Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 276

For MMR Obsessives, another turn around the circuit

My MMR critic, Michael Ward,  has now posted a  rebuttal of my reply to him. By the way, our old friend Sir Martin Narey has become involved in this  (Some may remember his brief visit to these quarters  - he departed before our discussion on DNA databases and the death penalty was finished.  The final phase of this encounter is to be found here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/10/martin-narey-retreats-to-his-comfort-zone-and-other-matters.html ). He has joined Ex-Comrade Aaronovitch in endorsing Mr Ward’s work on Twitter, so Mr Ward has now become a proxy for two heavyweight Blairite  figures. Congratulations to Mr Ward, for attracting such powerful establishment support.

 

I reproduce Mr Ward’s latest below, interspersed with my responses in bold type.

 

It is entitled ‘Peter Hitchens, MMR, and the core issue’

 

He begins:

 

‘This began with my previous blog-post in which I "fisked" (to use the current jargon) one of Peter Hitchens's articles on MMR in between waiting for my computer program to compile (nobody pays me for blogging). Mr Hitchens (to his credit I suppose) has now reproduced my fisk in full and added some more words re-defending his original position.

 

Rather disingenuously, Mr Hitchens complains that my "essay (including quotations from [him]) is almost 6,000 words long". Yes Peter, but about 4000 of those words are yours - to which you have now added another 3000. ‘

 

PH remarks: I don’t know what’s disingenuous about this.  Actually, I wasn’t complaining, merely stating a fact and warning readers that there was rather a lot of it, as there is now.  As far as I am concerned, if something is worth arguing about at all, then it is worth arguing about properly. I only mention this because it demonstrates something about my critic’s attitude towards me. He cannot even acknowledge my readiness to give his case in full without adding a grudging ‘I suppose’). We shall observe more of this later.

 

 

 

I could respond to the other statements Peter makes concerning drugs, communism, "shades", guns, GM, Iraq, and electrons, but let's try and stick to the point for once:

 

PH remarks:   Some of the things he lists are in fact central to this argument, which – as I have tried to point out – is essentially a dispute about the individual versus the state, and the freedom of the press. It is a matter of opinion. It is not something about which anyone may be definitively *right* or *wrong*.  You either believe that the NHS belongs to the people, or that the people belong to the NHS. What I object to about his criticism is its self-righteous lecturing tone, its lack of any sort of generosity towards an opponent, and its constant attempt to suggest that I said things I did not say, and did things I did not do.

 

If, in spite of all the considerations I've outlined, Peter Hitchens thinks that the NHS should have offered single vaccines at the height of the scare, he is (as they say) "entitled to his opinions."

 

PH remarks: That is jolly kind of him. As for the ‘in spite of’, none of the considerations he has set forth has any bearing on the following simple point, which he has never addressed properly nor attempted to rebut. It is highly likely that, had the single vaccines still been available on the NHS, a large number of the children who were not given the MMR would have been given the single jab, and the present outbreak of measles would not have happened. I state this in the most modest possible terms. 

 

 

 

The experts feel, on balance, that this would have done more harm than good overall. Peter Hitchens feels the opposite.

 

PH remarks. His ‘experts’ believe this, but they are not neutral observers. They supported the ‘MMR or Nothing’ policy and it is hardly in their interests to admit that it was a failure. I am on record as saying *at the time* that it would fail and why. At the time, they assumed it would work.  I rather think my warning has been borne out and their assumption has been shown to be wrong.   I do not ‘feel’ anything. I believe that all the evidence suggests that it would have been so. The objections to continuing with the single vaccine can be met as follows. 1. Fears about the quality of unregulated single vaccines could easily have been overcome by the NHS continuing to supply it, and maintaining quality control. 2. The claim that parents would not have completed the programme of vaccinations are just that, claims. In my experience, the worried parents were overwhelmingly among the more responsible and thoughtful parts of the population. It was precisely because they were conscientious and thoughtful that they were worried about the MMR. Why should it then be assumed that they would fecklessly fail to ensure immunisation? This is just lofty contempt for the masses , from the very people who claim to love them so.  3. We know beyond doubt (because it happened) that the government’s chosen course, of offering the MMR or nothing, led many parents to say ‘very well, then, nothing’. As an attempt to enforce take up of the MMR, this policy was one of the most abject failures of public health policy in recent years. In a free society, compulsion through refusal of choice doesn’t work.  People just choose to do nothing, rather than to do what the state wants. Who is responsible for the failure of government decisions? Why, the government that takes them. Certainly not the free people who refuse to be bossed about in this manner.

 

Mr Ward says  In the end, nobody can say for certain what the two outcomes would have been of the two competing policy decisions. It's a matter of judgement. I incline (steeply) to the expert judgement and I find the reasoning behind Peter's view wanting, but I accept that Peter has every right to express a different view here.

 

PH comments: Once again, it is jolly nice of him to concede to me the freedom to have a different opinion on the nature of government, its powers and responsibilities, and on the freedom of the people, from his almighty selfness. But I have to tell him that I couldn’t care less. I had that freedom already. My forebears won it for me, and protected it from danger, as I now seek to do for my children.

 

If he finds my reasoning ‘wanting’ then he has yet to explain how or why. His inclinations are obviously obedient, conformist and statist, and he is the perfect citizen for our modern world (as I am not).  But if he wants to criticise my reasoning,  he has to show some sign of doing any of his own. He still hasn’t explained why he continues to claim that a policy which has demonstrably failed – the policy of MMR or nothing - was better than the alternative. Let me repeat. The policy which he favours was an abject failure. It did not work. It flopped. It did not achieve its intention.   

Let me repeat the simple point. The ‘MMR or nothing’ policy failed. Thousands of grown-up people refused to be bullied into allowing their children to have the MMR. That is why we have the problem we have now.  That failure lies on the shoulders of those who decided to adopt it, who plainly knew nothing of human nature or of parental love, and who have yet to learn their lesson. 

 

Mr Ward continues: ‘But this is not all Peter said.

 

‘If, in spite of all the science to the contrary, Peter Hitchens thinks that MMR may cause autism,…’

 

 

PH comments. This is very slippery. He knows perfectly well that I  repeatedly said in my 2001 article that I did not know or pretend to know the answer to this question. But he needs (as we shall shortly see) to try to portray me as some sort of anti-scientific scaremonger,  hence this disreputable conditional sentence, willing to wound but fearing to strike.

 

 

Mr Ward continues ‘…he is not entitled to that opinion in the way he is entitled to his opinion about single jabs.’

 

PH comments : Thus the underhand, half-made accusation is advanced on the edge of a remark, just enough to damage, not enough to get him into blatant trouble with the truth. I love the way that those who like to pose as above-the-fray ’scientists’ will resort to such tactics when in trouble. I haven’t expressed any such opinion.

 

Mr Ward continues ‘But let me explain what I am saying and not saying here. (I shall come in a moment to what Mr Hitchens actually says.)

•Though I rather wish Mr Hitchens had not expressed his opinions, I am not saying he should be prevented from expressing his opinions.

•I am not saying that science is always right. Science is based on the current best evidence and is constantly revised in in response to the latest evidence. Occasionally there are mavericks in science who challenge the status quo, are ridiculed, and then turn out to be right. Most of the time, however, mavericks turn out to be wrong.’

 

PH comments. Well, this is fantastic news. And if these so-called ‘mavericks in science’  turn out to be right, then where would we have been if we had ignored or decried them, especially if their warnings had in fact turned out to have saved lives or saved people from danger, and we could have saved more people from death or tragedy had we listened to them sooner? And who coudl know in advance that this would or would not be so?

 

As long as such things happen, the layman in the media is not entitled to make a judgement on whether to publish their warnings. Nor, given the record of governments and drug companies, can the layman in the media, or the ordinary subject,  assume that the majority is right, or that the government is right.

