Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 269
June 23, 2013
The sinister reason they're robbing the Guides of God
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
If this country still had any spirit, tens of thousands of families would this weekend be resigning from the Girl Guides (or ‘Girlguiding’ as it is now modishly known) and setting up a pro-British, pro-Christian breakaway.
An important youth movement, in which young minds are formed, has been taken over by radical revolutionaries, who plan to cut references to nation and God from the Guide ‘promise’ – a pledge they themselves describe as the organisation’s ‘beating heart’.
They know what they are doing. The same people long ago captured the schools and universities, which are now factories of Left-wing conformism. Now they want the youth movements as well.
But there will be no revolt. This is partly because the New Left are masters of a technique known as ‘salami-slicing’, by which they slowly change the country into somewhere else.
Each individual action is so thin a slice that only a few people will mind, and most will jeer at them for caring. ‘Moral panic!’ they will squawk.
But once enough of these slices have been taken, it is clear that a deep and lasting change has happened. By then it will be too late. People will quickly forget that Girl Guides were ever Christian or patriotic. And the pledge to honour the Queen – which has been kept for now – will go later.
As one of nature’s stroppy non-joiners, I’ve never been a Boy Scout. For me, the joys of the outdoors are overrated.
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.
And both Hitler Youth and Communist Pioneers had one thing very much in common – recruits were urged and even ordered to attack the Church. Pioneers jeered at priests in the street and even campaigned against Christmas trees.
Hitler Youths (whose meetings were held at the same time as church services) spied on priests and denounced them for the slightest criticism of the regime.
Hitler knew well what he was up to. To those many German adults who refused to follow him, he sneered: ‘When an opponent declares “I will not come over to your side”, I say calmly, “Your child belongs to us already . . . what are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community”.’
Or, as the brainwashed Hitler Youth sings in the film Cabaret, ‘tomorrow belongs to me’.
Parents who struggle to bring up children to love God and country know already how true this is, how their young come home from school stuffed with politically correct equality and diversity rubbish and ignorant of our history and tradition. Now the same process will affect the Guides.
Why should this happen? For those who think the Scouts and Guides are too patriotic or too religious, a Left-wing scout movement, the Woodcraft Folk, has long been available. I rather admire them for their independent-minded guts.
Long may the Woodcraft Folk flourish in our free, Christian country, but why should the Girl Guides copy them, and introduce this sickly little pledge of selfishness and squidgy loyalty to their ‘community’?
You’ll have to ask those who appointed Julia Bentley as the organisation’s chief executive. Ms Bentley is a zealous sexual liberationist, condom outreach worker, Blairite commissar and abortion apologist, so what did they expect?
But who, apart from her, actually wants this change? A few months after she was appointed, the Guides sent out a ‘Consultation’ questionnaire. Questions 7, 8 9 and 10 are all about the wording of the promise. I asked, and asked and asked ‘Girlguiding’ to give me figures on how respondents actually answered these questions. They flatly refused to tell me. Draw your own conclusions.
***
Putin told the truth about Syria
When Vladimir Putin pointed out that our supposed allies in Syria include people who cut their dead foes open and bite into their entrails, many media organisations treated this as an allegation or rumour, using words such as ‘reportedly’.
Why? Existence of a film of the event was first reported by Time magazine on May 12.
Time interviewed two colleagues of the man involved, whose name is Khalid Hamad and who also calls himself Abu Sakkar.
They confirmed the story. Then Abu Sakkar was interviewed on video.
Far from denying the action, he tried to justify it by saying he had found pictures of atrocities on the dead Syrian soldier’s phone.
The organisation Human Rights Watch is also reliably reported to have authenticated the film.
Sakkar belongs to the Farouq Brigades, a so-called ‘moderate Islamist’ group of the type David Cameron wants to arm.
So, as Mrs Merton might ask, why do the largely pro-intervention British media hesitate to accept that the story is true?
***
It's no use police standing guard AFTER the crime
Though I have no real idea who she is, I am sorry that Helen Flanagan, apparently a soap opera actress, has been burgled.
But what possible use was the police officer who was posted outside Ms Flanagan’s Cheshire home?
This comically pointless deployment is typical of the new, useless police.
They wouldn’t do it for people who aren’t TV stars, and it doesn’t help solve the crime or stop a future one.
It just rubs in the awkward fact that, once a crime is committed, a police officer isn’t really much use.
Prevention is their job, and they won’t do it.
***
What are prisons for? I suspect that those who run them don’t believe they should exist.
They certainly don’t believe in punishment, and without that moral purpose jails are just so many human warehouses.
The latest Chief Inspector’s report on Lindholme in Doncaster – available online – is a thing of horror.
Prisoners live in fear amid freely-circulating drugs and alcohol. There is more of this than we hear about.
***
As we are now going to talk to the Taliban, will all those who incited, supported and demanded the continuation of a war we were bound to lose please apologise to the families of the dead – especially the families of the British servicemen and women, lions sent by donkeys into pointless danger?
Talks were available from the start, but George W. Bush and the Blair creature (donkeys if ever I saw them) were too anxious to conceal their own weakness and ignorance of international affairs to listen.
These men should be living out the rest of their lives in penitential Trappist monasteries, praying for forgiveness and cleaning lavatories.
Yet they still dare to show their faces in public (and in the case of Blair, are paid for it). They would not dig. They dared not rob. And so they lied to please the mob.
***
The Met Office says we are in for a chain of cold, wet summers? Buy barbecue shares. These warmist zealots long ago lost all contact with reality.
If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down
If this country still had any spirit,
tens of thousands of families would this weekend be resigning from the
Girl Guides (or ‘Girlguiding’ as it is now modishly known) and setting
up a pro-British, pro-Christian breakaway.
An
important youth movement, in which young minds are formed, has been
taken over by radical revolutionaries, who plan to cut references to
nation and God from the Guide ‘promise’ – a pledge they themselves
describe as the organisation’s ‘beating heart’.
They
know what they are doing. The same people long ago captured the schools
and universities, which are now factories of Left-wing conformism. Now
they want the youth movements as well.
Girlguiding plan to cut references to nation and God from the Guide 'promise'
Institution admits that the pledge is the 'beating heart' of the traditional Girl Guides
But there will be no revolt.
This is partly because the New Left are masters of a technique known as
‘salami-slicing’, by which they slowly change the country into somewhere
else.
Each individual
action is so thin a slice that only a few people will mind, and most
will jeer at them for caring. ‘Moral panic!’ they will squawk.
But
once enough of these slices have been taken, it is clear that a deep
and lasting change has happened. By then it will be too late. People
will quickly forget that Girl Guides were ever Christian or patriotic.
And the pledge to honour the Queen – which has been kept for now – will
go later.
More from Peter Hitchens...
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devastating financial - and human - cost of our fatherless society
15/06/13
PETER HITCHENS: Tired of being ruled by thick, rich people? Bring back grammar schools
09/06/13
PETER HITCHENS: We set Syria ablaze... Now we're hurling in explosives
01/06/13
The horrific killing of a soldier in London does not deserve the attention it is still getting
25/05/13
The Great Innocence Robbery: The awful abuse of girls in Oxford is just the latest consequence
19/05/13
Wondering how they ignored a kidnapper in Ohio? Well we're ignoring something MUCH bigger
11/05/13
PETER HITCHENS: Fruitcakes and closet racists? Cameron's talking about YOU!
