Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 278

My final word on Mr Jacubs

I reproduce below Mr Jacubs’s two responses to my own rebuttal of his contribution.

 

I do so to explain why I shall not be engaging with him any further. I did so mainly because he persisted in posting comments which made personal attacks on me and my motives (and subsequently cast doubt on my loyalty to this country). I believe I have dealt with those. In his responses below he does not concede a single point or offer any sort of apology for these personal slights. He continues to misrepresent my position in various ways which suggest he has not made any effort to understand it, and in any case prefers to believe his version of what I think and say, to what I actually do think and say.  

 

He does not acknowledge the clear and indisputable evidence (provided by Harris himself without any sort of hesitation or equivocation, and fatal to Mr Jacubs’s position)  that Arthur Harris knowingly followed a policy of deliberately attacking civilians in their homes. In response to my many rebuttals ( I would say refutations) of his various claims against me and against my arguments, he neither counters, nor does he concede.  So far as I can tell, he remains unmoved in any way by anything  I have said, and I rather expect that he will be posting more of his dreary and unresponsive assaults on my character in the months to come. So be it. Worse things happen in big ships, as my father used to say. I now know it will not be worth responding.

 

The argument was, as all arguments are, useful to me in helping me to refine my position. It may have been useful to other contributors and readers, unfamiliar with this important dispute. I am glad if this was so.  As for me, I now know that there is no point in arguing with Mr Jacubs, as he is not actually interested in considering any point of view but his own on this subject (believing as he does that those who differ from him are motivated by disloyalty and other ignoble influences and personal failings) , and I shall not do so again.

 

I am chided by one reader for arguing with Mr Jacubs,  because of his age. Mr Jacubs has made no such complaint on his own behalf, and I would point out that he picked this fight, in a most aggressive manner. He has also lost it, but like so many people who lose arguments, he is sublimely unaware of the fact.   

 

This is what Mr Jacubs has said:

 

‘I have read Mr Hitchen's reply and have come to a conclusion on this matter. I will make some comment in reply but this can go on and on forever. I do have not, do not and will never believe that the bombing of Germany by Bomber Command and the USAAF both of whom killed thousands of civilians was a deliberate plan to do just that. I will say here that I am not a fan of Bomber Harris but not for the reason given by Mr Hitchens. I firmly believe that Harris overdid everything with regard to the bombing campaign. He sent far too many aircraft loaded with far too many bombs to far too many targets. Thus he was responsible for the death of thousands of RAF aircrew. That said I do not believe his flamboyant speeches indicate he deliberately target innocent civilians. Many mistakes were made and lives (on both sides) lost because of them. However this discussion was originally about the bombing campaign and whether it had shortened the war and I believe it did by anything up to a year. Somewhere or other I know Albert Speer agreed with this view. This discussion then moved to the subject of civilian deaths which is highly emotive and like Mr Hitchens I am being drawn into personal accusations which do not in any way contribute positively to this discussion. This whole matter was initially raised because of Bishop Bell's wartime speeches. I have stated clearly that I regard him as a good man who in my opinion spoke misguidedly at a sensitive period in the largest global conflict of all time. I clearly stated he was the opposite of being pro Nazi and I am rather surprised Mr Hitchens had not clearly read my comment. I know a fair amount about the history of WW2 for I lived through the worst of it and survived the blitz by a few yards. I could quote other people who I and my parents knew and suffered dreadfully, much worse than I, during the Battle of Britain and the months of the night time bombing. I am sure Mr Hitchen's knowledge exceeds mine in various fields but neither of us can conclusively prove our point. Mr Hitchens has said I am obviously an angry man (or some such phrases) in many parts of his arguments. I totally admit to that. I have both lived through and read the history of that dreadful war. A close family friend and a hero of mine lived just 5 doors away. He was a bomb aimer on Lancasters and was killed over Germany in November 1944. His mother died of a broken heart and his father soon after that. This story has indeed contributed to my anger. The Germans started this war – that is to say the attack on our country – and men like my friend Alan who was just 22 were drawn into the conflict to die a horrible death. I am so thankful that the Bomber Command memorial has at last been erected and dedicated to the 55,500 men who died. The war Germany started cost the lives of 451,000 Britons. I weep for them all for they would all have lived but for Germany and the Nazis. I had prepared answers to most of Mr Hitchen's replies to mine which were in reply to his original article. This argument is both emotive and perpetual. He says I support the killing of babies, I rightly take exception to this quite awful slight and then no doubt he will come back with further slights. I go on refuting them and try hard not to do the same to him but what is it all for? These are no longer comments and replies – it is a full scale no holds barred contest of words – some unpleasant, some accusing, some unkind, most untrue ad infinitum. I have just read through the draft replies I had prepared to post tonight and can see how this is losing its substance. Becoming a little bit “ya booish” on both sides. Mr Hitchens might disagree but I can see what I see. So to sum up from my side. 1. I believe the bombing of Germany by all sides was absolutely necessary and considerably shortened the war. 2. At no time do I believe it was the intention of anyone (including Harris) to deliberately target civilians. I do accept that there was an intention to bomb and kill war workers who were clearly legitimate targets. 3. I accept as I always have that the killing of women (not involved in war work) and children was dreadful but in my opinion unavoidable. 4. I believe that Bishop Bell and the minority who supported him were misguided.

