Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 267

More about War, the USA and God. Replies to contributors

‘HM’ writes :  ‘I’m not sure that I understand what Peter Hitchens is saying here: “Had we similarly failed to fulfil our obligations to Plucky Little Belgium, and made it plain in the pre-1914 years that we would fail to do so, we would still be a major economic, naval and diplomatic power…” Does “still” mean now, in 2013? “The main threat to us came not from that, but from naval, economic and diplomatic competition, and the biggest rival we had in those spheres was the USA.” How the USA was a “threat” to Britain in 1914. What were they going to do to us? “We gained nothing substantial or lasting from either war, but lost a great deal. A poor, militarily weak Britain is much more vulnerable to continental domination than a rich, imperial Britain would have been.” This suggests that Britain would have remained “imperial” if it had avoided war. Does he mean to the present day?

 

**My reply. Yes, I do mean that now, in 2013, we would be better off had we stayed out. So would a lot of other people. Had we kept out of the 1914 war, I believe Germany would have defeated France by November 1914, and imposed upon her a settlement which would have ruled her out as a major Continental power for the foreseeable future, if not forever. She was already in grave decline, and would prove in 1940 that she did not really have the wealth the capacity or the strength to maintain the position she claimed. In any case, as a Francophile, I must add that a swift defeat in 1914 would not have been anything like as bad as either Verdun or Vichy -  both consequences of the victory of the Marne.

 

Germany would then have gone on to attack Russia in full strength, probably in the Spring of 1915, a war which I believe would have ended with the cession of the territories which Germany eventually took over in the 1917 Peace of Brest-Litovsk.  The Romanov dynasty might well have ended as a result, but Russia would not have been anything like so devastated as she was after three years of war in 1917, and I doubt very much whether the Bolsheviks would have come to power. Austria-Hungary would have survived as a pensioner of Germany, though I suspect she would eventually have been absorbed, in all but name, into the ‘European Union’ contemplated by Kaiser Wilhelm and Bethmann-Hollweg. The strain of absorbing all this new territory, and of defending herself against the possibility of revenge from the East, would have preoccupied the German military for decades to come. I suspect that the naval programme ( see below) would have been quietly scaled down as an expensive toy. Germany’s need for a European empire (now satisfied through the EU, the Euro, the Single Market and Schengen) was always her chief driving force. Britain was only important to this plan insofar as she threatened to prevent it.

 

The ‘threat’ from the USA was commercial rivalry, the growing importance of the dollar, the gradual pushing of Britain out of the Western hemisphere by American power (as referred to by ‘Brian’ in an earlier thread) . This process was hugely accelerated and turned into a rapid cataclysm by the 1914-18 war, which caused us to liquidate our immense holdings In South America, until 1914 in many ways an unacknowledged part of the British Empire. Without 1914-18, it might not have happened yet.

 

The USA had also begun (Theodore Roosevelt having read Admiral Mahan on sea power, just as Tirpitz and Wilhelm II had) to create an ocean-going global navy, with Roosevelt’s ‘Great White Fleet’ touring the hemispheres to demonstrate Uncle Sam’s new-found sea power, a far more significant development than the Kaiser’s delusional ‘Luxury Fleet’. The Washington Naval Conference and the accompanying pressure from the USA to end our naval alliance with Japan could not, I believe, have taken place had Britain not bankrupted herself in the Great War. The USA achieved her objective, after all, by simply threatening to use her superior wealth to outbuild us if we didn’t sign.  These events clearly show that the USA *was* a threat to this country’s global standing (though of course not through naked violence, nor directly to our domestic liberty and independence, but in the end these amount to the same thing. If you become too weak and poor, you can’t stay free).

 

As soon as the opportunity arose, the USA seized the chance to curb our freedom of the seas (which she had long resented) , and to place restrictions upon our foreign policy through new international conventions. The 14 points and the League of Nations were early attempts by the USA to weaken the freedom of other states to act independently, consummated in the United Nations and the Nuremberg Tribunals, which (contrary to popular opinion) prosecuted Germany principally for ‘waging aggressive war’.  Work it out.  The USA, being an almost entirely contiguous land empire, and established top nation, benefits from such rules (as did the USSR from 1945-89 and as does China for the present) whereas the old-fashioned European empires scattered around the world – especially ours -  did not.  The general direction of US policy, as we have grown weaker, at Versailles, at Washington in 1920, at Placentia Bay, at Teheran and Yalta,  at Bretton Woods, and after Suez, has necessarily been damaging to Britain. It’s not usually personal, though one cannot help thinking that a resentment of the former colonial power may run deep in some American minds. But the USA could only rise at the expense of Britain, and so she did.

 

 

 

 

 

And  Patrick Harris said: ‘I'm legitimately curious what threat Mr. Hitchens believes the USA posed (or still does) to the UK in terms of diplomatic and naval competition.’

 

**See above.

 

 

Then ‘Andrew’ wrote :  ‘It is not often I disagree with Mr Hitchens but I do on this occasion. His argument is intellectually coherent and all he says is basically true. But it misses the central point and I suspect he is being deliberately provocative. To give up Europe to the Germans twice in a century would have been morally wrong - regardless of Britain's national interest. Ill-prepared, incompetently-led and all the rest of it - we did the right thing precisely because we were a Christian, Anglo-Saxon country with an often pig-headed commitment to a morality (allied to a sense of Imperial destiny) not shared by other countries in Europe.’