04/05/13
VIEW FULL ARCHIVE
As one of nature’s stroppy non-joiners, I’ve never been a Boy Scout. For me, the joys of the outdoors are overrated.
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.
And both Hitler Youth and Communist
Pioneers had one thing very much in common – recruits were urged and
even ordered to attack the Church. Pioneers jeered at priests in the
street and even campaigned against Christmas trees.
Hitler
Youths (whose meetings were held at the same time as church services)
spied on priests and denounced them for the slightest criticism of the
regime.
Hitler knew well
what he was up to. To those many German adults who refused to follow
him, he sneered: ‘When an opponent declares “I will not come over to
your side”, I say calmly, “Your child belongs to us already . . . what
are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the
new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new
community”.’
Or, as the brainwashed Hitler Youth sings in the film Cabaret, ‘tomorrow belongs to me’.
Parents
who struggle to bring up children to love God and country know already
how true this is, how their young come home from school stuffed with
politically correct equality and diversity rubbish and ignorant of our
history and tradition. Now the same process will affect the Guides.
Why
should this happen? For those who think the Scouts and Guides are too
patriotic or too religious, a Left-wing scout movement, the Woodcraft
Folk, has long been available. I rather admire them for their
independent-minded guts.
Long
may the Woodcraft Folk flourish in our free, Christian country, but why
should the Girl Guides copy them, and introduce this sickly little
pledge of selfishness and squidgy loyalty to their ‘community’?
You’ll
have to ask those who appointed Julia Bentley as the organisation’s
chief executive. Ms Bentley is a zealous sexual liberationist, condom
outreach worker, Blairite commissar and abortion apologist, so what did
they expect?
But who,
apart from her, actually wants this change? A few months after she was
appointed, the Guides sent out a ‘Consultation’ questionnaire. Questions
7, 8 9 and 10 are all about the wording of the promise. I asked, and
asked and asked ‘Girlguiding’ to give me figures on how respondents
actually answered these questions. They flatly refused to tell me. Draw
your own conclusions.
Putin told the truth about Syria
Vladimir Putin told the truth about Syria
When Vladimir Putin pointed out that
our supposed allies in Syria include people who cut their dead foes open
and bite into their entrails, many media organisations treated this as
an allegation or rumour, using words such as ‘reportedly’.
Why? Existence of a film of the event was first reported by Time magazine on May 12.
Time interviewed two colleagues of the man involved, whose name is Khalid Hamad and who also calls himself Abu Sakkar.
They confirmed the story. Then Abu Sakkar was interviewed on video.
Far
from denying the action, he tried to justify it by saying he had found
pictures of atrocities on the dead Syrian soldier’s phone.
The organisation Human Rights Watch is also reliably reported to have authenticated the film.
Sakkar belongs to the Farouq Brigades, a so-called ‘moderate Islamist’ group of the type David Cameron wants to arm.
So, as Mrs Merton might ask, why do the largely pro-intervention British media hesitate to accept that the story is true?
It's no use police standing guard AFTER the crime
Though I have no real idea who she is, I am sorry that Helen Flanagan, apparently a soap opera actress, has been burgled.
But what possible use was the police officer who was posted outside Ms Flanagan’s Cheshire home?
This comically pointless deployment is typical of the new, useless police.
They wouldn’t do it for people who aren’t TV stars, and it doesn’t help solve the crime or stop a future one.
It just rubs in the awkward fact that, once a crime is committed, a police officer isn’t really much use.
Prevention is their job, and they won’t do it.
Helen Flanagn emerges from her home in Prestbury, Cheshire, days after she was burgled
This comically pointless deployment of an officer outside Flanagan's house is typical of the new, useless police
What are prisons for? I suspect that those who run them don’t believe they should exist.
They certainly don’t believe in punishment, and without that moral purpose jails are just so many human warehouses.
The latest Chief Inspector’s report on Lindholme in Doncaster – available online – is a thing of horror
Prisoners live in fear amid freely-circulating drugs and alcohol. There is more of this than we hear about.
As we are
now going to talk to the Taliban, will all those who incited, supported
and demanded the continuation of a war we were bound to lose please
apologise to the families of the dead – especially the families of the
British servicemen and women, lions sent by donkeys into pointless
danger?
Talks
were available from the start, but George W. Bush and the Blair
creature (donkeys if ever I saw them) were too anxious to conceal their
own weakness and ignorance of international affairs to listen.
These
men should be living out the rest of their lives in penitential
Trappist monasteries, praying for forgiveness and cleaning lavatories.
Yet
they still dare to show their faces in public (and in the case of
Blair, are paid for it). They would not dig. They dared not rob. And so
they lied to please the mob.
The Met Office says we are in for a chain of cold, wet summers? Buy barbecue shares. These warmist zealots long ago lost all contact with reality.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2346719/PETER-HITCHENS-The-sinister-reason-theyre-robbing-Guides-Gods.html#ixzz2X04CaEuj
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June 22, 2013
Answers to Correspondents
Some responses to contributors:
Mr Godfrey asks :’ Mr Hitchens wrote: 'As this is fundamentally a religious question, one chooses whether one accepts the existence of free will or not, depending on what sort of world one wishes to inhabit.' How is that an argument? Surely reality is not changed by human whim? Either something is true or it is not, this must be the case for 'religious questions'.
**My reply. It is not an argument so much as an acceptance that there are several questions which cannot be answered by logic and scientific enquiry. And yet we know that much depends on the answer. They are, at base, the same argument as the God argument. And they take us to to the same point, where we choose the belief we desire. I just think this is straightforward honesty. Anyone can ask me why I believe what I believe, and I will tell them.
But what makes this a dead-end argument is the insoluble difficulty - that the atheists start from a series of presuppositions, which they claim (baselessly) are self-evident. They engage their emotions at the start, thus rejecting any questions or facts which might suggest even the possibility of created universe. They shut their minds, and praise themselves for doing so, claiming that they are ‘bright’ and thast rleigious believers are stupid.
They deny that they have any motives for holding these presuppositions, and so refuse to discuss those motives – which are the only interesting things about their position, otherwise a dull statement of unproven certainty, usually garlanded with jeers about the ‘stupidity’ of those who don’t agree with them. Worse, it is often accompanied by intolerant and potentially totalitarian beliefs about the teaching of religion to children.(See my ‘The Rage Against God’)
This is often coupled with the ludicrous claim that babies are all atheists , until they fall into the hands of religious indoctrinators. This, as I’ve pointed out is as absurd as Christians claiming that atheists born into atheist cultures are all religious believers, until they fall into the hands of atheist propagandists. Babies, of course, have no beliefs of any kind, any more than hedgehogs do. They are encouraged, as they grow into full humanity, into certain beliefs which are current in the societies in which they are raised. But as soon as they become aware that these beliefs *are* beliefs, then they can in principle be persuaded to believe something else, or to stop believing what they believe.
