Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 257

That Lord Desai Moment at the Cambridge Union

Here’s a brief clip of the final moments of last Thursday’s Cambridge Union debate, in which I challenge and reprove Lord Desai for dismissing religious believers as liars ( as I believe he had repeatedly done in his speech).

 

I clambered to my feet during his speech to do so through a point of information, the formal way of putting a question to an opponent. The speaker is not obliged to accept this, and Lord Desai (though clearly aware of my desire to intervene, as he was at one point face to face with me) did not do so. So I sat down, waited for him to finish, and then went over to put the point to him anyway, privately. My reproof ,which I suspect was inaudible to almost everyone in the hall, was then picked up on the microphones (I am not at all sorry about this. I am perfectly happy for everyone to know what I said and how I said it).

 

What is not clear from this excerpt is the way in which Lord Desai, a man of undoubted intelligence and charm, repeatedly imputed dishonesty to religious believers during his speech, which, being the final speech of the evening, was particularly important. Regular readers here will know that I take accusations of dishonesty very seriously (and only make them myself when I believe they can be proved).  I don’t think Lord Desai at any stage realised that I was genuinely angry about this. He sought me out after the debate to wish me a cheerful and friendly goodnight, and to shake my hand. I’m again, unsure whether he noticed the formal coolness of my response. Here it is anyway. I believe the Cambridge Union will shortly post a full version (though various microphone problems that I experienced during the debate may mean that some of what I said wasn’t recorded).

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NrDX4JmQrk

 

 

 

A Sort of Reading List (with thanks to 'HM')

Here I reproduce, with thanks,  a recent posting by ‘HM’, which answers (or partly answers) a question often put by contributors here about my book recommendations:’ Here – because I like lists – is a list of some of the writers and books that Peter Hitchens has praised, or at least mentioned with interest. Some of it is from memory so there may be mistakes. Eric Ambler Kingsley Amis The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker The Great Deception, by Christopher Booker and Richard North The Real Global Warming Disaster, Christopher Booker William Boyd Ray Bradbury The Gap in the Curtain, by John Buchan Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, by Patrick J. Buchanan The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan Edmund Burke A.S. Byatt The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, especially the Sherlock Holmes stories and Micah Clarke.  The Stars Look Down, A.J. Cronin Charles Dickens, especially Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities Orderly and Humane, by R.M. Douglas The Siege, by Helen Dunmore Silas Marner, by George Eliot T.S. Eliot The Third Reich in Power, by Richard Evans When Money Dies, by Adam Fergusson C.S Forester Flashman books, by George Macdonald Fraser Robert Frost Alan Furst Night Falls on the City, by Sarah Gainham Goodbye To All That, by Robert Graves Among the Dead Cities, by A.C. Grayling Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene She, by H. Rider Haggard Covenant with Death, by John Harris The Ghost, by Robert Harris George Herbert To End All Wars, by Adam Hochschild South Riding, by Winifred Holtby A.E. Housman M.R. James Alan Judd Keats Philip Larkin Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carre The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis The House in Norham Gardens, by Penelope Lively The Box of Delights, by John Masefield Somerset Maugham The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monserrat Aubrey and Maturin novels, by Patrick O’Brien George Orwell The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard The Death of Mao, by James Palmer Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman English Journey, by J.B. Priestley Alms For Oblivion, by Simon Raven Mary Renault Philip Roth, but only American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara Shakespeare Nevil Shute Peter Simple (Michael Wharton) Strangers and Brothers, by C.P. Snow Race and Culture, by Thomas Sowell John Steinbeck, especially East of Eden and Travels with Charley Elizabeth Taylor Tennyson The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey Edward Thomas The Big Pick-Up, by Elleston Trevor Hugh Walpole Evelyn Waugh P.G. Wodehouse All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson The Lady Vanishes, by Ethel Lina White John Wyndham W.B. Yeats The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig And a few he doesn’t like: Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ted Hughes, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Ian McEwan, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf’

 

 

Rounding Off a Couple of Last Week's Debates

In the hope of rounding off two discussions from last week, I had better reply to ‘Ernest’,  and to ‘William’ who posted on the War and on the Miliband matter . I was away at the Cheltenham Festival (of which more later), for much of Saturday and Sunday and have only just found the time to examine these properly.

 

I have (as I sometimes do) interleaved my responses to what ‘Ernest’ and ‘William’ say, in their original posts, marking my replies ***

 

First ‘Ernest’

 

He begins’ The string of events from April 1939 to June 1940 was of course disastrous for the Allies.’

 

***I respond, he says ‘of course’, but why, why, why ,why does he treat what happened as inevitable?  There was no ‘of course’. It was our active choice to make the Polish guarantee, so placing ourselves in the hands of Colonel Joszef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister (not, by all accounts , a nice or reliable man). Colonel Beck , with our guarantee in his pocket, could determine when, how and whether we entered the conflict. Far from underlining our concern, the guarantee tied our hands. We could, of course, have intervened at any point in continental affairs had we thought it possible or worthwhile, without this guarantee. But with the guarantee, we lost the freedom to decide when or if we did so. This is an amazing, rash voluntary squandering of a crucial, irreplaceable sovereign power. I can think of no parallel in human history, of a major country giving to a minor, far-away nation whose interests were by no means the same as its own, such power over its fate and future.

 

 

He continues ‘Stalemate was the best that could have been expected anyway.’

***Was it? Fluidity and freedom of  action were available had we chosen. Stalemate is the blockage of a game already begun, by an inability to move on both sides. The question here is, why begin a game which we certainly couldn’t win, in the first place? We were more able to move, and act independently, without a guarantee.

 

Ernest ‘The guarantee to Poland was conceived as a deterrent, but should war have broken out as a result, all that could have been hoped for was a cessation of German expansion in the interim and an eventual negotiated truce, in the hope that neither side had an appetite for a rehash of 1915-18.’

 

***I am baffled by this vague, groundless speculation. Contemporary documents show that the British chiefs of staff, and their political masters, knew perfectly well that the guarantee was militarily worthless. Not that it needed any great intelligence skills to compute this. Likewise, the German leadership, who were well aware of the feebleness of our land forces, and of the defensive nature of the French Army. I believe Frederick the Great said that diplomacy without weapons was like music without instruments. It is a good summary of our actions at this time. It could only have been a *deterrent* if the country supposed to be ‘deterred’ had any reason to fear that we would or could act upon it. They knew (and so did we) that we couldn’t. Halifax, I think, conceived it to polish his reputation as a moral figure among his friends in London, and to soothe his wounded pride after the occupation of Prague. Alas, the Polish government (alone in Europe) believed that it was a serious promise, and did not understand that it wasn’t until after Warsaw had been bombed and its armed forces rolled up in weeks by German and Russian armies, without Britain or France lifting a digit to help.

 

 

 

Ernest continues ‘ A limited war would have been preferable in their view to continued serial German expansion.’

***Really? Most politicians, who know what it costs and what its dangers are, seek to avoid war at all costs and are aware that it cannot be ‘limited’. Once begun, it will invariably spread, and be very difficult to end. If 1914 taught nothing else,  it taught that. I ask again, why should Britain be worried by German expansion into areas where we never have had, did not then have,  and still do not  have any important interests, political, commercial or diplomatic.’

 

Ernest again : ‘Since war wasn't engaged from a position of superiority, I do think PH has a strong case that this was a foolhardy endeavour, in lieu of which Germany would in the near term have continued to swell and become, in landmass terms, roughly the Central Powers reconstituted (less the Ottomans). This in itself wouldn't have been catastrophic.’

 

***Some progress here, but…

 

…Ernest won’t give up : ‘ But the idea that Germany would have been done with Poland after the ceding of Danzig is not borne out by the land-grab of March 1939.’

 

****I have never speculated on Germany’s eventual attitude towards Poland, though the actual German governance of Poland, chaotic and wasteful as well as cruel and stupid,  after the 1940 invasion suggests a distinct lack of interest in large parts of that country, and efforts mainly confined to re-Germanising those bits which had been German or Austrian before 1914. What certainly seems evident is that it wasn’t an urgent matter. Taylor’s reading of Hitler’s policies – that each grab was an opportunist one, taken at short notice and aided by the clumsiness of his opponents and not according to any great plan, seems sound to me.  If ‘Ernest’ hasn’t read his ‘Origins, he should. It explodes all kinds of conventional-wisdom stuff. After the cession of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia’s generally artificial, fissile nature became obvious (as it demonstrated again after 1989).  The Slovakian breakaway left a hopeless rump behind. Its takeover by Hitler was no doubt regrettable, and would prove very regrettable for the Jews of the region, once the extermination campaign got under way after 1941 . But it is hard to see it as a reason for Britain to sacrifice her empire.

 

To attempt a parallel with Danzig and the Sudeten matter is highly misleading. Poland without Danzig would not have been a rump state, nor would it have broken up into two separate states.  The ‘Plucky Little Poland’ myth tends to blind us to the facts I keep reiterating. In March 1939, Poland was one of Germany’s closest allies, had benefited from the carve-up of Czechoslovakia, and was  Judophobic and far from free. In the absence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (which, once again, was not inevitable) Hitler might well have been glad to maintain Poland (which hated the USSR, had unexpectedly beaten it in war in 1920, and lived in constant fear of a Soviet revenge)  as a glacis between him and the USSR, preferably with the Polish Armies concentrated on the Eastern frontier. 

 

Ernest continues: ‘ Also, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had so much else in it for both parties, that I can't see some permutation of it not taking shape.’

 

***Hmph, but it’s hard to see *how* it could take shape while the Polish-German non-aggression pact (which was destroyed by our guarantee)  was still in force. Stalin didn’t dismiss Litvinov and appoint Molotov until May 1939, after the Polish guarantee. The serious contacts with Ribbentrop didn’t take place till August, by which time Moscow was sure that Britain and France weren’t serious about talks with them, and weren’t reliable allies. Funny to think that we might have got an alliance with Stalin in 1939 by giving him a free hand in the Baltics, Bessarabia and Finland.  In the end, we had to pay him off with all these things, plus Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.  

