Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 261

Why I've been Sleeping Badly, plus Various Responses

I thought it was time for some general comments and responses. First, a small basket of reproaches, perhaps brought on by a near-sleepless night, caused by a BBC experience late on Sunday.

 

Many months ago I offered Damian Thompson the hospitality of this weblog to make out his case that I am guilty of ‘scaremongering’ over the MMR vaccine, a claim he has repeatedly made, notably in his column in the Daily Telegraph. I deny the accusation.  He seemed unwilling to take up the offer, but hinted that he might address it elsewhere. I am still waiting. I think that if he does not make out his case soon, I shall be entitled to believe that he lacks confidence in that case.

 

More recently, I responded to an attack on me by Ms Charlotte Vere, a would-be Tory MP, who claimed (on the basis of my support for full-time mothers) that I favoured making girls leave school at 14. I rebutted (and in my view refuted) this claim. She replied with a largely unresponsive article, which I posted here as promised, and to which I replied. Since then I have heard nothing but silence from her.

 

Talking of silence, can any of my readers give me any instance of any of the notable feminist voices of our age having spoken out against (or even commented upon) the CPS refusal to prosecute doctors who offered to abort baby girls, on the grounds of their sex? I am of course against this horror on absolute Christian grounds, in that I regard it is a form of murder, a prohibited act. But surely the anti-sexist sisterhood have their own solid reasons to object to it. Or do they? 

 

As to the incident that kept me awake, it was the BBC’s choice of my old adversary Mehdi Hasan to present the Radio 4 programme ‘What the Papers say’ .

 

The last time Mr Hasan presented this programme, the BBC apologised on air for the way in which I was treated.

 

New readers can look this up here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/07/what-the-papers-didnt-say-and-what-they-did.html

 

and here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/08/what-the-papers-say-says-sorry-up-to-a-point-cows-quotes-the-bbc-and-me.html

 

and here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/03/what-the-butler-said-my-continuing-struggle-with-the-bbc.html

 

and finally here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/04/ofcom-to-hitchens-get-lost-.html

 

 

Summed up, the BBC view (upheld by the Trust and not even considered by OFCOM) was that my treatment on the programme (grotesquely caricatured voice, misquotation) was just a ‘mistake’ and had no significance of any sort. So far, my quest for an example of any comparable ‘mistake’ happening to anyone else on WTPS,  ever, has come up empty.

 

 

After the OFCOM brush-off, I wrote to the BBC saying I would now take up the offer, which they made immediately after the ‘mistake’, to allow me to present ‘What the Papers Say’ , the first time I have been asked to present a Radio 4 programme this century.

 

I had felt I could not do so while my complaint was still being investigated. But having exhausted all procedures, I felt free to do so now.

 

I will break a rule here to say that I am at present engaged to present the programme next Sunday evening on BBC Radio 4 at 10.45 pm.

 

But how about this? So far as I know, and I have been paying fairly close attention, Mr Hasan had not presented the programme since the BBC apology, more than a year ago. I have no idea how presenters are chosen, or on what basis they are rotated. No doubt the choice of Mr Hasan to present the programme last night was entirely fortuitous.  But I will leave readers to imagine the thoughts that went through my head when the theme music for the programme was followed by the sound of Mr Hasan announcing himself as presenter.

 

Some responses to comments. Can rational, intelligent contributors here please *not* try to debate with the fantasists who continue to believe ludicrous conspiracy theories about the terror attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001? These people have lost all contact with reality, will not be persuaded and are only encouraged when normal human beings try to contest this piffle. It is a waste of time for the rest of us, and may well cause a shortage of electrons in the long run.

 

I assume this contribution from ‘von Journo’ is satirical, and not to be taken literally : ‘The prehistoric classrooms Mr Hitchens refers to, with their terrifying teachers and violations of the pupils' basic rights, appear by modern standards to have been spectacularly unsuccessful. They might well have helped him, "an Olympic-standard maths duffer" to "an O-level in the subject". But In the modern, enlightened system, any duffer can earn a doctorate. Success in education no longer requires the accident of birth of being born clever. The contemporary educational system is much fairer and produces far more graduates.’

 

Once again the Finnish education system is held up for our delight. Scandinavia (though changing fast thanks to recent mass migration) is often alleged to be a post-Christian, egalitarian paradise by leftist secularists. The reality is slightly different, but there is one very powerful point that needs to be udnerstood here. Finland doesn’t suffer from Britain’s several deep divides, especially our class system, and does not have a legacy of huge, decaying ex-industrial cities where the worst urban conditions are concentrated.   It is precisely because of these divides that selection by ability is such an important issue in Britain, and why it is banned by law by our egalitarian political consensus.

 

Even so, I suspect that measures of educational success in Finland’s schools suffer from the usual problems – the absurd lack of congruence of survey methods in different countries,  the readiness of all education systems to judge themselves by more or less subjective outcomes (inspection reports, notoriously subjective, exam results, more concerned with paper qualification than with actual learning, concealed selection either by catchment area or by the encouragement of early leaving by the non-academic, etc etc etc). I would be very grateful for any impartial person with experience of the Finnish system to write in and tell us about it.

 

 

Perhaps I could ask ‘Nick’ to elaborate on the argument he offers here : ‘Mr Hitchens has an unerring ability to miss the point on every issue he raises.The problem with immigration is really the problem of welfare and the minimum wage. Without those things the indigenous population would be working and there would be no NHS and government schools and council houses etc for the immigrants to clog up. Problem solved. Unless of course you are a Socialist pretending to be a Conservative in which case you will ignore the issue altogether and distract people with elegantly written nonsense.’

 

It just so happens that the parties which have encouraged or failed to halt mass immigration are also keen supporters of the welfare state and the NHS, both of which existed before the mass immigration project was launched, and which coudl nto be abolished without the mother of all political upheavals.

I’m not sure that the minimum wage has made all that much difference, though there is no doubt that mass immigration has helped to keep it low without any difficulty. As opponents of the minimum wage pointed out when it was being introduced, it would either be so high that it damaged employment prospects or so low that it made little difference.

 

The government’s main intervention in wages has been the maze of tax credits, through which it has quietly subsidised low wage employers throughout the country. I have often wondered if this is really permissible under EU competition rules. Or perhaps the EU, like most people, simply haven’t noticed what is going on.  

A Broadcast Clash with a Moral Warrior

On Friday I discussed Britain’s standing in the world with Professor Anthony Glees of the University of Buckingham on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2.  Depending on how much of the Beach Boys’ ‘California Girls’ you want to listen to, it’s at about 1 hour eight minutes into this

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039blnf

 

 

It struck me as I listened to the Professor that he sounded rather less academic than I did. I was also right to say that I was referring specifically to Syria, not to the Middle East in general, hence my repeated references to the Sykes-Picot under which we parcelled out the Middle East with France (see that interesting book ‘A Line in the Sand’).

 

 

Yes, immigrants need homes. So let's move them into Chequers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Those of us who warned for years
about mass immigration can only grieve now that the things we predicted
are coming true. It is starting – where else? – in the primary schools,
where people are simply having to accept that many, especially in less
well-off areas, will be too full from now on.

Next
it will be housing, which is why Government Ministers are screeching
curses at those who are trying to stop them concreting over the
countryside and turning spacious suburbs into crowded urban quarters.

I
can’t see why those who have saved all their lives to live in pleasant
places should be forced to lose their peace and space, because cynical
politicians left the nation’s door open for ten years and now can’t
close it.

Let the people in
charge set an example – an ‘affordable’ estate in the grounds of
Chequers, and a little development next to each of the many homes of the
Blair Creature would be good.

But
that won’t stop the quiet spread of unofficial shanty towns in areas of
high immigration. How long will councils be able to resist or police
the five-to-a-room overcrowding, and the conversion of garden sheds into
homes, which is the inevitable result of importing hundreds of
thousands of underpaid young men?