 

**I thought I had disposed of the case that either war was a ‘Good War’ fought for a moral purpose. Doesn’t ‘Andrew’ realise who our principal ally was in the 1941-45 conflict, which followed our defeat in the 1939-40 war. Doesn’t he realise we were committed to that hideous alliance precisely because of that defeat? And that that defeat was brought about by our (for the second time in 50 years) idiotically threatening war without an army to back our threats?

Stalin, that’s who it was, with his concentration camps and his secret police and his torture cellars, a form of rule we helped him extend almost as far west as Hanover, and most especially into Poland, the country for which we claimed to be going to war  to save in 1939. What moral purpose we served in 1914-18 I’m also not sure, as once again we were allied (from the start)with an earlier and less totalitarian Russian despotism.  In both wars we used terrible methods – the deliberate starvation of German civilians by blockade in 1914-18, and the deliberate bombing of civilians in their homes in 1942-45. Had we ‘given up Europe to the Germans in 1914’, we would not have had to ‘give Europe up to the Soviets ‘ in 1945. Nor, in my view, would there ever have been any Nazis, or any concentration camps. It was the long continuation of World War One which made these things possible.

 

I might also add  a note on the Jews of Europe. I do not believe the mad mass murder of European Jews would have taken place had Germany won a swift victory in 1914. The historical trail which leads to Hitler and the Nazis begins in the insane, demoralising horrors of the trenches. We have discussed elsewhere the fact that the ‘moral’ Allies did nothing to save the Jews from Hitler, and that the war was not fought for that reason. The effect of the 1914-18 war upon the Turkish empire and the Middle East needs a whole separate article. What if the Ottoman empire had survived?

 

 

David Anderson  writes : ‘With regard to the entry into the Great War: is it worth bringing the question of the naval arms race into the discussion here? The British government might have (rightly) been a good deal more hesitant to commit itself had German not been building an enormous blue water navy of something like 50 capital ships by 1914. With no (serious) overseas empire to protect, such a force could only serve one purpose and everyone knew what it was. German control of the low countries might have meant far less to HM's government had the Kaiserliche Marine not made Germany a serious naval power. That is not to deny that the entry in the war was a disaster for Britain and the empire, or that remain aloof with our enormous navy in reserve would not have meant that the outcome of the war wouldn't have left us in a very strong position, with regard to both Germany and America. Anyhow, I think the issue is an important one which makes the decision to declare war at least comprehensible. On the German side, one has to wonder how much more formidable her armies would have been, had men and money not been directed to the navy. Apologies if Mr. Hitchens has already commented on this elsewhere.’

 

***Certainly it influenced British thinking. But why be provoked into war, when you are strong enough to get your way without it? Our Navy was still , in 1914, quite strong enough to ensure that the Kaiser’s Fleet stayed largely in port. Had we not been distracted by a land war in 1914, we could have ensured a far greater superiority in the event of any future conflict. If Germany had won a swift land victory over France, and then a second one over Russia, in 1914 or 1915, what use would the German fleet have been beyond the Baltic and perhaps some raids on Vladivostok? Hitler pretty quickly realised that a German surface Fleet was a waste of time in pursuit of German foreign aims, and threated to have his own Navy melted down. Submariens are a different matter, but that didn’t arise until well after the war began. The German fleet was a good reason to maintain and strengthen our own, but a poor one for joining up with France and Russia in a continental war in which we had nothing at stake.

 

 

 

Finally, a word of thanks to John Vernau, whose posting is a model of clear understanding. I do urge some of my New Atheist critics to read it, as they will then be able to see what their prejudice prevents them from understand.  Perhaps if they at last understand what it is they don’t understand, and that they don’t understand it because they don’t want to understand it,  they will at least go away to their bunkers and leave me alone.  As to those atheists who say they are not moved by any hostility towards God and religion, good for them. But the New Atheists most certainly are, and often say so, and that is why they wish to assert that belief is an illegitimate choice (whereas by contrast I am quite happy to acknowledge that they may be right) . All such assertions lead inexorably to totalitarianism and censorship, as I have demonstrated elsewhere.

 

Mr Vernau wrote:

 

 ‘I notice that some contributors have referred to the "God hypothesis". The point of Hitchens' Choice (and the similar Pascal's Wager) is that they proceed from the assumption that it is impossible to know anything about the existence or not of God. Once this is agreed, the logic is impeccable. I don't think either gentleman would allow the possibility of a God hypothesis, as hypotheses by definition must be falsifiable or provable. Mr Hitchens has stated his position which I think is unassailable. His only vulnerability (in the assumption) is to solid proof of the existence or otherwise of God or some encompassing proof such as that all things are knowable. In the absence of such proof, mention of Bible quotes, flying teapots or dairy products of whatever colour are irrelevant.’

Wot Abaht Alcohol then , eh? eh? eh?

We have had the Comment warriors here again, in response to (though in no way addressing) the story of the magistrate Yvonne Davies.