 

Ernest : ‘It's when a Barbarossa comes into the picture that a huge threat to western security looms into view down the road. The resulting German super-state had the potential to match, or even eventually surpass, the USA in raw power.’

 

**Did it? Facts and figures to back this claim?

Ernest :’The six months it might have taken for an unhindered Germany to knock out the USSR (in the main) may not have been long enough a period to intervene in the west with decisive effect, even after a couple more years of preparation.’

 

**What does he mean ‘unhindered’. Germany could not have risked its Western frontier with an undefeated and heavily-armed France in its rear. Armed neutrality can hinder just as much as war. Also, without the Soviet supplies of oil and other materials (fruits of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)  which fuelled the 1940 Blitzkrieg (and which continued to be delivered right up to Barbarossa) , and which rendered Britain’s naval blockade ineffective, and without the gold resources which Germany had obtained by conquest of the Western European states (which under my theory would not have taken place), Germany would have been in great difficulty mounting such an invasion . The USSR would also have put up much stiffer resistance from the start, not being handicapped by Stalin’s refusal to believe that an invasion was possible, or even that it was taking place some hours after it had begun. Time travel is complicated. Lots of things change, when you alter something as big as the Polish guranatee, not just one.

 

Ernest : ‘Rearmament is not a one-way process, and the Germans had proved bloody-minded enough to risk the overheating of their peacetime economy to achieve this end. Forged in the humiliation over Czechoslovakia, the Apr 1939 guarantee might not have been timed wisely (1939 being too late for multinational intervention, and too early for Anglo-French success), but it was a calculated risk, much like Hitler's own diplomatic moves.

 

**I don’t think it was calculated at all. It was an emotional spasm, almost wholly bereft of calculation  or even thought. Taylor, as I recall, regards the German economic problems as a myth, and I believe many others agree with him.

 

Ernest :’Given the speed at which the power dynamics of the late 1930s were shifting, it's perhaps drawing too much on full hindsight to excoriate the politicians involved to such an extent for having got caught so flat-footed. I don't need to exaggerate the threat posed by Germany in the event of the USSR's capitulation.’

 

***Well, yes he does. He still has to show what barmy impulse would have led Germany to attack Britain when it had no political, diplomatic, economic, military or other reason to do so, and had its hands full holding down its new eastern possessions.

 

 Ernest : ‘As in a gangster film, France would pay the price for 1914-19. ‘

 

***Gangster film indeed. But was this so? Germany’s treatment of France after the 1940 defeat was greedy, because Germany had always sought to finance its wars by indemnities on its enemies rather than by taxation. It was (later) murderous towards Jews, because the murder of Jews everywhere he could get hold of them  was Hitler’s main aim in life after 1941 (whereas before that date he was content with persecution, cruelty and expulsion) .   But it was not especially vindictive, judged by the genocidal, extirpatory standards of German behaviour in the eastern lands where it was genuinely interested in conquest and colonisation. There is a reason for this difference,. Germany regarded France as a nuisance getting in the way of its ambitions, but did not have any interest in turning her into a subject province of Germany.

 

 

 Ernest: ‘As a general (golden) rule I think it's worth sticking up for allies with whom one shares enough in common, even if PH sounds more laissez-faire. As for the Empire, invasion might not have been in the cards, but being bullied internationally is not a desirable state of affairs if it can be helped. Worse, changes in the Nazi leadership, their need for Permanent War and the passage of time could have caused any residual Anglophilia to morph into something else.’

 

***I have never posited ‘Anglophilia’ as any kind of motive force in this. I don’t think Hitler’s personal feelings towards England or the English ever mattered in the slightest. It was just that he had no material interest in fighting us, and plenty of material interests in not doing so. As for being ‘worth’ …‘sticking up for ‘ …‘allies with whom one shares enough in common’, I am baffled by this school-playground idea of diplomacy. Worth what? An empire and all our riches and standing? ‘sticking up for ‘? How? What with?  And as for ‘allies with whom one shares enough in  common’, how is this commonality measured?  

 

As the Royal Navy discovered at Mers-el-Kebir, patriotic Frenchmen did not feel they had much in common with us when it mattered most. Admiral Gensoul turned down repeated offers of the most honourable possible exits from his dilemma, knowing that his alternative meant that his fleet would fall into German hands, and also knowing that if he did not take those exits, we would open fire on him.  Darlan loathed us – Churchill thought he had never forgiven us for Trafalgar.  Many French people hoped for our surrender after 1940.  It is recorded that some of the most vicious fighting of the war, in the Middle East, would involve Vichy units attacking British forces. De Gaulle could never get Fashoda (or Quebec) out of his head. Why exactly was it, or should it have been, in British interests to boost France in her doomed struggle to assert equality with Germany -  an equality which ceased to exist in 1870 and never had the slightest chance of being revived?

 

All this noble, sentimental alliance achieved was the defeat and occupation of France for the second time in 70 years, and our near-defeat and national degradation.

 

Merci bien les Rosbifs!  Merveilleux! So much for the soppy old Entente Cordiale, which ended with the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs Elysee. . A bit of hard-faced cynical ruthlessness might have left both countries intact, and incidentally avoided the most embarrassing and stupid Naval battle in history.

 

 

 

Then I turn to ‘William’, on the Miliband issue.

 

‘Mr Hitchens – I must say that it was never my intention to stir the hornet’s nest to quite this extent, but thank you for your response , I shall endeavour to clarify my position. I suppose what I was left wondering was whether you do or don’t believe that Miliband Senior hated Britain and was a threat to this country – I sort of felt that you didn’t think he did/was, but couldn’t be entirely sure .’

 

***I’ll stick to what I said. It seems quite clear to me.   But I must draw any reader’s attention to my point that many of the worst threats to Britain come from within the modern Conservative Party , and so to restrict fears about subversion of this country to a deceased Marxist, and one of his two non-Marxist sons,  is not just unwise but missing the point about the nature, extent and danger of that that threat. Especially if, by attacking a deceased Marxist, you contrive to suggest that this threat can be countered by, say, voting Tory.

 

‘William’ (first quoting me )‘ ‘’I never ‘strive’ to confound expectation’’ Fair enough, it just struck me as a possible explanation, since my (possibly lazy) assumption was that your position on this matter would be consistent with your very distinct conservative media identity.

 

***IT is entirely consistent with it, as I should have thought I had clearly explained in the article. I wonder if he has actually read it with any care.  I am, however, more conservative than most conservatives in the media, precisely because I am better-informed than most conservatives about the nature of the revolutionary menace, and know that it advances itself behind many disguises. It is easy enough to spot a Marxist professor, who writes Marxist books and adopts leftist causes It takes a bit of understanding to recognise that a Tory (or Blairite) Cabinet Minister is pursuing and achieving Marxist objectives by destroying national independence, encouraging mass immigration,  or forcing egalitarianism on our country.

 

William: ‘ The quotation I gave did indeed belong to another contributor and I included it generally to illustrate one of the main arguments advanced by defenders of Mr Miliband senior. This was poor (again, possibly lazy) form on my part as I should have attributed the quotation, and I hope you will accept my sincere apologies for this.’

 

**Willingly.

 

William : ‘My subsequent points related to this argument rather than yours specifically. ‘the more you love your country, the more critical you must be of it when it has gone wrong. The test of loyalty is elsewhere.’ Where then?

 

***AS I said, in such things as perilous service  in the armed forces of the country involved.

 

William : ‘How do we differentiate those who are merely hatefully criticising? ‘

 

***By their actions, the only thing on which a free country judges anyone.

 

William : ‘ I think there is a difference between criticising aspects of how your nation is governed, and criticising everything about it, the institutions which define it or its fundamental character, which was the Mail's charge. " He fails to notice that I spent quite a lot of it pointing out that the *Tory Party* and some of its senior figures hold views and pursue policies which are deeply hostile     to British society," Sorry, I fail to see the logic here - just because figures in the Tory party may be radical Lefties, doesn't prove that Miliband' s father wasn't,

 

***It was not advanced to *prove* that Ralph Miliband *wasn’t* anything. It was advanced to show that the frothing of shock-haired Marxist professors is rather less important than the executive actions of smooth Tory and New Labour ministers. Oh, think! Please think!  (claps despairing hand to brow)

 

It was advanced to point out that, in their actions, Tory and New Labour politicians, of the sort who have never been accused of ‘Hating Britain’, have repeatedly and effectively *acted* as if they do, destroying our national sovereignty, encouraging or failing to halt mass immigration on a scale that can only be described as subversive, imposing on us Marxist egalitarian polices, especially in education. If that is so, shouldn’t we more interested in it than in the dead father of a politician (whose son doesn’t agree with his father’s views) , a man who never held any power or ever did any material damage to this country that I have seen proved, and fought for it (voluntarily so far as I know) in war?

 

 

William (first quoting me): ‘ " then of course there’s the word ‘fanatical’, which has no objective definition known to me. " Well, according to Google dictionary it either means "Filled with excessive and single-minded zeal " or "obsessively concerned with something" , both of which work for me regarding RM.

 

***Well,  can William really not see that the words ‘excessive’ and ‘obsessive’ are both subjective (I rather think the word ‘zeal is too, but I’m open to arguments) , and not measurable objectively?  He’s just shunted the train 200 yards down the line, but not changed its shape or contents.

 

William : ‘Judging men by their actions is certainly handy, but taking into account their words as well is even more so.’

***Nothing to do with being ‘handy’. Actions are the only true or permissible test. In a free society we think and say what we like (short of incitement to violence).

 

 

William ‘Never mind all the stuff about bully-beef sandwiches hot, sweet, brown tea, and Vera Lynn, anyone of the era would have done that.’