Only those who pretend that (or have been fooled into thinking that) ‘our belief is not a belief’ are not open to such persuasion. And in this way, atheists who deny that their belief is a belief (a position almost universal among the militant, ignorant, spiteful and intolerant new breed of God-hater) are like worshippers of some jungle idol , who belong to an isolated tribe which has never encountered anyone who does not worship this idol. They, too, do not know (or think) that their belief is a belief, or that any choice is available. But they have more of an excuse for this delusion, as they are surrounded by thousands of square miles of uninhabited rainforest, whereas the modern intolerant atheist is surrounded by two thousand years of learning, literature, history, philosophy, music, art and architecture, in which the existence and nature of an alternative view, freqyuently held by intelligent and informed persons, is made plain.
The truth is that atheism and theism only exist as concepts because they are two options in a choice (the third option is agnosticism) . If there were no choice, the words would not need to exist. I am sure, in the Newspeak of the ‘new atheists’, some such linguistic measure is being attempted.
Mr Godfrey also says : ‘The Nazi party claimed to be socialist for propaganda reasons (**PH : There is a good joke to be had here about a number of other nominally socialist parties, but I will refrain from making it) , one can look at their actions on family (for instance) to see their conservative ideology shining through, espousing in this case exactly the approach you do yourself Mr Hitchens, that a women's place is raising children, and having as many as possible,’
**Well, that is not actually my position, at least not so far as I know, and if Mr Godfrey can produce any evidence that it is, I should like to see it. It is a false caricature of my position, which is that state and culture should stop treating full-time motherhood as a shameful waste of resources, and as a demeaning activity for an educated woman, or indeed any woman, and should stop arguing that paid work outside the home is morally superior to unpaid work in the home. I have no views on how many children other people should have. It is up to them.
Mr Godfrey also notes that the National Socialists took to “… outlawing abortion, hardly a leftist position.”
***TO which I reply that Stalin’s USSR also outlawed abortion (after an initial period when it was freely permitted, see my ‘Rage Against God’ ), and you can’t get much more leftist than that. Leftists who are in power, have aggressive foreign policies and have big conscript armies tend to be against abortion, for obvious reasons. Leftist governments have also been strong persecutors of homosexuals (Castro, the USSR) users of Torture ( lots and lots of them) and of capital punishment (Castro and now China and Vietnam). The National Socialists did not, as far as I know, have any moral objection to abortion. Though they may ahve uswed the objections of others as cover for a policy essnetially aimed at ensuring the supply of cannon-fodder.
He says that the NSDAP’s ‘approach to Atheism… could send one to the camps,’
Is that so? I had never heard of anyone being sent to the German concentration camps for atheism as such. I am pretty sure some of the senior NSDAP figures were openly atheist. Can he give me facts and references on this?
He then quotes Hitler (I’d be glad of a reference here) ‘ In this speech from 1933 Hitler makes clear his faith, and his hatred of non-believers: "To do justice to God and our own conscience, we have turned once more to the German Volk." "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
I would guess he was there referring) in the word 'atheistic') to the Communists, but I’d need context to check. We have discussed Hitler’s religious beliefs (and his political game with the churches) before. He was not an atheist. But it is fairly clear that he was also not a Christian. As to what he was, I draw readers’ attention to the extraordinary prophecy made by the poet Heinrich Heine , in ‘Religion and Philosophy in Germany’ , in 1832, almost exactly a century before it was fulfilled :
‘Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit -- has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals. ...
'... Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder comes rolling somewhat slowly, but its crash will be unlike anything before in the history of the world.
'At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away. ... A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.’
Mr Godfrey urges me ‘Please have the decency to admit to where your own ideas, taken to the extreme can end up, as I have to admit and ponder about Marxism, you must about Conservatism.’
**Well, if anyone can point to where my Anglican, Burkean ideas can lead when taken to the extreme, I’ll cheerfully own up to it.
But his comparison with Franco and the South American juntas seems a bit far-fetched. I have nothing in common with them that I can see, and if I do, perhaps he can say what it is?
He also says that ‘enlightenment ideas are what give us democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of association and the rule of law, before that was Absolutism, Church and Crown trampling all before them, in lock step. Which I sincerely doubt is what you desire, or I have misjudged you. ‘
I think this is a misreading of history, and urge him to read the opening section of Macaulay’s ‘History of England’ in which he points out that absolutism had not flourished in England for centuries before the Cromwellian age, and that it was an attempt to impose it on this country that led to the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. The rule of law, especially its superiority over temporal power, as set out in Magna Carta (the root of all civilised government in the world) originates in Christianity. Church and Crown were endlessly in conflict with each other in England, hence the great cult of Thomas a Becket.
I didn’t say Mr Embery was ‘slow on the uptake’. I said he was ‘obtuse’, an entirely different thing , which I note he is reluctant to repeat, fearing perhaps that others may agree with me. He was being so, and I didn’t need to get angry, nor did I get angry, to point out this fact to him. He then flounced off, in my view because he was losing the exchange.
Mr ‘B’ says : ‘You give the game away when you write: "one chooses whether one accepts the existence of free will or not, depending on what sort of world one wishes to inhabit" , a perfect example of "argumentum ad consequentiam". This demonstrates that you are arguing according to your emotions, rather than to the "facts and logic" which you continually espouse.
**I reply ‘This is broadly true. I am quite clear about it. But he fails to note that I only cease to use facts and logic because, in his particular argument, they cannot answer the question. As I have said here before not above a thousand times, the default position on religion, provided by all the facts and logic the human mind can provide, is agnosticism. I cheerfully accept that if I wish to go beyond this point, to religious belief, I am obviously making a choice based upon my desires. But I am endlessly amused by the fact that hardly any atheists are prepared to admit the same, and instead indulge in teenage word-games to pretend that their belief isn’t a belief. I thought English linguistic philosophy was pretentious and dire when I first encountered it, but it is elegant and intellectual prepared with this lumpish ( and usually snotty) evasiveness.
All I ask is that, where facts and logic cannot decide the issue (which is the case on the God question and related matters) my opponents would be so kind as to admit that they, too, are influenced in their choice by their desires. Alas the God-haters are stuck. Their initial impulse is hatred of God, which leads them then to dismiss all evidence of his possible existence. They are so deluded by their own petulant, self-seeking fury that they cannot see themselves for what they are. These seething emotions are then visited instead upon those who dare to suggest that God might in fact exist.
He says : ‘You are guilty of precisely the fault of which you accuse Mr Falls. Knowledge of the workings of the human brain and the role of free will are being constantly updated’ . **Well, no doubt, but knowledge of the human brain remains superficial and very sketchy.
‘ and some of the conclusions reached by the likes of Sam Harris make for very uncomfortable reading for those brought up to believe in the primacy of free will in our actions. I would hope that it would be common ground that our actions and reactions are determined by the workings of the brain.’
** (I’m not quite sure about the word ‘determined’ here. Greatly affected, for certain. But I think there are those who might question the all-embracing description ‘determined’. The argument about consciousness and the brain is very complex and tricky. Just hesitating, not being dogmatic).