 

And once you have memntioned the controversy the public will take its own view. This was the point of the quotation from Sarah Boseley of the ‘Guardian’, no friend of mine or of my opinion, which I included in my riposte. The ‘responsible’ (often meaning conformist,  cautious, statist, conventionally wise) course may well turn out to be a deeply damaging one. Governments are often wrong. Weapons of mass destruction; the heterosexual AIDS epidemic; the beef scare; the bungled foot-and-mouth outbreak; the disgusting neglect of patients in some hospitals. The list is long.  That is what I meant by freedom necessarily being irresponsible. The media must be *free* to criticise. That means it, too, must be free to make mistakes. Because without that freedom it cannot expose the more important mistakes of governments.

 

 

Mr Ward continues; ‘•There is nothing wrong with journalists reporting the views of maverick scientists or even their own maverick views providing such views are placed firmly in the context of whatever mainstream scientific opinion is at the time. This is particularly important when the general public (who do not read scientific literature) may react to a report in the media and put their own health or (especially) that of their children at risk. ‘

 

PH responds. I couldn’t agree more. And in that 2001 article, that is exactly what I did. My only objection here is to the use of the word 'maverick' as a known factor. How can we know? And, as I have pointed out rather a lot, my 2001 article was written when the controversy was already well-established in the public mind.  He flatters me graetly if he imagines that a 2,500-word long read towards the back of the book of a Sunday newspaper will have had much effect one way or the other on mass public perceptiosn of the MMR. If Mr Ward wishes to criticise any other journalists for what they write, let him do so with specific examples. My own impression is that the problems were in general legitimately reported by the media, some taking one view, some the other, as is only proper in a plural society, and also that the problems which followed, of reluctance to allow children to be given the MMR,  could easily have been avoided by following the policy I advocated at the time, of continuing to make single vaccines available to those who were concerned.

 

 

Mr Ward continues ‘Now Mr Hitchens claims that he is not saying that MMR causes autism: …

 

PH retorts : ‘I do not *claim* any such thing, I *say* so. The use of the word ‘claim’ implies incredulity on the part of the person who uses it, and hints to the reader that the statement is not to be trusted. On what, precisely,  does he base this incredulity? What entitles him to urge this mistrust on his readers? Once more, he is resorting to the slippery and the underhand, never a good sign.

 

Mr Ward quotes me

‘…were I arguing that Dr Wakefield was right, or the MMR was dangerous, I would need to show my qualifications before doing so. [...] But I am not.’

 

PH remarks . I should have thought the words ‘I am not’ were pretty clear. A simple unambiguous statement in words of one syllable. But watch what Mr Ward now does with this material.

 

 

‘The problem is that this statement - though strictly true - is again disingenuous. Let's take just one of Mr Hitchens's sentences:

“The claims of an MMR risk have not been proved, but nor have they been disproved.”

This sentence is of course true. The problem is that it is always true no matter what empirical claims you put in there. For example, try substituting "for the existence of unicorns" for "of an MMR risk". The sentence is still true.

 

PH comments. I am used to this nursery stuff in debates with atheists. It’ll be orbiting teapots, flying spaghetti monsters and Father Christmas next.  There is no evidence for any of these things, nor do they explain anything which is unexplained.  There *was* evidence suggesting that there *might* be reason to worry about the MMR.   At the time that I wrote the article involved, 2001, the issue was still one of controversy.  Mr Ward disagrees with this because of his inclination to be on the side of authority. That does not make him right or me wrong.  Nor does my inclination to refuse to believe anything until it has been officially denied (Bismarck’s advice) make me right and him wrong. A free society allows us both to exist simultaneously, and causes necessary imperfections in the order of things.

 

A group of qualified doctors had raised a difficulty with the MMR in 1998. The process which has since led to the discrediting of their claims had hardly begun by 2001, and was certainly not over. The original MMR had in fact run into problems in 1992 (not over autism but over its mumps component), difficulties which must have raised general questions about it in many minds. 

 

Two of the original vaccines had been withdrawn.  It is also the case (recognised by any serious person) that almost any vaccine can carry a risk for a minority. Many people have always feared vaccines for this reason. Fears which might normally have been dormant, or been reduced to a belief that the risks were so small that they were most unlikely to arise, were instead very widespread. What Mr Ward seems entirely unable to understand is the presence of fear in the human mind, especially fear in  parent’s mind for the safety of a child.  You can’t lecture or shout it out of existence. Sometimes you just have to recognise its existence, and treat it sympathetically.

 

 

Mr Ward ( and I don’t recall us being formally introduced, so I wish he wouldn’t refer to me as ‘Peter’) continues : ‘Sentences like Peter's, which are always true no matter what is the case, do not tell us anything about the world; so Peter is correct. He has not made a false factual claim here

 

‘Nevertheless, this sentence, without actually saying anything, puts the false idea into a reader's mind that there is some credible doubt about the safety of MMR.’

 

PH comments. Ah, so I haven’t actually said anything untrue. But someone might get a false impression from what I have said. So I have sinned. Well, what is this sin? That  ‘this sentence, without actually saying anything, puts the false idea into a reader's mind that there is some credible doubt about the safety of MMR.’

I will go further than Mr Ward’s coy formulation. The sentence states clearly that there is a possibility that there might be such a doubt. On the other hand, I will say that there was, when I expressed it,  nothing *false* about it this idea.  When I wrote the 2001 article, I thought this was so. Mr Ward’s certainty that the controversy was over and done with by 2001 is, frankly, absurd. How old was he at the time?  And I was, in my view, entitled to think that this was so.  I was mistaken, but I did not *know* that then, and nor did Mr Ward *know* it, though it may have been his opinion, a different thing (though he tends to confuse the two, as so many of my opponents do).

 

I do still worry that the possibility exists that a small minority of children may react badly to this (and other) injections, and that the authorities may regard this as an acceptable price to pay for mass immunisation, an interesting moral problem we could discuss elsewhere, but one which (inevitably) looks different if you suspect that your child is one of the small minority. That’s why I quoted Vivienne Parry’s interesting remarks on this subject in my original article. Does he disagree with her, by the way?

 

Had Mr Ward written at the time that the matter was satisfactorily resolved, he would have been expressing a certainty to which he was not entitled. His instincts,  as we have discussed, are to side with establishments, authorities, mainstreams etc. Mine are to do the opposite. It is perhaps a good thing that I am journalist, and he is whatever he is. There was open disagreement among those qualified to judge. I wasn’t qualified to decide between them.  I had,  as it happened, played precisely zero role in creating those doubts. They existed quite independently of me, and had grown up as the result of the writings and sayings of qualified doctors and of experienced medical writers. That was why, before I ever put finger to keyboard, thousands of parents had decided that they were not going to give their children the MMR. It had happened.

 

Mr Ward continues ’As I write, there are hundreds of children across the UK suffering from measles. Dozens have been hospitalized. I have a great deal of "human sympathy" for these children and their parents’

 

PH replies : In that case, why can he not see that bullying those parents with the ‘MMR or Nothing’ alternative patently did not work, and did not work because it was never going to work, and was a mistake, and is the reason for the hundreds of children suffering from measles, about whom he now says he is so concerned. It is more than likely, in fact practically certain,  that these children are the children of parents who were offered the ‘MMR or Nothing’ option and predictably chose ‘nothing’ .

 

 

Mr Ward says ‘ - which is precisely why I became angry enough to write my original attack on Peter Hitchens's article.’

 

PH responds :I am not sure about the ‘precision’ here. And I would say that anger and reason seldom go hand in hand.  He hasn’t shown that my article played any part in this. It was written when the controversy was already old and well-established,  when doubts about the MMR were widespread, and after the authorities had adopted the ‘MMR or nothing’ policy and indeed after that policy (high-handed and insensitive as it was)  had begun, inevitably, to fail. By that time doctors were being paid large bonuses to increase MMR uptake, and much of the media, plus the government, were shouting repeatedly at parents that the MMR was safe. I was one of those parents. I remember it well. They’d been doing so for ages. It wasn’t working. My article advocated a return to the policy of offering single jabs on the NHS. Had this policy been adopted, most of those now suffering from measles wouldn’t be.

 

Mr Ward contends :’This would not have happened if those children had been given the MMR vaccine at the recommended time.’