 

I would like to make some final points regarding the recent argument with Mr Hitchens over the bombing of Germany. It started as a journalistic column but turned into a full scale argument largely due to Mr Hitchen's intransigence and my resulting “red mist of anger”. Let me thank those people here who supported my stance whether wholeheartedly or in parts. This is to me a very emotive subject and let us be honest no one will ever know for sure the ultimate effect the bombing campaign had on the outcome of WW2. I lived through some of the worst of the German bombing (the blitz) spending every night down our shelter for months on end. I saw the thousands of children being evacuated from London and witnessed London burning night after night. I remember the tears and outright anger (which I found difficult to understand at the time) of two women whose husbands had been killed in the war. I remember coming up from our shelter to find three houses opposite destroyed with – as I found out later – loss of life in each house. I watched a landmine descend by parachute and destroy a local golf pavilion killing 3 occupants. I remember making a visit to Ipswich near where I was born sometime in 1943 and joining in the cheers as bombers of the USAAF flew overhead to bomb Germany in the daytime. I remember the V1 flying bombs (doodlebugs) on the first morning they were launched when one landed a few hundred yards away killing 35 people including many damage repair workers on a bus. I remember the thuds of the V2 rockets as they landed day and night for weeks. I remember going up to London with my parents on VE day in May 1945 to cheer Churchill and the Royal Family. That was a great day. These experiences moulded my life and my views on life. I came of age as it were in the 1950's which was a peaceful period of hope in which my family,friends and neighbours came to terms with life. I did my National Service (3 years) in Germany half of which was in Hamburg. In 1952 half the city had been magnificently rebuilt the other half was still in ruins. This did not however influence one way or the other my views about our bombing them. Finally I just wish to say that my great anger is aimed at those who only read of this war to end all wars and then past verdict on what they consider our wrongdoings. With some it is an obsession 70 years after the conflict to seek out anything negative they can find, win appraisal from those on the political left and stand patriotism on its head by blackening the memory of those who fought for the freedom we have today. I frequently thank God for that freedom – a freedom that is now I fear being rapidly eroded.

If you missed it....

For anyone who missed  the programme ‘Great Lives’, first broadcast on Tuesday 2nd April,  in which I make the case for Bishop George Bell,  it can be listened to here,

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qxsb/episodes/player

 

The Gun Control Debate

The debate between me and Professor Will Self on Gun Control can now be watched here

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3P5YlVsPWE&feature=youtu.be

 

This is an updated version. problems should have been ironed out.

Morality is Central to Political Economy

I am dismayed by the narrowness of the discussions on the health service  and on welfare reform. Today, in a discussion on the NHS, I was assumed to be in favour of scrapping the NHS because I was critical of it. No doubt others will assume that I wish to persecute (or write rude things about) individuals who live on state handouts.

 

In both cases, my would-be critics are wrong. I think some sort of state-supported health service is both just and necessary (actually even the USA has extensive means-tested health care for those who qualify, which I simply state as a fact, rather than because I particularly approve of those arrangements, before anyone jumps to conclusions). It’s just a question of how best to do it, and of what you are trying to achieve.

 

The person who made this assumption was bandying the expression ‘free at the point of use’ as if it was some sort of panacea. I pointed out that it mattered much more what exactly it was that was *free*, and what the *point of use* was. Of course it’s not *free* in any other sense, as it absorbs a huge amount of taxation, and is not *free* at any other point.  But if what’s free is a dirty, neglectful dump in which there’s a substantial risk of leaving iller than you entered, or of dying unexpectedly while there,  with a hospital-acquired infection, the fact that it is *free at the point of use* is not that important.

 

Quite how one overcomes these problems, in a heavily unionised industry run at least partly (some would say mainly) for the benefit of its many employees, is also hard to work out.  Things such a s cleanliness and efficiency in large buildings with large workforces can only really be achieved by one kind of discipline or another - dedicated self-discipline, or external discipline enforced by authority. Nothing else will do it.

 

These problems are of course less serious in smaller units than the NHS prefers (it has an almost Soviet drive towards gigantism and centralisation, a few enormous Pharaonic hospitals, on which resources are concentrated). There’s also the unavoidable problem which our secular society does not like to discuss, that we must all die in the end, and that most of us will encounter the NHS only when we are already seriously ill. I believe the statistics show that the vast majority of NHS care that any of us will receive is concentrated in the final weeks of our lives. This, of course, is the moment when the drugs and other resources of modern medical care are of least use.  That’s why the NHS is really a National Sickness Service.

 

A National *Health* Service would encourage and help people to take exercise, lose weight, eat a wise diet ( tax-breaks for those who do this would be a good idea) . Plenty of  swimming pools, convenient to workplaces ( and not made virtually unusable by play sessions and other distractions, just set aside for straightforward swimming) , would do more for health than any number of hospitals, as would cities designed to make cycling and walking pleasant and easy. It would be based on the idea that people have some sort of duty tolook after themselves.

 

It would be absolutely free for emergencies, children (about whom parents should never hesitate to seek medical advice) , the chronically ill, the old  and those with catastrophic illnesses  ( people often neglected by private insurance).  But otherwise I see no good argument against a small payment for each GP appointment, for those in work – or a substantial bill for anyone who arrived in A&E as a result of getting drunk (a bill which could also be paid off by a stint doing satisfactory orderly and cleaning work in A&E). There are dozens of ideas of this kind that could be considered to make it into a *Health* service, but almost nothing can be discussed until we get out of our heads the fiction that the NHS is some kind of sacred institution that cannot be criticised, and that those who do criticise it are axiomatically its enemies. As it is, all we get are two dogmas – one the nationalisation fetish, and the other the privatisation market fetish - battling away pointlessly as the hospitals themselves get worse.

 

As for welfare, you cannot possibly start sorting it out by tinkering with the method of delivery. The problem is the ethic at its heart. Since Harold Wilson’s revolutionary government reformed it in the 1960s, the benefit system has been an *entitlement* , a project for income redistribution and social change (and incidentally a state-sponsored rival to the married family). Before then it was genuinely a safety net, there to support those who ran into trouble.

 

It is this belief that people are morally entitled to other people’s money which lies at the heart of the brilliant, but deeply misleading,  Labour propaganda about a ‘Bedroom Tax’.

 

I personally see little value in penalising people for having extra bedrooms (what real chance is there that this will lead to a fairer distribution of social housing? Virtually none). But the idea that Housing Benefit is an entitlement, justified by egalitarian morality,  and that reducing it is therfeore a form of taxation, is at the root of this.

 

Iain Duncan Smith’s changes make no real effort to counter this idea. That is why ( as he actually admits) his changes will fail to reduce the bill. As long as the nation wants the benefit system to enforce egalitarian ideas about social justice, and to support new forms of household  it is bound to get bigger and bigger. And that will not be the fault of those who collect the benefits.

 

The politicians are the ones who have corrupted the population with these payments (which also, incidentally , subsidize low-wage employers, another part of the apparent policy of turning this into a low-wage economy, an interesting and unexamined change in our way of life) . They can hardly turn on their victims and berate them for accepting what is offered.  After all, once the Protestant Christian morality of the past (along with its hatred and fear of debt and its shame at accepting something for nothing) had disappeared ,  why should anyone object? And the state has done nothing to protect or uphold that morality; rather the contrary.