‘If so, surely the introduction of a toxic substance into the brain can affect our judgement, our responses and our ability to control our actions. You constantly argue that the abuse of drugs damages the brain and the psyche. Why do you stop short of conceding that it can damage our ability to make rational decisions, or to exercise free will?’
**I haven’t stopped short of it. It damages everything (though it is absurd to say that it makes the exercise of will impossible) . But I won’t accept initial criminal drug-taking as an excuse (legal or moral) for continued criminal drug-taking. As my main purpose is to deter people from ever taking drugs in the first place, I am mostly concerned with the initial decision, in any case. Severe punishment of those who possess illegal drugs, at whatever stage, would ensure that in many more cases. This will inevitably involve punishment of so-called ‘addicts’, who would find, in disciplined and properly-run prisons, that they were quite capable of giving up the substances to which they claimed to be ‘addicted’. So I win both ways.
‘Sharispa’ asks : ‘In ‘The Rage Against God’ you say that the most frightening thing for revolutionary socialists to accept is that the socialist project failed because it sought to usurp the place of God in people's lives. Why do you think that some ex revolutionary socialists can accept this (albeit very few) and others cannot? Could it be because those who cannot accept are still actually such socialists and cannot let go of the utopian idea, while those who can accept have let go of the idea? Anyway, I don't want to second guess you and would be interested in your view.’
**My view has always been that belief in God and a serious religious position are most likely to form in the minds of mature and experienced adults. The nature of our society allows and encourages people to remain in a permanent adolescence. People in the university-educated elite classes of the post 1960s West no longer grow up. So they remain moral teenagers, demanding sovereignty over their own bodies and insisting on their ‘right’ to ruin themselves if they so wish, failing to understand that they are not islands unto themselves. It is this understanding that is crucial to abandoning utopian schemes, which are all about human vanity.
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.
I don’t have much to say about Thursday’s ‘Question Time’, except to say that I was distressed by the sycophancy shown in general to Russell Brand , who was at best platitudinous. And to point out that my views are not identical to those of Melanie Phillips, with whom I have had more than one quite sharp exchange on foreign policy matters and on the Tory Party. I am also not wholly at one with her on the drugs issue, and do not (for instance) accept the validity of figures claiming that drug abuse is falling in this country. How could such figures be reliably obtained? Nor do I believe that drug abuse is something that can be ‘treated’.
Can the person now posting as ‘David Jatt’ please settle upon one name for himself? Others are entitled to know that he is posting under more than one name.
June 21, 2013
Musings on a Sultry Friday Afternoon
Leafing through contributions during a rare tranquil moment today, I found this from Mr Nigel Falls, who has been besieging me with peremptory tweets about drugs and ‘addiction’. I can’t think of a worse medium than Twitter in which to hold such a discussion (for some reason Paul Embery, of whom we now see so little here, has turned up there too, anxious to re-engage me on the subject of God, another subject unfitted for 140-character snippets, as it has proved.) .
So I am pleased to welcome Mr Falls here, where facts and logic can be properly deployed, an index is available, and books can be recommended and even read.
He writes : ‘I am proud to say I am one of the tedious people besieging Mr Hitchens on Twitter about his infuriating belief that addiction does not exist. I must add that I am from Northern Ireland so the intransigent, siege mentality is second nature to me. Mr Hitchens puts absolute faith in the misanthropic musings of Theodore Dalrymple whilst scornfully dismissing the majority opinion of clinicians and the anecdotal experiences of former addicts on this matter. All Dalrymple's book ‘Junk Science’ proved to me was Mr Dalrymple was in great need of a career change as he so obviously despised the people he dealt with on a professional capacity but that is just my opinion. The crux of Mr Hitchens's argument seems to me a semantic one as addiction cannot be objectively defined by scientific tests its existence amounts to an absurd piece of conventional wisdom. Mr Hitchens frequently cites Orwell's brilliant Essay "Politics and the English Language" as a major influence in his highly readable (I grudgingly concede) journalistic style. In it Orwell says "Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this" Mr Hitchens is doing exactly what Orwell warns us against by reducing the argument for the existence of addiction to the absurd on semantic grounds. Anyway thank you for the interesting debate Mr Hitchens. I do apologise if I may have bored you almost to sleep with my arguments but then again some people pay good money for narcotic substances which have the same effect.’
Almost all of this, apart from the empty, ad hominem attacks on Dr Dalrymple, is dealt with in my exchange with ‘Citizen Sane’ , which is recorded here: http://citizensane.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/youre-gonna-have-to-face-it-youre-addicted-to-peter-hitchens/
I’m amused by the attempt to use Orwell against me here . The relevant passage (right at the end of that incomparable essay, which can be found in full here https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm )
Is as follows :
‘I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs. ‘
Well, I don’t claim that abstract words are meaningless, only that they cannot be used to describe material things, and that abstract concepts cannot be treated as if they had material existence. And I certainly don’t advocate quietism. If addiction is abstract, as Mr ‘Falls’ seems to concede, then it cannot be a disease of the human body beyond the control of the person suffering from it, and so cannot be ‘treated’ as if it were . It must be (as it is ) a concept. And a concept of what? Why, of a certain moral standpoint which denies the existence of free will. As this is fundamentally a religious question, one chooses whether one accepts the existence of free will or not, depending on what sort of world one wishes to inhabit.
This is the beginning of a sensible discussion of what it is, in that case. But such a discussion can only be held once Mr ‘Falls’ has accepted the need to argue on the basis of evidence and fact, rather than on the basis of his passions. And, where evidence and fact run out ( as they do in questions of faith) to concede that certain things must, this side of the grave, remain a matter of opinion. Next, to see that a rival opinion cannot necessarily be classified as ‘wrong’. It must be admitted as a legitimate possibility to be considered.
And on what grounds should we consider it, and on what basis will we choose whether to believe it in preference to a rival idea? Here's why teh God argumnet matters so much. The choice between them is then a moral or theological one. What the ‘addiction is a disease’ faction cannot accept is that their standpoint is a questionable opinion about free will, not an undeniable fact about physiology.
By the way, I have seen ‘Citizen Sane’ criticised for having in some way surrendered to me thanks to an alleged awe of my celebrity. Well, I see no evidence for this. he retains his indendence through our exchange. As for overaweing anyone, I’m not that majestic a figure (5 feet nine inches in my socks, overweight, big nose, bad typist etc ) and it’s amazing how many of my other Internet opponents manage *not* to be overawed by this effect., and address me as 'you ****'.
To return to Orwell, ‘Fascism’ has actually become meaningless because of the abusive and lazy use of the word as an all-purpose insult or denigration by left-wing propagandists. Its only serious meaning now is ‘to do with the Fascist government of Italy under Mussolini’. At the root of this problem was the difficulty which the Comintern, and later the Cominform, had with the expressions ‘Nazi’ and ‘National Socialist’ . ‘Nazi’ always called into mind ‘Nazi-Soviet Pact’, an event the Left wish to forget or (increasingly) have never heard of and would rather not hear of, thank you kindly.
‘National Socialist’ has obvious problems for any left-wing propagandist who wants to pretend that barbaric authoritarian despotisms are conservative in origin. In fact it's utopian 'enlightenment' ideas that usually inform them.
