godkin lectures which he gave at Harvard in 1960.

 

Just finding the little volume was fun. What a setting for a ghost story or an old-fashioned murder mystery this wonderful library would be, with its vertical maze of staircases, its iron floors, its long banks of shelves, illuminated only when a reader is searching them. Like H.G.Wells’s Magic Shop ( a lovely short story which I re-read for the first time in years a few nights ago) it seems to stretch on and up and in forever, like a pleasing dream,  and I have never failed to get slightly, if pleasantly,  lost while in search of something. More than once I’ve had to ask one of the delightful staff to find the book I’m looking for, as its system of shelving is quite unique and not all that easy to follow, and the maps it issues are baffling to me.

 

I also paid a call on the complete edition of the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, refreshing my memory of its astringent entry on ‘Delirium Tremens’, which dismisses the idea (nowadays popular with advocates of ‘addiction’) that ‘DTs’ are the result of abrupt cessation of alcohol  as an outdated nonsense. It describes the malady as a simple consequence of prolonged heavy drinking. How funny that fashion has now switched round again.

 

You don’t need to belong to the London Library to get hold of Snow’s little book. I’m sure many other libraries either have it (it was published by the Oxford University press in 1960 and 1961, and presumably in the USA by a Harvard imprint)  or can get it for you on inter-library loan. It’s quite slender. But the first half of it is absolutely astonishing.  I’ve always known it contained the factual background to some scenes in Snow’s particularly moving novel about deep friendship,  ‘The Light and the Dark’, in which the Second World War plan to bomb German cities, and the Whitehall row about it, forms at first the background and later, rather tragically, the foreground, to the final part of the story. But I didn’t know the half of it.

 

Snow was deeply involved in the British state’s effort to recruit science to prepare for the Second World War. As a man of the pretty hard left of the time (just how hard is hinted at in the another book in the series, ‘Corridors of Power’, in which Snow’s semi-autobiographical hero more or less admits to sympathy for the USSR) , he longed for Winston Churchill to be in office throughout the late 1930s, believing that a Churchill government would stand up to Hitler.  

 

And he knew several extraordinary figures in the semi-secret world where government, science and politics intersect. One was the fascinating  Maurice Hankey, who appears in some of the books ( as I believe) as the politician Bevill . The others, who are the principal characters in ‘Science and Government’ are Sir Henry Tizard  (whom Snow obviously admired greatly) and F.A. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), the mysterious German-born naturalised Briton, scientist and intriguer  who became Winston Churchill’s chief scientific adviser. Snow is utterly fair to Lindemann, and seems to have liked him as far as it was possible to do so. He notes that both Lindemann and Tizard were abnormally physically brave, and both proved it by extraordinary flying exploits during the First World War.  It is amazing that they survived.

 

But it would not be true to say he admired Lindemann.

 

The two scientists quite famously quarrelled over Lindemann’s belief that bombing German civilians would win the war.

 

Lindemann advocated , quite specifically, the bombing of German working class homes. ‘Middle class houses have too much space around them and so are bound to waste bombs’, as Snow explains the view. ‘ Factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit.’

 

Lindemann argued that , given a total concentration of effort, bombing all the major towns of Germany could destroy 50 per cent of all houses.

 

Snow notes at this point, in a superb and (to me) moving piece of understatement: ‘It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing’…. ‘…Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right’.

 

But he returns to the practical point. As well as being wicked, the policy was plain wrong.

 

Tizard said that Lindemann’s estimate of the possible destruction was five times too high. Patrick Blackett (a former naval officer who had become a noted physicist high in the scientific councils of the day and later the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics and ennobled as Lord Blackett), independently advised that Lindemann’s estimate was six times too high (Both were slightly out. But nothing like as wrong as Lindemann was.  Lindemann’s estimate of destruction was in fact *ten times too high*, as the post-war bombing survey revealed) .

 

They might as well not have bothered to argue. ‘The minority view [of Tizard and Blackett] was not only defeated, but squashed. The atmosphere was more hysterical than is usual in English official life; it had the faint but just perceptible smell of a witch-hunt. Tizard was actually called a defeatist’.