 

Almost without exception they used the 'argument' (is it taught in school PSHE classes? I suspect so) that alcohol is bad and legal, and that these facts  in some way undermine the case against cannabis.

 

Here is the comprehensive rebuttal which I have given in the past to this twaddle:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/02/the-continuing-crisis-and-some-responses.html

 

I am amused to say, in re-reading it, how many other recurrent nuisances feature in this post.

So many people come to this weblog to write, but not to read.  As a result, I learn a lot from them, often how poor their arguments are, how they avoid thinking, etc etc. They learn nothing from me . It seems unfair, but it's their choice. One contributor here never reads what I write at all, and keeps saying the same thing over and over and over and over again. Is it kind of me, I sometimes wonder, to let him do this?

'Sunday Morning Live' - fatherhood, the Church and Forgiveness

On Sunday 30th June I took part in the BBC TV programme 'Sunday Morning Live', which can be watched by following this link, for some time to come:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b036pq9h/Sunday_Morning_Live_Series_4_Episode_1/

It's some months since I was last on any form of national broadcasting, though people always tell me I'm 'on all the time'(usually on the basis of a couple of appearances - on that basis, judging by the past couple of months, it would be equally true to say that 'I am 'never' on TV and radio. The truth is these things are quite episodic, and are often down to complex formulae of 'balance' on panels, which can and do change at the last minute. I also do quite frequently turn down appearances, or talk myself out of them, because it's a subject I don't care or know enough about.

 

The only way to be 'on all the time' is to achieve the status of BBC favourite which means you appear regularly on panels or as a presenter.

 

I'll say little about yesterday's programme (my contributions speak for themselves) except to say that the format does allow for quite a lot of proper discussion, that the subjects are serious ones, and that it is intelligently produced and presented.  

First Steppes in Pragmatism, or 'Ethical Foreign Policy meets Oilfield' - Mr Slippery Goes to Kazakhstan

So our Prime Minister, Mr Slippery, has managed to slip in a visit to Kazakhstan.   Now, I have no personal objection to such visits. We need to get our military equipment out of Afghanistan, the Pakistani route may be closed or difficult, and we need business, and if we need to be nice to an unpleasant despot to achieve these things, that is fine by me. My only principle in foreign policy is the national interest of my country, its sovereignty and liberty. 

 

But Mr Slippery's stern interventionist moral position on Syria’s Hafez Assad, and on Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi, is rather undermined by his politically-expedient friendliness towards the comically sinister ( but sinister even so) Nursultan Nazarbayev.  Of course, Anthony Blair (to whom Mr Cameron is,  as we know,  the heir) has already been busy in this interesting part of the world, where the offices of critical newspapers burn down mysteriously (and headless dogs are hung up outside their charred offices), and critical individuals get roughed up equally mysteriously in darkened hallways.  A conspiracy theorist might think these things were connected. The very idea.

 

Those who would like to read more about the Kazakh paradise and its fascinating capital city can do so by following the two links below, both of which were written following an enjoyable visit I made there a few years ago. Alas, I do not think I shall be going back.

 

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327296/Kazakh-President-Nazarbayev-dictator-Royal-warrant.html

 

and

 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/soviet-stepchildren/

 

 

Here We Go Again - The Tory Pledge of a Marriage Tax Allowance

With a yawn and a shrug, I note that Mr Slippery is once again dangling his marriage tax allowance before his ever-shrinking rump of voters and supporters. This follows a brief outbreak of equally unconvincing John Bull imitations last week, when he pretended to have a had a row in Brussels, and noisily denounced a children’s colouring book illustrating a day in the life of an MEP. That'll show those EU johnnies).

 

I cannot definitively trace Mr Cameron’s pledge of a tax break to married couples any further back than June 2005, when (during his interestingly long  campaign for the Tory leadership, which he wouldn’t have won if it had been a short campaign) he told the Policy Exchange think tank that it was right to use the law and the tax and benefits system to encourage people to stay together.

 

This was eclipsed by 2007 by George Osborne’s costly promises on inheritance tax (what exactly happened to them?) , which successfully frightened Gordon Brown out of holding an election. By December 2009 the allowance was back and had become a specific plan to offer tax breaks worth about £150 a year to married couples. I say a *plan* because, soon after it was announced, it was savaged by the single-parent lobby, who heckled Mr Cameron and said it was discriminatory’  (which of course would have been the whole point of it).

 

Thereupon it became a ‘hope’, though it was later upgraded to a promise of action during this (2010-2015) Parliament (one which the Liberal Democrats were specifically exempted from supporting in the Coalition Agreement, which is an  interesting sort of conditional or perhaps forlorn hope).  I seem to recall that it has been dragged up a few times since, whenever Mr Cameron was in deep trouble with the collection of hypnotised buffers, in the media and at Westminster,  who make up the so-called ‘right-wing’ of the Tory Party, and who can be endlessly fooled by the same tricks, symbolic gestures of no value which are in many cases never implemented (referendums in the distant future, alleged vetoes of EU measures which have never actually been proposed) or greatly delayed and of no value in any case (the departure of the Tories from the EPP in Brussels was another one of these. When it was at last accomplished it turned out to be what it had obviously been from the start, futile).