I won’t even begin to discuss the problems of matching the NSDAP and Mussolini up to General Franco, or Salazar, or Marshal Petain. It would be as time-consuming and useless as trying to draw up a street plan (with bus map) of the Lost City of Atlantis.
But if one wishes to deal with the abstraction ‘Totalitarianism’ all one needs to do is to introduce such things as :
‘National Socialist Party’ , or ‘Gestapo’, or ‘OVRA; or ‘Fascist Party’ , or ‘Pravda’ or ‘Voelkischer Beobachter’ or ‘People’s Court’ (and how like Judge Jefferys’ Bloody Assize was to Roland Freisler’s horrible trials, or Andrei Vyshinksy’s Moscow equivalents, can be seen in Conan Doyle’s tremendous description of Jefferys in action in ‘Micah Clarke’) , or SS, or Gulag, or NKVD; or in the modern day, the Chinese Lao Gai.
And then one can see that these things have actual objective, material and human manifestations which are far from abstract, can be measured, studied, in many cases photographed, always documented.
Addiction has no such characteristics. It remains both physically unmeasurable and logically and verbally slippery, meaning one thing at one time, and another at a different time, depending on which part of the argument is being advanced. It was (as the record shows) through this question of definition that I managed to persuade ‘Citizen Sane’ of the (very simple) point that I repeatedly make. He was able to concede it because he was able to subordinate his passions and his desires to his reason. Far from being a demonstration of weakness or subservience, it was a considerable demonstration of character and intelligence.
June 20, 2013
Some Thoughts on Writing
Here is another part of the interview I gave (while in the grip of a horrible, distracting cold and sore throat) to Doug Wilson, during my visit to Moscow, Idaho in February. It's about writing as a trade and an activity.
http://www.canonwired.com/featured/hitchens-on-being-a-writer/
In Praise of John Rentoul (he won't like it)
Sometimes , during my solitary struggle to point out the blindingly obvious to a deluded multitude, I receive help and solace from unexpected quarters.
One such, among the most perceptive writers on the Left, is the Blairite (and Blair biographer) John Rentoul, whose chiselled, famished features I occasionally glimpse as we go about our rather different business in the mighty building that houses Associated Newspapers and the Independent stable. Occasionally we even exchange a friendly jeer or a wan smile, across the gulf of ideology which lies between us.
Mr Rentoul is updating his Blair biography, and last week published an extract in the ‘Independent on Sunday’ which some of you may not have seen. It can be found here :
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tony-blair-poster-boy-or-cartoon-villain-8660465.html
The extract which I like most opens as follows : ‘ [Blair’s] main domestic monuments were the improvements in education, the health service and cutting crime.’
This of course is what Mr Rentoul calls these actions. Others might describe them as a huge increase in the size of the state sector, and a brilliant exercise in propaganda and the manipulation of statistics.
But here comes the key part : ‘The greatest acknowledgement of his achievement was the change in the Conservative Party. This is a true measure of a leader's historical significance. Just as the Tory party accommodated itself to Attlee's postwar settlement, and Blair himself marked Labour's accommodation to Thatcherism, by 2005 he had forced the Conservatives to put public services before tax cuts. Even in trying to close the deficit five years later David Cameron and George Osborne protected spending on the NHS and schools.
‘The Conservative Party. has abandoned the idea that people should be encouraged to opt out of the NHS; and who would have thought that the Tories would now be opposed in principle to extending selective state education? ‘
Quite. Though the ‘acceptance of Thatcherism’ is much more a matter of the post-Cold War Left finally understanding that state ownership was no longer important to their project. Mr Rentoul does not discuss (who except me does?) the immense significance in modern egalitarian politics of the ban on selective schools. But he instinctively knows that it is very important indeed, and that the Tory surrender on this is likewise very significant.
In fact it is far *more* significant than Labour’s noisy abandonment of Clause Four , a tactical alteration and admission of a long-extant reality, without any change in fundamental aims. The Tory embrace of absolute egalitarianism (of the ‘equality of outcome’ type) is a colossal surrender of principle and revolutionary in effect. Egalitarianism has now replaced both Christianity and national patriotism as the principal basis of belief an action in this country.
STOP PRESS – in today’s ‘Independent , Steve Richards, another acute commentator of the Left, underlines the same point. Mr Richards (with whom I hope to be sharing a platform at York University on Sunday morning), amusingly points out the political interchangeability of certain columnists keen on what I would call the Blair-Cameron project.
My favourite passage is this : ‘…this particular reform agenda commands wide support from followers of the two rulers. It is easy to imagine some of Cameron’s advisers working for Blair and vice versa. Take a look at a quartet of brilliant columnists. The writer Julian Glover gave up a column to work for Cameron. The former Blair adviser Philip Collins became a columnist. Daniel Finkelstein entered the world of commentary from the Conservative Party. All three could join my esteemed colleague John Rentoul, the world’s leading Blairite and fan of Cameron, for a glass of wine and would agree on most matters. As well as being brilliant, I always find them to be cheerful. No wonder, they and their ideas have ruled for decades.
‘Blair rationalises this consensus by arguing that the era of the left and right is over and that the only split is between “open and closed” – protectionism vs free trade, interventionism vs isolationists, immigration vs strict controls. This rather loftily elevates Blair’s own politics to an entire global trend. Finkelstein got closer to it when he wrote approvingly that Blair had moved towards the centre right. Cameron astutely noted this, too, and, in his very smart early phase as leader, recognised that the best way to undermine Blair and Labour was to support him. The support also happened to be sincere.’
Of course, as columnists, they are not forced to choose a direct party allegiance. There are many politicians who would be in a similar position if the rules of tribal loyalty were not so strong – and many BBC figures who could be included in the list if they did not have to assert their ‘impartiality’ whenever they are specifically questioned.
Mr Richards’s article is here
June 19, 2013
UKIP is still Dad's Army
UKIP - NO APOLOGY from Peter Hitchens:
I’ve been surprised to find that some people have taken my ‘American Spectator’ article as a retraction of my past criticism of UKIP. No such thing was intended, though ‘Phil W’ ( and several people on Twitter) seem to think so. Nor do I think that a careful reading will show that such a reading is justified.
Here is Mr ‘W’ :
‘UKIP - AN APOLOGY, by Peter Hitchens In common with all other newspapers, I may have given the impression that I do not believe that UKIP has any credibility as a political party. Phrases such as, 'absurd Dad’s Army of UKIP', 'UKIP will remain small', 'silly, futureless organisation' and 'amateur, and on shallow foundations' may have given the impression that I believed UKIP is farcical non-entity with no political future. Additionally, readers may have inferred that when I claimed UKIP, 'really lacks any polished and persuasive performers' that I do not rate Mr. Farage very highly. I now realise none of the above is true and that UKIP's recent success, 'is in fact a long-delayed and irreversible confirmation of a crucial truth', and that only 'conformist choirs of conventional commentators in London' would seek to deny this. Furthermore, rather than lacking in appeal, Farage actually 'embodies something indomitable, irreverent, commonsensical, and entirely British that is instinctively liked by many, whatever their political views'. I apologise for any confusion this may have caused.’