 

Morality lies at the heart of all political economy.

  

 

 

 

 

 

My Easter Day Column - The Full Version

Owing to a production problem, only part of my Easter Day column was placed on this site on Sunday. Here is the whole column, including all items:

 

The big black car swept straight through a red light and on to the pedestrian crossing, just in front of me.

It was only thanks to luck and providence that nobody was hurt or even killed. The steady green man, which is supposed to mean that it is safe to cross, was clearly showing.

I called out to the driver, who looked guilty but drove on.

Then I saw, 20 yards away, a red police van, containing three officers in uniform. I tried to get their attention. By the time one of these surly public ‘servants’ had grudgingly wound down his window, the offender was well on his way down the road.

‘We’re doing something,’ the scowling constable said, with the air of an important person diverted from his important duties. It was true. They were doing something. All three of them seemed to be sending text messages on their mobile phones.

As it happens, this was one of three instances of drivers jumping red lights at pedestrian crossings which I saw last week.

One was a toffee-nosed Kensington lady (no doubt a stalwart of the Conservative Party) who was angry with me for catching up with her and rapping on her window. ‘How daih you touch my cah!’ she shrieked. Not a hint of shame or regret. How were these people brought up?

I can’t for the life of me see any difference between her and the foul-mouthed White Van Man who (later the same day) ploughed heedlessly through a different pelican crossing and swore unoriginally at me when I simply pointed at him.

Pedetrian crossings (and traffic lights) seem to me to be rather wonderful things. By stopping at them, we recognise that we are all subject to the law, and that other people are just as important as we are. By not stopping at them, we scorn the law and assert that we are special.

And these days lots of people do not stop at them, and I think it matters a great deal.
 
We are slowly becoming barbarians, even in Kensington, but not just there. It was the same week in which a teenage girl was mauled to death by a pack of dogs that no civilised person could possibly have wanted to own. It was the same week when the actor Clive Mantle had half his ear bitten off in a Tyneside hotel. Why? He asked some people in the corridor outside his room to make less noise.

And it was the same week the Government came up with its solution for the problems of the NHS. Make nurses do some actual nursing (you know, washing the patients). Make it a rule that hospital staff tell the truth (!). And set up yet another Stalinist inspectorate to check up on everyone.

Of course it won’t work. Like the useless police, the inspectors will always be ‘doing something’. The rules won’t be enforced. More people will die in filth and pain.

Because there is only one thing that really keeps us safe, on the roads, when we are ill, everywhere – and that is conscience. Conscience is what makes us observe red lights, what makes nurses do the dirty, smelly jobs, and tell the truth, and look tenderly after the helpless, querulous beings that most of us will one day become.

And conscience is dying among us, among Tory ladies and foul-mouthed White Van Men alike.

By a strange coincidence, conscience is dying more or less at the same time as the Christian religion is dying, and Easter is becoming just another chance to shop. Are these things connected? I suspect they are. While you wonder, take care crossing the road and don’t fall ill or get old, or ask anyone to be quiet.

Now tell your husband who's to blame, Samantha   

NOW that Samantha Cameron  has seen the miseries of Syrian refugees for herself, she should use her privileged position to tell her husband that this terrible crisis is largely his fault.

 

It is because Britain and others have been madly urging on the Saudi and Turkish-backed Islamist fanatics in Syria that a formerly peaceful and prosperous country has been turned into Hell.

 

And for what?

 

If our supposed allies win, what sort of state will they create?

 

***************

 

The colour's new, the madness isn't

 

 

LONG ago I lived in a mad country, where expensive bread was so heavily subsidised that it was cheaper than swill, and so fed to pigs.

 

It was called the USSR, and it was ruled by Red zealots. Now I live in another mad country, where Green zealots close perfectly good coalfired power stations in the middle of a fuel shortage.

 

It is like watching a dentist pulling out sound teeth, or a surgeon cutting off a healthy limb, and being able to do nothing to stop it.

 

***************

WHO should we be angry with, when we see the convicted oaf Nathanial McIntosh jeering at us from his sordid holiday in Thailand, when he is, in theory, being punished for a crime?

 

I can't be bothered to be cross with McIntosh. He is only doing what our cardboard criminal justice system let him do.

 

When will people understand that this system, from the police to the judges to the prisons, is a deliberate fraud?

 

When will they grasp that every politician who talks about being 'tough' or having a 'crackdown' on crime and disorder is lying?

 

Parliament long ago disembowelled justice.

 

Even so, it would be fun to make Theresa May, Chris Grayling and David Cameron live next door to McIntosh for a few months.

 

It would also be justice.

 

********************

SILLY anti-Russian prejudice led to suggestions that the unlovely plutocrat Boris Berezovsky had been rubbed out on Kremlin orders.

 

A much more likely explanation of his self-slaughter is the fact that he had recently begun taking 'antidepressants', which in many cases produce suicidal thoughts in people who hadn't had them before.

 

So, I might add, had the tragic Donna Oettinger, who stepped in front of a train with her small son in her arms.

 

She was taking a drug that has been linked in studies to an increased risk of suicide.

 

When will they join up the dots?

 

Coroners should be on watch for this.

 

**********************

A beautiful voice ... belting out the familiar tune of tyranny 

 

HAUNTING pictures of Peng Liyuan, China's beautiful, musical and militarist First Lady, tell us a great deal about China.

 

Most importantly, they tell us that it is not a free country, and not likely to be.

 

She sings on behalf of power.

 

We used to believe that only free countries could become rich.

 

China is ominous proof that this is no longer true.

 

And if that is so, how long will freedom survive when it has so many enemies?

***********************

 

We need genius, not a good giggle

 

 

LONDON'S Mayor Al Johnson (his real name) is not a 'nasty piece of work'.

 

Mrs Johnson may have some harsh things to say about him (and to him) but he is in most matters a generous and thoughtful gent, made more likeable by a fine sense of the ridiculous.

 

The really damaging truth about Al is that the laughter conceals neither a genius nor a gangster, but a dull and perfectly normal, boring Tory careerist with no original ideas about how to save the country.