 

PH replies : ’We are now in the good old territory of ‘If we had some ham , we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’. Can he not grasp that the parents involved were not, under any circumstances short of force, going to give their children the MMR? All manner of persuasion had been tried, their minds were made up, much as his mind is made up about my personal wickedness, bless him.  I strongly suspect that the bullying attitude of the government, far from increasing coverage, served to persuade many waverers to refuse the MMR. When it turned out that the Blairs were not prepared to say what their own personal policy was, that put the lid on it.  Why, then , is he so anxious to blame me (who never wrote a word on the subject from 1998 to 2001), rather than the government?

 

Mr Ward says :’The reason they were not given the vaccine at the recommended time is that their parents were scared.’

 

PH. This is absolutely true.

 

Mr Ward says : ‘The parents were not scared by (no longer a Dr) Wakefield's original paper - which they never read and which was thoroughly discredited by other experts within months of its appearance and utterly discredited by 2001. The parents were scared by what they read in the newspapers.’

 

PH replies : These are assumptions we cannot test. My guess, from many discussions with people about where they get their ideas from, are a bit different. Some parents may indeed have read the Wakefield papers. Some may have been influenced by newspapers. Most, I suspect, became aware of a concern as part of the background noise of their lives, almost certainly from TV and radio, already by 1998 much the most powerful media,  far more than from newspapers.  They had it in their minds that there was a dispute about the matter. They had (as most parents have) a worry about allowing needles to be stuck into their children. They didn’t think measles was that serious a problem, having had it themselves and not suffered greatly.  They resented the bullying attitude of the authorities and were made suspicious by it.

 

Mr Ward says :’Even if it were true that things would have been better if the NHS had supplied single vaccines (it almost certainly isn't true but let's let that pass)’

 

PH: No,  I will not let it pass. Why would it ‘almost certainly’ not have been better? On what basis, other than his own fervently pro-authority view, does he reach this bizarre conclusion? The parents feared the MMR, not single injections, which had been available since 1968 and had never been controversial. Even if the masses were the feckless, irresponsible people he assumes them to be (and they are not) it is surely beyond all doubt that more children would have been immunised against measles had the single jab been readily available at their GP surgery  after the Wakefield controversy began. He really must explain why a choice of MMR or single jab would have had *worse* results than the ‘MMR or nothing’ policy, which has had the results we now see. Nobody suggested the withdrawal of the MMR, just its continued availability alongside an alternative for those who were worried.  Of course, I know he won’t. He’s much too anxious to blame free speech and a free press, to take the responsibility away from his beloved state.

 

Mr Ward says ;’It would still be the case, I submit, that the actions of journalists (including Peter Hitchens) were deeply irresponsible and were partly responsible for the current epidemic.’

 

PH replies . He can say this if he likes. I don’t much care. I’ve been, as I so often have cause to say, insulted by experts.  If he regards my actions, which were aimed at the sensible resolution of a difficult problem (and which I firmly believe, had they been heeded, would have avoided that problem)  as ‘irresponsible’ then that’s just a difference of opinion over what amounts to ‘irresponsibility’ . I don’t impugn his motives. I think he’s an honest authoritarian utopian, of a kind who can do much good provided he’s balanced in society by people who aren’t quite so willing to take the state at its word.

 

Lots of factors contributed to the current outbreak (is it an epidemic? I wouldn’t have thought it had reached that stage but I’m not sure of the technical definition) . I would list them as : Honest doubts expressed by doctors ; legitimate coverage of those doubts across all the media; worry among parents, often highly emotional; highhanded bullying by the authorities and foolish secretiveness on the part of Downing Street, the refusal by the authorities to understand or sympathise with the fears of parents, and to give them an alternative they would accept. Lots of children not immunised at all.

 

Mr Ward concludes: ‘Nothing Peter has to say about drugs, communism, "shades", guns, GM, Iraq, or electrons changes this uncomfortable conclusion.’

 

PH. Nor am I sure why they would. Stick to the subject. Comrade Aaronovitch will understand the stuff about Communism. It’s him it’s aimed at, and he knows (unlike Mr Ward, who plainly knows little about me) why I’m bothered about it.

 

It’s my suspicion that nothing of any kind would change Mr Ward’s mind (in this he is quite like the parents who wouldn’t let their children have the MMR in 2001, though he will never see the similarity). A made-up mind is a made-up mind, and the difference between us is, as I say, principally one of temperament.  I suspect that he likes humanity as an idea, but finds individual humans a bit awkward, especially if they disagree with him. He trusts authority. I don’t. I think the NHS belongs to the people. He thinks the people belong to the NHS. There’s no resolution to these differences, which will always (I hope) exist in our country.  That’s why we have an adversarial parliament. But it helps if both sides respect the motives of the other, and assume a common humanity. It’s the censorious lack of generosity in his tone that I find disquieting.

I am not on Trial, even if you wish I were. You are not my Prosecutor

Here is a note on the rules of debate, prompted by the high-handed, self-righteous and overbearing tone of a number of people currently commenting on several topics here.  I doubt they will recognise themselves, as fanatics seldom know that they are fanatics,  but I hope they do. It was also specifically addressed to a contributor on the latest 'MMR' thread.

 

A Mr 'Alexander Search' writes : 'You challenged someone on Twitter twice to provide evidence that there were any deaths caused by the MMR scandal. That evidence was provided and you've refused to reply. Why?'

Well, I haven't  'refused' to reply.  I may not have noticed the question, or statement, involved. I don't spend all my life on Twitter, to put it mildly, and I'm often puzzled by its workings. I post many comments there, and some produce replies, while others don't, Often it is hard to tell which have, and which haven't. Sometimes long daisy-chains form, which are difficult to follow.

Anyway,   I've seen no such evidence.

The question I asked was in fact specific. Several people were claiming on Twitter that the current outbreak of measles, which they style an epidemic, had led to deaths. I simply asked when and where these deaths had taken place, as I am not aware of them (though I have seen some press reports suggesting that such deaths are likely . I wonder if my critics think such reports are 'irresponsible' or 'alarmist').

As I make plain in my original essay on the MMR, I am well aware of deaths from measles, during past outbreaks in Dublin and the Netherlands, and of one some years ago in England (I was unable to obtain details of this case from the authorities, who said that 'patient confidentiality' prevented them from divulging details, though I never sought to identify the person). If confidentiality is that strict, how were they able to discuss the matter publicly at all?

Because of the refusal of the authorities to reveal details, it is impossible to know if this death was that of a normally healthy person, or of someone already ill; or if there were any other special circumstances.  These may have been very important. Why can't we know?

I object to Mr Search's prosecutorial tone, and only answer his aggressive question because it is important to establish the truth. I am not on trial (though many of my critics plainly wish I were), and he is not in a position to demand answers from me in this fashion.

My reason for declining to engage in exchanges with some people on some subjects is that , while I am indeed happy to debate with anyone who is serious about debating, I see little point in debating with those who enter discussions by expressing open contempt for me and my views, or by acting like public prosecutors in a show trial.

A certain willingness to believe it possible that you may be mistaken, a willingness to learn from an opponent, and a generosity of spirit towards that opponent,  are essential for any serious debate.

Where these things are lacking, it is generally faith that is at issue, not knowledge or understanding. But it is also a special kind of secular faith, whose adherents don't even recognise that it *is* faith. Those afflicted often show this by acting and writing as if their opinions are facts.

 It's perfectly possible to discuss faith with people who understand that this is what they are expressing, and that others may not necessarily share it. But it is not possible to do so with those who believe that those who don't share their own certainties are contemptible fools.

Facts and logic are useless weapons against  such (often false) certainties. So contributors here who want responses from me should bear in mind that the more scornful,  lofty and prosecutorial they are, the less likely I am to bother with them. 

Remember, I have actually changed my mind on substantial matters. I know how it's done and (even more important) how it's not done, and also how it's avoided. It is a joy to argue with thise who are mature enough to change their minds. It is a tedious, unfulfilling chore to argue with those mental  adolescents (of any age) who are not really interested in any mind but their own. 