Mr ‘W’ and others should read what I say more carefully. The article is of course written for an American audience who have never heard of UKIP and may in some cases think that the Tory Party is a conservative formation. My aim was to explain to them how and why it was that Tory voters had deserted their party, and what it might mean in general. I might add that Dad’s Army, to which I frequently compare UKIP, is largely unknown in the USA and probably wouldn’t be understood if it were.
I concentrated on attacking the Conservative Party because this is my main secular aim in life, and I think that if its true state becomes more widely known in foreign countries, this knowledge may reflect back into Britain and do it damage.
I also chose to make some more general points about what Anglosphere conservatism is, how it has its roots in the general contentment of a free law-governed people and so is vulnerable to opponents who are informed by ideology. It cannot understand them, and so cannot oppose or defeat them, or undo their bad deeds. This theme has become more important to me as I argue this case, and was a large part of my contribution to a recent debate at the University of York, in which I urged the local student Tories to disband.
I’d also add that I have for some time urged my readers to vote UKIP as the least worst option. This is emphatically not because I endorse that Party, which I absolutely and definitively decline to do, but because a large UKIP vote will aid the destruction of the Tory Party, my chief aim in politics.
My reservations about Mr Farage, and my lack of sympathy with him, are clearly stated in the American Spectator article. For instance: ‘His voice is a kind of bray, as those who have seen his attention-seeking public attack on European Council president Herman Van Rompuy will know. (Mr. Farage, a fine self-publicist, had no doubt noticed that a similar verbal machine-gunning of the then Labour premier Gordon Brown by an ambitious Tory called Daniel Hannan had garnered a large YouTube audience.)’.
Anyone who knows what I think about marriage, cars, drugs, decorum, smoking and drinking will also not see the following passages as a keen endorsement: ’He is happy, even eager, to be photographed with a half-empty (or is it half-full?) glass of beer in his hand. And by “beer” I mean the proper tepid, flat liquid, pumped into the glass by hand through yards of slimy tube, known in England as “bitter” and served by the pint, not in foreign liters.
‘He is a committed smoker (despite having survived testicular cancer). If there were an Olympic long lunch contest, he would be a gold medalist.’
Or :’ Apart from the smoking and the beer, his life is a living, breathing (or rather, wheezing) rejection of political correctness. He is not embarrassed to visit lap-dancing clubs. One would expect him to ask for extra lead in his gasoline and extra tar in his cigarettes. He was exposed in a downmarket newspaper (which did him no harm at all) for allegedly sharing an energetic night of passion with a Latvian woman, not his wife, an episode about which he seems to be both proud and embarrassed. He has been run over while far from sober, and narrowly escaped death when a light plane in which he was flying crashed (the plane was towing a UKIP campaign banner, which somehow got tangled in the tailplane). Claims that he is some sort of foreigner-hating xenophobe crumble when it is pointed out that he has French ancestry and that his (second) wife is German.’
I note that this behaviour appeals to an important part of the public because this is true, not because it appeals to me.
But the heart of my description is here : ‘Behind him stands a party that has little substance and many possible embarrassments. Mr. Farage himself is not a social conservative (he has mused in public about “decriminalizing” drugs), though quite a lot of his supporters are and he will sooner or later have to face this. But my guess is that he is a demolition man, not a builder. His task is to destroy. He is a missile directed straight at the heart of David Cameron’s Tory Party. And when he has finished exploding he may, with luck, have cleared a space for the creation of something Britain has never really had but now badly needs: a truly conservative party…’
This sums up my attitude. I am glad he is damaging the Tories. I do not agree with him, or particularly approve of him, or of his party. I still regard UKIP as a Dad’s Army which cannot possible replace the Tories as a major party of government.
(I have retained the American spellings from the original in all extracts)
June 18, 2013
An Article from the American Spectator, about UKIP
Some of you may be interested in this article from the June 2013 issue of the 'American Spectator', in which I try to explain the recent electoral success of UKIP to a U.S. audience. Some of you may not be interested.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/06...
or simply put "Peter Hitchens", "American Spectator" and "Revenge of the Fruitcakes" into any search engine.
June 17, 2013
A Rare Outbreak of Scepticism in Syrian Coverage - but was it justified?
A number of British media outlets were obviously shocked by Vladimir Putin’s sneer that it was unwise to arm Syrian rebels who ‘eat the organs’ of their enemies. Reporters used words such as ‘apparently’ and ‘allegedly’ to qualify the Russian President’s words. Nice to see some scepticism about war propaganda in Syria for once, as the atrocity tales of the rebels tend to have been believed without qualification, especially by the hopelessly partial BBC, as has the rather vague assertion that President Assad has used chemical weapons ‘against his own people’ (I ask again, is this better or worse than using them against other people’s people? Is there any major nation whose armed forces have never been used to put down uprisings or indeed drive people from their homes on its own territory. It’s hard to work out what else the US Army was doing in the last third of the 19th century).
Readers of this blog and my column will be familiar with this story, about a Syrian rebel leader biting into the heart of a dead soldier, which would have marched across every front page in ‘the West’, and led every TV bulletin for hours , had it been one of President Assad’s troops doing it to a rebel soldier. Yet it is an interesting reflection on the general bias towards intervention that these major news outlets were willing to be sceptical about it last night and this morning. For there really isn’t much doubt about it.
Well, the story appeared most fully in Time Magazine on 12th May, and the YouTube video, which I will leave you to find for yourself if you want, is pretty easily available.
I wrote in my column on June 2nd about
‘…a gentleman called Abu Sakkar, [who] recently publicly sank his teeth into the bleeding heart of a freshly-slain government soldier.’
Was I making it up, or taking the information too readily on trust? You be the judge.
Here are some significant extracts from the ‘Time’ story (there’s a link to the whole thing here: http://world.time.com/2013/05/12/atrocities-will-be-televised-they-syrian-war-takes-a-turn-for-the-worse/#ixzz2WTQtGsYr )
'Aryn Baker at TIME (May 12, 2013)
‘The video starts out like so many of the dozens coming out of the war in Syria every day, with the camera hovering over the body of a dead Syrian soldier. But the next frame makes it clear why this video, smuggled out of the city of Homs and into Lebanon with a rebel fighter, and obtained by TIME in April, is particularly shocking. In the video a man who is believed to be a rebel commander named Khalid al-Hamad, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, bends over the government soldier, knife in hand. With his right hand he moves what appears to be the dead man’s heart onto a flat piece of wood or metal lying across the body. With his left hand he pulls what appears to be a lung across the open cavity in the man’s chest. According to two of Abu Sakkar’s fellow rebels, who said they were present at the scene, Abu Sakkar had cut the organs out of the man’s body. The man believed to be Abu Sakkar then works his knife through the flesh of the dead man’s torso before he stands to face the camera, holding an organ in each hand. “I swear we will eat from your hearts and livers, you dogs of Bashar,” he says, referring to supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Off camera, a small crowd can be heard calling out “Allahu akbar” — God is great. Then the man raises one of the bloodied organs to his lips and starts to tear off a chunk with his teeth.’