 

If only people would stop laughing for long enough to see that, the bubble would burst.

 

As it is, I fear he will be swept to office on a wave of giggles, and only then be found out, which will be sad for him and us.

 

****************************

IT IS 50 years since Richard Beeching wrecked Britain's railways.

 

He was egged on by Transport Minister Ernest Marples, a shady and wicked man who profited personally from the building of motorways, which was the real reason for ripping up perfectly good train tracks.

 

Marples, as is not widely enough known, died abroad in disgrace, having fled the country to escape the taxman.

 

I was just 12 years old when the railways were ruined, and I knew at the time that this was a great and tragic folly.

 

All the grown-ups told me it was inevitable and necessary.

 

Now, after half a century, I turn out to have been right.

 

It's the story of my life, really.

 

***********************

 

YET again the top universities are accused of being unfair to state school pupils.

 

This is upside down.

 

The state schools are unfair to their pupils, by refusing to select on ability, by insisting on watered-down comprehensive schooling and by failing to tell the young that they need to take the tougher A-levels to get into the top colleges.

 

Why should good universities lower their standards to indulge this stupidity?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How I am partly to blame for Mass Immigration

The following article, on Mass Immigration, its history and importance, was published in the Mail on Sunday on 31st March:

 

WAS this Britain? Every group of people I passed was speaking Russian.

The shops were full of black bread, pickled cucumbers and vodka, the faces were Slavic.

The advertisements in the windows were in the Cyrillic script I had come to know so well when I lived, many years before, in Moscow.

Yet here I was in the shadow of a lovely English Gothic church tower, half-way to dear old Skegness, surrounded by fields of English turnips, leeks and sugar beet, under an English heaven.

This was Boston, Lincolnshire, which I had first seen three decades ago as a somnolent, slightly shabby market town where a kindly traffic warden had found me a parking space, saying: 'We can always find room for a foreigner.'

In those days, a visitor from London was about as foreign as it got in Boston.

Now they were talking Portuguese in the pubs, Polish in the cafes, Latvian and Estonian on the buses.

If I had fallen into the river and called out 'Help!', I couldn't even have been sure that anyone would have understood.

Somehow this transformation was more of a shock, more disturbing and perplexing, than any of the other migration-driven changes I had seen.

And that tended to be the attitude of the older residents - not anger, hatred or hostility, we are not like that - but bafflement that such a huge thing could have erupted into their peaceful lives, without anyone warning or asking them.

We had all got used to London being different, long ago.

The former mill towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, with their huge new mosques and veiled women, were a place apart.

But Lincolnshire?

If it could come here, into Deep England, then it would come to everywhere.

It really is not much good the Prime Minister turning round now and saying to the people of Boston 'this must stop'.

Even if anyone believed he can or will do anything (and his various schemes are as firmly based as Theresa May's promises to get rid of Abu Qatada), the event has happened.

The greatest mass migration in our history has taken place.

The newcomers are lawfully here.

They have the jobs, live in the houses, use the NHS.

Their children are in the schools.

Come to that, they are paying tax.

Our leaders only had to go to Boston, any time in the past five years, and they would have known.

But all our leading politicians were afraid of knowing the truth.

If they knew, they would at least have to pretend to act.

And the truth was, they liked things as they were.

And it was at least partly my own fault.

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.

It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants - from anywhere - as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.

Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people - usually in the poorest parts of Britain - who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly 'vibrant communities'.

If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn't come from such 'vibrant' areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).

We might live in 'vibrant' places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.

But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients - not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.

When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as 'racists'.

What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as 'racist'.

And it also meant cheap servants for the rich new middle-class, for the first time since 1939, as well as cheap restaurants and - later on - cheap builders and plumbers working off the books.

It wasn't our wages that were depressed, or our work that was priced out of the market. Immigrants didn't do the sort of jobs we did.

They were no threat to us.

The only threat might have come from the aggrieved British people, but we could always stifle their protests by suggesting that they were modern-day fascists.

I have learned since what a spiteful, self-righteous, snobbish and arrogant person I was (and most of my revolutionary comrades were, too).

I have seen places that I knew and felt at home in, changed completely in a few short years.

I have imagined what it might be like to have grown old while stranded in shabby, narrow streets where my neighbours spoke a different language and I gradually found myself becoming a lonely, shaky voiced stranger in a world I once knew, but which no longer knew me.

I have felt deeply, hopelessly sorry that I did and said nothing in defence of those whose lives were turned upside down, without their ever being asked, and who were warned very clearly that, if they complained, they would be despised outcasts.

And I have spent a great deal of time in the parts of Britain where the revolutionary unintelligentsia don't go.

Such people seldom, if ever, visit their own country.

Their orbits are in fashionable London zones, and holiday destinations.

They are better acquainted with the Apennines of Italy than with the Pennines of their own country.

But, unlike me, most of the Sixties generation still hold the views I used to hold and - with the recent, honourable exception of David Goodhart, the Left-wing journalist turned Think Tank boss who recognises he was wrong - they will not change.

The worst part of this is the deep, deep hypocrisy of it.

Even back in my Trotskyist days I had begun to notice that many of the migrants from Asia were in fact not our allies.

They were deeply, unshakably religious.

They were socially conservative.

Their attitudes towards girls and women were, in many cases, close to medieval.

Many of them were horribly hostile to Jews, in a way which we would have condemned fiercely if anyone else had expressed it, but which we somehow managed to forgive and forget in their case.

We have recently seen this in the distressing and embarrassing episode of Lord Ahmed's outburst against a phantom Jewish conspiracy.

But I recall ten years ago, in a Muslim bookshop in the backstreets of Burnley, seeing on open display a modern edition of Henry Ford's revolting anti-Jewish diatribe The International Jew, long ago disowned by Ford himself.

It is unthinkable that any mainstream shop in any High Street could sell this toxic tripe.

Many of these new arrivals, though we revolutionaries welcomed them, knew and cared nothing of the great liberal causes we all supported. Or they were hostile to them.

Many on the Left still lie to themselves about this. George Galloway, the most Left-wing MP in Parliament, owes his seat to the support of conservative Muslims.

Yet he voted in favour of same-sex marriage.