 

As Snow says : ‘It was not easy, for a man as tough and brave as men are made, and a good deal prouder than most of us, to be called a defeatist’

 

Perhaps worse was the internal exile into which Tizard was forced, denied all further influence, despite his great knowledge and experience, and exiled to the Presidency of Magdalen College in Oxford, his talents wasted at their very peak, and when they were most needed by the country he loved. No, it is not Soviet, there was no Siberian power station, and no bullet in the back of the head. But it is not English either. And it is stupid, stupid, stupid.

 

You will search in vain in most histories of the war for more than tiny passing references to Tizard. If there is another book which describes this moment of official insanity, I do not know where it is. I sat over my supper,  shocked into immobility, my knife and fork abandoned and my glass of wine ignored, almost trembling with wasted anger over this awful story of long ago.  Why had I till then been only  dimly aware of it? Why is it trapped inside this small, obscure volume retrieved from deep in a rather impenetrable library? Why isn’t it taught in schools? Why hasn’t anyone written a play about it?

 

Well, partly because it would undermine the nonsensical cult of Winston Churchill, who for all his merits had many bad qualities which we are generally not supposed to go on about.

 

His complete support for Lindemann (who by the way was a non-drinking , non-smoking vegetarian with no known sexual relations with anyone,  who lived on the whites of eggs, Port Salut cheese and olive oil, a strange boon companion for the boozy Edwardian WSC, who is said to have occasionally persuaded Lindemann to drink a glass of Cognac) simply crushed all opposition.

 

Well , that’s half the story, but – shocking as it is – there’s an even more worrying postscript. I reckon that most of my critics on the subject of bombing, the ones who say the Germans deserved it, the ones who think that burning and mangling women and children in their homes was a justified and effective means of war, the ones who tot up the diversion of resources to anti-aircraft measures and claim this somehow turned the scale in Russia  (even though the bombing didn’t get properly under way until long after Hitler was beaten at Stalingrad and the course of the war was decided anyway), and yet who don’t find that the deliberate killing of civilians, in areas where opposition to Hitler was concentrated, was both stupid and immoral….

 

….I would reckon that even these people would say that the invention of radar and its deployment in the Home Chain on the eve of war was an unmixed blessing and possibly saved this country.

 

Well, if Churchill had been in power a few years earlier, there would have been no radar, because his pet Lindemann would have stopped its development.

 

The ‘Tizard Committee’ (officially the 'Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence’) began meeting in secret in January 1935. Tizard  kept it small and concentrated, and picked its members with great care (Blackett being one of them) . They decided quickly that radar was the one thing to back. And they began the concentrated, brilliant, exhausting work on it  (and on persuading the armed forces that it was what they needed) which would put Britain significantly ahead in its develop at a vital moment in world history.

 

As Snow Says, most of the vital work (which made it available to the RAF in the summer of 1940)had been done by the end of 1936. The development of such devices is slow, and this was an amazing piece of prescience and competence.

 

And yet in 1935, Lindemann became involved. This was a result of a secret arrangement under which then then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, agreed to allow Winston Churchill to sit on another secret committee on air defence, one for politicians rather than scientists.

 

With Churchill came Lindemann, who was placed on the Tizard Committee.

He very nearly wrecked it. It became full of ‘diatribes by Lindemann, scornful, contemptuous, barely audible, directed against any decision that Tizard had made, was making, or ever would make.’

 

Lindemann ‘demanded that[radar] should be put much lower on the priority list and research on other devices given the highest priority’.

 

These other devices included wholly impractical plans for infra-red detection, and the dropping of parachute mines and bombs *in front of hostile aircraft* , as if they were ships.

 

Two members of the committee, including Blackett, could bear it no longer and left. This happened after Lindemann abused Tizard so fiercely that the secretaries ‘had to be sent out of the room’.

 

With typical Whitehall cunning, the committee was reconstituted and Lindemann was somehow left off it. Radar survived and was ready in time.

