Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 268

An Interview with the York University newspaper "Nouse"

Alas, there will be no recording of my conversation with Greg Dyke at the University of York last Sunday, which was often quite entertaining (f0r me, anyway).

 

But here is one of the interviews I gave to student newspapers afterwards. Others may yet appear.  I’d dispute with Mr Witherow that I ever used the word ‘learnings’ (he says the recording is fuzzy there) , and I rebut his suggestion that I refuse to argue about addiction ‘on scientific grounds’. My view is entirely scientific. In the absence of any objective evidence of ‘addiction’, or of any sustainable objective definition of it,  it is clearly a concept based upon relativist morality. This sort of thing is always a problem when someone else is describing an argument.

 

 

http://www.nouse.co.uk/2013/06/27/peter-hitchens-the-taming-of-a-trotskyist/

 

And another interview

And another York student newspaper interview, in a rival publication (my interviewers in this case can’t get it out of their heads that I somehow want to dump ‘The Great Gatsby’ from the reading lists. I don't. I also forgot to recommend Robert Penn Warren's 'All the King's Men', which I should have done. Never mind):

http://www.theyorker.co.uk/politics/york/14107-the-yorker-meets-peter-hitchens

 

The written account’s a bit brief, but they’ve kindly provided a recording, here

 

http://soundcloud.com/byrnetoff/peter-hitchens-interview-the

 

 

On Meaning What We Say - and Saying What We Mean

The actual words, spoken or written, are the key to all debate. That is why my responses to critics sometimes run to thousands of words – because I take their actual words and respond to them.

 

This is yet another argument against that left-wing electronic mob, Twitter, where anonymous contributors make hit-and-run assaults in postings which cannot be more than a few words long.

 

Here, there is less excuse. So to those who have contrived to suggest that I somehow claimed that the abolition of the promise to God by the Girl Guides was comparable to, or equivalent to the establishment of the Hitler Youth by the German National Socialists, I say, read the article again.

 

One of these is ‘Corbow’ , who, when challenged to justify his first attack ( ‘Are you seriously arrogant enough to state that by not "conforming" to Christian values and traditions that such a stance is on par with Hitler's Youth? Yet, when parents "...bring up children to love God and country..." this is not conforming to a baseless, out-dated, hate-promoting tradition? I ask you this (though I highly doubt this comment will even be allowed), how can one manage to be a reasoned, logical, free-thinker while still maintaining accordance with a two-thousand year-old "guide-to-life" that hasn't once been updated to accommodate how society operates in the present?)...

 

 

...responded with his all-pervasive charm and generosity of spirit :

 

’ Are you daft? Or just playing coy? It's obvious the mechanism you're utilizing when you say such things as, and I quote,"...has been taken over by radical revolutionaries" or "But I can’t help noticing that youth movements have been hugely important in the political struggles of our age. The Russian Communists and the German National Socialists both banned the Scouts and Guides." Also, "The same people long ago captured the schools and universities, which are now factories of Left-wing conformism," followed by, "And both Hitler Youth and Communist Pioneers had one thing very much in common – recruits were urged and even ordered to attack the Church (something you clearly define as an attack in the idea they want to remove 'God' from the pledge ***Note by PH **This sentence seems incoherent to me. What is it that I ‘clearly define’ exactly? ****)." These quotes was clearly in direct relation (****PH again ‘what does ‘in direct relation’ mean here? Again, incoherent***) to the movement that you are detailing in the first section of the article. If it isn't=, then the only other way I can read it is that you arbitrarily (***See below for rebuttal of this claim***) began discussing Hitler's Youth which makes equally little sense.

 

'You could have compared the change currently underway in the Guides to any other possible youth movement in history (some might even say it's a positive change), but the fact is that you find a generation speaking up against your religion offensive, (***PH I have no knowledge of any generation doing any such thing. Nor would I find it ‘offensive’ if it did. Rather, I see adults taking steps to ensure that the next generation are brought up in ignorance of what was their national faith***) so the only two parallels you can draw to it are Russian communists and Hitler's Youth. If you don't understand the English mechanism that allows such an inference to be made when it's so painfully obvious the goal of this piece is to vilify the secular movement then I pity you.

'The fact remains that this change is in no way outlawing the scouts or guides (PH***Indeed not. That is the cleverness of the salami-slicing ‘soft totalitarism’ of the modern politically correct, ‘equality and diversity’ movement. They have more sense than to try to outlaw them, and in any case they have no need to do so, as they can alter them without serious opposition, As I pointed out, we haven’t the spirit to resist**)

 

, and is simply looking to update it by accommodating all who wish to join instead of remaining stagnant in a theology that has long been losing it's death-grip on creativity, logic, and rational thinking. The idea that you need a "god" to tell you how to live, and how maintain strong moral character attests to how weak that character truly is.’

 

Let me explain to Mr ‘Corbow’ that I meant exactly what I said, no more, and no less. The link between the description of the salami-slicing of Christianity and patriotism, and the conduct of the great totalitarian youth movements, was this :

 

‘I can’t help noticing that youth movements have been hugely important in the political struggles of our age.’

 

The banning of the Scouts and Guides by Stalin *and* Hitler would suggest to me that this isn’t just a matter of toggles, campfires and badges, but a very important part of national life, recognised as such by two people to whom power, and ideas, and the way they were communicated to the young,  were important - and who (I’m sorry to say) were highly successful in their objectives.