It would be interesting to be at any meetings where Mr Galloway discusses this with his constituents.

Of course, all political parties are compromises, but there is a big difference between splitting the difference and flatly ignoring a profound clash of principles.

This sort of cynicism has been at the heart of the deal.

Immigrants have been used by those who wanted to transform the country.

They have taken the parts of them they liked, and made much of them.

They have ignored the parts they did not like.

Mr Galloway likes the Muslims' opposition to the Iraq War and their scorn for New Labour (and good luck to him). But he does not like their views on sexual morality.

The same is true of many others.

One of the most striking characteristics of the majority of migrants from the Caribbean is their strong, unashamed Christian faith, and their love of disciplined education.

Yet the arrival of many such people in London was never used as a reason to say our society should become more Christian, or our schools should be better-ordered.

At that time, the revolutionary liberals were hoping to wave goodbye to the Church, and were busy driving discipline out of the state schools. So nobody ever said 'Let us adapt our society to the demands of these newcomers'.

They had the wrong sort of demands.

Instead, the authorities made much of the behaviour of a minority of such migrants, often much disliked by their fellow Afro-Caribbeans - men who took and sold illegal drugs and who were not prepared to respect British law.

If proper policing of such people could be classified as 'racist', then the drug laws as a whole could be weakened, and the police placed under liberal control.

This is why the so-called 'Brixton Riots' of April 1981 were used as a lever to weaken the police and undermine the drug laws, rather than as a reason to restore proper law and peace to that part of London.

Something very similar happened with the Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Few noticed that the report openly urged that people from different ethnic groups should be policed in different ways - and actually condemned 'colour-blind' policing.

In whose interests was this?

And wasn't this attitude, that different types of behaviour could be expected from different ethnic groups, racially prejudiced?

But what did that matter, if it suited the revolutionary liberal agenda of purging the police of old-fashioned conservative types?

The same forces destroyed Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster who - long before it was fashionable - tried to stand up against political correctness in schools. He was driven from his job and of course condemned as a 'racist'.

Yet it would have been very much in the interests of integration and real equality in Bradford if his warnings had been heeded and acted upon.

As it is, as any observant visitor finds, Bradford's Muslim citizens and its non-Muslim citizens live in two separate solitudes, barely in contact with each other. Much of the Islamic community is profoundly out of step with modern Britain.

Once again, revolutionary liberals had formed a cynical alliance to destroy conservative opposition.

Their greatest ally has always been the British Tory politician Enoch Powell who, in a stupid and cynical speech in 1968, packed with alarmist language and sprinkled with derogatory expressions and inflammatory rumour, defined debate on the subject of immigration for 40 years.

Thanks to him, and his undoubted attempt to mobilise racial hostility, the revolutionary liberals have ever afterwards found it easy to accuse any opponent of being a Powellite.

Absurdly, even when Britain's frontiers were demolished by the Blair Government and hundreds of thousands of white-skinned Europeans came here to work, it was still possible to smear any doubters as 'racists'.

It couldn't have been more obvious that 'race' wasn't the problem.

The thing that made these new residents different was culture - language, customs, attitudes, sense of humour.

Rather than them adapting to our way of life, we were adapting to theirs.

This wasn't integration.

It was a revolution.

Yet nobody - especially their elected representatives - would listen to them, because they were assumed to be Powellite bigots, motivated by some sort of unreasoning hatred.

I now believe that the unreasoning hatred comes almost entirely from the liberal Left.

Of course, there are still people who harbour stupid racial prejudices.

But most of those concerned about immigration are completely innocent of such feelings.

The screaming, spitting intolerance comes from a pampered elite who are ashamed of their own country, despise patriotism in others and feel none themselves.

They long for a horrible borderless Utopia in which love of country has vanished, nannies are cheap and other people's wages are low.

What a pity it is that there seems to be no way of turning these people out of their positions of power and influence.

For if there is to be any hope of harmony in these islands, then it can only come through a great effort to bring us all together, once again, in a shared love for this, the most beautiful and blessed plot of earth on the planet.

 

The Bombing of German Civilians - Mr Jacubs Responds

Mr Tony Jacubs has responded (on the relevant thread) to my remonstrance of Saturday.

 

I thought it would be helpful if his response, which is lengthy, was published here as a free-standing article. I have broken it up into paragraphs, and apologise to Mr Jacubs, or to any grammarians, for my rearrangement. I just thought it was more easily readable here (I have removed one repeated word. Otherwise the text is unaltered). I will publish a reponse, when time allows.

 

To me there is one group of people by no means a small group whom I regard with deep suspicion. They are politicians, lawyers and journalists. That said I will try to reply to Mr Hitchens but it will be less concise than I would have liked because I have just acquired a disgusting chest infection. I accused him of loathing all things to do with Britain's contribution in two world wars. Well that was the impression he gives me. Was it sweeping? Yes it was. The problem here is that Mr H conveys his feelings of utter contempt for some occurrence or some person or organisation and then passes on to another subject.

 

If one feels strongly about some point in recent history as I do and I keep reading Mr Hitchen's views to the contrary when I was around at the time and he wasn't I think I have a right to get angry. Loathing may not have been a word he used but it certainly comes over as such. I have never mentioned anyone in his family so I don't know why he brings them into it. I could do the same but my concern has been with the decision of our WW2 leaders to promote all out bombing of Germany. His detestation for Harris I find disgusting and certainly implies a loathing of the man to me and why he goes on about the conditions of the aircrew when on missions – something we all know about - I do not understand. I have never said he blamed them. I do actually read what he writes and yes to some extent through a mist of fury because I loved the country we had than and the way our men fought for it.

 

He mocks our pseudo religion “We won the War”. Yes Mr H we bloody well did win it. We never started it. We were peaceful and desperately hoping another war would not come. You and the other re-writers of history can only read about the war and choose to always to see it from the point of view of the enemy. You cannot even begin to understand the views of those who had to be involved because they are no longer here. You just keep picking on the tiny minority who protested at the time and there are hardly any left to answer you back. Of course this country's leaders made mistakes in winning that horrible war. My point has always been why keep picking on them when the real horrors were perpetrated by the enemy? He says it is all right to kill enemy soldiers in battle as if it were easy to do that without collateral casualties and damage. So it would appear from that statement that we should only have bombed front line German troops. We should have left their war machine untouched until their troops were repelled to the cities. He sadly accepts the “inevitability of unintended civilian casualties in modern war”. However when that does happen he accuses the war leaders of deliberately targeting civilians. I find that accusation shocking.