 

Now, with UKIP continuing to grow quietly at Tory expense, and awaiting only the Euro elections next year to do Mr Cameron some more damage, here comes the marriage tax allowance again. This time it is garlanded with political correctness because it must obviously apply to same-sex marriages as well as to heterosexual ones. This (as has not been noted) will make it harder for the other politically correct lobby (the single parent family one) to attack it.

 

I think it’s also being denied, in this version, to ‘Higher Rate’ taxpayers, a categorysupposedly made up of greedy plutocrats, but which now includes a huge and growing part of the population. For the ‘Higher rate’ is rapidly, thanks to not being uprated in line with inflation, becoming the new Standard Rate. That won’t make Polly Toynbee happy, exactly. But it may make her less unhappy.

 

I don’t know if there’s a majority for this measure in our present House of Commons and I don’t much care. Left wingers who jeer that nobody will get married, or stay married, for the sake of £150 a year, are quite right. The plan was always a gesture without substance, which is why it exists at all.

 

A real reform would start with the current divorce laws, a scandalous state of affairs which makes every husband in the country permanently vulnerable to the unilateral dissolution of marriage (wives are equally vulnerable in law to one-sided divorce, but they are far more likely to end up with the house and the children , regardless of their behaviour, so it is the husbands who are much more exposed in most cases); and which puts the state on the side of the party to a marriage who wants to dissolve it, rather than on the side of the party who wants to maintain it.

 

This is the influence which has led to the destruction of many marriages which would otherwise have endured, and which reduces the number of future marriages, because it deters many men from embarking on a course which is horribly likely to end in disaster. This encourages unmarried cohabitation. Quite enough is already done by the tax and benefits system, and by our culture, to encourage the formation of fatherless households.

 

The abolition of the old marriage tax allowance was never crucial in this process of dismantling lifelong marriage  (though there was a long stage in the Thatcher era when unmarried couples could get twice the tax relief on mortgages that married couples could get, which, I suspect,  deterred quite a lot of people from getting married) . It was and is the 1969 Divorce Law Reform Act, plus the wholly amoral case law on property and custody which has followed it (see the chapter ‘Difficulties with Girls’ in my ‘The Abolition of Britain’) which has hollowed out the institution of marriage in this country.  Until someone is prepared to re-examine that law, which indulged adults at the expense of children, nothing much will change.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Myth of Peaceful Cannabis

I note that the myth of cannabis as a 'peaceful' drug is being advanced again. Those who are seduced by this piffle are invited to visit this link

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/07/high-and-violent.html

which shows that, whatever the truth is, not all cannabis users are that peaceful.  

It cost one brave JP her job - but we're ALL victims of the Great Cannabis Con

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The Government and the courts are lying to you. Officially, cannabis is against the law. In practical fact, this is largely false.
This country is running a covert experiment in marijuana legalisation, which makes Amsterdam look puritan and severe.
But officially the law stays on the books. This allows Ministers to make grandiose claims that they are still fighting to protect your children from drugs, when in truth they have surrendered to the cannabis culture.
It also allows the Government to claim it is honouring the treaties that oblige us to ban marijuana. This fake law is one of the biggest lies in modern politics, so big that it is almost impossible to expose it. I have many times tried, though my recent detailed and carefully researched book on the subject was ignored or crudely smeared in most of the media.
But perhaps this will persuade you. This week a Manchester magistrate, Yvonne Davies, was forced from her job because she pleaded with a convicted cannabis grower, Christopher Duncan, to mend his ways. She did so because her own brother, Glen Harding, died tragically after becoming a habitual cannabis user.
Mrs Davies had no doubt that her brother’s disastrous descent was the result of this extremely dangerous and potent drug – crazily viewed as ‘soft’ by our culture. Just as in the years when science first began to link cigarettes with lung cancer, direct causal evidence is lacking. But the correlation is so strong that no responsible person can ignore it.
So there was Mrs Davies, enforcing the law as it is written down, trying to do a bit of good by sharing her own grief. And what happened?
Peter Reynolds, leader of a campaign to weaken the cannabis laws, lodged a complaint. I know Mr Reynolds. He is a charming, plausible and determined pest. I sometimes get the impression he thinks he is cannabis in person, so sensitive is he to criticisms of it.
Actually, he is not a very good advocate for his greasy and dangerous cause, and is easily countered by facts and logic. I and my friend David Raynes (a former Customs officer who knows about drugs) have beaten him in debate, and before an audience of students, too.
He has also complained (unsuccessfully so far) against me to the Press Complaints Commission.
Yet his attack on Mrs Davies succeeded. The allegedly tough and allegedly Conservative ‘Minister of Justice’, Chris Grayling, and the Lord Chief Injustice, the overpraised Lord Judge, agreed she should be reprimanded, a serious sanction. They said: ‘The views expressed in court were inappropriate. The Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice agreed and concluded that her combined actions fell below the standard of behaviour expected of a magistrate.’
The complaint from Mr Reynolds was supported by several retired magistrates, who ought to be profoundly ashamed of their behaviour.
Mrs Davies said it was ‘astounding that the views of a pro-cannabis campaigner were used to build a case against me. As far as I am aware, cannabis is still very much illegal in Britain.’
But it isn’t really. Like so many kind, dutiful, respectable people, she still has no idea of the depth and fury of the revolution which is still scouring its way through all our institutions.
One of its most vindictive and hateful aspects is its worship of human selfishness. And one of the main symbols of this new and ugly faith is the stinking weed called cannabis. Its cult is summed up in the words so often spat out by sulky adolescents of all ages: ‘I can do what I want with my own body. It’s none of your business!’
As Mrs Davies knows very well from her own bitter experience, it is our business, as a society and as individuals. The grief caused by her brother’s sad suicide in a canal, the grief caused to parents, children, brothers and sisters when family members go permanently mad after using cannabis, is real.
Many people write to tell me of such things. And a wise society would praise Mrs Davies for trying to hold the line against this evil, to help the young resist the tremendous peer pressure to risk their sanity by drug-taking.
But we are not a wise society, and those who sit in the seats of power are not fit to be trusted with that power. Now you have seen how they acted in this case, and which side they took in this quarrel, will you at last believe me?