 

My next linking point was as follows: ‘And both Hitler Youth and Communist Pioneers had one thing very much in common – recruits were urged and even ordered to attack the Church’.  Thus I established that to the radical revolutionaries of ‘left’ and ‘right’, a central objective was to combat the influence of the Christian religion.

 

I believe that hatred of the Christian religion (which is subversive to any utopian plan, and to any state or movement which seeks dominance over the minds of men) is one of the crucial driving forces of the 20th and 21st century drive towards a combination of individual selfishness and increased state power, in the midst of which we now find ourselves. In fact there could be no better summary of the mess in to which we are driving ourselves, one of total self-indulgence in our own lives, which hands over all authority, power and conscience to the state. That is what all this surveillance is about. That is why the tear-gas spray, the water cannon and the armour-plated robo-cop are so rapidly replacing policing by consent

 

At no point to do I say that the modern Girl Guide organisation is like Hitler or Stalin, or anything of the kind. I say, rather that youth movements are very important, and that struggles over politics and religious belief have often involved them in more direct and ferocious ways. I also point out (though none of my critics mentions this, or notes my strong approval fopr this pluralist arrangement) that there have always been, in this country, youth organisations that have catered for those who regard the Scouts as ‘militaristic’ (as many once did), or the Guides as too monarchist or religious, and also those who think the sexes should be mixed rather than separated at this age.

 

I can recall left-wing parents quite often describing the Scouts as ‘fascist’ ( a silly designation, I always thought) and I seem to remember, though I can’t at present locate it, a passage that effect (quoting such a parent) in Richard Hoggart’s fine book ‘the Uses of Literacy’. 

 

But my opponents would like those who have not read my actual words to think I have said the crude things they allege against me (particularly on 'Twitter'), because they know that there is, even so, an important truth under discussion her, in which they are on the disreputable, intolerant side.  

 

Then I quoted Hitler’s great sneer at non-Nazi parents,  because it is (regrettably) a statement of truth. Those who control the formation of young minds in modern centralised societies can easily overpower the influence of home and they know it. Hitler’s frankness on this matter was unusual. He was , however, speaking a truth which is important to us, and which explains why battles over the pledges given in our youth movements have signgificance at all, and are worth commenting on in national newspapers.

 

This is why I strive so hard to get people to read my books. On pages 152-3 of the British (Continuum) edition, and pages 206-7 of the US (Zondervan) edition of ‘The Rage Against God’, I give a great deal of space to an article on Richard Dawkins Net, called ‘Religion’s Real Child Abuse’

 

You can find it here.

 

http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/118-religion-39-s-real-child-abuse

 

Check the bit about ‘priestly groping’ . I was amused when, some months ago, a number of newspapers discovered as ‘news’ that Professor Dawkins makes this (actual and direct) parallel.

 

Here he also strongly recommends a passage (‘What Shall we tell the Children?) in a lecture by Nicholas Humphrey (‘The Mind Made Flesh’ )

 

Which you can find here

 

http://edge.org/conversation/what-shall-we-tell-the-children

 

So you can check that it really does contain the following deeply shocking passage, a manifesto for censorship,  dressed up ( as so many awful things are) in the language of liberalism. Please read it carefully  :

 

‘Should we be campaigning for the rights of human beings to be protected from verbal oppression and manipulation? Do we need "word laws", just as all civilised societies have gun laws, licensing who should be allowed to use them in what circumstances? Should there be Geneva protocols establishing what kinds of speech act count as crimes against humanity?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ah, those Bible literalists.  But where’s the line?  I don’t believe in the literal truth of Genesis, but I certainly believe in the literal truth of Christ’s life, and think it the most important event in human history, philosophy  and literature.   What is to be permitted to be taught, and what not?  Am I, in his scheme, to be allowed to teach my children that Christ died on the Cross for our sins, and rose again from the dead?  Can I teach them the Apostle’s Creed?  Or is it, In principle up to him and his fellow ‘enlightened’ ones, to decide whether such acts are the equivalent of knocking their teeth out or locking them in a dungeon?  Once you have admitted the principle, that any such teachings are impermissible, then there is no clear end to what you license.

 

Pay attention to what people say. They may really mean it. That is, without doubt, one of the main lessons of history. And the New Left’s savage and self-righteous loathing of Christianity is a very powerful and growing force. Such people cannot even begin to understand my ( blazingly simple and obvious) point that belief is a choice, because they have, long ago, already made the choice *not* to believe, because they know in their hearts that belief is a threat to all they desire, and fear that, if people see it a choice, they may well choose the ‘wrong’ alternative.

 

As people see and hear what they want to believe, and conceal most diligently from themselves what they also wish to conceal from others, the very suggestion that the universe might have a benevolent purpose makes them exasperated and enraged. QED, here , every other week.

There is a passage on belief,  in C.S.Lewis’s  ‘the Silver Chair’ (one the best of the Narnia books) , in which a discussion of the kind some of you still bother to have with the endlessly evasive, sidestepping Mr ‘Bunker’ (a man who has been energetically avoiding the conclusions of his own arguments here for more than a year), is very elegantly and cleverly portrayed. The passage is towards the end, after the terrible Chair itself has been hacked to pieces by the newly- released Prince Rilian. 

Plucky Little Belgium Revisited

It is amazing how our illusions about Britain’s conflict with Germany. In what is (unusually) an interesting and pertinent contribution, ‘Brian’ from ‘Coventry’ rightly notices my mention of the real rivalry between Britain and the USA, so much more important than the theatrical contest with Germany of which we make so much, while  somehow forgetting the roles played in this battle by the USSR, its predecessor Russia, France and the USA.