They can only afford to accept those wages because they live at a far lower standard of living than the indigenous population.

Then
it will be the NHS, if it isn’t already, with GPs and casualty
departments overwhelmed by numbers, and, of course, the roads and public
transport.

This is a huge change in the lives of British people, unasked for, undeclared, undiscussed. It is only just beginning.

And
so the rest of us will try as best we can to live in harmony in the
overcrowded, low-pay Third World economy which we have had foisted on
us. We know that the migrants themselves are not to blame and are only
trying to better themselves.

Those
who did it, and who still will not act to stop it, are another matter.
As the truth dawns I think the voters will find a way of punishing the
politicians who subjected us to this. The old parties are all complicit.
They all dismissed protest as ‘racism’ and refused to be honest about
the matter. Why should any of them survive?

From
now on, abandon them, and refuse to vote for them. Strip these
unpleasant, sneering careerists of the money  and power that protects
them from the consequences of their own actions. Let them find out in
detail what it is they have done to the rest of us. It will be some
compensation.

When you see Dave like this he's finished!

Poor
old President Hollande, caught by the cameras innocently making silly
faces at a primary school class. He’ll never recover. 

Ed
Miliband has an even worse problem because he always looks awful on TV
or  in photographs. And in modern politics, shallow and trivial as they
are, that’s enough  to destroy a man.

There’s a very
interesting formula which decides whether embarrassing pictures of major
politicians are published. I promise you that there are many such
pictures of David Cameron, far worse than the famous sunburn shots.

As
long as the media are still a bit afraid of him, they won’t get out. As
soon as they’re sure he’s done for, they will. Watch out for it.

How cruel to make maths dunces take the GCSE over and over again. Modern education  is torture precisely because it isn’t tough.

In my prehistoric classrooms, we sat in rows, chanted our tables, our weights and measures and our counties and capitals. 

Our
teachers ranged from the terrifying to  the petrifying. They threw
small objects at  us if we didn’t pay attention. They wrote rude things
on bad work. They made us do it again if we got it wrong. And as a
result, I, an Olympic-standard maths duffer, got an O-level in the
subject, and I am still astonished by (among other things) my French
vocabulary.

These
days, the poor things sit listlessly in undisciplined classrooms, don’t
chant their tables because it violates their human rights, and after
three years of alleged French they have learned nothing beyond
‘Bonjour’.

In education, it’s kind to be cruel.

 
'Humanitarian' war doomed Libya

I
am still baffled as to how bombs are a compassionate response to
atrocities, or how a country that can’t police Manchester can police the
Middle East. And anyway, President Obama has told Washington that his
real plan in Syria is regime change.

Well,
I am no supporter of the Assad  government, despite an, er, mistaken
claim to this effect by the pro-bombing Tory  MP Brooks Newmark in the
Commons, which he has refused to withdraw. But I am worried about who or
what might replace Assad once he’s gone, which must surely be part of
our calculation.

Hardly anyone pays
attention to the outcome of our intervention in Libya, also allegedly
humanitarian. They rejoiced  at the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. But
what happened? Liberated Libya is now a failed state, actually importing
oil because its own oilfields have fallen under the control of lawless
militias.

These are the same
ferocious Islamists who murdered the US ambassador, tried to kill the
British ambassador, and who desecrated a British cemetery from the
Second World War, taking special care to smash the gravestones of Jewish
soldiers. We freed them with our bombs.

Job done, as Mr Blair might say.

 

Doctors are caught offering to abort baby girls because they are girls.

The Crown Prosecution Service refuses to act.

Our enlightened Director of Public Prosecutions seems  to view killing as OK if it’s politically correct.

Assisted suicide, in such people’s minds, is fine. Abortion, to them, is a liberation of modern womanhood.

Getting rid of unwanted girls – though ‘sexist’ – is multicultural. So, the PC pluses outweigh the minuses.

And crime falls,  as fewer and fewer evil acts are crimes any more.

 
Safe cars only breed stupidity

As I ride my bike through modern British traffic,  I observe the rapidly declining standards of driving.

Many drivers are increasingly heedless, selfish and unaware of the danger they run, or of the danger they are to others.

So
I am completely unsurprised by the mad, violent chaos on the Isle of
Sheppey bridge on Thursday, which seems to me to have been  caused
almost entirely  by inconsiderate, thoughtless stupidity.

Were
it not for all those safety devices (which protect car-users from their
own folly but do nothing for pedestrians  or cyclists), many would have
died.

Why do Sixties Peaceniks Turn into 21st Century Warmongers?

‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’, was a favourite chant of protestors against the Vietnam war.  It was also scrawled in ragged capitals on a very long hoarding in Broad Street, Oxford, for much of the summer and autumn of 1967. Every time I went past it (for then as now I was an Oxford townie), I would hug to myself the secret knowledge (confided by him) that my late brother, Christopher, was personally and solely responsible for the inscription, which he said had taken him an alarmingly long time to do, in days when there were still proper police patrols in England. Tourists would photograph it. It lasted for many months.  I seem to recall it once featured in a TV programme.  I always meant to tease him about it, once he had decided to support the Iraq war. But, for one reason or another, that was never possible and now never will be. I get a bit of a lump in my throat, remembering it.

 

‘LBJ’, for those whose knowledge of history is restricted to the Romans, the Tudors and the Nazis, referred to Lyndon Baines Johnson, then President of the United States.

 

The Vietnam war was, well, what was it?  Anyway, it was a thing everyone under 20 was against, throughout the Western world. I used to be against it myself.  Then I was for it, for a bit. Now I rather think I’m against it again, but I can’t claim to have done enough homework to be half as sure as I was when I was 16. Fortunately, my views on the subject matter even less now than they did then, though I suppose that, as part of the great Rentamob of the era, I probably helped to destroy much that I now wish had survived.

 

In  fact I once owned a North Vietnamese flag, which I would wave about at demonstrations of all kinds, to signify my support of the National Liberation Front and of dear old Ho Chi Minh, the avuncular wispily bearded sage who headed the North Vietnamese police state which we then hoped would win the war, and sweep away with Americans and their client state in South Vietnam .

 

I think it was mainly because  we disapproved of the Americans. We just did. I was, like most protestors, more or less clueless about the details of the quarrel.  Sometimes, we would chant ‘Ho! Ho! Ho chi Minh!’ as if his mere name was enough to resolve any doubts that bystanders might have.  Did they put something in the water about then? They certainly put something in the cigarettes. It sometimes seems to be the only explanation for the general (and more or less permanent) departure of reason from the country.  Years later, I had one of those lookingGlass moments when I found myself living in a Moscow street, very close to a square named after Ho chi Minh and featuring a surprisingly tasteful memorial to the old monster.  There in the heart of the Evil Empire, the rebellious was respectable, and vice versa.

 

When I wrote a few years ago about the horrible year of 1968, I quoted Timon’s curse from Shakespeare (cleverly applied to this era by Bernard Levin in his superb book ‘the Pendulum Years). It runs : ‘Obedience fail in children! Slaves and fools, Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench and minister in their steads! To general filths convert green virginity! Do it in your parents' eyes! ...

Son of sixteen, pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire; With it, beat out his brains ... Lust and liberty, creep in the minds and manners of our youth, that 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive and drown themselves in riot!'  

 

Much of what I’ve written since, especially my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ has been an attempt to understand and explain ( and atone for) that odd convulsion, which was proof against all criticism at the time and which still affects all our lives so deeply. The other day,  researching background for a novel I shall probably never write, I looked up the records of Oxford in the revolutionary 1960s (How many familiar names stood out from the crumbling pages, so long ago yet so recent too) and the seeds of every modern evil, especially drugs and abortion, but also the severe intolerance of the modern left,  were already flourishing in that sunny walled garden.  