Even Brady has his uses in our polluted world

The Ian Brady freak show does have its uses. It helps my campaign to bring back hanging, simply by reminding people of the Moors case.
And it was quite funny to hear this gruesome pervert and murderer praise Roy Jenkins, the smirking gravedigger of British criminal justice, as ‘the best Home Secretary ever’. It’s a tribute Lord Jenkins richly deserves.
But it should also remind us of the part that pornography played in the Moors murders. I mean so-called mainstream pornography of the kind that now flows through our culture available to all, a reeking canal of slurry as wide as the Thames or the Tyne.
While we fuss (rightly) about child pornography, we shrug about material marketed by businessmen whose donations are accepted by reputable charities.
The Left-liberal novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson attended the Moors trial, and could not get out of her Left-liberal head the fact that Brady and Myra Hindley shared and made much use of a ‘modest library’ of some 50 books devoted to sadism, sexual perversions, torture and Nazism.
In her book On Iniquity, Miss Johnson wondered out loud if they had been influenced by these books. Of course they had been. In my own Left-liberal phase, I read Hubert Selby’s Last Exit To Brooklyn while it was on trial for obscenity, and to this day, 47 years later, I wish I hadn’t.
Yet we still revere John Mortimer, who worked so tirelessly in the courts (and was so well rewarded for it) to make this mental poison readily available in every home.
And we still look back on the Lady Chatterley trial as a day of liberation, rather than the moment we invited pornography into our midst to do all the damage it has done and will do.
 
I am pleased to say that the measles outbreak in South Wales seems to be coming to an end. Better still, it may not have been as bad as it first seemed.
Public Health Wales were able to test 689 of the reported cases. Of those, only 318 tested positive – about 46 per cent.
Apparently, for every patient with measles who seeks medical advice and tests positive for the illness, there will be at least one other who doesn’t see a doctor.
Still, these figures are interesting and I am surprised I have not seen them before now. I commend them to the BBC and others who have in the past made much of this outbreak for various propaganda purposes.

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

Armageddon and Green Cheese

Well, Mr Smythe has at last let us know what’s on *his* mind’ , after all his attempts to suggest that he knew something Fritz Fischer didn't.  He says ‘a belief in German war guilt in WW2 is ridiculous. Germany was a relatively small nation in 1939, all they could possibly start was a small European war against Poland. England and France with their massive Empire ensured the war was a world war’

 

Ah. ‘I never started World War Two, guv, honest, all I done was invade Poland and the USSR, and Denmark, Norway and Belgium, and Holland, and Yugoslavia, and Greece, and North Africa.  It was only those British and French imperialists and my Japanese allies what turned it into a World war. I mean, left to me it would just have been local’.

 

Well, it’s a point of view.

 

By the way, here's a link to an excellent essay by Nigel Jones on the controversy about who started World War One.

 

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2012/09/lets-not-be-beastly-to-the-germans/

 

 

 

I explore below why my views on the World Wars are so often resisted by people who oughtn’t to resist them, and misinterpreted by people who should know better.

 

I do not say that Germany ought to dominate Europe because I am some sort of pan-German enthusiast for the German way of life nor because I am (as so many of my critics would dearly like to believe) some sort of crypto National Socialist. I am a British patriot and Burkeian conservative, whose principal political concern is national independence and liberty (the foundation on which all other aims must be based) and is repelled by such ideas.

 

I say it because, since the reunification of Germany in 1870, no other outcome is possible , unless the other European powers were to defeat Germany and impose a truly Carthaginian peace upon her, from which she could never recover.  But I don’t think any civilised person could support that. Imagine the brutality and destruction that would be needed. Unthinkable.

 

So how does the intelligent patriotic conservative react to the unification of Germany? By forming unprincipled alliances with an old enemy and with a distant despotism (a normal tyranny in 1914, a horrendous torture chamber in 1941), to try to prevent the inevitable? What a silly attitude.

 

As others have pointed out here, Britain somehow failed to fulfil her ‘obligations’ in Scheswig-Holstein, without being condemned to perpetual infamy. Had we similarly failed to fulfil our obligations to Plucky Little Belgium, and made it plain in the pre-1914 years that we would fail to do so, we would still be a major economic, naval and diplomatic power, and Belgium (not having been ‘rescued’ by our declaration of war, or persuaded into self-destructive bravado, a la Poland,  by a baseless belief that we would somehow rescue her with an army we had not got) might well have been spared four years of occupation, plunder and depredation, plus the slaughter of many civilians and the destruction of many of its towns.