 

**Would they? Did they? Auden and Isherwood (for example) fled to the USA.  Many Communists sabotaged the war effort in factories until Summer 1941. Quite a lot of people, I think he’ll find, didn’t exert themselves hugely to do their bit. Heard of the black market, has he? Or the spivs? Joining the Navy as a volunteer rates well above that.

 

 

William : ‘  I'm rather more interested in his recorded list of pet hates: respectability; good taste; "there will always be an England"; the respectable Sunday papers; the monarchy, the church, he was in favour of a planned economy;’

 

***This doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly terrifying set of views. Many perfectly patriotic people have held one or more of them. Now, active and practical support for joining the Euro, or unrestricted mass immigration,  that’s a serious charge.

 

William : ‘he wanted us to lose the Falklands war;’

 

**Did he? Can ‘William’ please provide chapter and verse for this claim?

 

William : ‘he didn't believe in nations, being committed to the internationale’

 

**I’m not quite sure what this means. He wore the uniform of the British Royal Navy, a national force, and served in it in a war against (among others) the nations of Germany, Japan and Italy. This seems to me to demonstrate a rather practical acceptance of and belief in the existence of nations, whatever songs he may have sung – and the ‘Internationale’ is much-favoured (privately) among today’s Blairite elite, and tends to be sung at their funerals. And then there’s Lord Heseltine’s musing that  ‘The nation states have had their day as powers. The world must be more ordered and centralised .  .  . it’s unstoppable and irreversible’ – the significance of which seems entirely to have escaped most of the people who read this article.

 

 

 

As for ‘William’ being the name of ‘William’. No doubt that is true, but without a surname attached it is, even so, the equivalent of a pseudonym, as he cannot be identified by it. Whereas all that I say is said openly by me under my own full name. 

I don't know if crooks fear Britain's new FBI - but it should terrify the rest of us

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Why does Britain need an FBI?  We are not a  vast continental empire with 50 different legal systems and thousands of local police forces. We are a compact kingdom whose remote, bureaucratic police forces are nothing like local enough.

Nor do most of us spend much of our time fretting about Capone-style gangsterism. It would be tough if we did.

The UK’s biggest and most violent organised crime syndicate, the Provisional IRA, now sits in government and receives taxpayer subsidies through its political front organisation.

What worries us much more is the unchecked misery of  so-called petty crime, which infects all our lives with out- of-control littering, vandalism, graffiti, spitting, shoplifting, aggressive begging, unpunished theft and menacing knots of feral youths polluting once-peaceful neighbourhoods.

This goes onwards and downwards, through informally legalised drugs and all the wretched things they bring in their train, and the state-sponsored surrender to drunkenness begun under Margaret Thatcher and completed under the Blair creature.

Nothing happens to those  who behave badly. There is  no redress for their victims, besieged in their homes or fearful on the street, who have learned not to bother to seek help from the law.

The answer to this is not another bunch of poseurs in baseball caps, running around with guns and shouting. It is the firm enforcement of existing laws at street level by unarmed, foot-patrolling constables.

But you’ll never see them again. Instead, the Government is spending almost half a billion pounds on the National Crime Agency, a rather sinister body (with a big baseball cap budget) whose very existence defies our national traditions.

It is directly under the control of the Government, which appoints its boss. That boss can issue orders to chief constables, who are supposed to be independent of government but now are so no longer.

Its officers are civil servants who must obey their superiors.

This sets them apart from traditional British constables who swear an oath to uphold the law, and so are actively obliged to refuse unlawful orders.

But NCA officials can be granted the same powers  as sworn constables, to arrest, to search premises and to  carry firearms.

Few now know any of our national history, but Parliament refused for decades to allow the creation of police forces in this country, because they had seen what such forces had become on the European continent.

They were hated engines of state oppression, and a menace to liberty. Robert Peel’s ingenious compromise – an unarmed, non-military force under local control – was devised precisely to avoid that danger.

Now we have the very thing our forebears feared. There was, as far as I know, no public demand for it. We seem to  have quite enough top-heavy, self-important unaccountable agencies guarding us from imaginary perils as it is.

It has been created without any fuss or major opposition. And one day, in the hands of a future government, it could be a real menace. When that comes about, don’t say nobody warned you.
 

Sexed up... the couple who wrecked marriage


It’s interesting what TV chooses to glamorise. One favourite is British traitors who spied for Stalin. For some weeks, we’ve had a sympathetic portrayal of a gang of violent crooks in Birmingham.

But the latest effort is a dramatisation  of the careers of the (frankly rather dodgy)  sex-obsessives, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

Channel 4 hired Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan to play them as an attractive young couple. Actually, Masters looked like something out of The Munsters, and Johnson resembled a bossy nurse in an electro-shock ward.

This follows an equally propagandist Hollywood attempt to make a hero  out of that creepy charlatan Alfred Kinsey, another apostle of sexual liberation.

If all this stuff were laid  end to end, how much misery would it have been found to cause?

If we were really all so ignorant of sex before the sexologists and the sex-education zealots came along, it’s amazing the human race managed to survive for all that time.

What they really wanted was to wreck old-fashioned marriage. And they did.

Thick and fast comes the vindication for those of us who warned for years that cosmetic school reforms were worthless.

The new OECD studies confirm our case. But can people please stop blaming  this exclusively on Labour?

This has been a bipartisan crime. Note well that my generation, the 55 to 64-year-olds,  do hugely better in tests than their equivalents  of today.

Why? We still had grammar schools.  Until they come back, nothing will change.


 
If killing girls isn’t sexism, what is?

It’s now clear. The law  says that if a woman wants to kill her baby because that baby is a girl rather than a boy, that is legal.

Now, I can think of almost nothing more bigoted than killing a baby simply because it is female.
Anyone who genuinely thinks that women are as valuable as men (as I do) must be revolted by such  an action. That’s even if  they think that abortion is fine (as I do not).

From which I conclude, by their weeks of silence on this issue, that the great majority of our feminist sisterhood are lying frauds, motivated not by real feminism but by opportunist, careerist greed.

They will shout for special treatment in employment, education and boardrooms  – but they won’t say a word to save an innocent baby, torn to bits in the womb for being the wrong sex.

 
Coming soon to Downton Abbey – an airship crash in the grounds, a lesbian love affair between a maid and a noblewoman,  a male-to-female transsexual butler (played by a woman), and aristocratic heroin abuse.

As I remember, Upstairs Downstairs used to have actual plots.

No need for that sort of thing any more, now that all our soap operas have been  taken over by sensation and propaganda.

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

The Cambridge Atheism Debate - a Nakedly Partisan Account

Well, I had my usual magical effect in Cambridge on Thursday night, ensuring my side’s defeat in the final vote (though the result, roughly 200 to roughly 180) was close enough for both sides to feel reasonably pleased.

 

As so often, the problems began with the motion, which was  ‘This House Regrets the Rise of new Atheism’.

Well, what *is* the ‘new Atheism’? No generally accepted definition exists. there is no New Atheist Consistory, Synod, Politburo or Sanhedrin.  For me , it is a particularly abusive, hostile, bumptious, arrogant, superior and over-confident version of the Atheist view, which is not a simple personal belief but is publicly, actively hostile to religion and is, in some cases, specifically ready to prevent its being taught, as a faith to be believed rather than as an anthropological peculiarity, to children. (I mention this to forestall the inevitable riposte from the anti-God comment warriors, that they're happy for children to be taught*about* religion - as if this distinction were unimportant rather than utterly crucial).

 

That’s the only thing I regret about its rise – that it has brought into public discussion an attitude which could lead to censorship and suppression of religion.

 

I’d been given a task I usually avoid – that of opening the debate for the proposition. Under the circumstances, I felt I had to do it, but speaking to a cold audience, when you haven’t got the measure of your opponents, is something I don’t like doing and don’t do well. It takes at least twice the effort to get a laugh out of a cold audience, or any other sort of response, as it does to achieve the same with one that’s already become a living beast, and is engaged and attentive.

 

So I stuck rather ploddingly to my evidence, the statement by Philip Pullman that he seeks to undermine the basis of the Christian faith, Richard Dawkins’s strange musings on how the destruction of Christianity might be a form of victory for his cause (New Statesman, December 2011 ‘'Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?') and on equating the teaching of religion to children to child abuse. I was told by one person present that Dawkins had only linked this comparison to a specific case. I don’t believe this is true. He may have done so *on one occasion* (in fact he *did* do so on one occasion, as the following lnk shows), but he has many times, most notably in 'The God Delusion’  made the same general comparison.

 

In any case, his general intolerance is made very plain by his keen endorsement of Nicholas Humphrey, in an article on the web here http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/118-religion-39-s-real-child-abuse ,called ‘Religion’s Real Child Abuse’

 

 

'What shall we tell the children?' is a superb polemic on how religions abuse the minds of children, by the distinguished psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. It was originally delivered as a lecture in aid of Amnesty International, and has now been reissued as a chapter of his book, The Mind Made Flesh, just published by Oxford University Press. It is also available on the worldwide web and I strongly recommend it. Humphrey argues that, in the same way as Amnesty works tirelessly to free political prisoners the world over, we should work to free the children of the world from the religions which, with parental approval, damage minds too young to understand what is happening to them. He is right, and the same lesson should inform our discussions of the current pedophile brouhaha. Priestly groping of child bodies is disgusting. But it may be less harmful in the long run than priestly subversion of child minds.’

 

So, let us go then, you and I, to Mr Humphrey’s article, which is to be found here.

 

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/humphrey/amnesty.html

 

At the shocking core of it is this passage:

 

‘Should there be Geneva protocols establishing what kinds of speech act count as crimes against humanity?