 

But what if Churchill had by then been Premier?

 

Snow admits the paradox - he and his friends had at the time clamoured for Churchill to be brought back into the Cabinet, to strengthen our war preparations and stiffen our national sinews..

 

But if that had happened, Lindemann would have been able to do to Tizard in 1936 what he did to him in 1942 over bombing – deploy the power of Churchill to crush him.

 

And then what would have happened to radar? It would not have been remotely ready by 1940. Good speeches by WSC wouldn’t have won  the Battle of Britain if there hadn’t been radar too.

 

‘With Lindemann instead of Tizard’, Snow concludes,  ‘ it seems at least likely that different technical choices would have been made. If that had been so, I still cannot for the life of me see how the radar system would have been ready in time’.

 

It’s an interesting contrast between what we thought we knew, and what actually happened. I do urge you to read ‘Science and Government’. And I wish someone would write a play, or a TV drama about Tizard and Lindemann. That’s the way to get such things into history, now nobody knows any.

Memories of Australia

 

Some of you might enjoy these extracts from my recent appearance at the ‘Festival of Dangerous Ideas’ in Sydney. Some of you won’t. Here they are anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8RwcpZ-kU&feature=youtu.be&a

The police didn't kill Mark Duggan - 50 years of liberal 'compassion' did

We asked for it. We repeatedly voted for politicians who promised compassion. And now we have compassion coming out of our ears. And we moan that we don’t like the result. Yet we carry on with the same plan, madly expecting it to have a different outcome.

It was ‘compassion’ that abolished the death penalty for murder, so forcing us to arm the police – who had until then been guarded from violent criminals by the real threat of the gallows.

Look how compassionate that turned out to be. The lone armed constable in the dark and dangerous street now has to act as prosecutor, defence counsel, judge, jury, executioner and appeal court, and all in a matter of seconds.

No wonder the inquest jury in the Mark Duggan case ruled that this was a lawful killing. Which of us knows how he would act in such conditions?

And yet why is this bloody system morally better, more just, more kind, more proof against error than a jury trial with the presumption of innocence and the possibility of appeal and reprieve?

But we’re all so compassionate that, when we’re not bombing and invading foreign countries for their own good, we feign horror at the idea of bringing back the hangman.

There’s no logic to it. The liberal bombing of Baghdad and Belgrade unavoidably and predictably killed innocent human creatures. Yet the people who backed the bombing claim that the much smaller risk of hanging an innocent makes capital punishment unacceptable.

Because abolishing the noose is compassionate, the feeble logic of the abolitionists still triumphs. Try defending the death penalty in any ‘civilised’ gathering in this country and see how quickly you are sent to Coventry and dismissed as a Victorian monster.

And then we make ourselves angry at the spectacle of modern Britain on TV, the claimers of benefits turned into a sort of national entertainment.

But why do these unhappy, hopeless people exist? Who corrupted them, by offering them the chance to live in this dreadful, doomed way, while at the same time giving them no moral guidance or help?

We did, repeatedly electing governments that offered compassion to the poor, in the form of a welfare state with its moral heart ripped out.

Try suggesting that there is a difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor, in any public forum, and feel the temperature drop below freezing. And yet a welfare state which refuses to recognise this is bound to corrupt people into idleness and worse.

Roughly 50 years ago, beguiled by smiley reformers, we chose the wrong future. We adopted ideas which were mistaken and have proved to be disastrous.

We called them ‘compassion’. But who were we really being compassionate to? Not, as it turns out, to the poor we claimed to be helping. They suffer most from the compassion of our criminal justice system – which in 2012 was so compassionate it refused to imprison 28,997 offenders who had committed at least 25 crimes.

It is the lives of the poor that are blighted by anarchic schools that can’t teach, and by amoral handouts. It is their streets which are full of the drugs whose use we won’t punish. It is they who have been first to experience the abolition of fathers and stable families, which leads directly to the growth of criminal gangs.