 

But to return for a moment to Vietnam and the rest, one thing which was quite universal among the 1968 generation was a detestation of war, and especially the bombing of foreign countries for their own good.

 

Now, and it’s one of the most interesting things in the world that this is so,  in the more thoughtful regions of the Left, there’s a contrasting love for war and bombing, the Chicago School, as one might teasingly call it, of people who are inspired by the speech delivered by Anthony Blair in Chicago in April 1999. This was the one which justified dumping the 350 years of wisdom since the Peace of Westphalia had accepted that you didn’t interfere in foreign countries because you didn’t like the way they were governed.

 

This conclusion had been reached after the Thirty Years War had shown what happened when you *did* interfere on such grounds. Much of the continent looked like like a Hieronymus Bosch depiction of Hell.

 

I doubt if the Blair creature understood the implications of the words he recited to the Economic Club that evening.  ( a good clear version can be read here http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/jan-june99/blair_doctrine4-23.html)

 

I have never believed that he understood what he was doing, domestically or internationally. But others did understand.

 

But the speech contains a beautiful, near-perfect example of the ‘Good War’ concept I wrote about yesterday, in which all our foes are versions of Hitler, and we are all versions of Churchill : ‘This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later.’

 

Very little work has been done, in the years since, on the actual fate of Kosovo or on the real nature of the ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’ to whom we lent the airpower of the North Atlantic Treaty. It is my belief, from what I have read, that the outcome has not been an unmixed joy, especially for the Serbian minority and the Orthodox Christian heritage in that place, and that the KLA are not necessarily gentlemen.  I also remain fascinated by the way in which the Yugoslav Federation could not be permitted to coexist with the rival federation of the EU (in a milder, slower way, the United Kingdom, and its one-time semi-detached but actually rather close relationship with Ireland has also been quietly loosened by devolution).

 

The real core of the speech lay elsewhere. It was a proclamation of the end of the Nation State: ‘Globalisation’ Mr Blair trilled ‘has transformed our economies and our working practices. But globalisation is not just economic. It is also a political and security phenomenon.

 

‘We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist. By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nations.

 

‘Many of our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world. Financial instability in Asia destroys jobs in Chicago and in my own constituency in County Durham. Poverty in the Caribbean means more drugs on the streets in Washington and London. Conflict in the Balkans causes more refugees in Germany and here in the US. These problems can only be addressed by international co-operation.

 

‘We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not.  We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas in other counties if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure.

 

‘On the eve of a new Millennium we are now in a new world. We need new rules for international co-operation and new ways of organising our international institutions.’

 

National sovereignty, a thing all previous British prime ministers had at least claimed to value,  was now to be dismissed as ‘isolationism’ and ‘protectionism’. What had previously been normal was now redefined as a discredited dogma. Those who had for years seen Communism as the great revolutionary force in the world were now able to transfer their allegiance to a globalised, multicultural USA. That’s why you find so many Marxists cheering on the missiles.

These were the rules for intervention he set out.

 

‘Looking around the world there are many regimes that are undemocratic and engaged in barbarous acts. If we wanted to right every wrong that we see in the modern world then we would do little else than intervene in the affairs of other countries. We would not be able to cope.

 

‘So how do we decide when and whether to intervene. I think we need to bear in mind five major considerations

 

‘First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers. And finally, do we have national interests involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a difference that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe.’

 

 

Personally I find these rules rather incoherent. But have his heirs and successors even abided by them, especially on the questions of prudence, and of staying to see the matter through? Were they really observed at the time?  Were such things as the Rambouillet accords on Yugoslavia (which no sovereign government could possibly have accepted)  a real attempt to exhaust all diplomatic options?  Have Britain and the USA seriously attempted to pursue peace in Syria? Who judges?

 

Well, here’s a intervention backed by the Chicago School, the one we engineered in Libya, by claiming (as in Kosovo and as in Syria) to be acting to prevent a massacre. I’ve always thought evidence of the likelihood of this massacre was in rather short supply, but leave that aside.

 

How is Libya getting on, since our humanitarian intervention? I’ve mentioned elsewhere the failed attempt by our supposed friends to kill the British ambassador, and their successful attempt to kill the US ambassador. I’ve mentioned their desecration of a British war cemetery in Benghazi, with special attention paid to smashing the gravestones of Jewish soldiers.

 

But, as so often if you want to know what’s really going on in the world, you need to turn to the work of that peerless foreign correspondent, Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, who keeps an eye on these liberated zones, after most people have gone. Read his article on today's Libya here http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/special-report-we-all-thought-libya-had-moved-on--it-has-but-into-lawlessness-and-ruin-8797041.html?origin=internalSearch 

 

One particularly striking fact is this – that ‘Free Libya’, actually an oil producing state, is now importing oil to keep its power stations going because production has almost completely stopped. I remember a similar paradox in Iraq during my visits there after the invasion, with immense queues at the petrol stations.

 

The invasion has , it seems to me, made things worse. Muammar Gadaffi was without doubt a wicked tyrant, and more than a little unhinged. But why did anyone think that, by overthrowing him, they could guarantee that his successors would be better? The same dim vision seems to inform those who wish to overthrow the Assad state in Syria. Can they guarantee that what follows will be better? Of course they cannot. Then how can they be so hot for action? And can President Obama (holder of the Nobel Peace Prize and, so far as I can recall, not elected on a platform of war-making in either 2008 or 2012)please make up his mind? Is his Syrian intervention a self-contained punitive strike, as we are told? Or is it in fact a plan for regime change, as the BBC reported he had told neo-conservative war enthusiasts? One or the other, but not both.  

 

One final thing, a small problem for the Churchill part of the ‘good war’ cult. Churchill himself did not  share Mr Obama’s and Mr Cameron’s disdain for chemical weapons. The ‘Guardian’ published this interesting historical reflection earlier this week.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons

 

 

Isn’t life complicated?  

Why They have to Drag Hitler into It - the Cult of the Good War

Here comes Hitler again, plus evil dictators in general, appeasement and the rest of the bits and pieces, board, dice, tokens, model ships and planes,  and wads of other people’s money that are to be found in that much-loved Westminster and Washington DC board game,  ‘How to Start a War’.

 

I was just wondering, on Sunday morning,  how long it would be before Syria’s President Assad would be compared to Adolf Hitler, and the American Secretary of State John Kerry almost immediately obliged by saying Assad had ‘joined the list of Hitler and Hussein’ who had used evil chemical weapons. Alas, all kinds of countries have used these weapons. Many that never used them still made and stockpiled them. If the possession or use of chemical weapons is itself a crime, few major powers are clean.  Winston Churchill’s own personal attitude to this matter is interesting, and characteristically robust, but does not fit too well with the ‘Assad as Hitler and Obama as Churchill’ narrative. 

 

It was perhaps a pity that a picture  of Mr Kerry,  and his spouse,  dining with the future Hitler-substitute Bashar Assad (and his spouse, once the subject of an admiring profile in  ‘Vogue’, now withdrawn) swiftly emerged from the archives . But what is that greenish fluid they are all about be given to drink?

 

Perhaps it wasn’t a pity. I myself find the wild mood-swings of the leaders of the ‘West’ , in their attitudes towards foreign despots, very informative. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Order of the Bath springs to mind, not to mention the reunited German state’s belated vendetta against Erich Honecker, whom they had once entertained and met as a diplomatic partner. And of course the very-swiftly-forgotten protests over Deng Xiaoping ‘killing his own people' in Peking’s Tiananmen Square, and the amazing licence granted to Boris Yeltsin to do things (including ‘shelling his own parliament’) which we would never approve of if Vladimir Putin did them.  Though perhaps the Egyptian ‘stabilisation government’ or Junta, might get away with it. I see they are now charging Muslim brotherhood figures with murder, and nobody is laughing.  As for Robert Mugabe, where does one begin?