 

'No. The answer, I'm sure, ought in general to be "No, don't even think of it." Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with. And however painful some of its consequences may sometimes be for some people, we should still as a matter of principle resist putting curbs on it. By all means we should try to make up for the harm that other people's words do, but not by censoring the words as such.

 

'And, since I am so sure of this in general, and since I'd expect most of you to be so too, I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture today to argue in one particular area just the opposite. To argue, in short, in favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.

 

'I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed—even expected—to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.

 

'Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.

 

'In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.’

As so often, the attack on a *particular* freedom of speech is brought on stage under an escort of expostulations about how the would-be censor is passionately in favour of freedom of speech in *general*. Just not on this subject. Do please read the whole thing. I doubt you’ll get a clearer warning of what such people want , and how they will seek to justify it.

 

Anyway, it was this aspect of the new Atheism that I sought to warn against. I said that my opponents, the journalist Tom Chivers, the Philosophy Professor Hugh Mellor, and the distinguished economist Lord Desai, weren’t really anything like as bad as the cause for which they were speaking. I’d read articles by Mr Chivers in which he strongly discouraged the idea that believers were necessarily less intelligent than atheists. I (rightly) assumed that a distinguished metaphysician such as Professor Mellor would have more sense than to take the route of lofty intolerance. He just tried to suggest that the new Atheists were just like the old ones, in which case what’s new about them? And he asked ‘Who reads Bertrand Russell now?’ to which I squeaked ‘I do’, but he either didn’t hear me, or affected not to.

But I must admit that I was surprised to find Lord Desai, a friendly and humorous person, dismissing believers as ‘liars’ and peddlers of ‘rubbish’, and speaking as if he *knew* the truth about the universe. I tried to get him to take a point of information on this, but he either ignored me or didn’t notice me, so when he sat down I went across the aisle to reprove him for using the word ‘liar’, which I think is both logically indefensible and morally wrong in a debate between civilised people on matters of belief.

 

I was accused afterwards, ludicrously, of ‘squaring up’ to Lord Desai (on Twitter, where else?), and even of being physically threatening to him. This charge was made by one rather intense young man who approached me afterwards and began to address me with the words ‘with the greatest possible respect…’  (always a bad sign).  Lord Desai, who actually sought me out for a cheery farewell handshake after the debate, did not seem to have observed this threat . I was, actually, genuinely quite cross with him, but I don’t think he really noticed. I’m quite tickled to imagine that,  at nearly 62, possessing a portly frame and  being five feet nine inches in my socks, I can be regarded as physically threatening by any being much bigger than a hedgehog.

My allies were Tariq Ramadan and Anne Atkins. I was greatly impressed by Professor Ramadan, despite my strong disagreements with the Muslim faith. He appeared to have a similar view on the nature of belief (as opposed to knowledge) to my own, and very effectively squashed an undergraduate who suggested incorrectly that he claimed to *know* the unknowable, an accusation constantly made against believers by atheists, along with the equally mistaken claim that we think there can be no morality without God. So much of this debate consists of brushing off misconceptions, again and again and again, before you can even start discussing the real issue . Anne was very effective indeed on the absurdity of claiming that scientific understanding was incompatible with religious belief, and told a funny anecdote about Richard Dawkins too long to repeat here ( I believe the debate was recorded, and will eventually be generally available, though I had a lot of microphone trouble and not all that I said can have been recorded). But I parted company with her when she warned against ‘Islamophobia’, something I don’t believe exists.

Getting the Dinky Toys out Again

All right, let’s get the Dinky Toys out yet again. I still can’t get most of the contributors here to think. Again and again they imagine that by repeating sentimental old fancies, or fantasising on the basis of the touching old belief that in 1940, Britain was a major European power, and a major preoccupation of Hitler, they deal with the question at issue.

 

They don't.

 

The question is, why on earth did we risk (and lose) our standing, wealth and power for the indepndence of Poland?

 

Look, Hitler didn’t much care about Britain, and was surprised and puzzled by our involvement in the war.

 

And people keep dipping into the story as if it can be analysed without going back to the point of decision - for instance the speculation by ‘Ernest’ that ‘As we know, the USSR in 1941-2 was in no shape to wage war against the Wehrmacht on equal terms. Without British pressure in the west, German attrition from 1939-41, and the arrival of the first Arctic convoys, Operation Barbarossa might well have triumphed by the arrival of the first winter.’

 

The point of decision is April 1939 and the British guarantee to Poland. Can I say here once again that I think it likely, though not certain, that a rationally-governed  Britain might have wanted to intervene in a Continental struggle at some point. I have never said, and do not say, that we should have stayed out of such a conflict under any and all circumstances. I do say that the circumstances of our entry into war were more or less certifiable. Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong issue. Wrong allies. Wrongly-structured armed forces. Insufficient funds.

 

Let me ust ask ‘Ernest’ to start from April 1939, and consider a plausible alternative.

 

Imagine: Britain does *not* give a guarantee to Poland ( and so neither does France).

 

Poland accepts the German offer of a renewal of the 1934 non-aggression pact.

 

It enters talks with Germany about the cession of Danzig and new German rights in the Polish corridor, and agrees these things.

 

The following things then do NOT happen. There is no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. There is no German invasion of Poland. There is no Soviet invasion of Poland. There is no direct frontier between the third Reich and the USSR. There is no war in the West. Britain does not breach Norwegian neutrality by mining her waters or by sending warships into her waters. There is no Norway campaign, no invasion of Denmark, no invasion of the Low Countries,  no invasion of France. Why should there be?

 

I doubt if Stalin would have invaded Finland without the cover of war. During all this time, Britain is rearming, and now maintains a substantial defence force on its own territory.

 

Now, perhaps ‘Ernest’ could explain to me, how, starting from here, he gets to a German attack on the British Empire. What for? On what pretext? For what rational purpose? When? Where? How?

 

That’s exercise one.

 

Then a brief response to Mr Jones and his ‘Your thesis depends on an image of Hitler as a much-misunderstood man of entirely rational aims and essentially limited ambition’. Well, and what of it?. Mine and A.J.P.Taylor’s . Hitler’s main driving force was, it is true, an unreasoning murderous hatred of Jews. But had he been wholly irrational and chaotic, he would not have manoeuvred himself into the Chancellery as he did, nor been able to rule a major country, frequently outwitting and destroying rivals and opponents . Read Kershaw’s life if you doubt it.  I dislike the phrase ‘much-misunderstood’ as it (intentionally?) suggests that I have some sort of sympathy with Hitler, which I do not. Taken literally, however, it is true that many in Britain particularly have lazily promoted or accepted the idea that Hitler was just a madman.  I don’t have much time for the ‘Teppichfresser’ (Carpet-biter’) myth about Hitler, which I think first appears in William Shirer’s Berlin Diary.  No doubt, by the final days in the Bunker he had lost all contact with reality, but most politicians of all kinds eventually do this to some extent. His ambition was undoubtedly limited by possibility, though he was (as Taylor repeatedly explains) much more of a brilliant seizer of opportunities, than a careful, long-term planner.

 

France and Britain, by their support of Poland and their declaration of war (how precisely could he or would he have declared war on us if we hadn’t declared war on him?)  allowed him to humiliate France, eliminate the only serious Western military threat to him and plunder the prosperous nations of Western Europe. But if we hadn’t given him that opportunity, there’s no reason to believe he would have done all these things. What’s more, why were we shackled to the corpse of France in the first place? We had no formal alliance, nor any reason to have one.  France is not our traditional ally, her interests weren’t and aren’t ours, her reluctance to commit herself to war from 1936 onwards was evident to anyone with eyes in his head, and there was no reason to believe she would perform well in any war.  

 

Clive Govier (who needs to grasp that contributions here are not posted till the moderators get round to them, so multiple postings of the same comment don’t help anyone) argues that by saying we lost the war we had started in 1939, at Dunkirk, I am contradicting myself when I say that the rescue of 300,000 soldiers saved us from capitulation.

 

You can lose a war, and yet not surrender to your opponent. In fact, 1940 is the best example of this in history. We went to war in September 1939, with France as our ally, to protect the independence of Poland. By July 1940, Poland had ceased to exist, the whole of Western Europe with the exception of Sweden and Switzerland had been occupied by German forces, and our own army, stripped of billions of pounds worth of equipment, had left the field of conflict and had no obvious way of returning. Meanwhile we were, literally, bankrupt.

 

I repeat. We lost the war we entered in September 1939. Our principal war aim was not merely unfulfilled but now entirely beyond hope. Our principal ally was a prostrate corpse and , where possible, our enemy ( see Mersel-Kebir, and Syria) . We had no troops on the European continent, nor any effective means of attacking the military power of our principal enemy. We were dependent on the USA for our funds, and could in future not act against their wishes. We had lost the power of independent action.

 

It is true that had Hitler captured the entire BEF at Dunkirk we should probably have had to make terms. With that many hostages in enemy hands, it would have been politically very difficult to abandon them to what would probably have been rather brutal enslavement, far away,  for an indefinite period,. That's to leave aside the fact that we would have lacked the nucleus round which we could build a new army. Thus, the success of the Dunkirk evacuation, and the courage of the rearguard probably did save us from having to move the final step from defeat to surrender. I am glad of it, but it can hardky be called a great national triumph to have escaped subjugation, by so narrow a margin. It was certainly a great deliverance. But if we won;t recognsie just how serious matters were,  and how close our delusional, vainglorious folly of April 1939 had taken us to catastrophe, we won't learn from events.

 

No doubt we had ‘fight left in us’. So did the French (whose soldiers’ courage helped save us at Dunkirk). Part of their Maginot garrison refused to surrender until the Defence Minister went in person to order them to cease fire. But once you are defeated, having ‘fight left in us’, does not save you from the consequences of defeat.