 

 I am not going to answer him point for point as he would dearly like. This way the main issue gets avoided. Will I apologise for the use of various strong adjectives in my posting to him? No I will not because as he well knows this is avoiding the issue again plus it is being over pedantic. At no time did the wartime government set out to target civilians in their homes. He has no evidence to support such a claim. He knows full well that when targeting cities because they contained factories and businesses connect directly to the war that civilians would be killed – just as they were in London, Coventry, Liverpool and in the Baedeker raids etc. Yes I believe we retaliated in the only way open to us and in hindsight it is so easy to say we over retaliated.

 

 But had he been here in 1940 to 1945 Mr Hitchens would have seen people cheering our bombers on their way to Germany night after night. I saw it from my birth town in East Anglia. In 1940 we were at the mercy of the Third Reich waiting for the coming invasion, then came the Battle of Britain and the blitz. All we had was the remnants of our defeated army and the beginnings of our bomber force. We out produced the Germans in heavy bombers which we had developed solely (I have to keep saying this) because it was all we had to hit back with until as we hoped the Americans would join us in defeating the Nazis. This is the justification Mr Hitchens asked me for. He keeps going on about moral codes. Tell that to the survivors of the Holocaust. Tell that to the relatives of those bombed in their sleep like my neighbours. I watched as the ambulances took away the bodies and was too young to fully understand at the time.

 

 I watched a film on TV some years ago when a German woman survivor in I believe Cologne said she understood why they were bombed simply because they did it to us first. She even admitted her original worship of Hitler. I do not have any idea how many shared her view but how honest of her. He keeps coming up with alternative targets for our bombers. This is typical of history re-writers, they are forever saying “why didn't we do this or that?” We did what seemed right at the time. If we had had months to think out all our tactics in trying to win this dreadful conflict we would undoubtedly have done many things differently. He then implies I might be suggesting he doesn't condemn the appalling massacres I mentioned. He knows full well I did not say or imply that. If I thought that I would not entertain a discussion with him. His inference that I might be doing so is insulting to me and I would expect an apology from him about that.

 

 

My reason as he well knows for mentioning all those horrors was to emphasise my point about his continually picking on what he sees as the horrors committed by the British. I wonder also why Mr Hitchens is “troubled” “by these things” as he grows closer to his grave. By “these things” he appears to talking of all things to do with the war including the use of the atomic bombs. I am not troubled by anything from the past but I am certainly troubled by the prospects for the future. I am annoyed and upset by people like Mr Hitchens when because of their world experiences, their education, their reading etc. they feel equipped to re-write history. When I said “they” tried to kill me and my family by “they”, I meant (oh God do I really have to spell this out?) the Luftwaffe, the German military machine, the German government, all those who supported the German war effort, all those who voted Hitler and the Nazis and their supporters into power. Why does he keep on about the suffocated and burned to death of Hamburg and Dresden? The German aircrew can come and kill us in our homes but – he implies - that does not give us the justification to bomb a distant German city? We should just sit in our bombed out homes and say we must behave in a civil and Christian way about this. We must not let our airmen retaliate even though it is our only means of doing so.

 

 As tired as I get of saying this I will never the less continue to do so. Mr Hitchens was not here sitting in the rubble of his home having lost his family. I am talking all the time about how we felt here at home being bombed in the war. This is the point lost to Mr Hitchens. In the war. Not seventy years after the war but in the war. I find it hard to get into the mind of someone obsessed with the horrors of bombing in a country which started by bombing us. The obsession goes on when he talks of the baked corpses of their children in suitcases. Where did he get that from? No doubt he read it somewhere. It's all what we the British did to the poor Germans. I know I am wasting my breath here – that's obvious but his continual digging out of these what I find sick clichés nauseates me. Yes so does war in all its forms.

 

Had the Germans remained neutral after WW1 and Europe remained a united force for good of course there would have been no burnt corpses or suffocated families in their cellars but they didn't – did they? They started a war and committed some of the worst crimes against humanity in all of history. However – for the umpteenth time – we were the innocents – Hitler and the Nazis were the criminals and all Mr H can do is call us criminals because we retaliated in kind. He says he has re written nothing! Yes he has. Anyone who claims we fought a bad war is to my mind re writing it. He is perpetually looking at the war from the point of view of a survivor of British bombing who is carrying the dead burnt corpse of their child in a suitcase. He never does it from the standpoint of an English survivor of German bombing. I thank God that I and my family survived (just) and that I had not been born a German living in a bombed German city. It was war – Germany started the bombing and I survived. I am tired of him keeping on telling me how they suffered – we suffered because of them.

 

 

I am not surprised he has suffered a great deal of anger from our veterans but as he so often says he is a hate figure and he sure revels in it. Yes he has attacked the veterans for when he attacks their leaders – Harris for example who most aircrew admired – he attacks them – that is why he had abuse from them. Why should he go to America? Because they don't tolerate criticism of their military in all wars as easily as we do. However I am sure he can produce some evidence to the contrary. One more point - perhaps the best way of summing up my argument. If the killing of civilians – deliberate as with the atomic bombs – or non deliberate – yes non deliberate as in the bombing of Germany results in the shortening of the war with the consequent saving of many more civilian lives it has to be justified. Ending any war as speedily as possible has to be morally right. WW2 was not just a war between Germany and the countries it attacked and invaded. It was a fight by the Allies to put an end to the atrocities being committed by the Germans on a massive scale. Therefore the means we adopted in defence and attack had to justify the end. That is how I see it and it is the reason I find Mr Hitchen's views on the conduct of our war leaders reprehensible.