 

These wild mood-swings inform me that their current spasms of outrage are false, and that the reasons they give for their behaviour are not reasons but pretexts, thus encouraging us all to search for the real reason. Does it lie in them, and in their flawed characters - or in some object they privately have, but won’t openly discuss? Perhaps both.

 

Mr Kerry (whose public speaking style I once unkindly compared to chloroform, after witnessing him alienate and bore a huge theatre full of American Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tennessee) also proclaimed that ‘we’ (that is, the Executive of the US government) were ‘not going to lose’ the approaching vote on bombing Syria. This was delivered as a statement rather than a wish.  Well, in that case, why hold the vote at all? I do think people should stop trying to influence votes by the stampede method, under which you persuade the more sheeplike voters that, by supporting you,  they are just doing what everyone else is doing. Baaaa.

 

If you actually believe in debate, and people making up their minds on the basis of the arguments,  this is surely an outrage. Of course, if you don’t actually believe in unpredictable votes, and cynically regard all this debate stuff as top-dressing for absolute power, then that’s another matter.

 

But Hitler always comes into this because he is part of a cult, the cult of the good war and the finest hour, one of whose branches is the cult of the nice bomb and the moral bomber.

 

According to the scriptures of this cult,  a wicked dictator called Hitler was overcome by a brave and good democrat called Winston Churchill. Churchill triumphed at Dunkirk, and then fought Hitler to save the Jews from the Holocaust, also liberating Europe at D-Day, so that we all lived happily ever after.  A group of people carrying umbrellas, called the ‘appeasers’ and led by a man called ‘Chamberlain’,  wickedly opposed Churchill and gave in to Hitler at Munich. If it had not been for them, Hitler would have been seen for what he was, attacked and overthrown long before.

 

 

Regular readers of this weblog will know that this version of events  contains some nuggets of truth – Hitler was evil and was defeated, Churchill had many noble qualities. Britain, though defeated on land in 1940,  was not invaded. But they will also, I think, admit that a) it is far from complete and b) there are probably millions of people in Britain and the USA who believe something very similar to the above, about the events of 1938-45. This, alas, still influences their judgement when their leaders try to get them to go to war.

 

The most fanatical followers of this cult are, however, not just harnless members of a re-enactment society spending their weekends making ‘Boom!’ and ‘eeeee—ow!’ noises as they play with their Dinky toys and Airfix models in the attic.

 

They re-enact this myth in the form of actual red war, and are to be found among professional politicians in Britain and America. These initiates  periodically choose a new person to take the role of ‘Hitler’. This can be almost anybody, including such minor figures as Manuel Noriega of Panama.

 

For, in the ritual of the Churchill cultists, the important thing is not who takes the part of Hitler, but who takes the part of Churchill, and who takes the part of Chamberlain.

 

And the smaller the would-be Churchills get, the smaller the alleged Hitlers get too. Note that, despite its many crimes against the laws of civilisation, the Chinese People’s Republic has never been called upon to play the part of Hitler, nor is it likely to be.

 

Invariably, the American or British leader calling for war  imagines he is Churchill. Invariably, those who oppose the war are classified as appeasers and equated with ‘Chamberlain’. And invariably, the targeted dictator is classified as ‘Hitler’.

 

The awful truth of the Second World War is that it is much more complicated than that, that it was not fought to rescue the Jews (and largely failed to do so)  and that many entirely innocent and harmless people did not experience it or its aftermath as ‘good’; also, that of its two principal victors (neither of whom was Britain, despite Churchill’s role) one, Stalin,  was as evil a dictator was one might find in a long day’s search.

 

Which is why western schoolchildren learn little about the Soviet Army’s part in the defeat of the evil Hitler, or indeed about Churchill’s increasingly subservient, not to say appeasing , relationship with Stalin in the later years of the war. Or why so little is said about how slight Britain’s direct contact with the land forces of Nazi Germany was between 1940 and 1944.  Let alone of the complex diplomacy which brought Britain into war with Germany in September 1939.

 

Let’s discuss some of this. Just before my recent journey to Berlin, I visited my favourite second hand bookshop in search of serendipity, and there found, in stout 1960s Penguin editions priced at three shillings and sixpence,  a book I hadn’t read for years (A.J.P. Taylor’s ‘The Origins of the Second World war’ and a book I had never read but felt I should have done ,Len Deighton’s ‘Funeral in Berlin’).What could have been better travel reading, on a journey to berlin undertaken close to the 74th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Great War?

 

I must say I think Deighton’s best work was done elsewhere, and later.  But ‘Funeral in Berlin’. Like ‘The Ipcress File’, is tremendously redolent of the rather ghastly 1960s period of iconoclasm, David Frost, the King’s Road and all the rest of it. The buzzing, headachy urgency of the language, the miasma (as Kingsley Amis called it) of expensive king-sized cigarettes and fashionable whiskies. You can almost hear the narrow lapels creaking and the Soho jazz grating on the ear (as Krushchev put it) like a tram accident. It also makes one think of the brilliant encapsulation of that whole rather horrible era in the opening moments of the Michael Caine film of ‘Ipcress’ . Bad old ways were being cast aside, to be replaced by bad new ways.  

 

Deighton was also years ahead of John le Carre’s ‘A Perfect Spy’ in making the point that spies themselves are more like each other than they are like the people who employ them, and that their mutual understanding (which looks like betrayal to the rest of us) casts doubt on the ideologies whose spearheads they are.

 

I didn’t myself think it evokes the old East Berlin very much. Reading it in my rented, westernised flat in the Heinrich Heine Strasse (a few hundred yards from a former border crossing), with a fine view of the TV tower and the old Red Rathaus, I felt he’d somehow missed the real feeling of the murky, thrilling city I still remember so well. But there are some unpleasant and disturbing thoughts on how much of the wicked Nazi state, especially its secret service, survived the death of Hitler. And, put in the mouth of a German war veteran, there are some unsettling remarks about how much Britain experienced war, in comparison with either Germany or Russia.

 

Taylor, on the other hand, wears very well. His writing remains clear, intelligent and perceptive. He invites the reader into a sort of complicity. Look, he says, most people couldn’t bear this much reality, but you and I can. Sit down and listen to this…

 

His dismissal of the importance of the Hossbach memorandum, supposedly a sinister deep-laid plan for war, actually an inconsequential political ploy,  his casual mention of the fact that the Czech president Emil Hacha, was not ‘summoned’ to Berlin in 1939 but sought the meeting himself, and a dozen other myth-cracking torpedoes, all still have the freshness  they must have had when his book was published (to howls of rage) in 1961.

 

I must say I find his argument that Hitler was a wild improviser, and that French and British attitudes towards him, Germany and Eastern Europe were incompetent and often absurd,  much more persuasive than the standard narrative. He also offers a better explanation than anyone else of how (through a series of bungles and miscalculations) Britain ended up madly guaranteeing Poland and so giving Colonel Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister,  the power to start a general European war whenever he chose. He chose September 1939, and much good it did him.

 

Nobody reading this work would be impressed by the diplomatic skills of politicians, or anxious to offer them any power to start wars. They do not, for the most part, have a clue what they are doing. They claim success if it turns out all right, and are never there when the booby prizes for failure, death and loss are being awarded.

A Weekend in Normal - and a Brush with Senator Chloroform

Thinking about John Kerry's recent behaviour inspired me to look up this account of his performance I wrote during the 2004 Presidential election.

 

In Normal, they know who'll be President...and it isn't going to be Senator Chloroform  

     

Forget the babble and chaos of the big cities, America's small towns are the true heart of the nation - and they've bad news for John Kerry

By: PETER HITCHENS in Normal, Illinois

 

Mail on Sunday 5th September 2004

 

They call this place Normal, but for most of the world it is an unattainable, abnormal paradise of safety, peace and prosperity. Here on Planet America all the problems are small ones. This is not the multicultural chaos of distant, noisy New York, a place viewed from this vantage point as a more or less foreign city, Babylon on the Hudson, only just clinging to the edge of the United States.