 

By the way, I do wish people would stop saying, as they do here so often, that Hitler had any serious plans to invade this country in 1940. He did not. Sea Lion was a sketchy thing, a going-through-the-motions paper exercise, laid aside with relief after a few days. The German Navy (rightly)  did not believe it would be possible. And there was no political will behind it. The whole myth of the Finest Hour has depended for years on the belief that the Wehrmacht were poised to storm through Kent, Sussex  and Surrey, and march down Whitehall. By believing this, we flatter ourselves immoderately.  Hitler wasn’t interested in any such thing. Had it mattered to him, he would have invaded Britain, not Russia, in 1941.

 

It is because Britain returned to the war later, in a wholly different guise and with wholly different aims, that people don’t recognise the decisive moment in 1940.   In June 1944, when we finally re-entered to the main theatre of war (yes, I know about North Africa, the Far East and Italy) , we were not fighting under our own command, but under an American general and in an unwilling alliance with Stalin, who frequently spoke to Winston Churchill as brutally as Hitler had spoken to Neville Chamberlain – and Churchill, despite the public bulldog image,  had to take it humbly. We had perforce abandoned the aim of protecting Polish independence. And we now fought to cede Poland to Stalin (along with the whole of eastern Europe).

 

To ‘Paul P’ I say with confidence that Oswald Mosley and the BUF never had any political importance in this country their importance is exaggerated by the far left, which engaged in street battles with the Mosleyites and like to think this led to the BUF's defeat. But the BUF never had any serious following or influence, especially after the violence at their Olympia rally, and not much before it. Had Mosley been allowed to roam the country, rather than being locked up during the war it would have made no difference .

 

It was the Communist Party, which spread defeatist propaganda during the Blitz and which sympathised with strike action in war production factories, which posed more of a threat to the war effort, though of course this ended abruptly after the German invasion of the USSR.

Returning to Mr Jones, who says ‘'Delusions of great power status' and asserting we were secondary players in the 'real' war contradicts your lament that joining that war lost us the Empire.’. No, it doesn’t,. we were, by 1939, a second-rate power, but with an empire. By 1956 we were a second rate power without an empire. I’m not sure what the power-rating equivalent of Standard and Poors may be, but I’d guess we’re now rapidly approaching the status of third-rate power.

 

But in European continental terms, we were only a major power between 1916 and 1918, when to the great loss and grief of many homes and families, we fielded the most important army of the Allied powers. It helped to bankrupt and weaken us in many ways later and showed (to my entire satisfaction) that the costs, in human and money terms, of such a status, are too high for this country to pay. Our previous interventions were as members of coalitions, in which most of the fighting was done by others. Waterloo was a great battle, but ‘our’ side was far from being purely British, and in any case it would never have happened without the ‘Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig the year before, which most British people have never even heard of  , nor without the Retreat from Moscow, a linear defeat of France by Russia, in which the Grande Armee was destroyed by ten thousand cuts and slashes.

 

I don’t know ‘Mein Kampf’ and I am happy to accept that Hitler rages against France in the pages of that volume. Well, what of it? Britain stayed aloof from the Prussian defeat of France in 1870. Why should we not have done so again if such a conflict had broken out (see above for reasons why it might not have done without the crazy Polish guarantee). What British *interest* was ever served by an alliance with France?

 

When I beg my readers to *think* my main request is this. *Examine the events of 1939-40 afresh. Do not assume that because something happened in a certain way, it had to happen that way.*

 

I’ll brush aside the silly stuff about Hitler having a ‘song in his heart’. What is this supposed to suggest? For about the ten thousandth time, this war had no moral content.  Wars seldom do. They are about ruthless violence, inflicted in scenes of desperation, when all other recourse has failed. Millions of innoents die or are maimed in them. The survivors are left scarred, inside and out, bereaved and msierable for years aftrwards. The costs are appalling. There is nothing romantic about this fiklthy busienss at all, any more than a sewage outfall is romantic. Necessary sometimes, but good, never.  Had it been a moral war for freedom, democracy, law, justice, tolerance etc, we could not have ended it as the subordinate allies of that obscene mass-murderer Stalin . But we did.

 

Mr Jones asks ‘do you honestly think a Germany that dominated Europe would have left us the Empire for long?’

 

Yes, I honestly do. Germany has never been seriously interested in a global empire. It has always wanted to imperialise in the Balkans and the great grain lands that lie between the Carpathians and the Black Sea. And if Mr Jones is going to quote Hitler to justify his belief that Hitler was bound to attack France, all Hitler’s writings suggest that he was happy to leave Britain to get on with being a global empire. I wouldn’t rely totally on that myself. I just can’t see any good, self-interested, cynical reason why he would have wanted to attack us.

 

He further asks : ‘wouldn't Russia still have undermined it by fostering or supporting independence movements?’

 

Quite possibly, But had we stayed out of the war in 1939, we would have been better able to counter this. I don’t think Stalin was especially interested in that, as it happened, and have never seen any evidence that he was.

 

‘ Or America?’

 

Undoubtedly, and the USA used the weakness and bankruptcy of post-1939 Britain to force us to weaken our grip on our empire. My point precisely. Howcan he not have noticed this?

Had we stayed out in 1939, this would certainly have been postponed, perhaps avoided altogether.

 

‘Would the Indian nationalists have gone away, or should we have put them down?’

The moment when the Indian nationalists became certain of victory was our defeat at Singapore in 1942, which defeat, as I have often said here,  was a direct consequence of our going to war in Europe in 1939.  All of Asia, from that moment, realised that we were not invincible, and our departure was only a matter of time . Without that, we might still rule India. Churchill knew that Singapore in 1942 was the worst moment of his premiership. Imagine a world without it. Had we not made the Polish guarantee in April 1939, there might well have been no Singapore defeat.   

 

‘ Would we have had the moral right to hold onto an Empire into the modern age?’

 

Did we ever have a ‘moral’ right?  Our 'right' to empire , like all major powers’ 'rights' to empire depended ultimately on our material power and on our ability to persuade the subject nations that we would effectively defend our rule with force or substitutes for force, if challenged. Thus the Soviet empire collapsed after Gorbachev, but the Chinese, American and EU empires still maintain their integrity.

 

I must go and prepare for my next debate,  on drugs, at the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday evening.  http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature/whats-on/2013/cheltenham-decides-prohibition-is-the-right-policy-on-drugs/

Have a  thoughtful weekend. 

General Conversation

Time for some general conversation. Once again I’m urged to follow ‘conventional wisdom’ about World War Two. But this ‘wisdom’, while certainly conventional, doesn’t seem to me to be particularly wise. It  still doesn’t answer the basic question ‘What precisely was Britain’s interest in preventing German expansion eastwards?’ Why should we have cared? What difference did it make to our national interest whether Poland, a Judophobic semi-despotism which participated greedily in the rape of Czechoslovakia,  remained independent, or which of two repulsive, homicidal tyrannies dominated the lands east of Berlin?

 

Nor does it answer to the next question which is ‘If we did have such an interest, why did we not develop an Army capable of enforcing our will on the continent?’  In fact, when Duff Cooper, as a war minister, proposed in 1936 that we develop such an Army, he was over-ruled, on the grounds that we could not afford to develop such an Army *and* build the Air Force we needed for national defence, *and* maintain the Navy we needed to hold on to our empire. These grounds were essentially true. We were simply not rich enough to afford all three.  In the end, we created such an army by becoming a pensioner, debtor and subsidiary of the USA, which exacted its price by ending the British Empire and removing forever our freedom to act independently as a military power (a point the USA made quite clearly at Suez, for those who had somehow missed it earlier).

 

Which of the other services do ‘conventional wisdom’ supporters think should have been run down to pay for the  Army necessary for their favoured policy?  What do they think would have happened to our ability to defend the Empire, or our home islands, had we done so? Do they accept that this might have mattered?  Bear in mind, while considering this, that the existence of a large Army does not guarantee victory. The French Army was huge, but proved useless in practice. This is partly because it was designed and trained wholly for defence, in conjunction with the Maginot Line – a line which was fatally incomplete because of Belgium’s return to neutrality - and therefore useless in practice.

 

If it is said that Hitler (for reasons which remain a mystery to me) had some secret, irrational desire to attack and invade this country, in contradiction of all his published thought on the matter and in defiance of Germany's interests and of common sense, then let us proceed along these lines.

 

If I accept, for the sake of argument, that Hitler did have such a desire, what was our best response to it?  Britain in fact possessed its own Maginot Line, far better than France’s  in the form of the Channel, complete and very hard to cross in an opposed invasion. Why then risk or squander our armed forces and their equipment in continental operations, where they would necessarily fall under the command of French generals and be at the mercy of French withdrawals on their flanks? Better, surely, to remain neutral, husband our resources and fortify our island against the possibility of attack, with the intention of deterring such an attack and defeating it decisively if attempted. I have to say that the abject defeat of a German attack on Britain in 1940, with the Channel full of German corpses,  might well have led to the fall of Hitler and his regime (which is perhaps why he did not attempt it even after our Army was robbed of all its equipment, and many of its finest soldiers,  at Dunkirk and Calais. Imagine how much more reluctant he would have been to attack, had our Army been fully equipped with tanks, artillery and motor transport, and waiting on our side of the Channel?) .

 

 

Something resembling this policy in fact took hold of the British establishment *after* the German attack in May 1940, with Gort being given the freedom to pull our troops out of the line, and the RAF rushing for the ports to get its planes and equipment home, while Churchill resolutely refused French pleas to fling our aircraft into a doomed attempt to rescue the French armies. Alas, this policy could only be completed by the sacrifice of Billions of Pounds worth of equipment and stores (by today’s values) and the loss of several irreplaceable warships. Not to mention the death or capture of some of our very best soldiers in the perimeter rearguard.

 

Bear in mind also that countries which declare war on other countries, lose and are conquered, must submit to dictated peace terms. Countries which are not at war do not need to make terms, and cannot have them dictated to them. Once you start a war, then you are obliged to win it. But if you do not start it, and deter belligerents from attacking you,  by strength and preparedness, this problem does not arise. Of course it was right of Churchill to refuse to seek terms in 1940. But it was only because of the guarantee to Poland, and what followed, that he was in that position at all.