 

I have remarked before that the boneheaded and vainglorious football chant ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup!’ is not all that much stupider than the average British person’s view of the history of Anglo-German combat in the 20th century. I know little of the World Cup, but the idea that Britain was Germany’s main enemy in World War Two (or could have beaten Germany on her own in that conflict) is so far-fetched as to be laughable. Even in World War One, it was not until 1916 that we had a serious army in the field against Germany. In WorldWar two we had no such army until 1944,  our tiny forces having been driven from the Continent in 1940 (as their predecessors very nearly were in 1914). And had it not been for the earlier losses inflicted on Germany by France and Russia, I doubt whether our victory in 1918 (by which time we were Germany's principal foe, for once)  would have been possible. I am unsure how crucial the American intervention in 1917-18 was in military terms, but Tuchman hints that the US intervention had as much to do with safeguarding its very heavy material investments in the war efforts of Britain and France as it did with anything else.

 

 

Anyway, Mr ‘Brian’ asks :’Didn't that process [of rivalry with the USA] begin with Britain allowing the US to arbitrate in a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in 1895, Lord Selborne's exclusion of the USN from the Two-Power Standard in 1901, frustrating a Canadian border claim in Alaska in 1903,and the withdrawal of ships from the Caribbean to bolster the Home Fleet..Britain effectively surrendered to the United States before WW1 because of the growth of its immense economic power, the impossibility of defending the Canadian border and the Admiralty's view that the Royal Navy could only prevail against the US Navy in its home waters if all European powers were neutral. Britain rationalised this strategic weakness by deciding that a war between the two great English-speaking powers was impossible.’

 

I didn’t know about Selborne’s action or the Venezuela dispute, and would be glad of a reference. Fritz Fischer specifically mentions a British loss of naval prestige thanks to a withdrawal from bases in the West Indies in his indispensable account of the approach to war. Tuchman quotes Moltke as saying before 1914 that the German Fleet would not beat the Royal Navy, but would so weaken it that it would lose supremacy to the Americans, clear evidence that the Germans had noticed and considered this development . The Canadian border disputes, not to mention the row over the British building of the Confederate raider ‘Alabama’ during the Civil War, were constant causes of Anglo-American envy and rivalry, and the fuzzy non-resolution of the 1812 war (Britain’s last real chance to stop the USA becoming a rival)  continued to rankle with both countries, right up to the Bretton Woods conference after World War Two.

 

But anyway, it’s clear that this was the real conflict that we utterly lost, round about the time all our gold was shipped secretly to Montreal in 1940 (all the easier to send it on to the USA to pay our vast debts), though Brettin Woods put the lid on it .  And that, had we not got ourselves into two huge and costly European wars , we might have kept a good deal more of what we lost to the USA, especially Imperial Preference, the Sterling Area, a global fleet,  and our investments and influence in South America.

 

And yet still contributors here don’t get the point. The myth that Hitler sought to invade Britain, no longer supported by any facts, is still believed. Churchill said that Hitler ‘knows he must break us in these islands, or lose the war’. But , while stirring and heart-warming, these words just weren’t true. If Hitler had taken Moscow in the autumn of 1941, we would have had to make peace with Germany . Whereas, if Hitler had invaded and seized Britain in 1941, the USSR would have continued to fight. That, apart from the fact that Germany had always yearned for Ukraine and the Crimea, was why Hitler launched his greatest military force against Stalin in summer 1941, and not against us.  Does anyone really believe that we could have withstood an attack in such strength, even with the Channel to protect us? But it never came. The Blitz was indeed terrible for those who had to endure it, but it was small compared to the furnace of barbarism that engulfed eastern Europe from the Bug to the Volga and the Don, and it was virtually over by 1942.

 

It is suggested that, if Britain had not joined France in 1914, Ludendorff could still have sent the Bolsheviks to Petrograd by sealed train. This is unhistorical.  Imperial Russia (especially after the catastrophe of Tannenberg) was never a keen participant in the war and  would have been ready to make peace ( I believe there were overtures in 1915) with Germany.  This would have been even more the case if France had been rapidly defeated, as she so very nearly was in August-September 1914, and as I believe she would have been had we not allied ourselves with her in 1914.  But with France out of the war, Germany could have done pretty much what she wanted in the East, and certainly would not have taken the desperate step of encouraging a Bolshevik uprising which might spread to her own territory, and in point of fact very nearly did. Such a  thing was only possible because of the collapse of the Tsar’s government. As long as the Tsar was on his throne, Lenin and the rest of the Bolsheviks would have been arrested and imprisoned the moment they set foot on Russian territory. It was only when it was clear that the Provisional Government in Petrograd planned to carry on the war that Ludendorff’s cynical plan was hatched (Ludendorff, by the way, was very much not a Christian, an interesting sidelight on the man who was later to stand beside the allegedly Roman Catholic (ha! ha!) Hitler in Munich. He also spoke excellent Russian).

 

I am asked if Britain, if invaded, should have put up only ‘token resistance’. The person who asks this question entirely misses the point. Belgium was a neutral country, feebly armed, which had not in any way volunteered to be part of a war. The Germans had no interest in Belgium as such, but only desired transit for their troops to attack France (they had asked for this on a number of occasions) . By resisting the German invasion with serious force, Belgium’s leaders did not save their country from anything, but rather subjected her people to a terrible and incredibly violent onfall of violence followed by a cruel and costly occupation lasting many years. Honour could have been satisfied by a symbolic resistance, and many lives, livelihoods (and come to that towns, villages and cultural treasures) could thereby have been saved.