 

The Republican Convention in Manhattan has been little more than a distant yelling noise somewhere on the horizon, swimming briefly on to the TV screens of those who were not quick enough to change channels in time to avoid the strange, guttural orations of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the embarrassing public debut of the Bush daughters.

 

In Normal, life is sweet and enviable. Power and politics do not trouble its people very much, so they are unlikely to give much trouble in return. The secret of good government is to let men alone, and that is what happens here. There is so much space that even the poorest homes stand on their own amid little private patches of green. Grim blocks of council flats, terrace houses, even semidetached homes, just don't exist.

 

They work and keep most of what they earn for themselves. It is not much of a place for the adventurous, but for those who want a town where they can raise children and let them roam the shaded streets without fear, it is about as good as it gets. Many of its citizens go out into the wider world for a little and then return to Normal to bring up families.

 

Yet it is not a museum of Eisenhower-era segregation. Black and white citizens manage to live alongside each other in middle-class suburbs. I even spotted a game of cricket in a park, played and watched by the Indian computer geniuses who have come here in large numbers to help run the insurance business that is the town's main activity.

 

Schools are good, white-collar jobs plentiful, and while the Mitsubishi car plant has just announced several hundred job losses, there is a good chance that most of the victims will quickly find new work. A flourishing university keeps the town centre alive while the suburbs at evening glow with the alluring lights of sports-bars and steakhouses, promising the rewards of fun, pleasure and relaxation at the end of the full, hardworking day.

 

This is the USA foreigners fly over without seeing, and the USA whose citizens rarely travel abroad and often never possess a passport. But it is closer to the American reality than the famous cities of the East. Here, a little more than 100 miles southwest of Chicago, the great cornfields sweep right up to the edge of the city.

 

Huge silver express trains pause for a minute as they roll down towards Kansas City and St Louis, emitting those long, nostalgic moans originally designed to frighten buffalo; a reminder that they are in the middle of a vast, peaceful continent with thousands of miles of friendly territory on all sides. If there are enemies, they are a long way away. It's a wonderful life. You half expect to find James Stewart or some other symbol of good-hearted America swinging down the street.

 

Chris Koos, the town's mayor, is not a bad substitute. A tall, rangy, affable Vietnam combat veteran who runs a busy bike shop, Koos is carefully non-political because Normal has a sensible rule banning the parties from contesting local elections.

 

He explains: 'People don't generally talk about their politics. We don't run for election on political platforms because it keeps us focused on the local level.' I suspect that Koos, quietly impressive like most men who have seen the face of war, is a very liberal Republican and a very conservative Democrat in a single body. This is wise. He explains that in a small place like Normal, with little more than 40,000 people, everyone has to be careful not to go too far when times are polarised.

 

But he suspects that the Iraq war - with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the continuing bloodshed - is damaging President Bush even in this very Republican part of the world. 'I have a very good friend, a Republican, who says he will not vote for George Bush.' But here's the interesting bit: 'He won't vote for John Kerry either.' Just down the road, in the coffee house on Beaufort Street, I found Marc Lebowitz, an administrator at Illinois State University. Marc, in his 50s, is a keen Democrat who very much wants George Bush evicted from the White House in November.

 

But he admitted: 'I have a hard time separating what I would like from what I think is going to happen. I suspect George W. Bush will be reelected unless there is a more dramatic economic downturn than we have seen so far. People will be afraid to have a new administration when we still have troops committed overseas.' In many other conversations, some private, I get the same impression over and over again: that the Democrats fear their man will not make it, while the Republicans fear their man is not up to it. This is not a recipe for regime change in Washington. The likely closeness of the result shows just how many people have doubts about their commander-in-chief. This is a contest which the incumbent President ought to be able to win easily. But, as Mr Bush well knows, a victory is a victory, however close.

 

Some - and they are a significant number - are unshakable supporters of George W. Bush. The President may look corny and false to weary Old World observers, but we need to realise that many Americans find him both inspiring and convincing.

 

Paul Woolsey, a 22-year-old Military Police specialist, is the sort of American everyone should talk to.

 

Movingly and persuasively, he speaks the straightforward language of the American Dream. Any country that can bring up someone like this, idealistic and courageous, has reason to be proud, whether you agree with him or not. And when I told him that I disagreed with him about the war he politely and reasonably accepted that I had another point of view.

 

This is no caricature fanatic. He has no doubt that he lives in the best and most free country in the world and he wants to spread its benefits as far and as wide as possible. Paul took part in the liberation of Iraq and expects to be there again soon. He is passionately committed to the war as a good cause. 'My justification was the little children that I saw, the people who I saw liberated on the streets of Baghdad.' Millions of others think like him and will, like him, vote for the President.

 

Jack Capodice, 45, a surgeon and leading Republican, is cool and cautious but explains why he, too, is sticking with Mr Bush. He says that while there's no great enthusiasm for the President, there is not enough discontent to unseat him either. If he misled the American people, he did not do so intentionally. He has few illusions: 'I don't think George Bush is a particularly intelligent person.

 

On the other hand Bill Clinton is an extraordinarily bright person - but I think he was an ineffective leader.' He accepts that if the Democrats had a better candidate they would be more of a threat: 'If Bush wins, it is due to the weakness of the Democrats. John Kerry looks stiff, rich and spoiled, as old-establishment as anybody could be.' I can confirm that. When I left Normal I headed to Nashville, Tennessee, to watch Senator Kerry speak to the American Legion Convention, a rather moving assembly of military veterans, where patriotism is taken for granted and every speech ends with the words 'God Bless America'. The day before, President Bush, a man who has never been within a thousand miles of a battlefield, had spoken to the same audience and had successfully charmed them into warm acclaim.

 

Kerry, who has seen real battle, failed to move the Legion and won nothing but tepid, polite applause. He never even managed to make it into third gear. His whole appearance smacked of incompetence and demoralisation. There was a long wait while Kerry's team set up the machine that enables him to look as if he has memorised his speech while he is in fact reading it. But he might as well not have bothered. The candidate's weary, lifeless delivery had all the passion and uplift of a train cancellation leaking out of a station loudspeaker. The only striking-thing about Mr Kerry is his very peculiar appearance. His hair, extraordinarily luxuriant for a man of his age, looks as if it has had helium pumped into it.

 

This makes you wonder what happens when he lies down, and also emphasises the amazing length of his famished, coffin-shaped face, like one of those enigmatic statues on Easter Island. His fat-free frame is so spare that he only just manages to look three-dimensional.

 

And then he messed up his big chance. The truth is, Mr Kerry is in trouble. Merciless, effective TV commercials, disowned by the White House but very helpful to it, have torn into his one strong point - his war service. They as good as say he is making up his record. Worse, they remind veterans that Mr Kerry once compared the US armed forces to Genghis Khan and chucked away the medals he now makes much of. For conservative ex-soldiers, this wipes out all the credit of his actual service.

 

He could have dealt with this. He could have pushed aside the advisers who always urge caution and asked angrily why he, a man who actually did fight for his country, was being pilloried when George Bush, who skulked at home during the Vietnam war, was let off. But he didn't. Mr Kerry waited two more days before he was finally goaded into a reaction by Republican mockery, delivered in a midnight speech which received scrappy coverage on the crucial morning TV shows and in newspapers, partly because it came so late at night, partly because of the rapid approach of Hurricane Frances and partly because it was overshadowed by President Bush's nomination speech in New York.

 

Damning the Republican gathering in New York as 'a convention of anger and insults', Kerry directly compared his Vietnam combat service with Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated deferments, saying: 'I'll leave it up to the voters whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of combat duty.