The Second World Waugh - some thoughts on 'Put Out More Flags' and 'The 'Sword of Honour' trilogy

I knew this would happen. No sooner had I finished re-reading ‘Brideshead Revisited’ than I had to turn again to ‘Put Out More Flags’, Evelyn Waugh’s very funny, very melancholy novel of the Phoney War.  And then of course I had to go on to the great Waugh trilogy, known collectively as ‘Sword of Honour’. They’re all connected, linked partly by the war and partly by Waugh’s melancholy version of Roman Catholicism.  I’m not in a position to know, but I believe more conventional RCs often find Waugh’s approach to the faith eccentric. Personally, I find it interesting and illuminating.

 

Waugh’s books have been divided into accounts of a wholly appalling, cruel world in which God is apparently absent, and others in which the hero finds that , in the end, there is nothing worthwhile but God, and His grace, in the world. I’m not sure it’s that simple , and I even doubt sometimes whether these books will endure for much longer. This is not because of a fault in Waugh, but because the books are about an ostensibly modern world, yet so different from anything they know as to be utterly remote. If they were set on another planet, or two centuries ago, I think the current generation of people in their twenties and thirties might more easily see the point of them. But they cannot conceive that England was ever really like this.

 

 

Although the characters and plot are not directly connected, I always think of ‘Put Out More Flags’ as an overture to ‘Sword of Honour’ . Cruel  snarls at Cyril Connolly and his pretentious magazine ‘Horizon’ are a feature of both, as are jibes at left-wing literary London in general, British military incompetence, Communist infiltration of the establishment and the boundless stupidity of the internal security organs. 

 

The trilogy, by the way,  begins with ‘Men at Arms’, is succeeded by ‘Officers and Gentlemen’ and ends with ‘Unconditional Surrender’.  These three are so autobiographical that it is sometimes hard to forget that they are also fiction. Guy Crouchback, the central figure in ‘Sword of Honour’, even celebrates his birthday just one day later than Waugh himself ( I noticed this because Waugh and I share the same birthday).

 

The title ‘Sword of Honour’ is sourly satirical, referring to the sword specially forged ( at the suggestion of King George VI) to commemorate the Red Army’s stand at Stalingrad. The sword, apparently a very fine and possibly final example of the ancient English sword smith’s craft,  was actually presented to Stalin at Teheran by Winston Churchill, a sad national humiliation given the way in which Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt ganged up on Churchill during that conference. I believe it was dropped on the floor during or after the handover ceremony.

 

Waugh, and his hero Guy Crouchback, regarded the unchosen British alliance with Stalin as deeply dishonourable, as of course it was. ‘Men at Arms’ begins with Guy,  last of a long line of Roman Catholic squires, deserted by his flighty, pleasure-seeking wife, exiled in Italy, too old for normal military service – but greatly moved by the Stalin-Hitler pact. Here at last, he feels, is the modern world in arms. He can honourably take up his sword against it. There is a touching scene in the church of the Italian town where he has been living, where he visits the tomb of an English knight, killed in some forgotten act of chivalry while on his way to the crusades.

 

This scene is mirrored quite exactly towards the end of the trilogy (I won’t say exactly where) when a refugee says to him that there had been a will to war in 1939, a sort of death wish. She adds : ‘Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war’. Guy replies ‘God forgive me. I was one of them’. I have written elsewhere that this should have been the end of the trilogy, which in my view rather peters out towards the end. I  am sure that he had this dispiriting, defeated moment (presumably drawn from real life) in his mind when he wrote the opening scenes.  The description of the eventual fate of this refugee is one of the most unsettling and dismal moments in the whole work.

 

By the time Waugh wrote it, the very beginning of the 1960s, the true cost of the war in moral and cultural terms had not yet begun to be paid. The English middle classes appeared to have won back much of what had been lost in the war years and the Attlee period. The country still looked and felt (I can just remember this) more or less as it must have done before 1939, and astonishingly different from the way it looks and feels now. Men born before 1914 still had vigour and force, and dominated politics and the professions. Had he written the book in 1970, it would I think have ended on a very different note.

 

Now, Waugh’s unsparing bitterness is one of the things that makes his writing so good. But it is very strong meat. I must confess that for many years I have been unwilling to re-read his novel ‘A Handful of Dust’ because, since I grew up,  I have found one particular scene in it so distressing in its fury and misery, and its depiction of the casual evil to which we are so easily brought. I won’t say which moment it is, because I don’t even like to recount it.  For the same reason I have never been to see the film of the book.  I know that ‘A Handful of Dust’  is counted a masterpiece, and some people think it is his best. It’s just too much for me. It wasn’t when I was still a callow delayed adolescent. It is now.

 

But the bitterness is kept a bit more under control in the war trilogy, because it is also often very funny indeed. The ridiculous Apthorpe, (not forgetting his friend ‘Chatty’ Corner) is a giant comic creation. The insanely, yet loveably bloodthirsty Brigadier Ritchie-Hook ( based on a real person) is another. But, oh, the melancholy, and the sense of a beaten, demoralised nation – the stupid row about boots which ends when the Brigadier rasps ‘If they’re good enough to run away in, I cannot see what else we need to worry about’ (or some such words) - for the news of the British Army’s hurried retreat to Dunkirk has just arrived, and at that point nobody was pretending that this was our Finest Hour.

 

Guy Crouchback and his fellow Halberdier officers are trained in a decayed seaside resort in a converted, abandoned and obviously pretty desperate prep school called ‘Kut al Imara House’ . How many readers realise the significance of this name? No school could possibly have been given it. Thanks to my old-fashioned education I have always known that it is the site of a terrible and miserable British defeat (after a long siege in vile conditions) at the hands of the Turks (in what would later become Iraq) in 1916.  Many of those captured died of neglect and disease in captivity. Jan Morris gives a gruelling description of it in the last book in her Empire trilogy, ‘Farewell the Trumpets’  

 

The grim name presages much that is to come – the absurd propaganda phoniness of the early commando raids, the aborted landings in Dakar, the  futile catastrophe in Crete, the shocking desertion of Ivor Clare, apparently an embodiment of British courage, the moral collapse of Major Hound, the wholly fascinating , sinister, cruel character of Corporal-Major Ludovic, who ends up as an author of romantic fiction , gibbering at his pet Pekingese dog. And then there is the extraordinary character of Sir Ralph Brompton, perhaps based on Anthony Blunt, a dapper recruiter of Communist sympathisers into key positions, whose power and influence grow unchallenged through the final stages of the book. I personally long for a key to identify such characters, many of whom are too interesting, and too obviously pointed, to be wholly fictional.

 

Only Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, whose end I shall not reveal, and Guy’s saintly father,  emerge from the book with their honour more or less whole. I sense that Guy’s father is what Waugh himself would have wished to be, but knew perfectly well he could not be.

 

This sadness and melancholy is why you should start with ‘Put Out More Flags’. For this is sadder still. The pathetic last weekend of Cedric Lyne, doomed to die in Winston Churchill’s disastrous Norway adventure, and his schoolboy son, always stays in my memory.  This is perhaps because its brief and childish pleasures remind me of ‘Out Sundays’ from my own stern prep school (gosh, these strange places are the key to understanding the British governing and military classes, yet so little is written about them and people never confess to which ones they attended in reference books), awkward periods of release into the world of comfort and fun, preceded and followed by a life of hard beds, runny porridge and childish barbarity.  The contrast was often too much to cope with.

 

The scenes in the Ministry of Information are merciless (its headquarters, the University of London monstrosity which inspired Orwell’s vision of the Ministry of Truth, is said to ‘insult the sky’) as are the descriptions of the wartime security apparatus, and of the Connolly children, the worst evacuees in England. The Connollys are also very funny, though in a way that a lot of modern readers won’t like. Basil Seal is a close portrait of a real person so appalling (he is in other books) that the publishers feared he would sue for libel when he saw himself described. Waugh apparently claimed that anyone portrayed as successful with women, however nasty he was in other ways,  would never sue. He didn’t.

 

It is to this kindly, chaotic, ill-prepared, frivolous England, more or less clueless about what it is fighting or why,  that Guy Crouchback returns from Italy, to find that he is not wanted at all. This war will not be about romance, chivalry or goodness.  Nor was it, though many of us are still reluctant to admit that.  