 

 

Below is an extract from The US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1945 which I feel offers some support for my views regarding the success of the bombing campaign. THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY September 1945 (Extract) The Survey has made extensive studies of the reaction of the German people to the air attack and especially to city raids. These studies were carefully designed to cover a complete cross section of the German people in western and southern Germany and to reflect with a minimum of bias their attitude and behavior during the raids. These studies show that the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack. The night raids were feared far more than daylight raids. The people lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. They resorted increasingly to "black radio'' listening, to circulation of rumor and fact in opposition to the Regime; and there was some increase in active political dissidence -- in 1944 one German in every thousand was arrested for a political offense. If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. In a determined police state, however, there is a wide difference between dissatisfaction and expressed opposition. Although examination of official records and those of individual plants shows that absenteeism increased and productivity diminished somewhat in the late stages of the war, by and large workers continued to work.

 

However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident. The city area raids have left their mark on the German people as well as on their cities. Far more than any other military action that preceded the actual occupation of Germany itself, these attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. It was a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson, both in Germany and abroad, could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.

 

Below are my comments regarding Bishop Bell. I have been looking at the profile of Bishop Bell. To start with he was very pro German. He had a great affinity to the German church, had close friends within the German church and greatly admired German architecture especially the churches. He was chairman for the International Christian Committee for German Refugees. He singled out German Jews for prayer and helped German church families to come to Britain before the war. During the war Bishop Bell helped German prisoners of war and our own conscientious objectors. I think that little lot proves one thing – Bishop Bell was definitely very fond of Germany and the German people. I am not for one moment implying he was pro Nazi for the complete opposite is clearly the case. But it does explain why he spoke as he did in the H of L about our bombing of Germany. Fortunately for this country and perhaps the wider world he was not listened to. Even the then Archbishop of York replied "it is a lesser evil to bomb the war-loving Germans than to sacrifice the lives of our fellow countrymen..., or to delay the delivery of many now held in slavery".

 

He wanted the resumption of “friendly relations” with Germany and he opposed measures aimed to destroy the morale of Germany. What I wonder would his view have been if a close family member had been in say Auschwitz. Would his concern of German morale remained the same? Bell asked Anthony Eden to publicly explain that the British had no wish to enslave Germany – only to remove the Nazis. What a ridiculous statement - of course we had no intention to “enslave” Germany. We just wanted to save our country from enslavement. For Bell to have even thought he could influence the German population to get rid of Hitler by any means including assassination was so naive it beggars belief.

 

Even if Hitler had been killed in some plot or other it is a certainty other top Nazi leaders would have taken over and been even more ruthless than before. A look at the reprisals after Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in 1942 and after the abortive attempt on Hitler's life in 1945 for example show clearly how the Nazis increased their reign of terror and determination to fight on with even greater vigour. It must be mentioned here that Roosevelt's insistence on Germany's unconditional surrender at Casablanca in 1943 created a situation where Germany would now fight to the bitter end. This undoubtedly lengthened the war and caused hundreds of thousands more deaths on all fronts and on all sides. Maybe Bishop Bell criticised Roosevelt's decision but if so I have yet to hear about it. A German surrender with acceptable conditions would have obviated the need for intensive bombing and also discussion like this need not have taken place. Bishop Bell was an undoubtedly good man who in my opinion was fortunately not listened to by the government of the day.

 

 

 

 

And I respond to Mr Jacubs's response

My reply to Mr Jacubs’s response follows. My words are in bold type.  I should stress here that I have not attempted to dispute everything in Mr Jacubs’s posting. That would take too long. But I have inserted my responses after the passages which seem to me to be the most important

 

Mr Jacubs wrote:

To me there is one group of people by no means a small group whom I regard with deep suspicion. They are politicians, lawyers and journalists. That said I will try to reply to Mr Hitchens but it will be less concise than I would have liked because I have just acquired a disgusting chest infection. I accused him of loathing all things to do with Britain's contribution in two world wars. Well that was the impression he gives me. Was it sweeping? Yes it was. The problem here is that Mr H conveys his feelings of utter contempt for some occurrence or some person or organisation and then passes on to another subject.

 

If one feels strongly about some point in recent history as I do and I keep reading Mr Hitchen's views to the contrary when I was around at the time and he wasn't I think I have a right to get angry.

 

I respond: This is exactly why I cite George Bell, and his ally Richard Stokes MP. They were there at the time. Stokes won the MC as an artillery officer in the 1914-18 war, and was no sort of pacifist (Vera Brittain, who also protested, was a pacifist and I therefore do not call her in aid. Total pacifists have no agonising to do on such occasions. But they must also accept the greater consequences of their beliefs, which I am not prepared to do). Bishop Bell (who gave up his Palace in Chichester to others during the war)  lived in Brighton while it was being bombed, and once helped rescue a group of terrified people from a  house in which an unexploded incendiary was lodged. Bell and Stokes 'were there'. They spoke out. People were angry with them. They continued to speak because they believed that they were speaking for truth and justice. Their example is one which I hope I would have followed had I been there.

 

 

Loathing may not have been a word he used but it certainly comes over as such.

 

I respond: This won’t do. He cannot accuse me of feeling emotions which I have not expressed, because he chooses to believe, without evidence, that I hold them. This is poisoning the wells of argument. All kinds of things may ‘come over as such’ to him, but his state of mind is not evidence of anything other than his state of mind, and he should learn this simple rule when conducting an argument, if he hopes to get anywhere.  He should produce his evidence of this alleged ‘loathing’, or reconsider his claim. It is he who seems to me to be consumed with wrath in this discussion, and there is much evidence of this in the intemperate language that he repeatedly uses.

 

 

I have never mentioned anyone in his family so I don't know why he brings them into it.

 

I reply : I ‘bring them into it’ because Mr Jacubs accused me of ‘absolute loathing’( an unequivocal expression)  ‘for *all* (my emphasis) things to do with Britain’s contribution to winning both world wars’. If this were true, then I would of necessity loathe (absolutely) all those involved, including my father, mother and grandfather. Plainly, I do not do so.  I thought this neatly demonstrated that he was mistaken. I still do. If he does not understand this it can only be because he chooses not to.  I wish he would accept that he was mistaken.

 

I could do the same but my concern has been with the decision of our WW2 leaders to promote all out bombing of Germany. His detestation for Harris I find disgusting and certainly implies a loathing of the man to me and why he goes on about the conditions of the aircrew when on missions – something we all know about - I do not understand. I have never said he blamed them.

 

I reply : This is incorrect. He clearly stated that I ‘assume the worst’ of Bomber Command, a phrase which must be taken to include those who flew in that Command.