All these policies were implemented in the name of compassion. But who were we being gentle to? Why, we were being nice to ourselves, sparing ourselves the hard and unpopular decisions and choices that make civilisation possible, like indulgent parents who mingle neglect with bribes, only on a vast scale. And we still are.

To hell with compassion. Give me good honest harshness any day. It’s far kinder in the long run.

Isn't it rather insulting and racially bigoted for the police to assume the ‘Black community’ will be particularly upset by the death of a gangster?  Black people, just like everyone else, hate and fear crime and criminals.    

A 'risk' I'd be thrilled to run

What a lot of silly fuss about people risking the giant waves that have thundered against our shores during the last week.

Next thing you know, the whole sea will be fenced off and patrolled by portly wardens telling us to keep away lest we fall in.

If I lived in Porthcawl, I would certainly have got as close as I could to the raging of the sea. I have had the good luck to see most of the great sights of the planet, from the Himalayas to the Grand Canyon, and our lovely coastline in a storm is at least the equal of all of them.

Anyway, we should never forget that the sea, in its many moods, was what kept us safe and made us a great and rich nation.

I told you ADHD was a myth...

Wait long enough and the rest of the world will catch up with everything in this column. For years I’ve been pointing out that there is no objective, testable evidence at all for the existence of the fake ailment ‘ADHD’.

Now here comes Dr Richard Saul, one of the US’s leading neurologists (that’s a real qualification based on hard science), with a new book called ADHD Does Not Exist. Of course it doesn’t, but it soothes a lot of bad consciences, triggers a lot of welfare payments and makes a lot of money for the pill manufacturers.

So you get into trouble for saying so. Will ‘dyslexia’, that other great phoney excuse of our age, be next? I do hope so.

The TV series Blackadder was infantile Left-wing drivel. But, alas, it was still pretty much right about the First World War. That war was worse than futile. It was malevolently stupid and wrong. It destroyed this country, wiping out the best men of a whole generation before they could become fathers. We still suffer for that.

There was no good reason for this country to enter that war. We weren’t really obliged to defend the invented country of Belgium. The great Lord Palmerston oiled out of a similar commitment to Denmark in 1864, and nobody cared.

The US benefited hugely from staying out, then and later. Germany ended up dominating Europe anyway, through the EU, but only after millions of deaths, the destruction of countless homes and the horrors of Hitler and Stalin – all of which we would have been spared if France had been swiftly defeated in September 1914. If Michael Gove could just stop being so keen on supposedly benevolent wars, he would see that.

 

Water: It's Cold. It's Wet. It's Deep. It's Dangerous. We Know.

WARNING: CONTENTS MAY BE CONTROVERSIAL

On Sunday morning I was amused to receive the following e-mail (I have removed all clues to the author’s identity).  It was so enjoyably rude that I feel it reasonable to make it (and my response) public.

 

‘So you'd be happy to run the risk of getting swept away by huge storm waves?  Are we to assume that means you are also happy to risk the lives of people who would be despatched to try to save your life?  You, and all the people who run such ridiculous risks, should be left to drown.’

 

I replied, beginning

 

‘Dear *******’

 

 

Thank you so much for your interesting letter. I think one can take reasonable risks, and that our general attitude towards risk-taking is absurdly over-cautious. Maybe it’s because my parents had endured the dangers of war (my father was on the Russian convoys, where the combination of appalling weather and a dangerous and effective enemy meant each journey was compassed about by the risk of death, and survival not to be taken for granted. My mother was in Liverpool during the heaviest German bombing of that city, so bad, that news of it was suppressed) , and had things in better proportion than we, in our ultra-safe world, have them. In my childhood I was allowed to roam about unsupervised all day, climb trees, get cuts and scratches etc. I once climbed on to a horse in a field and rode it , bareback, for all of 15 seconds before being thrown off. It hurt. Risks? Undoubtedly. But worth it? Definitely. You’re quite right that, if swept away by the sea, I should be left to drown. It would have been my own choice to take the risk.

 

Best wishes,

 

Peter Hitchens

 

This led to a response, and an improvement in manners (but a hidden splat concealed therein). 