 

Is it a great work of art? I hope so. It grows on me each time I read it, and I find I can recall many passages almost word for word, which doesn’t in any way reduce the pleasure. These books are honest about an era which – for many of us – is still fogged by illusion, or gilded with romance.  They should survive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Conversation in Moscow

Here is a conversation I had with Doug Wilson, the Ayatollah of the Palouse, during my recent visit to Moscow, Idaho. My voice, I'm sorry to say, had almost given out (I'd moderqtd a debate the night before, and also done a harangue) and my nose could have been used as a traffic light. I apologise for this, but I thought that some readers might enjoy it anyway.

 

http://www.canonwired.com/featured/vo...

I believe there will be more from this source soon. I will link to it when it appears

Drugs and Guns - another hoarse conversation

Here is another instalment of my conversation with Doug Wilson, recorded on a snowy day in Moscow, Idaho, a few weeks ago.

 

The subject is gun control, and of course drugs, legal and illegal. And God. I apologise once more for my croaky voice.

 

http://www.canonwired.com/featured/gu...

 

Stuck Inside of London with the Pyongyang Blues Again

I must confess I’ve never taken much to John Sweeney, the BBC reporter in trouble for going to North Korea as part of a student trip. I remember a quarrel with him in a bar in Prague (in, what? 1988?  It’s possible) in which I very nearly lost my temper. I can’t recall exactly what it was about, but I assume it was politics.

 

But I sort of sympathise with him, up to a point, in his row with the London School of Economics about whether he should have entered the country in this way. It is very difficult for a journalist to get into North Korea, because the tour companies which go there won’t take you. They are, quite reasonably,  afraid they will lose business if they do.

This doesn’t matter if you are relatively anonymous, and I think quite a few journalists do sneak in on tours. I tried, but was quite quickly asked to drop out by the tour operators. So I had to find another way.  But it was not easy or quick. I spent 20 years trying, including hammering on the door of the North Korean embassy in Moscow (they wouldn’t come out to talk to me) and taking coffee with the charming staff of the new North Korean Mission in London, just down the road from Sid James’s old house.

 

I can’t, even now, reveal the full details of my eventual arrangements, which were circuitous and quite funny.  Nor am I sure how official my entry was. I’m sure that someone in the Pyongyang government knew who I was and what I was doing, but I’m not sure how high the knowledge had gone. I think, for instance that if the Pyongyang airport border guards had spotted anything in my passport revealing me to be a reporter, I would not have got in.

 

There were several journalists on the trip, from Australia and the USA, one with a TV camera,  plus some interesting and enterprising people who were not journalists, including two witty young women from California who – by the end of the trip – could do a jaw-droppingly accurate and very funny imitation of the curious marionette-like gestures used by Pyongyang’s beautiful female traffic police, while on point duty. These gestures are (or were, I believe things have changed as the traffic has increased) made still more haunting by their pertly tailored uniforms and by the fact that there was no traffic. It is widely believed that these officers are personally selected by the Leader himself.

 

I’ve never quiet fathomed how we all ended up on that particular visit. They all owed quite a bit to me, though – as the final hurdle of our visa procedure was an evening in the Chinese city of Shenyang (formerly Mukden) in which we entertained the staff of the North Korean consulate there. Several of them were very lovely women, and it was made clear to me quite late in the evening that it would be wise, for the purposes of getting visas, if some of the men in the party would dance with them. Nobody volunteered.

 

I cannot dance. But being British, and of a certain age, I did my duty even so, and embarrassed myself for Britain and for everyone else. As I twirled, an official headed out of the back entrance of the restaurant. Half an hour later, he returned with our passports, each adorned with the chocolate-brown oblongs which entitled us to enter the Democratic People’s Republic.

 

I’ll wait for tonight to see whether Mr Sweeney actually discovered anything of huge urgent interest or novelty on his trip. Almost everyone who goes sees more or less the same things – a controlled tour of Pyongyang, a trip to a mausoleum (I was refused this joy, which involved being personally vacuum-cleaned on the way in) , or to the museum housing gifts from abroad to the Great Leader, a trip to the frontier with South Korea, the National Library (which doesn’t have the works of George Orwell or Milton Friedman. We've all had fun asking). I was refused access to the Pyongyang Bowling Alley, though it exists. Then there are a few theatrical displays or parades, a very short journey on the Metro, the captured USS Pueblo (great fun this) and of course the crumbling Juche Tower, apt symbol of the Kim State.  My great good fortune was to see North Koreans spontaneously celebrating the rather picturesque and ancient festival of Chuseok, and also (quite separately)  to see enough incidents of drunkenness and enough evidence of a ready supply and a plentiful consumption of strong alcohol to form my own theory which is that the place survives only thanks to a perpetual fog of rice-wine.  

 

If you want a really good account of the country and its history, I cannot recommend too highly the book ‘Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty’ by Bradley K. Martin. Just don’t take it with you when you go.    

 

New readers might also like to read my own articles on my visit, now some six years back,

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486079/PETER-HITCHENS-North-Korea-great-Marxist-bastion-real-life-Truman-show.html

 

and

 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/prisoners-in-camp-kim/

 

 

 

 

Endeavouring to Find a Way Into the Past

Long, long ago now I found myself at the old Soviet Space Launch centre at Tyuratam in Central Asia, a part of the world that is so sad, so desolate and yet so captivating that half of me always wants to go back (while the other, more sensible half tells me not to be so silly). The names alone are enough to stoke the romantic part of me. The Syr Daria river, half dead, slipping through the dry yellow landscape, the hot, exciting winds, the bewitching domes of Samarkand (closer in spirit to its lovelier twin, Isfahan, not far away in Persia, than to anywhere in the old Russian empire). Flying over the Aral Sea, visibly shrunken from a  height of 30,000 feet, with its former size made visible by the darkness of the soil from which the water has now withdrawn. The hills outside Samarkand, plainly not far from Afghanistan, with many of the people dressed as they might be in Peshawar, and looking as if they have checked their Kalashnikovs in at the bus station. Then there is the pleasant oasis feel of any garden or shady place.

 

Well, there at Tyuratam (it’s not Baikonur, by the way. That’s hundreds of miles away, a ruse to deceive Western intelligence in Cold War Days), I found myself in a building that must  have hosted Yuri Gagarin as he prepared for his epoch-making journey into space in April 1961. It was modern in an old-fashioned way, streamlined and ornamented with rounded gadgets, like something from the film ‘Things to Come’ . It was an outdated, obsolete idea of the future.

 

I watched a space launch, an impressively noisy moment but nothing like as spectacular as I believe American lift-offs are, as the cloud-base at Tyuratam is almost always low, and we saw the rocket for a very short time before it vanished. Earlier I had got close enough to the launch-pad to see that it appeared to have a graveyard next to it, but I could get no explanation of this (I suspect it had something to do with a terrible accident there in 1960, when 120 people were killed when an ICBM ignited prematurely, an incident kept secret for the next 30 years).

 

The launch rocket I saw take off safely was carrying Helen Sharman,  the only British cosmonaut, and it was more or less identical to the one which had taken Gagarin into space. Soviet space rockets are the Morris Minor 1000s of the cosmos, simple, crude, dependable and cheap to make and run.

 

But I also had a strange feeling that I had wandered into my own childhood by a back way. I remembered, quite clearly, the sunny April day in 1961 in South Street, Chichester, in Sussex, when I had seen the newspaper headlines announcing Gagarin’s orbit of the earth. This took place on 12th April, so must have been announced on the 13th, my brother’s birthday, when I think my mother must have taken us both out for fish and chips in a mock-Tudor café that we used to like (I now suspect she loathed it) . And now here I was, where that great event had actually happened.

 

I had an absurd feeling that if I could somehow slip out of this place by a back door, I could make my way back to that lost world of Nikita Krushchev, Harold Macmillan and the hypnotic, faintly horrible ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ playing (yet again) on two-way family favourites, on the radiogram.   

 

Nonsensical, of course. No such door exists.  But I had a similar sensation when I learned that the makers of the TV detective dramas ‘Morse’ and ‘Lewis’ , having mined these characters to the limit, were going ahead with a series called ‘Endeavour’ about the young Inspector Morse, making his way as a constable in the Oxford of the 1960s.