 

By the way, I don’t think the USA’s chief reason for delaying entry to the war was a desire to displace Britain from its Imperial pinnacle. But I have no doubt that it eagerly took the opportunity when presented. I think it delayed entry until entry was necessary. I am still unsure what would have happened in the European theatre had Hitler not obligingly declared war on the USA in December 1941. Does anyone know of any study on this?

 

**

 

On the adoption of the metric system, Mr Henderson says I am wrong to argue that Australia adopted this system as a declaration of difference from the former ‘mother country’. He says, as an alternative explanation : ‘a 1968 parliamentary review (this was when the government was held by the conservative, pro-British Liberal-National coalition, as it is now) which found that the metric system facilitated greater efficiency in making calculations, was found to be easier for school children to learn than imperial measurements and had been or was being adopted by a majority of our trading partners’.

 

He must learn to distinguish ostensible reasons from actual ones. Metricators (like clock-shifters) seldom if ever own up to their actual revolutionary purpose, as in free countries they must operate by subtlety.  He might also trouble to think about some of the arguments he accepts without any apparent attempts to question them.  It would be *easier* for schoolchildren to be taught nothing at all, and to do everything with calculators (as they do in metric Britain, often with amusing results) . But it would not be *better*. Likewise, any fool can count his toes, but it doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be taught his times tables up to twelve, and to cope with such things as quarters and thirds, twelfths and sixteenths, which occur in many transactions and calculations, which toe-counting systems don’t allow for.

 

As for this ‘efficiency’ and ‘modernity’, this comes from the same stable as the idea that putting everyone in concrete tower blocks would solve our housing problems – starting with the idea, and finishing with the people. Free countries do things the other way round (which is why Americans live in houses with gardens, and Russians, except for the super-rich, who have houses too,  live in blocks of flats) .

 

Any properly-taught child can calculate easily and efficiently in customary measurements, as we all did until they were abolished. How else did we manage so well in the Victorian and Edwardian eras? How did the un-metricated USA manage to put a man on the Moon, which no metricated country has yet done?   A country can easily continue to use its own domestic measurements for its own domestic purposes, while supplying goods for export measured in whatever foreign terms the recipient requires. I can sell coal by the metric ton to China,  and steel by the metre to Germany, and still buy milk by the pint and quart, meat by the pound, cloth by the yard and petrol by the gallon, for my own use (while importing my oil in barrels) .

 

**

 

On the Soviet Union,  ’Albert Ross’ seems to be under the impression that serfdom ended with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In fact the serfs were emancipated in the 1860s under Tsar Alexander II, round about the same time that the USA was emancipating its slaves. By 1914, Russia  was one of the fastest developing economies in the world, and hugely reformed by comparison with its state in 1850 or 1900. Its governing classes had been greatly shaken by their defeat at the hands of Japan, and the 1905 revolution which followed.  Nobody can now know what might have been had the disastrous decision to go to war been avoided in 1914 (though Stanislav Govoryukhin’s moving film ‘The Russia We Have Lost’, disgracefully never shown in the West,  gives  a glimpse of the country at the time which is enough to make any friend of Russia weep with regret at what was destroyed by Lenin and his sordid, German-financed putsch).

 

Revolutions tend to slander their forerunner regimes, to make themselves look better. The Bolsheviks made such a  Hell out of Russia and her empire that they needed to slander the Tsars with especial vigour.   No doubt Tsarist Russia had many, many faults. But they are as nothing compared to the squalor, murder, repression, misery, violence and destruction inflicted on that poor country and its people by Utopian fanatics for 73 long, dark years.

 

As for the war of 1941, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once made an interesting comparison between the performance of the Russian armies of 1914, and those of 1941. It does not reflect well on the Red Army. Those who doubt this should watch the films of Russian soldiers marching to war in 1914, in the BBC2 series on the Great War (readily available) and compare these magnificent men with the examples of Homo Sovieticus, ground down by mad collectivisation, state-sponsored famine, purges and deliberate mass murder,  who fought in 1941. People still don’t begin to realise how foul the USSR was. No liberating armies ever rolled into the Gulag to record its horrors with cameras.

 

 

Finally,  a few thoughts on the posting by ‘William’ on the Miliband issue. It was quite a while back, so I will reproduce it here (And interleave my responses with it, marking them ***)

 

 He wrote : ‘One of the most windy, fence-sittingish articles I have read by Peter Hitchens in many a good while, and I largely support his public positions on the major issues . This piece to me seems to lack any distinctive conclusion - perhaps he is striving to confound expectation or avoid pigeon-holing and is being deliberately evasive ?’

 

***I should have thought it fairly clear myself and if anyone can’t see what it means then he must be looking through a distorting glass of his own making. It’s in clear, simple English, says what I intended to say, no more, no less, and I’m not prepared to offer any further help with it. Most of the people who have got in touch with me about it have had no difficulty with it.   I can’t quarrel with being called ‘windy’, since that’s subjective.  I’ve just looked at it again to reassure myself.  

 

For much of last week I was fending off calls from the BBC and other outlets, asking my views on the subject, on the grounds that a) was myself once a revolutionary b) I now work for the MoS . I decided that the MoS was the best place for my response.

 

I never ‘strive’ to confound expectation. I have no need to do so, since so many of my readers, both hostile and well-disposed, often have mistaken beliefs about what I actually think. In both cases, they attribute to me views which they would like me to hold. Then they are upset or disappointed, or disbelieving, or surprised when it turns out that I don’t.  Or they accuse me of being something called a ‘contrarian’ ( is a female ‘contrarian’ a ‘contrarina’?), on the assumption that I strike poses for effect. Nope. All I do is think. I recommend it.

 

 

My pseudonymous critic continues ‘Perhaps his considerations lie rather closer to home, being a former student Marxist radical himself?’

 

***Well, of course that must be part of it. That’s why I mention it at some length. I also mention that I, too, have been on the receiving end of the British Press, to make it clear that I mean what I say, when I say I think that Press should remain fierce and rough.

 

He adds , apparently quoting me  ‘ "criticism of a system does not amount to hatred of a country".’ Actually, these words , which he supplies in speech marks as if I had said them, do not seem to me to appear in what I wrote.  A more pertinent summary of my position, which does appear in the article, is as follows : ‘the more you love your country, the more critical you must be of it when it has gone wrong. The test of loyalty is elsewhere.’

 

So what follows is largely off-target.  Like many who read my articles looking for what they wanted to find, he doesn’t only manage to find something that isn’t actually there ( now, which prominent commentator and BBC favourite does *that* remind me of?) he fails to notice that I spent quite a lot of it pointing out that the *Tory Party* and some of its senior figures hold views and pursue policies which are hostile to British society, independence and freedom, and that many of the current policies of the Tory Party would have seemed pretty radical to us Trots back in 1972.

 

He says (of my imaginary statement) .  : ‘Nice try - this glib blandishment has been distributed freely and completely without critical examination.’

 

***A bit naughty, isn’t it to attack me for being ‘glib’, for having said something I didn’t actually say?

 

He then continues  to analyse my phantasmal non-blandishment thus : ‘It does In fact pose difficult questions about the nature of nationhood itself : to what extent a country is "a system" ; to what extent is culture "a system" (ie the targets of 'respectability' and 'deference' which the 45 year old theoretician, not the teenager, identified) ; is the monarchy, a system/institution which R Miliband criticised, not integral to the very identity of the nation? How can such a person hate a country's identity and not hate that country? How can such a person be a fanatical Marxist committed to the abolition of nations and also be "a patriot", the very essence of which is support for the nation-state?’.

 

***An interesting question, which in my view shows how complex the subject is,  and then of course there’s the word ‘fanatical’, which has no objective definition known to me. I have a tedious preference for judging people by their actions, rather than trying to make windows in their souls, a phrase first uttered by that most English of Queens, the First Elizabeth, and much loved by me, partly because of its origins in what will always remain, for me,  our most noble and inspiring era.  And that’s why I said what I said about the ’fanatical’ Comrade Miliband, gazing toothily out at us from that picture, in his CPO’s outfit. You can almost smell the fuel-oil, the bully-beef sandwiches and hot, sweet, brown tea, and almost hear Vera Lynn singing away in the background. He did that. Helped, as I understand it, by Harold Laski and A.V.Alexander, he joined the war effort. As I explained, the Royal Navy holds a special place in my heart, and I find it impossible to square these facts with the accusation. Others may not have this problem, I do.

 

Is the Monarchy integral to the identity of the nation?  As a monarchist, I might like to think so,  but am I in fact correct? Then what of Oliver Cromwell, God’s Englishman, and Admiral Robert Blake, patriots both in my view, along with the Ironsides who fought this country’s enemies at sea and on the Continent during the Commonwealth?  Yet they were not exactly monarchists, were they? And what of John Milton, one of our greatest poets?   I wouldn’t be surprised to find there were one or two republicans in the landing-craft at D-Day, aboard the escorts of the Murmansk convoys and in the Corvettes that struggled through the Battle of the Atlantic, and among the crews of the Lancasters and the pilots of the Spitfires and the Hurricanes.  

Mr Pseudonym continues :’It is actually rather a silly, oxymoronic argument to try and make, but there are a good many fools who will gladly swallow it.’

 

***Even if we examine the argument as I made it, rather than as he characterised it, are we talking about fools, or just about people who disagree with Mr Pseudonym?  The two may, just may, not be exactly the same thing.