 

What did Belgium gain from its ‘heroic’ resistance? Less than nothing. It is barely a nation now. I suspect it would be more of one if it had made only that token resistance in 1914. By the way, in 1914 Belgium as in 1939 Poland, there were frequent pathetic cries of ‘Where are our British allies?’ as the invasion stamped and crashed across the country. Of course, they were nowhere to be seen in either case, because of Britain’s unfortunate habit of promising aid it had no intention of supplying, and no troops to implement. Tuchman records a pitiful incident of Belgian civilians welcoming some German soldiers (whose recently introduced field-grey uniforms were unfamiliar to them) with Union Jacks and kisses, because they thought they were British. And the Germans having to reveal, in some embarrassment, that they were not in fact the British.

 

An invasion of a belligerent Britain, with the aim of conquering and invading this country should obviously be resisted to the limit. But it is not the same thing. By the way, nice Social Democratic Sweden quietly permitted transit of German troops across its territory, during the German occupation of Norway, in the Second World War. Few even know this, and it is not remembered in the wider world, nor is it the subject of much reproach.

 

 

I am given, yet again, this stuff about maintaining the balance of power in Europe, or of not wanting Germany to control the French coast. Well, what about the French controlling the French coast? I grew up in Portsmouth, which is still surrounded by enormous forts (some on artificial islands in the sea, some on the hills behind the city) built at colossal expense by Palmerston to defend our greatest naval station against *French* attack in the 1840s and 1850s. I am told that the Chiefs of Staff of this country were seriously concerned about a possible conflict with France in the years immediately after World War One. And some of the bitterest episodes in World War Two took place between British and Vichy French forces, who put a special venom into their clashes with the old enemy (not all that surprising, given that we had pounded a large part of their Navy to bits at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940, killing many sailors) . France also supplied weapons to the Zionist terrorists who attacked British forces in post-1945 Palestine. The illusion of an ‘Entente Cordiale’ is just that.

 

A victorious Germany, absorbing its victory in the West and (almost certainly) preparing for a  decisive strike towards the East , would have had neither time nor energy to engage with us. Germany  (as is made clear in ‘When Money Dies’) financed the 1914 war by getting into debt, rather than through unpopular taxation, a method which lends itself to short victorious wars but which is disastrous in long, unvictorious ones.  That was as a result of her far-from-happy internal political situation, in which the powerful Social Democrats steadily increased their vote, and the conservatives sought ways of crushing them. What would a war with Britain have got them?

 

As I say, there would have had to have been accommodations with a German-dominated Europe, but I doubt they would have been one tenth as painful as the one we have since made, and our navy and Empire would still have allowed us to stand aloof, provided we left the Germans a free hand in the East. And why shouldn’t we? We did , as it happens, do that anyway. Or haven’t you noticed the steady eastward spread of the EU’s borders and influence?

 

There’s all kinds of interesting side-issues about Mesopotamia, Persian oil, Basra, Kuwait and the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway, not to mention the alliance with Japan. But in the end I still can’t see how we could have been worse off by staying out.

 

.

 

An Inteview with the York University newspaper "Nouse"

Alas, there will be no recording of my conversation with Greg Dyke at the University of York last Sunday, which was often quite entertaining (f0r me, anyway).

 

But here is one of the interviews I gave to student newspapers afterwards. Others may yet appear.  I’d dispute with Mr Witherow that I ever used the word ‘learnings’ (he says the recording is fuzzy there) , and I rebut his suggestion that I refuse to argue about addiction ‘on scientific grounds’. My view is entirely scientific. In the absence of any objective evidence of ‘addiction’, or of any sustainable objective definition of it,  it is clearly a concept based upon relativist morality. This sort of thing is always a problem when someone else is describing an argument.

 

 

http://www.nouse.co.uk/2013/06/27/peter-hitchens-the-taming-of-a-trotskyist/

 

Puddleglum versus the Atheists

John Dee submitted this extract from ‘The Silver Chair’, (one of the Narnia books, written for children but by no means beyond the abilities of adults) by C.S.Lewis, a passage which I mentioned as a good example of belief in contest with the infuriating atheist assumption that there is no evidence, and never has been any evidence, for the existence of God.

 

The context is a scene in which the principal characters, who have fallen into a sunless, subterranean world, are being told by a persuasive witch (aided by hypnotic fumes, so often the enemy of clear thought)  that their memories of the other world, in which the sun shone,  are foolish falsehoods. Puddleglum, an Eeyore-like figure of profound pessimism (he is a Marsh-wiggle, a kind of half-man, half-frog),   nonetheless has greater faith and courage than the other members of the party. With his naked foot, he tries to stamp out the fire from which the fumes are coming. Aslan, for those who have not read the Narnia books, is an allegorical representation of Christ, taking the form of a Lion.

 

‘… the sweet heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. This instantly made everyone's brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes. Secondly, the Witch, in a loud, terrible voice, utterly different from all the sweet tones she had been using up till now, called out, "What are you doing? Dare to touch my fire again, mud-filth, and I'll turn the blood to fire inside your veins." Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic. "One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.’  

 

Personally, I always rather enjoy the Witch’s unmasking of herself as what she (and those like her) really is. It reminds me quite a lot of the lopsidedly-smiling, apparently tolerant man-of-the-world atheists who, when it really comes down to it, are intolerant would-be totalitarians, who hate the thing to which they profess to be indifferent and whose possibility they so energetically deny. They often ask me quizzically ‘How can you say that we hate God, when we don’t believe in him?’. My reply is always the same. You refuse to believe in Him because you hate Him’ .