 

I imagined that some effort would be made to reproduce the Oxford of that era, the years when I first got to know the city. Silly of me. How many people , who watched the programme as a Sunday evening diversion, would know or care?

 

There were enjoyable flashes of the past as it might have been anywhere, ten bob notes, postal orders, National Savings stamps, Post Office savings books, Ritz crackers, the usual old cars and rather tentative attempts to reproduce the male styles in hair and clothes of the time. I don’t think any self-respecting actor of today would submit to the reality of either. The women, by contrast,  were absurdly over-glamorised, as is the way with period drama. The general appearance of the world was never quite shabby enough. As for Oxford itself, it barely featured.

 

The shots that were taken couldn’t really do much about the fact that in 1965, the great work of refacing the blistered, blackened stone of the colleges was not yet finished,  that the famous bearded heads of so-called ‘Emperors’ outside the Sheldonian Theatre had by then crumbled into almost total ruin, and were about to be replaced (starting in 1970, by the brilliant, witty Michael Black) with clean, new versions.  Nor could they recreate the vast clanging car factories which then still existed, or the Pressed Steel works, or Morrell’s Brewery (now flats) or the sign that greeted surprised new arrivals at the ancient, sagging railway station ‘Welcome to Oxford – Home of Pressed Steel’.

 

Actually we saw little of Oxford.  The 1966 city, free of tourism,  beset with industry, with its light traffic, buses with conductors, uncloned shops, plummy department stores, shabby and affordable houses in North Oxford, scruffy pubs, butchers, fishmongers, gowned, predominantly male undergraduates, tweedy dons, unguarded, open college buildings (though their walls were spiked to stop their junior members breaking the strict curfews of the time) ,  and Direct Grant schools is as lost as Atlantis and would cost millions to replicate.

 

So Godstow wasn’t Godstow,  Cowley wasn’t recognisably Cowley, the Bus Station certainly wasn’t the Bus Station (it was the Covered Market), the Police Station wasn’t the Police Station and the featured Church wasn’t anywhere in Oxford I’ve ever seen. I thought they might have tried to recreate Maxwell’s bookshop, a brilliant idea before its time, owned by the horrible Robert Maxwell. It was a bookshop with its own café, a cheerful steamy refuge approached down a spiral staircase, and serving khaki frothy coffee in glass cups and saucers. It didn’t catch on, not then. People preferred Fuller’s , or the Cadena, and couldn’t see why anyone would want to buy a book and have coffee in the same place.

 

But oh dear , why can’t anyone get the simplest things right?  The Reverend John Blenkinsop should not, even now,  be referred to or addressed as ‘Reverend Blenkinsop’, but as ‘Mr Blenkinsop’.  This ugly American formula wasn’t even thought of in 1965, especially in Oxford. You don’t get married at a ‘registry office’. It’s a ‘register office’, as any copper would have known.  And no English person crossed his sevens in 1965 (in fact, in that odd film ‘Went the Day Well?’,  it’s that self-same strange continental habit that alerts the villagers to the fact that the soldiers in their midst are Nazi impostors). I don’t think people said ‘there you go’ , either,  or wore pearls while pinning the laundry on the line. And they didn’t take ‘medication’ . They took their medicine, or perhaps their pills or tablets.

 

I’m just waiting for someone to start talking about ‘train stations’ or to ‘commit’ to something without using a reflexive pronoun. I think I almost spotted an instance of ‘rolling out’ and I’m watching for a use of ‘going forward’, a use of ‘convince’ to mean ‘persuade’,  of ‘reticent’ when they mean ‘reluctant’ and of ‘may’ where ‘might’ would be better. And then, sooner or later, there are going to be some metres.  Amazing how quickly we forget our own past, and become the slaves of the present.

 

There’s certainly no way back, though sometimes a half-second exposure to a forgotten smell can transport me, with total recall, into a scene of 40 or 50 years ago. Why is it that no other sense has quite the same power?  TV will never be able to convey it, I’m pleased to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The League of the Militant Godless Strikes Back

Just to get my hand in this morning, I’m going to respond to a flailing, heavy-handed attack on me at a militantly Godless site, dealing  with my riposte last week to Mr ‘Bunker’ and his ludicrous claims about atheism.

 

It is entitled ‘The bad seed: Peter Hitchens blames atheism for Stalin and Hitler’, posted here http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/the-bad-seed-peter-hitchens-blames-atheism-for-stalin-and-hitler/ on a site entitled ‘Why Evolution is True’ .

 

 

It reads: ‘We needn’t go over this dumb anti-atheist argument again, except to note in passing that Peter Hitchens, the One Who Went Wrong, has an extremely MILITANT column in the Mail Online called “Atheism kills, persecutes, and destroys. Wicked things are done in its name.“  This man obviously has no sense of nuance. That’s also evident from how he begins his column, with an attack on a pseudonymous commenter, possibly fictional, named “Mr. Bunker”:

 

And I long ago recognised that there is simply no point in trying to debate with Mr ‘Bunker’, as I still think of him.  Whenever I encounter his debating style,  a picture forms in my mind of a mossy, weed-grown, lichen-blotched, dank concrete structure, in some twilit corner of a fallow field, with a lot of voluminous vests, greyish thermal long-johns and track-suit bottoms flapping heavily from an improvised washing line outside, as a thin stream of smoke, perfumed with bacon fat (or perhaps the aroma of supermarket lasagne),  issues from an even-more-improvised chimney.  A three-wheeled motor car stands not far away.  Next to this sad decay, a large peeling sign proclaims, with enormous letters ‘Bunkerism. World Headquarters’ This is, I should state, my image of the mind of Mr ‘Bunker’, not of the chap himself. No doubt he is a handsome and well-dressed person, living in a normal home.

 

This is simply bad writing: a heavy-handed, tedious, and overwritten depiction of a stereotype.  Whatever genes for good writing segregated in the Hitchens lineages, Peter didn’t get ‘em.

 

He goes on (and I’ll mercifully omit the text) to refute Mr. Bunker’s claim that “no crime has ever been committed ‘in the name of atheism.’”  Hitchens trots out the usual tropes about the Bolsheviks, quoting others to show that they made “this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action.” Certainly some religious figures were persecuted by the communists, but I doubt that the Doctors Plot was motivated by atheism. And they didn’t get rid of modern genetics—and persecute and execute scientists like Vavilov—because they were religious.  Really, the harm done in the name of atheism is miniscule compared to the harm done to keep Lenin and Stalin in power. Contrast that with the harm done directly in the name of faith in the Inquisition.

 

Stalin killed at least 20 million Russians, Lenin millions more. How many of those died simply because they were religious?  And was Stalin a murderous tyrant because he was an atheist, or simply because he was an evil man? I opt for the latter. Atheism does not turn good people bad.  In contrast, as we know from Professor Weinberg, “for good people to do evil—that takes religion.”

 

Hitchens then segues to the Nazis, but that canard has long ago been made into confit, so I’ll pass it over. Hitchens ends his piece in a way that’s far more “militant” than anything ever said by Richard Dawkins. Remember the following words when you hear the tired old phrase “militant atheist” shoved in your face:

 

The  exasperating and yet comically unshakeable conviction (held by Mr ‘Bunker’)  that the assertion of atheism is not a positive statement, that it is a mere passive absence, is directly contradicted by the death-dealing,  violently destructive, larcenous and aggressively propagandist application of their own passionate and positive atheism by the Soviet authorities, as soon as they had the power to put their beliefs into action.  If atheism is merely an absence, why on earth should it need to do these things to those who did not share its allegedly passive, non-invasive beliefs? And why, I might add, were both the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists so profoundly hostile to the idea of the Christian God (or, as Mr ‘Bunker’ would sniggeringly put it  ‘gods’ )?

 

Well, because these people, imagining mischief as a law,  have set themselves up as their own source of good, and cannot tolerate any rival to their own beliefs,  in the minds of men. One thing you can say for them : they understood very well what it was they believed.

 

Hitchens notes that he goes into greater detail about atheist evil in his 2010 book, The Rage Against God. I think I’ll give that one a miss, but I’m sure some brave readers have wallowed through it.’