 

And now Mr Pseudonym draws himself up to his full height, like an Edwardian heroine, and lets us know what’s really, really on his mind. What is that?  Maybe he’s a bit windy and fence-sitting about it, but I think I can discern something in the passage that follows, something not especially lovely  : ’We are always being told by the Left (and Mr Hitchens) that culture is all-important in defining a nation and factors like race aren't (eg left- leaning Sociologists have decreed that 'race' isn't a socially useful concept, or some such). What then, if Mr Miliband loved his country, did he in fact love, if he hated the nation's historical culture, identity and institutions and didn't believe in the importance of ethnicity? What was he referring to by " Britain" ?’

 

 

***Interesting, that. Ethnicity? Where did that slip into our discussion? Is this Mr Pseudonym’s version of poor Mr Dick’s King Charles’s Head?

 

Actually,  I haven’t myself noticed the Left making this point very much, about culture defining a nation, though Thomas Sowell, that leading conservative,  and I, his humble follower, have often done so. The Left don’t seem to me to be very interested in nations at all these days, since they adopted globalism, supranational bodies,  and open borders, and multiculturalism as their aims. They’re more interested in dissolving nations in a multicultural solution (an aim also beloved by the Tories). I don’t know what Ralph Miliband thought about that. It wasn’t, as I recall, much of an issue when he was most active.

 

It’s intelligent, educated, civilised, Christian people (not just ‘left-wing sociologists’) who have rejected the significance of ‘race’ as a determinant, and the others who have clung to it.

 

 

Mr Pseudonym finishes : ’It all sounds rather like the tactics of the Frankfurt School to me, attempting to unpick the fabric of the nation from within.’

 

***Does it, though? Can he give me a reference for this? I have to say I’m not sure which member of the Frankfurt School said this, or where. They tended to have other concerns.  And come to that, who else does he say has been calling for the ‘unpicking’ of the fabric of the nation from within?  As I was careful to note,  in a passage Mr Pseudonym ignores completely, lots of people who weren’t Marxists, and who never went near the Frankfurt School, and who demonstrably loved England, also found much to loathe about the country as it was when Ralph Miliband first encountered it. Why, I’d even venture to say it’s not quite perfect now.

 

In his final paragraph, Mr Pseudonym then says : ‘I think that bearing this in mind, it's legitimate/obvious to say that he did in fact hate any form of nationhood and to me (we can never really know) his naval service probably says more about his (entirely understandable) opposition to the regime which persecuted him than anything else.’

 

***I just don’t think he has produced enough evidence for his charges. And one of the things I love most about this country is the way it still just about clings, in a largely jury-free world, to the idea that a man’s innocent until he’s proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt.  

 

&&&I am asked, once again, about my various book recommendations. All that I have made here can be found by looking in the index under 'Culture'. I know of no other way of listing them, and haven't time at present to compile a separate list

Think! Read! Don't just Regurgitate!

I have to go and defend the Almighty (or rather attack His detractors, since He is quite able to defend Himself), at the Cambridge Union this evening, and so have to struggle into my ancient dinner jacket.

 

So rather than begin my planned revisiting of the wonderful Flashman books of George Macdonald Fraser, I’ll restrict myself to a bit of knockabout.

 

Thanks , by the way, to ‘Harry S’ for those details of the Labour Party’s appalling record on defence and rearmament in the 1930s, and for that biographical detail of A.V.Alexander. I’d love to know more, and to know where to look for more. 

The fashionable view of the Tories as weak ‘appeasers’, and the generally patriotic role of the top echelon of the Labour Party during the war itself,  have long obscured this very important truth – and also the fact that it persisted long after the character of the Hitler government became clear. The idea that the Left longed for and wished to prepare for a war with Hitler because he was uniquely wicked simply is not true. The history of the period was rewritten afterwards to leave out all this stuff, and ‘Guilty Men’, a denunciation of the Tories,  became the standard text. The fact that the Left were just as guilty, and indeed more so because of their supposedly extra hatred of the Hitler regime, implelled by their leftist virtue, needs constantly to be reiterated.

 

An Italian medical man states the standard cliché of foreign policy ‘British foreign policy, and English before it, has always focussed on being what is known in the trade as an "offshore balancer" and its main goal being to stop one power from dominating the Continent. Nazi expansion may well have ended in Poland and other Eastern European destinations, but then again, it may not have. It could easily have moved westwards into France (as of course it later did), and the British would then be facing a single power consolidating itself over the Channel. This is not in British interests, so London moved to act against the Germans.’

 

But any intelligent reading of the state of affairs on the Continent in 1936 onwards would have shown that the balance of power in Europe lay between Germany and the USSR. If our concern had been to ensure no single-power dominance, then that objective had more or less been achieved by German military and economic resurgence.  Adjustments between Germany and the USSR, over Poland, the remnants of Austria-Hungary,  Romania, the Balkans in general did not threaten that balance. Indeed, the encouragement of Poland to break its pact with Germany, which we engaged in, tended to upset that balance quite seriously. By the mid-1930s, neither Britain nor France was a major continental power to compare with either Germany or Russia (this remains the case in 2013, though the harsh truth of it was long obscured by American intervention via NATO, and is still obscured by the camouflage of German power in the shrouds of the EU) . Britain was never a major continental power. France ceased to be one in 1918, at the very latest. The claim had been questionable since 1870.

 

 

Our Italian friend also makes the classic error of characterising German expansion as ‘Nazi’ expansion, when in fact Hitler pursued classic German foreign policy, which has since Bismarck been interested in eastward developments, regarding France only as a nuisance to be eliminated if it made trouble, or formed alliances with Moscow.  If people wish to politicise foreign policy they would be much better to do so in the case of the USSR, whose foreign policy was for many years not purely national, but ideological.  Oddly enough the 'New Cold War' merchants cannot seem to grasp that modern Russian policy is transformed, thanks to the end of the Soviet Communist Party.

 

Also, ‘London’ did not ‘move to act’ against the Germans. Britain took no action against Germany until she was attacked. She lacked the means to do so. All her moves were on paper, and involved the threatened deployment of forces which Britain (and Germany) knew to be imaginary. There is a rude word for this sort of thing.  I do wish my critics would address the simple point: How can you assert your will on the Continent, without an army large enough to do so? 

 

But they never do, scurrying instead  for the shrubbery of sentiment and propaganda, in which they hide their nakedness.

 

The trouble is, a lot of people died because politicians of the time resorted to the same folly. And more will die in silly idealistic wars until this myth is punctured.

 

‘Paul P’ contributes this explanation of our behaviour: ‘The realisation that expansion westward would soon follow, and in fact that happened once German and Soviet forces had mopped up Poland. Our declaration of war over Poland rather forced Hitler's hand in the west, militarily and perhaps too early. It certainly galvanized our war preparation politics and industry into action, none too early. Had we made it clear that we would declare war over Czechoslovakia and had convincingly rattled our own sabres, such as they were, perhaps there would have been no Second World War. The thought must then be entertained that Nazism might have enjoyed such peacetime success in Germany that its spread by black-shirted osmosis throughout the rest of Europe might have enjoyed similar success. The mind shudders.’

 

Why won’t these people *think* instead of reiterating things they have read somewhere long ago? Talk about being the unconscious slaves of some defunct thinker. Strip away the barrier of sentiment, and interrogate each decision in the series of decisions that led (amongst other things) to war in 1939, the bloody erasure of Poland from the map, the humiliation of France and the destruction of Britain as a world empire. Were these decisions necessary? Were they right?

 

What is his evidence that Germany in 1939 or 1940 had any serious material, military, diplomatic or economic interest in westward expansion? If Britain and France had not declared war on Germany in September 1939, why would Hitler have attacked in the West in May 1940? 

 

Much more to the point, take the story  back to the actual point of choice. This was the moment when Britain chose the path which led inevitably to war for Poland, on Poland’s terms, at a time chosen by Poland, (even though in fact we couldn’t help Poland at all). Had Britain and France not guaranteed Poland in April 1939, and had Poland instead renewed its non-aggression pact with Germany(first made in 1934)and conceded Danzig and the Corridor, what harm would that have done to Britain and France? I can’t identify any harm at all from Britain as a result of Danzig (after all, a city full of Germans) becoming German again. But even if there was some harm of some kind, how does it compare with the lasting, profound harm we did to ourselves by joining that war, when we did?

 

Then let’s take this passage piece by piece. It’s as if the writer has never read any of the arguments I have posted on this subject, so many times:

 

‘Had we made it clear that we would declare war over Czechoslovakia and had convincingly rattled our own sabres, such as they were, perhaps there would have been no Second World War. The thought must then be entertained that Nazism might have enjoyed such peacetime success in Germany that its spread by black-shirted osmosis throughout the rest of Europe might have enjoyed similar success. The mind shudders.’

Think!

 

We could not ‘convincingly rattle our sabres’ over Czechoslovakia because we had no sabres to rattle. The British Army in 1938 was an even poorer and smaller thing than it was in 1939. The RAF was mainly composed of biplanes. the Royal Navy, as usual, lacked wheels by which its ships could reach central Europe.  France, as I have said, had no aggressive capacity, let alone the desire to use it.
Do these people own atlases? Do they know where Czechoslovakia was? Do they know that Prague is *west* of Vienna. And do they grasp that the German Reich surrounded Bohemia and Moravia on three sides by September 1939? German troops based in what had been Austria could have been in Brno in a few days, with no significant natural obstacles to cross. The whole of Bohemia and Moravia was within range of German airfields. The Czech defences in the Erzgebirge were certainly excellent protection against an attack from Saxony, but the Anschluss had rendered them obsolete. And while Germany invaded Moravia and bombed every Czech city with impunity, what would France and Britain have been able to do about it? Nothing.  There wouldn’t have been a ‘Second World War’, perhaps, just a smaller, quicker rout of Britain and France than eventually happened in 1940. The Second World War was a separate conflict in which the major powers were the USSR, the USA and Germany, with Britain, Japan and Italy playing secondary roles. Whether and how it would have happened as it did after 1941 is impossible to say.