The story adds:
‘Two TIME reporters first saw the video in April in the presence of several of Abu Sakkar’s fighters and supporters, including his brother. They all said the video was authentic. We later obtained a copy. Since then TIME has been trying to ensure that the footage is not digitally manipulated in any way — a faked film like this would be powerful propaganda for the regime, which portrays the rebels as terrorists — and, as yet, TIME has not been able to confirm its integrity.’
Then there’s this
In which Abu Sakkar himself does not deny the action when given the opportunity to do so, but instead offers excuses for it (by claiming film of atrocities was found on the victim’s mobile phone).
And this account
in which the same man exposes himself as a serious sectarian hate-merchant and boasts of other atrocities.
‘Al-Hamad, who is Sunni and harbors a sectarian hatred for Alawite Muslims, said he has another gruesome video of his killing a government soldier from the Alawite faith. (Syrian President Bashar Assad is Alawite; the conflict in Syria is increasingly sectarian.) “Hopefully we will slaughter all of them [Alawites]. I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip, I am sawing another shabiha [progovernment militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him into small pieces and large ones.” Al-Hamad also explained that even though both sides of the conflict in Syria are using video clips of their own brutal actions to intimidate the other, he believes his clip would have particular impact on the regime’s troops. “They film as well, but after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is,” he said, using his nom de guerre and referring to the part of Syria he currently controls.’
Human Rights Watch are reported to have validated the original evisceration video here
So, I think we can be pretty sure it’s the real thing. Abu Sakkar is in the ‘Farouq Brigades’, who are not Salafists or part of the militia supposedly linked to ‘Al Qaeda’. They are classified as ‘moderate Islamists’. Therefore they are the sort of people to whom William Hague wants to send weapons.
Suicide, the Addiction Fiction, Eating Organs in Syria and Cannabis
Just to run through a few unresolved matters from the weekend. I am still hoping to hear from ‘HM’ about the effect of ‘narrative verdicts’ on the suicide statistics. As I said, my exchange with this contributor was extremely useful and educational for me, as I had not known many of the details about suicide statistics, and he or she compelled me to go deeper into the matter than I had done before. I am now pretty sure that ‘narrative verdicts’ are making it very difficult to be sure what the true rate of suicide is.
My suspicion is that they may be unintentionally concealing events which are suicides, and possibly attributable to ‘antidepressants’. Once again, I don’t claim to know this. I haven’t the facilities (or the powers, in these days of protected data ) to research it . That is why I call for a proper international inquiry into antidepressants, their prescription, their side-effects, the correlation between them and suicide and massacres - with powers to demand the relevant information. I think steroids should be included. And for a start , Coroners should be required to ask this question, and reliable methods adopted for checking for the presence of psychotropics, legal or illegal, in the bodies of the deceased. Perpetrators of violent crimes should also in all cases be tested and for the presence of such drugs, and their medical histories made known to the courts.
I am told that the vitreous (or perhaps aqueous) humour of the eye is a better source for such tests, in a recently deceased person, than a blood test. Does any expert have any light to shed on this claim?
I will not name the major cases of violent assault which came before the courts last week in which the assailant was said to be using steroids, but I found two. I do wish people would pay attention to this, especially after the Raoul Moat and Anders Breivik cases. In one of last week's cases, the assailant was also said to be taking ‘antidepressants’ In the other more serious case, it is almost certain that the culprit was using illegal drugs.
A contributor complained a) that I gave no details of train timetable changes and b) that my article on fatherless families was unsourced. Well, newspaper articles don’t usually have footnotes, though I did make it clear that my principal source was the Centre for Social Justice pamphlet on Fractured Families, which is densely footnoted, and I have now provided a link to the text at the bottom of the article.
As for train timetables, I have a great deal of consistent personal experience to go on, as I travel a lot by train. Certain lines known to me are affected more than others. But I don’t possess (and haven’t had time to obtain) the historic timetables which would bear out my contention. If my critic is seriously suggesting that I have imagined the whole thing, then let him say so, and I can then challenge him to show it (I’ll give him the names of the lines involved,personally, if he asks). As it is, I think most travellers by train will be aware of this development, though of course there are some lines which, for various reasons, have not been affected.
I am about to embark on a proper reading of a study of rail privatisation ‘The Great Train Robbery – rail privatisation and after ’ , produced by the Manchester University Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, which I am told, in a fascinating article by by Aditya Chakrabortty of the Guardian, contains some devastating facts.
I am being besieged by a tedious person on Twitter who is unable to cope with my repeatedly-stated view that there is no such thing as ‘addiction’. I refer him, and any others who still swallow this absurd and lazy piece of conventional wisdom as if it were a scientific fact, to read this account, by an honest, generous and thoughtful opponent who recently engaged me on the same subject. http://citizensane.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/youre-gonna-have-to-face-it-youre-addicted-to-peter-hitchens/
I have just ( a few hours ago) posted a long article about President Vladimr Putin’s charge that the Syrian rebels, whom David Cameron wishes to arm, ‘eat the organs’ of their dead foes. This seemed to come as a surprise to much of the British media . Not here, it didn’t. See the previous posting for reasons to believe this story to be true.
And I would like to draw your attention to a fine article in today’s (Monday 17th June 2013) ‘Times’ by Libby Purves, about the stupid, dangerous and frivolous attitude of the cool classes to cannabis, in this season of rock festivals (which are also of course drug festivals). I can’t reproduce it or link to it, as it’s behind a pay-wall. But it cites Patrick and Henry Cockburn’s book ‘Henry’s Demons’, and the work on cannabis and mental illness of Professor Sir Robin Murray, as well as revealing a deep and very movingly expressed personal sadness which has persuaded her to reject the dopey frivolity of much of liberal Britain. Please get hold of it if you can. It must have cost her quite a lot of courage to write it. Ms Purves is no ally of mine on almost any subject, but I find that where people have thought carefully about this matter, whatever their politics, they tend to share my alarm about the way in which cannabis is now being portrayed and treated.
From Micah Clarke to Elmer Gantry - two very different books about religion
Quite often I read more than one book at a time, perhaps history on the train and a novel before going to sleep. In the past fortnight, I’ve been reading two novels, which have turned out to have one powerful parallel.
They are Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Micah Clarke’ – the full and rather lovely title, on the opening page of my tattered Edwardian edition (which used to belong to my father) is ‘His Statement as Made to his three grandchildren Joseph, Gervas and Reuben during the hard winter of 1734’; and Sinclair Lewis’s ‘Elmer Gantry’ , probably better known to most people through the film of the same name, which I have somehow never seen.
I have always loved Conan Doyle’s historical romances, having been born and educated in a country where the great, distant horns of chivalry could still be heard faintly blowing, far off, especially in deep countryside late on summer evenings. I doubt if any modern child could put up, unaided, with their slow introductions and rich prose, though the opening of ‘Sir Nigel’ , which runs ‘In the month of July in the year 1348, between the feasts of St Benedict and of St Swithin, a strange thing came upon England, for out of the east there drifted a monstrous cloud, purple and piled, heavy with evil, climbing slowly up the hushed heaven…’ is surely as good as any of Dickens’s great beginnings, and just to recall it makes me long for a fireside chair and a dark afternoon and hours of uninterrupted boyish peace in which to read it again.