 

'I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq,' he rasped, in words which many of his supporters feel he should have used weeks ago, when the attacks on his record first began.

 

Kerry's haggard, late-night rebuttal contrasted with Mr Bush's smooth, shameless speech, broadcast live by the main stations, in which he posed as the nation's defender against terror, and almost brought tears to his own eyes as he praised the courage of American troops.

 

Kerry has also been attacked for being inconsistent, in a clearly concerted attack by Republicans. But the President has been far more inconsistent. In a TV interview he admitted earlier last week that the 'War on Terror' could not be won. This is obviously true, since there is no defined enemy and no objective way of judging the moment of victory.

 

Then, realising that he had made several speeches saying the opposite, Mr Bush panicked and declared that it could be won after all.

 

Ignoring this open goal, and the chance to throw back the accusation of inconsistency, Kerry idiotically agreed with Bush's stupid retraction and pronounced that the 'War on Terror' could be won, must be won, would be won. He droned on about veterans' benefits and health care, spending theoretical billions of tax dollars. He gave a decent but uninspiring defence of his actually quite intelligent position on the Iraq war.

 

All around me in a hall half the size of Belgium eyes were closing and heads sinking on to chests as his brave but far from youthful audience-drifted into slumber or boredom-You could almost hear the shuffling-sound of minds wandering as Senator Chloroform anaesthetised the room and solved the sleep problems of any voters who might have been watching the occasion on TV.

 

Again and again, I thought he was about to wind up and say 'God Bless America'. Again and again, he began a new chapter of spending plans and healthcare schemes.

 

The final applause was one of the oddest things I have ever seen. Everybody was clapping, almost everyone was standing up but there was no real noise or force to it as palm feebly slapped against palm, and you felt they were longing for a signal to sit down. Perhaps they were. Two weeks ago Mr Kerry spoke to a similar gathering, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the applause was so thin that silence would have been better. The American Legion prides itself on its good manners and was obviously determined to be polite.

 

Afterwards, I took an unscientific poll of these grizzled old charmers in their forage caps and got the impression that most of them rather despised Kerry. If he cannot win them over, when he is a warrior and his opponent has messed up a major war, I do not see how he can win.

 

He is the wrong candidate in the wrong year. The Democrats never really expected to have a chance of winning the White House this time.

 

Hillary Clinton, who intends to be the first woman President of the USA, still needs to persuade most of America that she is really human, a task that will take effort, money and time. She needs four more years of George Bush to help soften her outline. She certainly does not need eight years of John Kerry, which would probably put her out of the race for good. Perhaps that is why he simply has not been able to attract the army of ultra-clever cynics who ran Bill Clinton's brilliant, conscience-free campaigns against better men than him in 1992 and 1996.

 

People have become President by accident. Many think George W. Bush did exactly that, and that his smarter brother Jeb was always supposed to get the job. For a while it looked as if John Kerry might do the same thing thanks to Bush's clumsiness and folly. But judging from what I saw in Nashville and heard in Normal, Mr Kerry has lost his nerve and his way and George W. Bush will get those four more years. It is not much of a choice. Those of us who like America and Americans must just hope that the second Bush term will be better than the first. 

Rail Travel, Monuments and Vanished Frontiers

As we get our breath back after the momentous events of last week, I thought I would touch on one or two of the things I would have written about,  had I not felt it necessary to oppose British participation in the planned attack on Syria (and rebut the claims of Ms Charlotte Vere, who seems to have gone quiet).

 

I might add at this point that I may soon need to write at length on an unexpected personal side-effect of that Syrian matter. But I am still hoping that I may be able to resolve it without mobilising.

 

I had just spent several days in Germany, which regular readers here will know is a country whose current arrangements I rather admire, and which I think one of the most interesting in the world. I’m also struck by how little most British people know about it, and how seldom they travel there.

 

I went to Berlin by train, a journey you can now do in one very long day, though I stopped in Cologne on the way out and in Aachen (or Aix-la-Chapelle if you prefer) on the way back.

 

This is not, alas the best stretch of landscape in the country, though the traveller sees the Rhine (and can glimpse the haunting, Wagnerian hills near Bonn if he climbs the spire of Cologne cathedral, as I did). He also sees  the Weser and the Elbe, the venerable monorail at Wuppertal, once the height of modernity, now a rarely-imitated curiosity, and one or two of those very Germanic hillside monuments including a vast and brooding statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I,  near Bad Oeynhausen.  I agree that there are quite a few rather large statues of Buddha, rather paradoxical given Buddhism’s general modesty. But if you leave those out of the argument, only the Russian Communists and the North Koreans have outdone this German frenzy for such things.  The Chinese aren’t keen. The allegedly biggest statue of Mao in Shenyang, gateway to North Korea,  is nothing by comparison.

 

I’ve still not seen the Stalingrad monument, but I have seen, and been impressed and rather overpowered by, the 203 foot statue of the Motherland at Kiev, and the Soviet war memorial in Treptow, Berlin (much smaller but still powerfully disturbing). It is an interesting exploration of national character to try to work out why such things have never been a feature of our culture or countryside.

 

I’ve always rather wished I could have seen the immense monument the Germans put up on the site of Tannenberg, the site of which is now deep in Poland. This is partly because this forgotten battle probably decided the fate of the world, by diverting German forces from the West and so ensuring their failure at the Marne in 1914; it is partly because that strange part of the world is full of disturbing contradictions and unsettling transformations – I have still never got over a brief visit I once made to Soviet Kaliningrad, now a sort of Russian Gibraltar cut off from Russia by Lithuanian territory.

 

Almost every trace of its German past as Koenigsberg had been deliberately erased, during a long period when it had been utterly closed to westerners. The German inhabitants themselves had been expelled long ago. You could still see a few pleasing pre-1914 houses, the tomb of Immanuel Kant by the redbrick cathedral (then locked)  and an obviously Germanic railway station, but I found little else.The old citadel had been flattened in an act of Soviet vandalism, and replaced by an incredibly hideous brutalist modern block.  Old maps of the former city could be obtained, and it was amusing to discover that Goeringstrasse had become Ulitsa Gagarina (Yuri Gagarin Street). There was also a rather haunting seaside resort on the Baltic coast, utterly unmodernised and redolent of the Weimar republic. I wonder if that seaside resort has survived among its pines, or become a tatty modern dump?   

 

Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander had signed the Treaty of Tilsit near here in 1807, in a pavilion in the middle of a river. The place was crammed with awkward history, but war and ideology had wiped out most of the traces of it.  Even Tilsit is now called Sovyetsk.

 

A trip to Tannenberg topday would find even less. Between them, the retreating Germans, the advancing Red Army and the re-established state of Poland completely destroyed this once-enormous structure, a sort of hilltop castle, later adapted by Hitler into a tomb for Field Marshal von Hindenburg, whose remains then had to be moved in a hurry to stop them being captured by the Red Army.

 

What, by the way, happened to the huge wooden statue of the Field Marshal in Great War Berlin,  into which loyal Germans paid to hammer nails, to raise funds for the war?  This odd practice was endlessly mocked in the British newspapers of the time, but I can find almost no references to it now.

 

There’s no doubt that architectural memorials to dead regimes can be very instructive, first in an Ozymandias way, as one see how what is now fallen and derided was once mighty; and secondly because architecture gives a better key to the past than any other art. The remains of the National Socialist parade ground at  Nuremberg, now a sort of lorry park, are very instructive, especially in light rain on a grey winter’s day. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. So is the Olympc Stadium in Berlin, tactfully stripped of any overt National Socialist markings, but obviously the work of a Utopian mind.