 

As I’ve pointed out before, Belgian neutrality was a dead letter before we intervened to ‘protect’ it. We didn’t save it, nor were we able to restore it. Nobody answers this point.

 

Then there’s the belief, mainly rooted in national vanity, that Germany in 1914 regarded us as a major target. She did after we got in her way (for reasons which German statesmen could not understand then, and  which I cannot understand now)  in 1914, and even more after we blockaded her. She had to.  But that was not because she ever had any territorial aims in our direction. It was by then a matter of responding to enmity with enmity, and hostilities with hostilities.

 

Similarly, there is *no* evidence that Hitler was interested in this country, except in so far as we got in his way while he followed his actual interests. The only question about World War Two (By the way,  I am not a pacifist ,as I am accused of being. I also have better reasons than many people for being hostile to the Hitler government’s internal policies., though I don’t regard these in general as a reason for war. Nor were they the reason for the war, nor did the allies have as their aim the prevention of the mass-murder of the Jews of Europe. Nor did they pursue such an aim.   Nor do I say we should *never* have entered that war, It might well have been to our advantage to have entered it at some stage. I just say that we entered it at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. Can we get that straight?)

 

It is a chore to have to spend so much time telling silly, lazy, critics what I do *not* think and have not said. But it’s the penalty anyone has to pay, who steps so much as an inch outside conventional wisdom on this subject, immediately you’re a ’pacifist’ , or a ‘Nazi apologist’ or ‘pro-German’ or ‘little Englander’ or some such concrete-headed slander. .

 

I have repeatedly answered the fatuous arguments of those who seem to think there is anything worse about Germany controlling the French coast than there is about France controlling the French coast. These are made-up objections. As long as this country maintained a strong navy and (later) a strong air force, the narrow seas were worth an army of about a million trained men to us, plus about two billion pounds’ worth of concrete forts, that is, a huge deterrent to physical invasion. The main threat to us came not from that, but from naval, economic and diplomatic competition, and the biggest rival we had in those spheres was the USA.

 

In any case, the interests of France lay mainly on the Mediterranean littoral, in the Middle East and in West Africa, and those of Germany in the Carpathians, The Balkans, Austria, the Ukrainian and Polish plains, and the Caucasus. People have read too many ‘War Picture Library’ comics. The First and Second World Wars were not, at heart conflicts between Britain and Germany. They were conflicts between Germany and France, Germany and Russia/The USSR and Germany and the USA, in which Britain was involved, largely by her own choice.  We gained nothing substantial or lasting from either war, but lost a great deal.  A poor, militarily weak Britain is much more vulnerable to continental domination than a rich, imperial Britain would have been.

 

Those who are convinced , and endlessly insist, that either the Kaiser or Hitler harboured plans to invade and subjugate this country, need to produce evidence of this desire, which on the face of it would have been wholly irrational if we had stayed out of their wars with France and Russia. We have always lacked an independent offensive capacity on the Continent, while at the same time possessing the most effective defence against Continental land attack that can be conceived of. Work it out for yourself.

 

Mr Harvey attacks me for not having made a case for belief in God, or defended Christianity here. Quite right. I don’t do either of these things.   I wouldn’t dream of trying.  I'm not qualified. I have enough trouble believing the creeds myself, without trying to persuade anyone else. I leave all that to other people.  

 

All I ever do is insist that my decision to believe in God is a rational choice plainly influenced by desire, open to anyone else who wishes to make it (and equally self-closed to any who wish not to make it, by their own desires) -  and that atheism and agnosticism are likewise rational choices influenced by desire.  Yet this modest claim is too great for the new God-Hating Atheists, who dare not concede that belief is a choice, or that their belief is a belief, because their hatred (and fear) of God is so strong they cannot even bear to consider the possibility He might exist.

 

They will not accept (or even consider) the (patently true) statement that, as we do not know, and probably cannot know, the origins of the universe or of life, it is *possible* (not knowable, not provable, just *possible*) that they were brought about by a purposeful intelligence.

 

Instead they rage about how there is ‘not a shred of evidence’ for the idea of God (which is simply not true, see above. No thinking, scientifically informed mind can exclude it) , make false parallels with irrational suppositions about Father Christmas, planets made of green cheese, goblins, dragons, orbiting teapots and the rest of the callow teenage jeering which passes for wit among these people. Or they demand theological arguments about the details of Christian belief and practice,  or the validity of passages in the Bible, which again aren’t at issue in the simple question of ‘might there be a God’.

 

One senses an irresistible desire to *change the subject* . And I have never known a debater wanting to change the subject when he knew he was winning. It’s a bunker in which to shelter a firmly shut mind from acknowledging a possibility,  which must be a possibility. As I’ve many times said, one can only wonder what it is that makes them so anxious to exclude a possibility that obviously is a possibility, that they actually lie to themselves. Fear is a powerful motive, as I know from my own experience. I think that’s what it is. Frit, that's what they are.  