 

There’s no real dispute about the human capacity to believe what we want to believe  (and disbelieve what we reject).  History is full of examples, not least Stalin’s obdurate refusal to believe persuasive intelligence that Hitler was about to attack the USSR in June 1941. There’s even an expression ‘Confirmation Bias’ in common, current use, which often operates in areas where the facts are well –known.  Why this should not apply to religious belief, where the facts are and are likely to remain inconclusive,  I really can’t understand. And why this bias shouldn’t operate *before the formal opening of the argument* so as to exclude material which the biased person does not wish to consider, I also cannot see.  

Much More than Five Minutes with Peter Hitchens

Some of you may recall a brief if concentrated TV interview I gave to Matthew Stadlen (Five Minutes with…) last year. Well, Mr Stadlen apparently enjoyed our chat in the garden so much that he wants to do it again, for longer.

 

 

This time it will not be on TV, but in a meeting hall in West London, and any of you who are interested in going can check the details here.

 

http://www.tabernaclew11.com/whats-on/eventdetails/16-jul-13-head2head-tabernacle/

 

 

It’s on Tuesday 16th July, in the evening.

 

A 1999 Interview of PH , and a 2009 analysis of the Useless Tories

Nigel Farndale, now a successful novelist, has recently posted his 1999 interview with me (originally published in the Sunday Telegraph) on the Internet.

 

You can find it here

 

http://www.nigelfarndale.com/2013/06/peter-hitchens/

 

It caused a certain amount of hilarity in my home after publication. Even our Burmese cat (now alas deceased) laughed at the description of Mrs Hitchens as ‘tall’ (I don’t recall Mr Farndale being specially short)  , and the poor creature, no stranger to vanity himself, had to be carried from the room wheezing with helpless mirth after reading the claim that I suffer from ‘low self-esteem. I’d add that some of the words placed in quotation marks couldn’t conceivably have been precise transcripts of what I said.

 

I’d always thought the jest about Canada was quite good, but so many people take it as a genuine, earnest comparison that I realise now that the image of the sour, humourless, jealous Peter Hitchens conflicts so totally with a response of this kind that they simply can’t absorb it. 

 

What interested me when I read it again after all these years was how many of the points put to me by Mr Farndale are exactly the same as, or enormously similar to, the sort of questions I get asked by left-wing interviewers today, the psychologising, the stuff about my brother, the idea that I do it for effect. I’ve given my responses to them over and over again, but the people who come to interview me now never seem to have paid any attention to my replies, and just come up with the same stuff over and over again.  The idea that my conclusions are reasoned and researched, rather than the products of a tortured mind and some sort of complex, cannot be entertained.

 

I stopped a person on Twitter in his tracks the other day by stating (as I believe to be the case) that my late brother had much more of a problem with my existence than I had with his.  He was not asked such questions, though.

 

Oh, and this is also rather good, about the Tories. From (I think) late 2009.

 

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2010/01/peter-hitchens.html

 

 

 

 

 

General Conversation on History and Religion

First , I’d like to be complimentary about the posting from ‘John’, the sort of thing which makes this weblog worthwhile. I’ll reproduce it here for those who may have missed it: ‘The Nazis are in no sense traditional or social and cultural conservatism taken to the extreme. If you were to say that old fashioned Toryism, that of Dr. Johnson, Swift and Bolingbroke, Clarendon and Strafford was Mr. Hitchens's conservatism or traditional conservatism taken to the extreme, then that might be correct. Or even if you were to say that the counter-revolutionary conservatism of Viscount De Bonald or Justus Moser was this extreme, you might be able to make an argument, but Nazism or fascism in no sense are simply the extreme of social or traditional conservatism.

 

Arguments CAN be made about Franco's (the distortion of the Spanish civil war that sees one side as good and the other evil, where in fact the Republicans were at least as bad and would have been worse victors from Britain's point of view, placing a communist regime in Western Europe, is to opposed) relationship to traditional conservatism. His means were often directly counter to traditional conservatism, but he did partially back a sort of nationalist traditional conservatism (Franco was never a fascist).

Whilst Macaulay is wrong (as is often the case) that the Stuarts tried for a novel absolutism - in fact, they rather hesitatingly simply tried to continue the Tudor absolutism (Henry VIII was a tyrant far, far worse than any of the Stuarts, even James II) - the idea the enlightenment gave us the rule of law is absurd. This is an idea of long precedence in Roman law, common law, and medieval and early modern European thought. In fact, Mr.Godfrey lumps together democracy and the rule of law, which are in fact quite different in origin and intent. The rule of law belongs to a long tradition of ordered liberty, long predating the enlightenment, but continued by the best elements of the enlightenment (the more conservative elements like Hume and Adam Smith). Democracy has far less to do with ordered liberty, and, when insisted upon in any strong sense and connected with ideas like radical equality, comes out of the radical enlightenment of Rousseau and the philosophes and is a menace to order, justice, and liberty. The old ideal was not democracy but the Res Publica, or the people's thing. This meant simply the government ruled in the interests of all its people, as a mass and in their several classes, associations, and interests. It did not mean the government needed to be significantly democratic; indeed, a King could rule a Republic in the traditional sense.’