 

 

 

‘Dear Peter

 

Thank you for that full reply.  I agree that in days of yore and childhood we all took risks like climbing trees etc which did not involve emergency services putting their lives at risk to save us and indeed, as children, it would never have crossed our minds that anyone else would ever be involved, as children think only of themselves.  Hopefully, most of us have grown up and do consider other people.

 

I remain firmly of the view that the sentiment expressed in your final point should have been included in your article rather than encouraging other idiots to behave in such a reckless, selfish manner.

 

Regards…’

 

 

Gosh, did anything I wrote encourage anyone to go out and risk his life? I’d no idea I had so much influence. I’d just repeat, in response to this,  that a sense of humour, and a sense of proportion, are necessary when facing the normal dangers of life. Excessive caution is just as bad for us too much rashness. Most of us are in far more danger from excessive, unregulated traffic (when did any of you last see a police traffic patrol? I don’t mean a police car rushing noisily at dangerous speed to the scene of a crime the police had failed to prevent, but an actual traffic patrol),  than we ever will be from the raging of the sea. Crossing or using a road ( as a cyclist or a pedestrian) is a deeply dangerous thing, and ought to be made safer. But it won’t be.  That is why some people actually wear body armour when they venture out on to our nationalised and subsidised state highway system.

 

Our absurd culture of excessive safety has already had many daft results. Idiotic signs can already be be found along one stretch of coastline known to me, warning that the cliffs are steep and the sea may be wet (or some such). And an Oxfordshire riverbank known to me is dotted with expensive metal signs warning of deep water. In a river? What next? There are also signs advising walkers that it may be risky to venture on the towpath when it is under water. Who’d have thought it? 

Next winter, I’ve no doubt, many sea fronts will be cordoned off by persons in high-visibility jackets, as soon as the wind rises above Force Two on the New Beaufort Scale (‘Plastic carrier bags fly through the air. Burger containers skitter along the pavement. Empty lager cans begin to rattle. Cannabis smoke no longer rises vertically’).

And my morning cup of milky railway station coffee (or ‘caffeine hit’ as Decca Aitkenhead would call it) is given to me in a cup whose lid proclaims ‘Contents May be Hot’.

 

Surely this sort of thing, if unchallenged, will turn us into hopeless milksops, scared of being savaged by our own hamsters and calling an ambulance (or the police) if we scratch ourselves while opening a bottle?  

 

For instance, On Sunday I rode my bicycle through floods twice. In one place, I did so where a man was drowned a few days ago, God rest his soul.  But I had walked into the flood before riding into it, to check the strength of the current and the depth of the water, which was much less than it had been on that sad occasion. I must confess that I rather enjoyed the slight feeling of adventure, and the fight against the elements when I had to pedal hard to overcome the (expected) side-on current. And I also enjoyed the fact that I had saved myself several miles of detour. Earlier in the week, I had deliberately walked as close as I could sensibly get to the flooded Thames (or Isis, as some still call it round where I live). I was rewarded by the most beautiful sight (invisible from anywhere else) of the overflowing river running at speed between two lines of overhanging willows up to their knees in the flood, the water looking like polished pewter in the late afternoon light. It could have been a painting by Fragonard or Samuel Palmer, and was one of the loveliest things I have seen in a long time. I think I was a better person, in several ways , for having taken these small risks.

 

I am a state-registered coward, and need to train myself to take risks, or I would never have lived properly. One particular risk I took, now almost 25 years ago, so transformed my life for the better that I still tremble to think what would have happened if I hadn’t taken it. I was in much greater danger from taking the safe way out. Goethe (I know I’m not him) used to force himself to climb the great tower of Strasbourg cathedral to cure himself of his fear of heights. And so he did.

 

I’m not suggesting that people take obvious mad risks. I’m suggesting that it is quite reasonable, and indeed good,  to get close to the sea in such storms, and that all the media fuss about ‘irresponsibility’ will lead to seafronts and breakwaters being roped off and taped off with those silly ‘Police : Do not cross’ tapes, and indeed ( as i said) guarded by portly officials in uniform. You wait and see if I'm wrong.