 

For the information and ease of readers, I reproduce here my original article, much of which my critic has unsurprisingly omitted, in case any of his readers see what I actually said, and realise that, afflicted by some sort of red mist at the sight of anything that challenges his world view, my assailant has not read what I wrote with any care, and so has got the whole thing wrong:

 

‘Atheism Kills, Persecutes and Destroys. Wicked Things are Done in its Name.

 

I make it a general rule to pay no attention to people who post here with silly, pretentious multi-word pseudonyms, particularly in the wearisome, unwitty but self-congratulatory format of ‘The-person-formerly-known-as’ . 

Who do they think they are? Why should we care what they used to be known as? And I long ago recognised that there is simply no point in trying to debate with Mr ‘Bunker’, as I still think of him.  Whenever I encounter his debating style,  a picture forms in my mind of a mossy, weed-grown, lichen-blotched, dank concrete structure, in some twilit corner of a fallow field, with a lot of voluminous vests, greyish thermal long-johns and track-suit bottoms flapping heavily from an improvised washing line outside, as a thin stream of smoke, perfumed with bacon fat (or perhaps the aroma of supermarket lasagne),  issues from an even-more-improvised chimney.  A three-wheeled motor car stands not far away.  Next to this sad decay, a large peeling sign proclaims, with enormous letters 'Bunkerism. World Headquarters' This is, I should state, my image of the mind of Mr ‘Bunker’, not of the chap himself. No doubt he is a handsome and well-dressed person, living in a normal home.

 

But I felt it necessary to correct the following statement, issued from the Bunker Vatican on Wednesday morning, and posted on the ‘Miliband…’ thread, with that unjustified confidence, and that hectoring tone,  which typifies so many of his pronouncements.

 

Here it is : ‘I find it tedious in the extreme to have to explain for the umpteenth time that no crime has ever been committed "in the name of atheism". By definition. Atheism is the non-existence of a belief, and nothing can be carried out in the name of something that does not exist. You are completely wrong on this point. You say that communism is a fundamentally anti-religious ideology. So what? The reason why atrocities were committed "in the name of communism" (not of atheism) was that the dictators you mention wished to defend and spread their ideology (not atheism). Don't you understand that? ‘

 

Well, yes, I do understand that this is what he says. And it is historically incorrect.  I do not think Mr ‘Bunker’ has made any effort to study the historical record. Given that this is so, he should surely be more modest and cautious in his assertions. But this is precisely why it is so tedious to argue with him. The less he knows, and the less he understands, the more certain he is of his case. And the more totally defeated he is in argument, the more he glows and exults with genuinely-felt triumph, like the Monty Python knight who, reduced by unequal combat to a limbless trunk ( and perhaps even to a trunkless head, I cannot remember), continues to issue bloodcurdling, boastful challenges to his antagonist.

 

As Beatrice and Sidney Webb wrote in their admiring description of the USSR (‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation,  1940 edition) : ’It is exactly the explicit denial of the intervention of any God, or indeed of any will other than human will, in the universe, that has attracted  to Soviet Communism the sympathies of many intellectuals and especially of scientists in civilised countries’.

 

They added :’Lenin insisted, as the basis of all his teaching, on a resolute denial of there being any known manifestation of the supernatural. He steadfastly insisted that the universe known to mankind (including mind equally with matter) was the sphere of science….

 

‘…When the Bolsheviks came into power in 1917, they made this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action’

 

(these passages are from Chapter XI, ‘Science the Salvation of Mankind’) .

 

Then one must examine the practical record of *specific*, deliberate and planned anti-religious acts by the Bolsheviks, which gave material expression to their beliefs on the subject .

 

(The parallel but differing behaviour of the German National Socialists, who, thank Heaven , had only 12 years of power instead of the Bolsheviks’ 73,  is a matter for another posting, but there is no doubt that the Hitler Youth, in particular, were taught scorn for the Church, its teachings and priests, and especially for the fact that Christ was himself a Jew. I will not here reproduce the exact words of a typical Hitler Youth song (recorded by Olivia Manning in her Balkan Trilogy) which explained that followers of the Fuehrer did not wish to be Christians because Christ was a ‘Jewish swine’. It rhymes in German. Even so, it seems to me that the message is clear. The chapter ‘Converting the soul’ in Richard Evans’s ‘the Third Reich in Power’ is useful in this discussion. As is J.S.Conway’s ‘The Nazi Persecution of the Churches’).

 

Thus, one of the first decrees of the new Bolshevik government (first promulgated on 26th October 1917 old style, and  repeated and reinforced the following January) was Anatoly Lunacharsky’s, as Education Commissar:  All religious teaching was specifically forbidden in all schools. In January 1922, a second decree went much further, banning the teaching of religion to all children, even singly, in church buildings, churches or private homes. Severe punishment ‘with all the rigour of revolutionary law’ , up to and including the death penalty,  was prescribed for those who broke this law.

 

The Soviet state, while encouraging the destruction, desecration, befouling and plundering of hundreds of churches (or the seizure of their buildings for deliberately squalid and degrading secular purposes, such as the use of the lovely Danilovsky monastery in Moscow as a reformatory for juvenile delinquents, a wicked act from which this building triumphantly re-emerged during the Gorbachev years), the public mockery, by state-sponsored groups, of religious ceremonies, processions, feast-days and rituals,  the theft and melting down of their bells and the persecution , imprisonment and state murder of their priests and congregations, also set up large numbers of anti-God museums, and sponsored the publication of atheist materials, including the magazine ‘Bezbozhnik’ (‘The Godless’) .  A  'Union of the Godless’ was also established at an ‘All-Union Congress of Anti-Religious Societies’. It later changed its name to ‘The League of the Militant Godless’.  In a country in which all printing, meetings and speech were tightly controlled, this state-sponsored organisation was free to publish what it liked, and to mount meetings and demonstrations uninterrupted by the authorities. It attained an official membership of millions, unlikely to have been voluntary (this, by the way, is what we call understatement), and had 70,000 branches.

 

By contrast, in the year 1922 alone, 2,691 priests , 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were murdered by the Bolsheviks, often after having been provoked into defending themselves or their buildings by Bolshevik activists (Source for the figures of deaths is ‘The Black Book of Communism’ ,  Harvard University Press, 1997, Edited by Stephane Courtois) .

 

A distinguished American newspaper correspondent, who lived during this period in Russia,  William Henry Chamberlin, recounted that ‘in Russia the world is witnessing the first effort to destroy completely any belief in supernatural interpretation of life’ (In ‘Russia’s Iron Age’, published 1935) .

 

Chamberlin noted energetic official campaigns against the bringing of Christmas Trees into Russian homes, campaigns to keep children from being influenced by their Christian grandparents, the severe persecution of priests and their children (denied both food rations and access to education, or employment, unless they renounced and denounced their fathers).

 

Mr Bunker might also learn (some hope, alas)  from F.A. Mackenzie’s book ‘The Russian Crucifixion’ (1930) , which details the complex web of rules by which the Christian church was driven out of Russian life by legal persecution, plunder and violence (even Church sewing groups were banned by law).

 

Mackenzie quotes Susan Lawrence, a British *Labour* politician who,  after a visit to Soviet Russia in 1922, noted that ‘the schools are propaganda schools, framed to inculcate a definite ideal, both in politics and religion. Communism is to be taught and religion to be exterminated’ , and the whole programme of the schools is to be directed towards this end’.

 

A fuller version of all the above is to be found in chapters 11,12 and 13 of my book ‘The Rage Against God’ published in Britain by Continuum, and in the USA by Zondervan.

The  exasperating and yet comically unshakeable conviction (held by Mr ‘Bunker’)  that the assertion of atheism is not a positive statement, that it is a mere passive absence, is directly contradicted by the death-dealing,  violently destructive, larcenous and aggressively propagandist application of their own passionate and positive atheism by the Soviet authorities, as soon as they had the power to put their beliefs into action.  If atheism is merely an absence, why on earth should it need to do these things to those who did not share its allegedly passive, non-invasive beliefs? And why, I might add, were both the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists so profoundly hostile to the idea of the Christian God (or, as Mr ‘Bunker’ would sniggeringly put it  ‘gods’ )?