 

Nothing gives a better idea of what Stalinism was actually like than the great Gothic towers which he caused to be erected all over Moscow, strikingly like American mid-century buildings in some ways, but also deeply different because of their overt Communist symbolism. They’ve mostly been rather well-restored in recent years, and act as an enduring monument to an era of dark and secretive power that beguiled almost as many people as it murdered.   

 

I hadn’t visited Cologne Cathedral for about 30 years, and , while impressed by its grandeur, its glass and its scale, and by the living bridge it provides to the middle ages,(the story of the completion of the cathedral from original designs, in the 19th century, after centuries of neglect, is astonishing) I felt it was a much more secular building than the first time I’d seen it on a winter’s morning, far darker, patrolled by stern beadles in unreformed 18th century garb.   Christianity has shrivelled in Germany as elsewhere in Europe.

 

The Cathedral at Aachen, a much smaller and odder building, suffers from the same problem of secularisation. It is amazing how much more of a religious feeling is retained in most of the English cathedrals, especially given the retiring, self-effacing nature of the Church of England. But two great wars have utterly wrecked the spirit of Christian Europe. I saw photographs of dense, impassioned crowds attending an exposure of relics at Aachen in about 1900.  It was (just) in modern times but could not conceivably have happened after 1914, let alone after 1945. It was like looking at a photo album of the lost City of Atlantis.

 

Aachen is a border city and you can walk, in about an hour, from the heart of it into the Netherlands or into Belgium. I chose the Dutch option, and was - as I always am – utterly amazed to be able to walk into another country without any passport formalities, or change of currency. I know I’m supposed to be pleased by this, but I’m alarmed by how such a huge thing has happened without anybody seeming to care.

 

If the Second World War was fought to preserve the borders of the Versailles settlement (which as far as I know, it was) how come most of the borders of 1919, or indeed 1939, are now no more significant than the boundary between East and West Sussex?

 

My journey also took me through Liege (which now has an astonishing new railway station, whose giant concrete ribs resemble the skeleton of some immense alien monster). I pondered that, 99 years before, the great battle to destroy and capture the Liege fortresses had just finished, and that many of the objectives of the German armies which had then marched on towards Brussels have in fact been achieved. Air travel tends to befuddle us. But stay at ground or sea level, and you will learn much, much more.      

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Oh No! I agree with Peter Hitchens! What Shall I do?

The electronic mob has swung behind me for once. I, the Hated Peter Hitchens,  am being pelted with praise on Twitter, for my recent assault on the Prime Minister and his contradictory, infantile and self-righteous desire to drop nice bombs on Damascus.

 

Nice bombs, by the way, explode, burn, kill, bereave, crush, rip, tear, scorch, amputate, maim, disfigure and disembowel in exactly the same way as ordinary bombs. But they have been launched by nice people in a good cause, so they are nicer than nasty bombs, in some mystical way.

 

I suspect the distinction is only visible inside the minds of those who demand that they be launched, and those who order them to be launched. I doubt very much if the service personnel who obey the orders (who tend to be free of illusions) can see the difference. And I am sure that those on the receiving end cannot.

 

But leave that to one side.

 

A lot of this praise is qualified with a formula that runs something like this. ‘Never thought I’d agree with Peter Hitchens’. ‘I’ll have to lie down now that I’ve found myself agreeing with Peter Hitchens’ , or ‘Amazing that Peter Hitchens has written something intelligent’.

 

Something similar happened in the pre-Twitter days of the Blair war on Iraq. Those who opposed the invasion eventually noticed that I too opposed it. I was even invited to speak on the platform at a ‘Stop the War’ rally. I declined, partly because (as I put it to them) I opposed the war for what they saw the ‘wrong reasons’

 

 

These were not pacifism (I am not a pacifist, and haven’t been one since my teens, when I quickly realised the huge and – to me – unacceptable implications of adopting this admirable position).

 

I saw it as an assault on national sovereignty which wasn’t in the interests of my country or of the USA, and for which no reasonable case had been made.

 

Also I couldn’t possibly speak from the same platform as those who denied Israel’s right to exist, especially as they claimed that the state resulting from Israel’s removal would be a ‘Free Palestine’. Whatever that state would be, I think we could guarantee absolutely that  it wouldn’t be free.  I couldn’t then, and can’t now, see what this questionable cause has to do with a desire for peace in the Middle East, a goal which depends entirely upon reasonable compromise.

 

The BBC, which had until the Iraq war been giving me an increasing number of invitations to discussion programmes, suddenly all but ceased to ask me on. It was faced with the impossible calculation which runs as follows : ‘Right wing person=bad person. Opponent of war = good person . This does not compute. He cannot really exist. Do not invite him on.’

 

For about two years, my invitations dwindled to almost nothing, except when they came from half-witted researchers who rang me up to ask me to defend the invasion, or the ‘war on terror’,  or bombing, or torture, or Guantanamo, despite the fact that my easily-available published work opposed all these things. When I did occasionally get on to panel shows, audiences and presenters were often puzzled, as they also are by my attacks on the Tory Party.

 

The football or boxing-match model of politics seems to have entirely taken hold. You are on one side or the other. If you diverge, you have gone over to the other side.

 

Life is not actually like that.

 

But of course my new Twitter admirers of today know in their hearts that I am a monstrous reactionary. So while they cannot fault the facts or logic of my attack on the Syrian war, they are chary of giving me any kind of general endorsement, just as I am chary of welcoming their applause.

 

Mind you, a lot of the Left never read my own paper, the Mail on Sunday, or its sister the Daily Mail. Few even know that they are separate publications and that I write for only one of them. They prefer to excoriate them from a safe distance. If they did read them, they would know (apart from anything else) that both papers are pluralistic in offering prominent platforms to several different views, and that there are strong divergences among conservative voices.

 

Melanie Phillips and I, for instance, disagree quite strongly about the ‘war on terror’, Iran and the Iraq war. Max Hastings, Stephen Glover and I have all been among those urging caution over Syria. Quentin Letts tends to be a more traditional Tory, as does Andrew Roberts. The Daily Mail’s leader column last week was strongly critical of the rush to war. The MoS was highly doubtful about the Blair war, and was also among the very first in criticising the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, and publishing the disturbing pictures of kneeling, shackled, blindfolded prisoners there.  It has also taken a strong pro-liberty line in domestic matters, as have I.

 

No doubt many left wing anti-war people would dislike my stance on mass immigration (though they might be surprised by my consistent positions on liberty, identity cards and the forcing down of wages). I expect they would be hostile to my views on education largely because I voice them (though grammar schools are surely fairer to the poor than selection by wealth as we have now). I expect my most profound division with most left-wing people would come over the sexual revolution and illegal drugs.

 

This is because the modern left, far from being a social democratic movement dedicated to the  bettering of the lives of the poor,  has become , above all things, a liberationist movement dedicated to the greatest possible personal autonomy.

 

This autonomy, as it happens, cannot readily co-exist with strong monocultural settled nation states with powerful conscience-driven moral systems; nor can it coexist with a strong and influential Christianity, or with the tightly-knit united married families prescribed by that system.

 

That is why the greatest and most urgent passions of the left are often engaged in denouncing the Christian religion (sometimes dressed up with a bit of anti-Islamism, but essentially aiming at the Christian faith because it is the one whose strength or weakness affects them personally), and in pursuing a globalist multicultural internationalism.  

 

And yet many of the left are also still as disgusted as I am by war. Their post-Christian ethic still rightly sees war as an evil in itself, very hard to justify. When their more advanced thinkers (like my late brother, and like whoever wrote Anthony Blair’s Chicago speech on the ‘Responsibility to Protect’) take these beliefs to their logical conclusions – namely idealistic war and nice bombs  – they balk. In fact they are balking at a consequence of their own beliefs, the pursuit of globalism , the dismantling of borders and nations, the dismissal of absolute prohibitions on ends justifying means.

 

Good for them. But it will plainly take more than this to get them to question their own beliefs.