But the best of them is ‘Micah Clarke’, and when I had to choose a name by which to go among the left-wing electronic mob that is Twitter, it sprang swiftly to mind. I never read it in childhood, and only came upon it after I had read Thomas Macaulay’s distressing account of the Monmouth Rebellion and of its terrible aftermath for the brave men and women who had picked the wrong year to rise up against a wicked King.. My father, who also loved it, had many times urged me to read it but (in the 3ay of sons) I had not heeded paternal advice.
When I did, I couldn’t be prised away from the book. It is (which will not surprise readers of Sherlock Holmes) full of excellent dry humour, much of which I should have missed if I had read it as a child. Its hero. Micah himself, is a huge, quiet, determined young man whose father (an old Ironside from Cromwell’s New Model Army, and a tremendous Protestant fanatic) and mother ( an emollient, diplomatic and commonsensical Anglican) dwelling on the edge of Portsmouth, must have been much like my own grandfather and grandmother. No wonder my father (who, like Micah, escaped the narrow confines of his home by taking up the profession of arms) liked the story.
I hope people will continue to read it, for it is full of sound sense about religious fanaticism, about war, about the plain absolute wrongness of torture, about fanaticism and tolerance, about courage and about England itself, its beauty still unravaged by industry, a rich and lovely landscape. It contains some of the most convincing descriptions of combat I have ever encountered, especially the successful resistance, by a band of peasants, to a disciplined charge by trained cavalry. They owe this success to the military skills of Decimus Saxon, a wholly disreputable and fraudulent soldier of fortune, liar, thief, braggart, staunch friend, and superb fighting man. Decimus is much given to speaking through his nose, and pronouncing ‘Lord’ as ‘Lard’ when in the presence of the Calvinist fanatics who form much of Monmouth’s army, though he sometimes has trouble concealing from them his true beliefs.
The book has much to say about this great movement of Bible religion, which we cannot really understand now and cannot imagine flourishing in our country. But it did. It held men’s minds as perhaps only Islam does now, and they fought for it without any real fear of death. Sometimes they did things which were more or less mad. Another great combat described in the book takes place as Saxon, Micah and his friends defend the Cathedral at Wells from a band of sectarian iconoclasts – like them, part of Monmouth’s army - , who try to smash its ancient sculptures and windows. It is a very hard fight, unsparingly described (and I sometimes wonder if Simon Raven had read the account in his childhood, for there is something about the shape of it which reminds one of the defence of Lancaster College Chapel by Hetta Frith and others, in ‘Places Where they Sing’). Doyle is plainly in tow minds about it. His description of Taunton, the capital of the rebellion and a place of sober prosperity, martial courage and high seriousness, is full of admiration. His description of madmen smashing the cathedral, and his mockery of some of the preachers, is full of dislike and mockery. Yet, as Decimus Saxon points out, it is such men as these who won the Civil War, roaring psalms as they drove the King’s soldiers from the field of Naseby. They knew what they fought for, and loved what they knew, and if our country is now a free and lawful place (or was until recently) , it is my reluctant view that they have something to do with it. The Stuarts, let to themselves, would have turned us into a continental autocracy, under the shadow of France and in her pay.
And then there is this passage, in which the coming catastrophe of Sedgemoor is foreseen, in which the rebels are cut to pieces, or (worse) captured and dragged before Judge Jefferys and his Bloody Assize, and their leader flees, only to be captured hiding in a bush, and then to grovel before the King he hoped to depose:
‘ It is no pleasant matter for me to dwell upon, yet, convinced as I am that there is no such thing as chance either in the great or the little things of this world, I am very sure that the sacrifices of these brave men were not thrown away, and that their strivings were not as profitless as might at first sight appear. If the perfidious race of Stuart is not now seated upon the throne, and if religion in England is still a thing of free growth, we may, to my thinking, thank these Somerset yokels for it, who first showed how small a thing would shake the throne of an unpopular monarch. Monmouth's army was but the vanguard of that which marched three years later into London, when James and his cruel ministers were flying as outcasts over the face of the earth.’
How odd, then, to turn later in the day to Sinclair Lewis’s tale of an American religious mountebank, forerunner of today’s televangelists, the prototype of every hypocritical windbag preacher in fact or fiction, ‘Elmer Gantry’.
I had read Lewis’s more famous books ‘Main Street’ and ‘Babbitt’ years ago, when as a newspaper reporter in provincial towns, I enjoyed his contempt for the pomposities of the respectable, the Rotarians and the Prominent Citizens, and his rejection of the idea that virtue resided in small places far from the wicked metropolis. I was in small places. I wanted to get to the wicked metropolis (I have since left it).
But this is something else entirely. It is a huge attack on the great Protestant evangelical movement which found its home in the USA after we in this country restored the Church of England in 1660. Such Protestantism was in 1920, and still remains, an immensely powerful force of intellect and morals in the United States. Gantry is from the start a fraud (though Lewis has to grant him one or two moments when he almost believes) and one of the funniest things in the book is that for years, the core of Gantry’s standard sermon (much loved by congregations all over the American Midwest) is in fact plagiarised from the words of Robert Ingersoll, a then-famous agnostic mocker of religion.
There is plenty in here which religious believers ( and anybody else) ought to read, to be warned against banality, stupidity greed and cruelty, which are of course to be found in any organised movement. In all fairness, Lewis is careful to include some characters who are simultaneously religious and good, and one or two who see right through Gantry from very early on.
Since I am myself a rather chilly latitudinarian Anglican, with little liking for enthusiasm, giant congregations or extrovert displays of piety, I have a lot of sympathy with these criticisms anyway. I don’t mind if religion is full of honest doubt, and sometimes easier to express in poetry, music and architecture than it is in plain prose.
And I think there genuinely was a problem for those who had made the Bible into a sort of Christian Koran, in the 19th and early 20th century, when it was quite impossible to argue the literal truth of many of its passages. To retreat was to collapse. The only thing to do was to hold the line with sheer determination and hope for the best. And in such times, of course, characters such as Elmer Gantry (and Decimus Saxon, come to that) may prosper. This of course hit hard at the Protestant sectaries who had , from the days of Cromwell, held to the Good Book as the absolute rule of life and thought. This is why those critics of religion who dispute the detailed claims of Christianity are so much more interesting than those who assert, in their tedious way, that there is no such thing as God and that to entertain the idea is the act of a moron. Plenty of non-Morons know this is not so, and have known it down all the ages. Deism, or Unitarianism, are much greater intellectual challenges to Christianity than atheism.
My problem with ‘Elmer Gantry’ is the end. A good and honest man, Frank Shallard, is first hounded from his pulpit by Gantry, then terribly injured in an attack by religious fanatics, while Gantry himself survives what ought to have been the utter exposure of his bloviating , lecherous, fraudulent self. The end of the book is said to have been written while Lewis was in the midst of a personal tragedy, and often drunk. Perhaps that is why it is so blatantly unjust that it almost makes the reader long for the intervention of Divine Wrath. Which is roughly where we began.
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