 

Well, because these people, imagining mischief as a law,  have set themselves up as their own source of good, and cannot tolerate any rival to their own beliefs,  in the minds of men. One thing you can say for them : they understood very well what it was they believed. ‘

 

And finally, my response to the attack:

 

First of all, let’s look at the title itself. ‘Peter Hitchens blames atheism for Stalin and Hitler’. I don’t mention Stalin at all. I don’t ‘blame atheism’ for either of them. My point was solely to refute (and I mean refute) one specific  claim by Mr Bunker’, who most certainly does exist (perhaps he’ll let them know, and indeed, join the happy throng at ‘Why Atheism is True’).

 

What Mr ‘Bunker’ said, what I specifically sought to deal with, was this claim: ’…no crime has ever been committed "in the name of atheism". By definition. Atheism is the non-existence of a belief, and nothing can be carried out in the name of something that does not exist. You are completely wrong on this point. You say that communism is a fundamentally anti-religious ideology. So what? The reason why atrocities were committed "in the name of communism" (not of atheism) was that the dictators you mention wished to defend and spread their ideology (not atheism). Don't you understand that? ‘

 

I did not then go on to ‘blame’ the acts of Lenin (not, as it happens,  Stalin) on atheism. I pointed out, from contemporary and in one case highly sympathetic sources, that a specific and active denial of God was an inescapable part of the Bolshevik world-view. I did not in fact say (and don’t think) that the Bolsheviks were Bolsheviks because they were atheists. I tend to the opposite view, that they were atheists because, as self-admiring world reformers convinced of their own supreme rectitude and virtue, they saw God ( and particularly the Christian God) as a rival whom they wished to get rid of. As I have said before, Atheists, unlike Christians, always have a very high opinion of their own virtue. It is, in all my experience, the most unvarying feature of the Godless person, that he is confident of his own goodness.

 

It’s my belief that he loathes the idea of God, and especially the Christian God, precisely because Christianity regards all humans as ‘miserable sinners’ in need of forgiveness and grace, subject to laws they cannot alter, and denies the perfectibility of man.  They hate this idea. They think Utopia is possible, and that they are the people to get there.  This accusation invariably produces paroxysms of spluttering fury among the atheists, largely because it is true (the only thing worse than being falsely accused is being correctly accused) . They seek to avoid any discussion of it with juvenile, undergraduate pseudo-philosophical pretences that their belief involves no personal choice ( See Bunker, passim). Of course it does. Belief is by its nature a choice. But we’ve dealt with that.

 

The next point is this. My reply tyo Mr ‘Bunker’ is wholly , narrowly specific. I could make many accusations against the Bolsheviks, starting with their putsch in October 1917, their suppression of the Constituent Assembly, with the opening of the first Gulag at Solovyetsky, or the suppression of the Kronstadt Rising. I could denounce them for their murders of the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, or of the former nobility, or of the Tsar and his family. I could attack them for the general merciless bloodiness of their conduct in the Civil War. I could go on to Stalin’s purges and the rest. I know how many people Stalin killed. I lived in Moscow. I visited the remnants of the Gulags and met their survivors. The cirpses of Stalin's victims were being exhumed in Moscow while I lived there.   But these, though they are the crimes of people unrestrained by any absolute moral code, are not my point in the article which has provoked this spasm.

 

My point is narrow. It is that the Bolsheviks pursued a specifically atheist policy, because of the atheism which was a central part of their belief system. They issued and enforced decrees against religion, of mounting severity and extent. They sponsored a specifically atheist movement which destroyed churches, persecuted priests and mocked the Christian religion in public places.  They destroyed, plundered and demolished churches as acts of deliberate and open state policy.  

 

I think it undeniable that these policies and actions are evidence of two things. One, that atheism has in human history been an active belief , held by powerful people; and two, that it has been the theoretical basis for measurable actions of violence, murder, destruction, censorship, persecution and theft.

 

Therefore the statement by Mr ‘Bunker’ is not true.

 

I’m sorry that my critic does not like my writing style. De gustibus non disputandum. I don’t much like his either, it’s too confident of its own rightness, and lacks any generosity of spirit,  but it is the content that worries me more.

 

I did not say that The Doctor’s Plot was based on atheism (it was based upon Stalin’s personal Judophobia, a strange mania which grips many people who have no religion at all, as well as people who are religious). I don’t say that the persecution (and, in effect, murder) of the botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was based on atheism. It was encouraged by his rival Trofim Lysenko, with Stalin’s backing. It has always seemed to me that this episode, in which dogmatic Communists destroyed a scientist for wishing to speak the truth, shows that the atheist left (for the CPSU was certainly atheist and certainly of the left) are just as capable of such actions as the Vatican ever was, and in modern times too. Good heavens, had the Vatican done to 20th century scientists what it did to Galileo, wouldn’t it have been even worse?  But Lysenkoism happened in the lifetimes of people still living, and the regime that did it had the endorsement of people such as Eric Hobsbawm, and the Webbs. Which episode has more lessons for the modern world? Yet which is the better known?

 

But what is the relevance of the following complaint to anything I said :’Really, the harm done in the name of atheism is miniscule compared to the harm done to keep Lenin and Stalin in power. Contrast that with the harm done directly in the name of faith in the Inquisition.’

 

The word is ‘minuscule’. But even if this is so, so what?  I don’t think the numbers of deaths of priests, nuns and monks I cite (for one year) can be so described. But in my moral system, one murder is a crime. In any case, all I sought to show was that specific acts were done in the direct name of Godlessness, which Mr ‘Bunker’ claims is not the case. They were killed *because* they were monks, nuns and priests. They were not just people who were killed by the Bolsheviks, who happened to *be* nuns, monks and priests. Can he really not see the difference? Probably not, but one must try, even with those most blinded by dogma.

 

I love, however, his grudging admission, worthy of the Hirohito Prize for Mountainous Understatement:  ‘Certainly some religious figures were persecuted by the communists’. Damn’ nice of you to admit it, old bean.

 

Now for Hitler. I was careful to distinguish between the Bolsheviks and the German National Socialists, because they were different. I don’t believe I said anything about Hitler being an atheist. I strongly suspect him of having been a Pagan, with an affinity for the old Norse Gods that Heinrich Heine warned would one day return to Germany to smash the cathedrals.  What he shared with the atheists was a loathing of the Christian God, and of the idea that Jesus was His son. Claims, by the way, that Hitler was a Christian tend to founder when examined. No-one has ever identified his confessor, if so, or can say which church he attended. The National Socialist hierarchy was full of adulterers and others who had transgressed against the Christian moral code, whom Hitler did not shun for their behaviour, rather the contrary. His own private life was not that of a believing Christian.

 

A commenter on my critic’s site points out correctly that Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy takes the form of a novel. But it is generally acknowledged by all critics and all who knew Miss Manning that the work is in fact almost entirely autobiographical. Anyway, there is no doubt that young Germans were taught in the Hitler Youth to hate and despise Christ,  as a Jew, and to sing songs of the kind I quoted. Had the National Socialist Revolution lasted as long as the Bolshevik seizure of power, I think its hatred of the Church would have become clearer. Fortunately, it did not. But let’s not pretend, or deny the facts of history, or , come to that, forget in such silliness the noble courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Archbishop Clemens von Galen, amongst others. They were Christians.  They fought Hitler, once they realised what he truly was,  in one case unto death, in the other in such a way that he might easily have been killed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let's remember Maggie for what she really was... a tragic failure

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.

She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.

I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.

The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.

They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.

Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.

Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.

 Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.

And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.

At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.

Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.

As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?

She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.

She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.

She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.

In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place

Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.

She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.

I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.

But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.

Putin: The Naked Truth

Alas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.

It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.

I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).
But why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.

Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.

Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee.

When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her.

When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.

The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.

Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?

If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.

Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day.

While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle.

In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.

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Drugs, the EU, Immigration and Press Freedom- A TV Interview with the International Business Times

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/uk-videos-news/2504/peter-hitchens-on-the-eu-immigration-drugs-and-press-freedom.html