A Debate on Immigration

I'm sorry about the stiff price, but thought some readers might be interested in this debate, organised by the Spectator magazine on David Goodhart's recent book on immigration.

 

http://events.spectator.co.uk/immigration.html

More about War, the USA and God. Replies to contrbutors

‘HM’ writes :  ‘I’m not sure that I understand what Peter Hitchens is saying here: “Had we similarly failed to fulfil our obligations to Plucky Little Belgium, and made it plain in the pre-1914 years that we would fail to do so, we would still be a major economic, naval and diplomatic power…” Does “still” mean now, in 2013? “The main threat to us came not from that, but from naval, economic and diplomatic competition, and the biggest rival we had in those spheres was the USA.” How the USA was a “threat” to Britain in 1914. What were they going to do to us? “We gained nothing substantial or lasting from either war, but lost a great deal. A poor, militarily weak Britain is much more vulnerable to continental domination than a rich, imperial Britain would have been.” This suggests that Britain would have remained “imperial” if it had avoided war. Does he mean to the present day?

 

**My reply. Yes, I do mean that now, in 2013, we would be better off had we stayed out. So would a lot of other people. Had we kept out of the 1914 war, I believe Germany would have defeated France by November 1914, and imposed upon her a settlement which would have ruled her out as a major Continental power for the foreseeable future, if not forever. She was already in grave decline, and would prove in 1940 that she did not really have the wealth the capacity or the strength to maintain the position she claimed. In any case, as a Francophile, I must add that a swift defeat in 1914 would not have been anything like as bad as either Verdun or Vichy -  both consequences of the victory of the Marne.

 

Germany would then have gone on to attack Russia in full strength, probably in the Spring of 1915, a war which I believe would have ended with the cession of the territories which Germany eventually took over in the 1917 Peace of Brest-Litovsk.  The Romanov dynasty might well have ended as a result, but Russia would not have been anything like so devastated as she was after three years of war in 1917, and I doubt very much whether the Bolsheviks would have come to power. Austria-Hungary would have survived as a pensioner of Germany, though I suspect she would eventually have been absorbed, in all but name, into the ‘European Union’ contemplated by Kaiser Wilhelm and Bethmann-Hollweg. The strain of absorbing all this new territory, and of defending herself against the possibility of revenge from the East, would have preoccupied the German military for decades to come. I suspect that the naval programme ( see below) would have been quietly scaled down as an expensive toy. Germany’s need for a European empire (now satisfied through the EU, the Euro, the Single Market and Schengen) was always her chief driving force. Britain was only important to this plan insofar as she threatened to prevent it.

 

The ‘threat’ from the USA was commercial rivalry, the growing importance of the dollar, the gradual pushing of Britain out of the Western hemisphere by American power (as referred to by ‘Brian’ in an earlier thread) . This process was hugely accelerated and turned into a rapid cataclysm by the 1914-18 war, which caused us to liquidate our immense holdings In South America, until 1914 in many ways an unacknowledged part of the British Empire. Without 1914-18, it might not have happened yet.

 

The USA had also begun (Theodore Roosevelt having read Admiral Mahan on sea power, just as Tirpitz and Wilhelm II had) to create an ocean-going global navy, with Roosevelt’s ‘Great White Fleet’ touring the hemispheres to demonstrate Uncle Sam’s new-found sea power, a far more significant development than the Kaiser’s delusional ‘Luxury Fleet’. The Washington Naval Conference and the accompanying pressure from the USA to end our naval alliance with Japan could not, I believe, have taken place had Britain not bankrupted herself in the Great War. The USA achieved her objective, after all, by simply threatening to use her superior wealth to outbuild us if we didn’t sign.  These events clearly show that the USA *was* a threat to this country’s global standing (though of course not through naked violence, nor directly to our domestic liberty and independence, but in the end these amount to the same thing. If you become too weak and poor, you can’t stay free).

 

As soon as the opportunity arose, the USA seized the chance to curb our freedom of the seas (which she had long resented) , and to place restrictions upon our foreign policy through new international conventions. The 14 points and the League of Nations were early attempts by the USA to weaken the freedom of other states to act independently, consummated in the United Nations and the Nuremberg Tribunals, which (contrary to popular opinion) prosecuted Germany principally for ‘waging aggressive war’.  Work it out.  The USA, being an almost entirely contiguous land empire, and established top nation, benefits from such rules (as did the USSR from 1945-89 and as does China for the present) whereas the old-fashioned European empires scattered around the world – especially ours -  did not.  The general direction of US policy, as we have grown weaker, at Versailles, at Washington in 1920, at Placentia Bay, at Teheran and Yalta,  at Bretton Woods, and after Suez, has necessarily been damaging to Britain. It’s not usually personal, though one cannot help thinking that a resentment of the former colonial power may run deep in some American minds. But the USA could only rise at the expense of Britain, and so she did.

 

 

 

 

 

And  Patrick Harris said: ‘I'm legitimately curious what threat Mr. Hitchens believes the USA posed (or still does) to the UK in terms of diplomatic and naval competition.’