The Birth of Big Dope . Marijuana/Cannabis becomes Big Business

I have Elaine to thank for alerting me to this interesting article: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-09/colorado-legal-marijuanas-strange-economics about the implications of legal marijuana/cannabis. (I use both words because I hope to have a small US audience for this posting). 

 

The ‘legal dope will be safer’ argument has always seemed to me to be wrong on two grounds. One, mind-bending drugs can never be safe. It's hardly surprising that people who mess about with their brains later become mentally ill, is it? You can’t repair a bent brain as you can mend a broken finger, or even a broken leg - though the constant puffing and boosting of  so-called ‘Neuroscience’ has managed to give many people the idea that science and medicine know much more about the brain than they actually do.

 

I’d love to know, by the way, just how closely the rise of ‘neuroscience’  (and the matching disappearance of old-fashioned psychiatry, and the diminishing of hard neurology) have marched in step with the growth of the big pill companies,  since ‘neuroscience’ first emerged in the 1960s.

 

The second problem was the assumption that legalisation would mean ordered legality. The truth is that it isn’t illegality that puts certain goods in the hands of criminals. It’s tax. HMRC have a constant huge battle to control the trade in tax-free cigarettes in Britain, and also the growing trade in untaxed alcohol. Both products are legal, and indeed regulated.  Their sale, consumption and manufacture are legal. They can be displayed in shops and alcohol can still be advertised, though cigarettes cannot be.

 

So the amoral ‘libertarians ‘ of the New Right predict that legalised dope will drop in price , and be more easily kept away from the young.

 

But we read here ‘…In Colorado, where authorities have levied a 15 percent wholesale and 10 percent retail tax on marijuana transactions, the price of legal commercial-grade pot has doubled to $400 an ounce since the start of the year, says Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association.’

 

Oh, and by the way, doesn’t ‘executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association’ rather make my point that legalisation( for this is what we are really seeing) will create a force best described as Big Dope, which will have huge commercial interests in the sale and promotion of this drug?

 

What if medical science, in coming years, finally manages to go beyond correlation and establish the link between cannabis use and mental illness?

 

Will this industry (by then no doubt equipped with large and comfortable offices close to the Capitol in Washington DC and to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, and a big lunch budget) keenly embrace these findings and withdraw its product from the market? Will the US and British Treasuries, by this time creaming off billions from marijuana taxes, be keen to lose this new and badly-need revenue?

 

Or will we see a repeat of the 50-year two-step between government and industry which so long delayed effective action to curb cigarette smoking in our societies?

 

Go on, guess.

 

I think it might also be interesting to find out what Colorado’s schools report, a year hence, about the impact of this change in the law upon their students. Of course, it’s not legal to sell to children. But the same is true of alcohol and cigarettes and somehow they seem to get hold of them.

 

But will anyone ask the right questions or monitor the right things? In whose interests will it be to do so, now that both business and government are set to profit? I suspect it will take about 20 years for the Left to realise that they have been thoroughly fooled by this campaign, which is just another big business ramp, no more admirable or radical than cheeseburgers or cola. Responsible, ethical socialists would surely have been against it from the start.

 

By the way, on a different aspect of this subject, a blogger called Oliver Dodd has been pressing me to respond to this silly claim that a country which seriously enforced laws against drug possession would be a police state

 

http://oliverdodd.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/why-peter-hitchens-is-wrong-on-drugs_11.html

 

As the author then unintentionally shows, real police states are quite happy to have a doped population. It is only free societies that need to act against this.

 

My answer to him is posted on his site. I forgot to mention that I had no idea that Edmund Burke had originated the words he attributes to him. Can anyone help?

Talking of unexpected sources, how many of you knew that the expression 'Hanging is too good for him' were originally spoken by the character 'Mr Cruelty' in John Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress', when the leading men of Vanity Fair are discussing how to put Faithful to death?

Knowing that, will those who use these words hesitate in future to do so?