 

This is serious, thoughtful and enlightening. I sort of agree with him about Macaulay and Henry VIII, but would point out that Henry was an aberration, and recognised as such at the time.  It’s an interesting question by how much he accelerated the arrival of the Reformation in England( and by how much he may also have delayed it).  But I have always been led to believe that his loathing for the cult of Thomas a Becket  (windows portraying Becket, and other monuments to him, tended to be smashed or removed if they were on premises Henry controlled) had nothing to do with any religious opinions, but rather with Henry’s dislike of the political power of the Church).

 

By the way, if people have at hand texts which answer questions ( as for example the Hitler speech) why don’t they provide the quotations, rather than referring me to the book? I don’t possess volumes of Hitler’s speeches, and it would take even me some time to locate and consult such a volume.

 

I am also grateful to Amarjeet Singh for his thoughtful and fair-minded contribution : I am an atheist and I get annoyed when I hear other atheists say "not believing is not a belief" and "I don't believe in God because I am intelligent" and all the other lines they produce. Their argument is that there is no proof for God, therefore it is a belief and as they oppose your view, their view is not a belief. Next time you are confronted with that argument Peter point out to the atheist that if they don't believe the universe was created with the helping hand of some creator they must think it spontaneously created itself. And as there is absolutely no proof of that, it is also a belief.

And if they play the intelligence card, point out Sir Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday (probably the two best minds this country has produced). Both fundamentalist Christians and neither was simply a product of their time and following the orthodox view on religion. Faraday was very hardline even for his day and Newton was extremely fundamentalist and is now described as a bit of a heretic.’

 

I have of course tried to point these things out, but it never makes any difference.  You cannot actually argue with dogmatists who don’t realise that’s what they are. I do know that some atheists have the intelligence and grace to recognise the position,  but a large part of my activity these days is devoted to showing that most of the New Atheists’ are not as clever as they think they are, lack self-awareness and fail to understand their own position properly.

 

John Jennings,  (first quoting me), writes : ‘Mr W asserts: ‘readers should know that PH defines addiction as something that CANNOT be overcome by will power alone’. Perhaps he could tell me where I have so defined it."

You have done so or implied it several times, here's one of them:

"In my view, ‘addiction’ cannot co-exist with free will, any more than the famous immoveable object can co-exist with the famous irresistible force. If one exists, the other cannot, by definition. Either there is free will, or there is not. If there is not, then we are slaves of circumstance who have no choice in our fates, such as ‘addicts’ are alleged to be."’

 

I am puzzled. Where does this say that addiction cannot be overcome by will-power? Which words does Mr Jennings think have this meaning? What I say here ( and have many times said ) is that the concept of addiction(which I reject as an invented falsehood and as an immoral denial of free will) cannot co-exist with the idea that we have free will. That is not in any way a statement about will-power versus addiction.

 

Mr ‘P’ writes : ‘If you were to tell me that you believe the planet Saturn to have green cheese at its core, my refusal to accept that that is the case does not constitute a counter belief. It's up to you to show me the goods and not me to expose your nonsensical contention.

 

‘The contention that green cheese is at Saturn's core is of course ridiculous, but is it any more ridiculous than the raising to life of dead men or the ascending of risen dead men into heaven. And that's just a small sample of the plethora of ridiculousness which if you encounter rational opposition you deem to be counter belief.

In fact the turning of atheism into belief is a propaganda ploy on the part of the religious who recognize that their argumentation is very much on its back foot, and becoming more unbalanced with every conversation, discussion and debate.’

 

Once again this is a silly confusion, into which he has fallen because he would rather mock than argue seriously. And he would rather mock because of his own (rather unjustified) conviction of his own superiority.’

 

The problem first of all is that the statement about cheese being at Saturn’s core does not explain anything which is otherwise unexplained. It is the same with all the silly jeering (which is annoying because it is silly and babyish, not because it is blasphemous or deliberately, rude, though it is that too) about dragons, teapots,  fairies, Father Christmas and Spaghetti Monsters.

 

On the contrary, if we take them seriously for a moment ( as their enthusiasts of course never do, because they won’t argue this matter seriously) , such things *require*  explanation rather than providing it. By what process could the core of a planet have become cheese of any colour? How would the ‘Monster’ have taken the shape of spaghetti and meatballs?  By what process could a teapot have come into an orbit? If there are fairies and dragons, dwelling amongst us as material things,  then why is there no material evidence of their existence and activities?

 

So these things require unavailable explanations, and explain nothing unexplained. Whereas the postulated existence of God *would* explain the origins of the universe

 

The monotheist God (as distinct from the gods of the various pagan cults) is said to be ‘ eternal, without body, parts or passions; of infinite power, wisdom and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things both visible and invisible. His existence ( which as I repeatedly say, and as Christ himself maintained in the passage which begins ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock’) can be acknowledged by us if we choose, or not if we choose. He will not force us into belief. If He exists, then He offers a possible explanation for the origins of the universe,  for there being something rather than nothing. He is of course a disturbing and unwelcome explanation to many. For if He exists, then that origin had a purpose, was not a random event, and the laws which govern the universe are not accidental, but designed and intended. Without such condition, as it happens, what is nowadays called ‘science’ would have no purpose, for why bother finding out the rules of a universe which has no rules?

 

If that is so, then the main activity of man must surely be to divine those laws (moral as well as physical) and live according to them. But it cannot simply be rejected as a possibility. We have no knowledge on which we can base such a rejection. So those who reject and mock it are simply closing their minds *in advance*to one possibility. From my side, I do not close my minds to the possibility that the Godless are right, that we are on a pointless lump of rock hurtling meaninglessly through space, having begun for no reason and doomed to end for no reason. But I openly reject it because I find the implications of that belief disgusting, dispiriting and terrifying. I would count myself dishonest, however, if I pretended  that anything other than my own wishes and desires had led me to choose God over pointless chaos.