 

I don’t mind at all if these people loathe me personally. I can even see why they do. I used to be like them.  But to any of them who like what I say about the Syria war, I make one request. Now read my books, read this indexed and archived blog. See if anything else I say might possibly make sense.  Ask yourselves if the thing we have in common – a desire for the good – might perhaps be more important in the long run than the things which divide us. And let thought take the place of thoughtless, ill-informed scorn.   

Nick Cohen, Owen Jones and Me

Last week, the Leftist journalist Nick Cohen (who has, for reasons which escape me, won the love of several conservative journals), used a column in the Spectator to call Owen Jones the 'Peter Hitchens of the left'.

I don't think either of us exactly welcomed the comparison.

Mr Jones, a youthful left-winger, is the author of a book called 'Chavs' and now a columnist for the Independent. At his age I was still toiling away in the stokeholds and engine-rooms of journalism, and many years from having my own column.

He gave his own rebuttal of this in the Independent. I wrote a letter to the Spectator, which is published in this week's issue, and reads:

 

'Sir: Nick Cohen (‘Forget “militant” atheists’, 24 August) presumably seeks to injure me by calling Owen Jones ‘The Peter Hitchens of the Left’.  Mr Jones - who also did not take the equation as a compliment - has offered his own response to this elsewhere.  I am mainly mystified. Mr Jones and I are both human, and both write for a living, but this doesn’t seem to me to amount to an important resemblance.

 

But I recall that Mr Cohen has never sought to rebut, with facts or logic,  some serious criticisms I once made (in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’) of his support for the invasion of Iraq. I also scolded my fellow-conservatives for imagining that this stance made Mr Cohen in any way their friend or ally. He seems to me to remain a committed enemy of conservative opinions, especially mine. I also recall with some amusement a rather raucous and personal public attack which he made on me at an Orwell Prize event some years ago.

 

I think it would be civil of Mr Cohen, whose past support for selective state schools shows him to be a man of intelligence,  to argue with what I say, rather than attacking me personally.

 

Peter Hitchens'

 

I really would be interested to hear Mr Cohen's response to the critique I make of his position on the Iraq war, and of the welcome he received among conservatives when he supported that war. I believe there is a YouTube version of his Orwell Prize attack on me, for those who enjoy that sort of thing. Anyone who does watch it should know (because I think it has some bearing in the incident) that the year before I too had criticised the Orwell Prize judges, for shortlisting Alastair Campbell for the prize. I thought, and still think, that Mr Campbell is absolutely not in the Orwell tradition.  

  

David Cameron is a vainglorious fantasist. He should quit

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

The Good Samaritan did not have a gun. I make this simple point to deal with those who seem to think that you can show mercy and pity by lobbing cruise missiles into war zones.

I make no claims to be a good person, but I am more and more annoyed by warmongers who dress up their simple-minded, vainglorious desire to bomb foreigners as moral.

Take Lord Ashdown, who moaned on Friday, after MPs voted against an attack on Syria, that he had never felt so ashamed. Really? Many of us can remember at least one occasion when Lord Ashdown certainly ought to have felt more ashamed.

But these days, our moral worth is not judged by such things as constancy and trust close to home, but by our noisy readiness to bomb people for their own good.

The moral bomber is one of the scourges of our age. He gets it into his head that he is so good that he is allowed to kill people (accidentally of course) in a noble cause. 

This stupid conceit was – at long last – challenged last week in the House of Commons. MPs, many of them rightly prompted by the fears and concerns of their constituents, refused to be stampeded by emotional horror propaganda. They kept their heads.

The response of the moral bombers was typical of them. There was twaddle about ‘appeasement’. There was piffle about how our world status has suffered (don’t these people know what the rest of the planet has thought of us since the Iraq War?).

There was tripe about damage to the non-existent ‘special relationship’ between this country and the USA. Anyone who has spent two weeks in Washington DC knows that this ‘relationship’ is regarded there as a joke.

There was foul-mouthed fury from taxpayer-funded Downing Street aides, who I don’t  doubt echoed their master’s voice. There were the usual snivelling attempts to portray dissent as disloyalty, cowardice or as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
These flailing, spiteful acts were the reflexes of a babyish despot deprived of a toy.
Luckily, we are not yet a despotism. Despite a long assault on our free constitution, MPs can still follow their consciences, and public opinion cannot be entirely suppressed or manipulated.

In some ways, most shocking has been the behaviour of the BBC. It uncritically promoted atrocity propaganda from the beginning, making no effort  to be objective. It frequently treated opponents of the rush to war with nasty contempt. If the BBC Trust is to justify its large budget and fancy offices, it would do well to investigate this grave failure to be impartial.

But it was not just the BBC. Until a couple of days before Mr Cameron’s War was abruptly cancelled, most of the media were still braying for an attack.
What bunkum it all was. The ‘West’ has no consistent or moral position at all.  The ‘West’ readily condoned Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980s and ignored his use of them in Halabja for years, trying to blame others for it.

Saddam, later a villain, was then our ally. Hypocrisy continues to this day. The US and British governments, as they vapour about the wickedness  of Syria’s government, refuse even to admit the obvious fact that the Egyptian military junta came to power by a bloody and lawless putsch.

And, as they weep loud tears for the dead of Damascus (whose killers have yet to be identified) they are silent over the heaps of corpses piled in the streets of Cairo, undoubtedly gunned down by the junta, which used weapons paid for by the USA to do so, and didn’t even try to hide its actions.

Mr Blair himself, in an article for the Warmonger’s Gazette, formerly known as The Times, actually says we should ‘support the new [Egyptian] government in stabilising the country’.

That’s one way of putting it.

No doubt Bashar Assad would say he was stabilising his country. If outrage is selective it isn’t really outrage.

President Assad, for instance, was a welcome guest at Buckingham Palace on December 17, 2002, when his country was already famous for its torture chambers, its sponsorship of terror and its harbouring of grisly Nazi war criminals such as  the child-murderer Alois  Brunner.

If you know anything at all about the subject, it is rather difficult not to laugh at Mr Cameron’s righteous pose.

As for the rest of the Prime Minister’s arguments, they are not fit for an Eton junior debating society.
WHAT is wrong with ‘standing idly by’, if the only alternative is to do something stupid? Why does it matter so much that this country takes part in the stupidity? How can he be sure that any military action is limited?

If you start a fight, you provoke retaliation. And you then start a chain whose end you cannot possibly know. So it isn’t limited.
And, as he has been bursting to intervene in Syria for months, how can he claim that his passion is solely to do with the use of poison gas? If his aim is to deter future use, what is the mad rush?

As for Cameron’s ‘intelligence’ document, I could have written it myself. It all came off the internet.

Truly, he is the Heir To Blair. But having had one Blair already, we are at last learning the folly of indulging such  fantasists.
I don’t quite understand why he hasn’t resigned, as I’ve never in 40 years of journalism seen a Prime Minister more totally and personally repudiated by Parliament and nation.
But, whether he knows it or not, I think he is now finished. That at least is one good thing to come out of this self-righteous, ignorant posturing.

Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Carney?
Every so often, some spiv of a businessman is dragged before the courts and prosecuted for raiding the savings of prudent retired people and condemning them to a pinched and miserable old age.

Can someone explain the difference between the actions of these crooks and the current policy of the Bank of England’s over-praised new governor, Mark Carney, apart from the fact that what Mr Carney is doing is legal? By keeping interest rates below the level of inflation, he uses his enormous power to make the nation’s prudent, thrifty savers pay for our national debt binge. It is targeted inflation, immoral in a dozen ways.

The aggressively pinstriped Mr Carney looks to me as if one of those sinister pencil moustaches, as sported by Private Walker in Dad’s Army, is about to erupt on his upper lip.
If he would oblige by growing one, then he would at least look the part.

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