 

**See above.

 

 

Then ‘Andrew’ wrote :  ‘It is not often I disagree with Mr Hitchens but I do on this occasion. His argument is intellectually coherent and all he says is basically true. But it misses the central point and I suspect he is being deliberately provocative. To give up Europe to the Germans twice in a century would have been morally wrong - regardless of Britain's national interest. Ill-prepared, incompetently-led and all the rest of it - we did the right thing precisely because we were a Christian, Anglo-Saxon country with an often pig-headed commitment to a morality (allied to a sense of Imperial destiny) not shared by other countries in Europe.’

 

**I thought I had disposed of the case that either war was a ‘Good War’ fought for a moral purpose. Doesn’t ‘Andrew’ realise who our principal ally was in the 1941-45 conflict, which followed our defeat in the 1939-40 war. Doesn’t he realise we were committed to that hideous alliance precisely because of that defeat? And that that defeat was brought about by our (for the second time in 50 years) idiotically threatening war without an army to back our threats?

Stalin, that’s who it was, with his concentration camps and his secret police and his torture cellars, a form of rule we helped him extend almost as far west as Hanover, and most especially into Poland, the country for which we claimed to be going to war  to save in 1939. What moral purpose we served in 1914-18 I’m also not sure, as once again we were allied (from the start)with an earlier and less totalitarian Russian despotism.  In both wars we used terrible methods – the deliberate starvation of German civilians by blockade in 1914-18, and the deliberate bombing of civilians in their homes in 1942-45. Had we ‘given up Europe to the Germans in 1914’, we would not have had to ‘give Europe up to the Soviets ‘ in 1945. Nor, in my view, would there ever have been any Nazis, or any concentration camps. It was the long continuation of World War One which made these things possible.

 

I might also add  a note on the Jews of Europe. I do not believe the mad mass murder of European Jews would have taken place had Germany won a swift victory in 1914. The historical trail which leads to Hitler and the Nazis begins in the insane, demoralising horrors of the trenches. We have discussed elsewhere the fact that the ‘moral’ Allies did nothing to save the Jews from Hitler, and that the war was not fought for that reason. The effect of the 1914-18 war upon the Turkish empire and the Middle East needs a whole separate article. What if the Ottoman empire had survived?

 

 

David Anderson  writes : ‘With regard to the entry into the Great War: is it worth bringing the question of the naval arms race into the discussion here? The British government might have (rightly) been a good deal more hesitant to commit itself had German not been building an enormous blue water navy of something like 50 capital ships by 1914. With no (serious) overseas empire to protect, such a force could only serve one purpose and everyone knew what it was. German control of the low countries might have meant far less to HM's government had the Kaiserliche Marine not made Germany a serious naval power. That is not to deny that the entry in the war was a disaster for Britain and the empire, or that remain aloof with our enormous navy in reserve would not have meant that the outcome of the war wouldn't have left us in a very strong position, with regard to both Germany and America. Anyhow, I think the issue is an important one which makes the decision to declare war at least comprehensible. On the German side, one has to wonder how much more formidable her armies would have been, had men and money not been directed to the navy. Apologies if Mr. Hitchens has already commented on this elsewhere.’

 

***Certainly it influenced British thinking. But why be provoked into war, when you are strong enough to get your way without it? Our Navy was still , in 1914, quite strong enough to ensure that the Kaiser’s Fleet stayed largely in port. Had we not been distracted by a land war in 1914, we could have ensured a far greater superiority in the event of any future conflict. If Germany had won a swift land victory over France, and then a second one over Russia, in 1914 or 1915, what use would the German fleet have been beyond the Baltic and perhaps some raids on Vladivostok? Hitler pretty quickly realised that a German surface Fleet was a waste of time in pursuit of German foreign aims, and threated to have his own Navy melted down. Submariens are a dfefrent matter, but that didn’t arse until well after the war began. The German fleet was a good reason to maintain and strengthen our own, but a poor one for joining up with France and Russia in a continental war in which we had nothing at stake.

 

 

 

Finally, a word of thanks to John Vernau, whose posting is a model of clear understanding. I do urge some of my New Atheist critics to read it, as they will then be able to see what their prejudice prevents them from understand.  Perhaps if they at last understand what it is they don’t understand, and that they don’t understand it because they don’t want to understand it,  they will at least go away to their bunkers and leave me alone.  As to those atheists who say they are not moved by any hostility towards God and religion, good for them. But the New Atheists most certainly are, and often say so, and that is why they wish to assert that belief is an illegitimate choice (whereas by contrast I am quite happy to acknowledge that they may be right) . All such assertions lead inexorably to totalitarianism and censorship, as I have demonstrated elsewhere.

 

Mr Vernau wrote:

 

 ‘I notice that some contributors have referred to the "God hypothesis". The point of Hitchens' Choice (and the similar Pascal's Wager) is that they proceed from the assumption that it is impossible to know anything about the existence or not of God. Once this is agreed, the logic is impeccable. I don't think either gentleman would allow the possibility of a God hypothesis, as hypotheses by definition must be falsifiable or provable. Mr Hitchens has stated his position which I think is unassailable. His only vulnerability (in the assumption) is to solid proof of the existence or otherwise of God or some encompassing proof such as that all things are knowable. In the absence of such proof, mention of Bible quotes, flying teapots or dairy products of whatever colour are irrelevant.’