 

Mr ‘P’ makes a grave category error is when he asks ‘The contention that green cheese is at Saturn's core is of course ridiculous, but is it any more ridiculous than the raising to life of dead men or the ascending of risen dead men into heaven.’

 

No , we are not arguing here about the details of the Christian faith. We are arguing about theism versus atheism. The cheese contention is limitlessly ridiculous, and not to be compared with the idea that the universe may have had ( and has) a Creator, as I *believe* (but do not *know*).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did We Fight for Belgian Neutrality in 1914? Well, if we did, we didn't save it.

Some of you will remember a discussion we had here some years ago about Hugh Walpole’s ‘Jeremy’ books. One of my favourite passages in (I think ) ‘Jeremy and Hamlet’ involves Jeremy, who has been given Walter Scott’s ‘The Talisman’ ( a book to be discussed another time),  to read as a school holiday task, failing again and again to read the story, and turning away bored from the crisp, fresh new pages between the smart green covers of the copy the school has given him.  Then,  encountering in a dingy shop a  grubby, second-hand edition of the same book, evilly printed, with the words disappearing into the fold, he is captured completely, and reads the book late into the night, secretly under the bedcovers.

 

I have just had a similar experience with Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August’, which I have many times taken up and put down, in fine, beautifully presented editions, and never read it. Yet, when a kind reader sent me his more-than-slightly-foxed, dog-eared, torn and sat-upon American paperback, complete with lurid cover, I opened it and have not really stopped reading it since at every available opportunity. What is it about beaten-up, roughly-handled, used books which so often makes them more inviting than pristine, beautifully designed works of the designer’s and binder’s art.

 

My edition is entirely free of footnotes or references , but I have every reason to trust Ms Tuchman in general, so I can simply storm through the pages as she describes that most momentous thing, the beginning of the first World War and the beginning of the modern world, ugly, savage and crude.  It kept me almost completely occupied during train journeys to and from York where Greg Dyke and I shared a platform on Sunday, under the chairmanship of Steve Richards, as part of a Festival marking the 50th anniversary of the University we all attended, Greg and I at roughly the same time. I might write about this occasion but sadly there’ll be no recording, as the microphones went wrong. On the way down, I was so absorbed I forgot to look out at Grantham, where I normally make a point of admiring the spire of St Wulfram’s, one of the loveliest steeples in all England.

 

Her non-academic, journalistic descriptive powers fill the mind with pictures and (in some cases) awoke in my memory sensations of the spirit and character of England that I had forgotten.  Since I first read and heard of it as a small boy, I have always tried to imagine the last minutes of peace. There is something about the feeling of hot afternoons beating down on huge industrial cities of brick houses, and of being in a cool, quiet room in the midst of this, which makes me imagine the sound of the newsboys calling out, as they must have done, to sell the special editions of the evening papers which announced the end of the world. It is the fact that the last minutes of the old were so sunny, and  so drowsy, that makes the violence of the upheaval all the more appalling.

 

Her descriptions of two events – the bringing up of the monstrous and sinister siege-guns which broke the Belgians at Liege, and the catastrophic failure of the Royal Navy to catch the German battle-cruiser Goeben on her fateful journey to Constantinople – are particularly moving and disturbing.

 

The story ends as it always does, with the world sinking into a long and tragic swamp of violence, loss and starvation.

 

And it’s my view that Ms Tuchman pretty much takes the standard view of the English-speaking world of our age, that is, sympathetic to the French, and unsympathetic to the Germans, and captivated by the ‘Plucky Little Belgium’ theme, and the belief that Britain had to join the war because of a ‘guarantee’ we had supposedly given to Belgium.

 

Strange that she should do so,  because she is brutally dismissive of Britain’s military contribution to the war (in my view correctly. The BEF were very brave, and fought well, but they were a tiny force, unable to influence the outcome of this struggle of giants).  What is more, she gives a very thorough account of the real reason for Britain’s entry into the war, the long, detailed talks between the interesting British Army officer Sir Henry Wilson and the French General ( as he was then) Ferdinand Foch  which, in the years before 1914, effectively integrated the tiny British army into France’s defensive plans in the event of war, and made us party to the Franco-Russian alliance without ever actually signing a treaty. A parallel Naval commitment, under which the British Navy was committed to defend the French channel coast against the German threat on the outbreak of war, was liberally used as a reason to browbeat wavering British politicians into agreeing to enter the war. We had , it was said, allowed the French to move heir fleet to the Mediterranean and leave the Channel unguarded. How could we now leave them in the lurch?

To which the reply is, if we had not made these rash secret promises (kept from most of the Cabinet and well beyond the authority of those who had given them) then we wouldn’t have been committed. And it is not the business of soldiers or politicians to commit their countries to war behind the back of that country’s own government.

 

Dr Barry Clayton wrote to the Mail on Sunday last week to give the conventional response to my argument that Britain could and should have stayed out of the Franco-German quarrel. He argued :

 

‘Peter Hitchens was wrong last week to label our entry into the First World War as 'our greatest mistake'. There were several good reasons why it was in our national interest. These included our treaty and moral obligations to go to Belgium's aid, and the need to support France and prevent German hegemony over Europe.

 

Hitchens's claim that a German victory would have meant no Hitler or Mussolini or a Bolshevik revolution is absurd. No one knows what would have happened if Germany had been victorious. It is all too easy to transform the 'What ifs' of history into 'If onlys', and use this to develop a nostalgic approach that demands a rewriting of the past to make this new version desirable, legitimate and possible.’