 

This is the point A.J.P.Taylor makes when he muses that it was much better to have been a betrayed Czech than a saved Pole. A war over Czechoslovakia would merely have subjected Prague to the horrors that were unleashed on Warsaw, and prevented the escape of many Jews who managed to leave the Reich in the year between Munich and the outbreak of War.

 Further:

I simply have no idea what 'black-shirted osmosis’ is. German National Socialism was by definition nationalist and German. It found few active sympathisers in any other countries, or in the countries it conquered. It found collaborators, as the powerful always do, sometimes among people who would have been among the noisiest patriots beforehand, or often among those who just hoped to be left alone as much as possible. Wait and see what you do when you’re invaded before being too hoity-toity about that. Hitler, unlike Stalin, was not an ideological invader. He was following the interests of Germany.
There is no doubt that, by picking a fight with Hitler and losing it, Britain and France placed Western Europe under German domination for five horrible years. Had they not done so, but instead maintained a strongly-armed neutrality, there is no reason to believe that Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands or Belgium would have fallen under German sway. Those  Jews and others who had fled Hitler to these countries , and to France, would quite probably have survived unmolested. As it is, they were murdered in their hundreds of  thousands, thanks to our posturing and bluster.
 

         Italy, too, might have been detached from German influence.

Clive Govier writes: ‘“Had Britain lost to Hitler, his totalitarian style would have brought about in this country the same medical experiments on the weak and defenceless as he inflicted in German concentration camps etc. Sooner or later, it would have been Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, writ larger.” This belief provides the clue as to why we declared war on Germany, and enables us to determine whether the decision was good or bad. The fact is, it was a decision born of fear (stoked by Churchill's repeated warnings) that the day was soon coming when Hitler would force Britain to become either an ally in the Nazi cause (with all that that implied, as to supposed Aryan superiority), or become his enemy, thus to fight an evil regime.’

 

Where do I begin? We did lose to Hitler, at Dunkirk. He just did not invade this country (which he surely would have done, had he been as interested in us as the myth-makers like to claim) . We risked the imposition of Nazi demands on this country *precisely by joining the war*. Non-belligerents do not risk defeat by declaring war, and do not risk being forced to make terms with their conquerors, who can be expected to give a hard time to those who declare war on them and are then beaten by them. Since we were not on the German route of march into France, had substantial air and naval defences (thanks to our wise decision not to build a continental army)  and could not be reached without a very hazardous seaborne invasion, we were unlikely to share the fates of the Netherlands and Belgium, nor those of Denmark and Norway, even if Hitler had decided on a westward war in 1940, without our declaring war on him. Our decision to go to war had nothing to do with Churchill’s ‘repeated warnings’,  but was driven by Lord Halifax’s personal vanity and  by general delusions of great power status, which, as we see, still persist. 

 

 

Think!

 

Read!

 

Stop regurgitating something you once read somewhere. 

. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That old Red Herring

A member of the audience at my recent Canterbury debate on drugs is posting on a dormant thread about the question of Keith Stroup and the use of 'medical cannabis' as a red herring to get pot a good name.

 

He says Mr Stroup denies the quotation.

 

If he follows this link, he will find that the record shows it to be accurate:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/stroup-keith/

(the matter is addressed in even greater detail in my book 'The War We Never Fought'

More Thoughts on Our Finest Hour

It was quite hard to do (the first one I ordered never reached me, only fuelling my determination) , but I’ve finally obtained a copy of the ‘The Big Pick-Up’ by the late Elleston Trevor (born Trevor Dudley-Smith 1920-1995, author of the ‘Quiller’ books under the name Adam Hall), the novel on which the 1958 film ‘Dunkirk’ is partly based. The film never attained the popularity of other war films, probably because most of it was deeply pessimistic. There are jaunty moments, as the ‘little ships’ set off , but much of it is necessarily grim.

 

It is nothing like as grim as the book. And, though described as ‘The Definitive Dunkirk Novel’, this work seems to me to be very little-known. I wonder if public libraries still stock it.

 

I had long been aware that the fictional accounts of the retreat and its aftermath by ‘Gun Buster’, in ‘Return via Dunkirk’ and ‘Battle Dress’ (both published soon afterwards and very successful)  had been sanitised for morale purposes. The careful reader can see that the writer is holding back on the horrors quite a bit, though they occasionally intrude on the edges of some of his short stories of headlong retreat, collapsing flanks, sudden death, fifth columnists and narrow escapes.  In a similar way Nicholas Monsarrat’s ‘Cruel Sea’ was published in a ‘cadet edition’ for schoolboys. The unexpurgated adult version is a good deal starker about the hideousness of war

 

But Mr Trevor’s book – while it demands to be read once you have begun it – is relentlessly dispiriting. It is one disaster after another, with several unpleasant deaths,  more despair than most will like,  a lot of straightforward, unconcealed accounts of human fear and pain, hunger,  blood-letting,  desertion and physical cowardice treated with unusual sympathy  -  and one morally disturbing incident I shall come to later which must have been drawn from the life- or death. These are real men, with all their faults and natural functions.  Given that it was written ten years after the war and five years before the Chatterley Trial (which was in 1960, not 1963) it is remarkably frank about both the gruesomeness of war, about fear and about sexual matters. A curious scene of debauchery and rape, in the midst of the bombardment of Dunkirk itself, has that feeling of waking nightmare, without a real beginning or end, which such events really have. Did it happen? I suspect so.

 

He wrote it after advertising for reminiscences from Dunkirk veterans (he himself had been an RAF flight engineer, working on Spitfires, debarred by his light-sensitive eyes from actual flying).

 

Its cover is initially misleading. It is one of those 1950s ‘Pan’ books, calculated to provide a nostalgic shiver to those of us who remember station bookstalls full of them (and simultaneously remember the accompanying clanking and wheezing of filthy and decrepit old BR steam engines shuddering past) , designed by a genius with plenty of red and yellow in the cover illustration.

 

It looks, at first glance, a bit like one of the War Picture Library comic books (they’d be called ‘Graphic Novels’ now, I suppose), with their simple patriotic plots, their rockfisted, huge-chinned heroes and their guttural, sinister Germans shouting  ‘Achtung!’ as they die, defeated. A fellow-passenger on my Oxford-bound train glanced at the cover and looked rather pityingly at me, obviously thinking I was revisiting my boyhood,  rather late.

 

But when you look again, at the soldiers in their Hore-Belisha battledress blazing uselessly at a German dive-bomber with their World War One rifles,  and one of their unarmed comrades shaking his fist at it, it’s not quite as it first appears. Behind stretches the beach under a filthy cloud (why do people always say ‘pall’? Do they even know what a ‘pall’ really is?) of smoke, while bombs fall on the long, passive lines of men waiting with diminishing hope for a boat home.

 

Right to the end, the small group of men who are the book’s central characters (‘heroes’ hardly fits) meet reverse after reverse after reverse. They are described as having holes running right through them, in a passage which is a bit too literary for the purpose, but you know what he means. ‘Nice to hear some of our guns actually being fired for a change’, muses one.   They are deeply demoralised by the knowledge of defeat and the misery of impotence in retreat, rejoicing at the smallest sign that our own side still has the power to hit back. Their near-obscene joy as a German bomber is shot down and it strikes the earth, its incinerated crew still alive and screaming, is entirely convincing. I have been told by several separate sources that the experience of being bombed when unable to hit back is one of the most distressing and infuriating known to man.

 

There are several points at which Trevor’s characters express views of war which come close to pacifism, the strange licence given to civilised men to become, and to be obliged to be the opposite of what they would be in peacetime. A man who would run to save someone from a burning building during peace, rejoices to see the building and its occupants burn in war. There is also a puzzlement as to what exactly the war is about, and how they can have got into this mess in the first place,  with such poor equipment and weapons. There is a stark admission of the unpleasant truth that it may well be better to die than to be saved after horrible injury. And - very unusual in British war books this – there’s an entirely credible account of a badly-wounded officer asking a soldier to finish him off, and the soldier actually obliging with two shots to the head. There are thoughts of death, hell and judgement, of lives full of regrets, from a wrongly-smacked child to a cruel word spoken, which can never now be put right because it is most unlikely anyone will survive this. There is a fine description of the malevolence of bombing planes.

 

And there is, to me, a highly significant moment when the guns at Dunkirk fall silent, and one of the characters wonders if this means the British Expeditionary Force has surrendered. This, after all, very nearly happened and could easily have done so, leaving our entire army as helpless hostages in the hands of Hitler. I still think that the Dunkirk rearguard, French and British, who fought on, as Trevor says, with no hope of rescue and nothing to look forward to but a prison camp or a grave, deserve more credit and more detailed commemoration.  But I think that would be hard to do, without gnawing away at the edge of the Dunkirk legend.

 

As I have said several times here, this was the end of the war which began in September 1939.  Britain and France had challenged Germany, as everyone had told them they must, though without ever explaining exactly how or why,  and they had been definitively beaten. The war that would follow would be between Germany and the USSR, and later the USA, with Britain as a subsidiary ally of the future superpowers, not determining the outcome or dedicating the terms.

 

You might say that independent British Foreign Policy, in continuous existence since the days of Henry VIII, died at Dunkirk.

 

Now, I’ll just mention the morally dubious incident, because I suspect that most British people, reading it, will sympathise with the officer who mercilessly forces his convoy through a crowd of French refugees, fearing he is about to be trapped and then caught by German aircraft. So do I, even though it seems to me that this account suggest strongly that several refugees died as a result. Trevor is unusually coy, perhaps because in 1955 those involved in the real event, which I have little doubt took place,  might still have feared consequences if it was too accurately described, and someone decided to investigate. 

But then what?  What sort of war was this, really?

If, as a nation, we had really wanted to know, we might have bought this book in greater numbers than we did, and it might be better-known. But, as usual, we prefer the golden myth to the base-metal truth, and so here we are.