 

Well, what was the wording in the 1839 Treaty of London which committed us to make war if Belgium was attacked? If we valued this commitment so highly, why had we not spent the intervening 75 years (particularly the 44 years since the Franco-Prussian war had first called the Treaty into question)  in creating an army capable of enforcing the alleged guarantee?  Such an army would have required compulsory military service and a huge outlay of money, diverted from the navy with which we held our Empire and our command of world trade. Quite rightly, in my view, we decided as a nation to spend money where it was of some use, and to stay out of continental entanglements, while avoiding that thing hateful to most Englishmen, a large standing army on the national territory. We had in reality acted as if the 1839 Treaty was indeed a ‘scrap of paper’

 

Since we hadn’t prepared in any way to enforce it, surely any commitment was a dead letter, just as our even crazier commitment to defend Poland’s independence in 1939 was as worthless as a Weimar banknote? The Royal Navy was a fine fighting force, but it couldn’t reach the River Meuse, or get anywhere near it.  Jackie Fisher’s idea of a diversionary landing on the Baltic coast and a march on Berlin had the merits of originality, but was otherwise daft. That was about where we were in 1914, lashed, by secret and illegitimate commitments to the French war machine, which was itself lashed to the tottering colossus of Tsarist Russia, with which Germany had long hoped to provoke a war.

 

Anyway, our intervention did not save Belgian Neutrality. And if we take the 1939-45 war as a continuation of the 1914-18 one, it can hardly be said to have achieved any of its other objectives either. This is problem with all this romance. We keep going to war to ‘save’ Belgians or Poles, and the people we save end up worse off than if we had betrayed them. And we do not, in fact, enforce the treaties we signed, because we never had the power to do so in the first place.

 

If Belgium had succumbed to German pressure, blandishment and bribes, and let the German army through without a fight, then the pretext of Plucky Little Belgium would have been denied us. Would we then have gone to war? I fear so, but because of Sir Henry Wilson’s private treaty, not out of some noble principle.

 

Those who have read Paul Belien’s devastating and enthralling critique of Belgium. ’A Throne in Brussels’, will be hardened against sentimentality on this subject. Perhaps Mr Belien’s very Flemish view of the artificial state is over-jaundiced, and his portrayal of its first King little short of savage (I bow to his detailed knowledge, but balk at some of his views), but it is hard to see what Belgium was fighting for when it resisted Germany in 1914.

 

What it got was not independence and integrity, but heavy, harsh occupation and destruction, much of which could in my view have been avoided by either ceding passage or putting up a token resistance to allow honour to be satisfied. As for its fabled neutrality, Britain’s entry into war did nothing to save that neutrality.  I don’t know what the standing of the 1839 Treaty is now, but Belgium was a military ally of France between 1918 and 1936, and Belgian troops joined the French in their  disastrous occupation of the Ruhr in 1923.  Belgium’s later resumption of neutrality between 1936 and 1940 was fatal to the ability of France to defend herself in 1940, and operated to the benefit of Germany.  Since 1948 she has been a member of NATO, a far from neutral body, and of the EU, of the Euro and of the Schengen Treaty, which puts her under the control of German power anyway, though we are not supposed to mention that.  

 

 And she now barely exists as a nation anyway, with the two solitudes, Flemish and Walloon, living in the same space with their backs turned on each other. I might add that Britain unquestionably violated Norway’s neutrality in 1940, and that Switzerland sensibly preserved her neutrality by maintaining a serious and well-trained people’s army, which any potential invader knew should give him a very hard time indeed. Whereas Belgium’s military preparations for her own defence in 1914 were in general feeble, though the threat had been obvious for a generation.  

 

In fact, it’s quite funny, in a bitter sort of way, to complete the Europe of 2013, in which the Polish-German,  German-Czech, German-Austrian,  Dutch-German and Franco-German borders, which so much blood was spilled to defend and maintain, now no longer exist at  all.  And Germany, whose domination of Europe was supposed to be prevented by two great wars…dominates Europe. The Great German War Fleet of 1914, barely used, did achieve one thing. It destroyed British naval supremacy by provoking us into a war which so weakened us that we had to hand supremacy to our real global rival, the USA.

 

Dr Clayton’s jibe that ‘Hitchens's claim that a German victory would have meant no Hitler or Mussolini or a Bolshevik revolution is absurd’ is without foundation. All these catastrophes were direct consequences of the bankruptcy, devastation and humiliation occasioned by a prolonged war between 1914 and 1918.  There is every reason to believe we could have avoided them, had the war been over swiftly.  

 

His assertion that ‘No one knows what would have happened if Germany had been victorious.’ Is also in my view mistaken. The September Programme was quite explicit, and would have affected us directly even less had we not entered the war in August 1914. Germany has never been specially interested in conquering or invading Britain. Its interests, for obvious reasons, lie elsewhere.

 

 He says :’It is all too easy to transform the 'What ifs' of history into 'If onlys', and use this to develop a nostalgic approach that demands a rewriting of the past to make this new version desirable, legitimate and possible.’

 

Maybe it is, I still think that we made a grave mistake in 1914, and have never recovered from it, morally, economically, militarily and diplomatically. Nor will we ever. It was the beginning of the sad, dribbling end which our country now faces, a bankrupt, enfeebled pensioner at the end of her strength. We may not learn from this. Perhaps others, who come after us,  will do so.