 

I do actually read what he writes and yes to some extent through a mist of fury because I loved the country we had then and the way our men fought for it.

 

I reply : And I do not?

 

He mocks our pseudo religion “We won the War”. Yes Mr H we bloody well did win it.

 

I reply : Though we did not ultimately lose it, we did not win it by any normal definition of victory. We ended it far poorer and weaker than we were when we started.  We have been in rapid national decline ever since. 68 years after that war, our principal enemy is far stronger and more prosperous than we are. We, by contrast, were impoverished by the war, lost our empire as a direct result of it, and became the subservient allies of two other major powers, both of which imposed their war aims on us. We have since lost control over our own borders, our foreign and trade policies are directed by others and 80% of our laws are made abroad.  We utterly failed to achieve the aim for which we went to war, namely the restoration of Polish independence. That had to wait until 1989 and was not achieved by us. Some would say that the fact that Poland lost much of its eastern territory for good, and that it subsequently submitted to indirect German rule via EU membership, meant that Poland, as it was in 1939, never regained its independence. So, we may have been on the winning side, but we did not win

 

We never started it.

 

I reply: This is, alas, not the case. Germany did not seek war with us and did not declare war on us.  Germany, whose ambitions lay in the east,  had little interest in us. We declared war on Germany in defence of Polish independence – a policy we had no means of enforcing as we had no significant army in Europe. We did so because the foolish diplomatic bluff of the Polish guarantee failed to convince anyone (except the Poles, who as a result failed to make a territorial compromise with Germany). 

 

We were peaceful and desperately hoping another war would not come.

 

I reply : This is an interesting point. It is true that a lot of tripe is talked about the pre-war era. The Labour Party, for instance, opposed rearmament until the last minute, then blamed the Tories for being ‘Guilty Men’. Labour had no clear policy towards German expansion except a vague aspiration towards ‘collective security’ , which was assumed by most people to imply some sort of reliance on the Soviet Union. Well, the USSR made clear in its failed talks with Britain in 1939 that its price for an alliance was a pretty free hand in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. So it was a choice between ‘appeasing’ one bloodstained dictatorship, or ‘appeasing’ another.

 

No doubt the British people hoped for peace, which is why enormous crowds cheered Chamberlain when he came back from Munich in 1938. What sane person hopes for war? They certainly had no desire to go to war for Prague, and we couldn’t have done any more good to Czechoslovakia in 1938 than we did for Poland in 1939-40 (look at a map). But hoping for peace doesn’t necessarily get you peace. Hard, cynical preparation for war (which was under way, though for a kind of war that didn’t happen, mainly defensive , deterring attacks on our own country and on the Empire) , combined with alert and unsentimental diplomacy (which was entirely lacking) , might have done.  

 

You and the other re-writers of history

 

I respond: What is this ‘re-writing’ of which he repeatedly speaks? What have I rewritten? The facts of which I write have been known for years. A.J.P.Taylor attacked the Polish guarantee while I was still at school. Opposition to bombing of German civilians, on military grounds existed at high levels in British politics and among the military in the early 1940s. Bell and Stokes opposed it knowledgeably at the time (Bell took advice from Liddell Hart, a prominent military expert of the time).

 

 

 

can only read about the war and choose to always to see it from the point of view of the enemy.

 

 

I respond : This is an inexcusable calumny, throat infection or no,  for which I feel entitled to require a withdrawal and an apology.

 

I do not regard women and children as my enemies.  As for the rest, I am not prepared to have a patriotism contest with Mr Jacubs,  but I defy him to produce a grain of evidence for his very serious allegation, undoubtedly defamatory if I chose to make an issue of it. Everything I write about this subject is written from the point of view of someone who wishes the best for his country, and hopes that we may learn from mistakes in the past.

 

You cannot even begin to understand the views of those who had to be involved because they are no longer here.

 

I reply: Perhaps not. I am not seeking to do so, though , like anyone of my age growing up in a service family, and with family connections in cities, such as Portsmouth and Liverpool, which were heavily bombed, I may claim to have a reasonable knowledge of what was involved and of how people felt about it.

 

You just keep picking on the tiny minority who protested at the time and there are hardly any left to answer you back.

 

I reply: What does it matter if they were a tiny minority? Where does it say that majorities are automatically right?  If one just man stands up for right and law , against everyone around him, he does not cease to be just because he is a ‘tiny minority’. What principle is Mr Jacubs arguing for here? That the majority is always right and the minority should be swept aside?  I have found no shortage of people ready to ‘answer me back’. I have spent much of the past few months in correspondence with them.

 

 

Of course this country's leaders made mistakes in winning that horrible war. My point has always been why keep picking on them when the real horrors were perpetrated by the enemy?

 

I respond: I have clearly responded to this already. Mr Jacubs does not seem to have read or understood what I wrote. I here repeat it, in extra large letters, in the hope that he will pay attention to it this time.

 

‘Does he really not grasp that it is precisely because this wrong deed was done by my own country’s government and armed forces that I have a duty to acknowledge and criticise it, if I think it to be wrong *on principle*, as I do?  It is on the basis of that same principle that I condemn all such things. What would he think of a modern-day German (or Russian) who refused to condemn the long list of misdeeds he produces below? Do these wickednesses in any way cancel out the wrongness (if it was wrong, and I believe it was, and I haven’t seen him explain why it wasn’t) of our deliberate killing of German civilians? How does this happen? What is the moral system which enables him to do so? If they don’t, and if each deed stands on its own, then the wrongness of the others has no effect on the wrongness of our bombing. In general, in working out what my position is, he may assume that I am against the deliberate killing of civilians in war on principle, whoever does it. If he is not on principle against this (and he appears not to be) then what is his objection to these deeds when done by others? On what consistent moral code (there is no other sort) is it based?

 

 

 

He says it is all right to kill enemy soldiers in battle as if it were easy to do that without collateral casualties and damage.

 

I reply. No I do not say this. Of course I accept the need to kill enemy soldiers in battle.  But I do not pretend that this (or any other form of modern warfare) can be conducted without unintended damage and death.  He is not reading what I say. I wrote : ‘ I sadly accept the inevitability of unintended civilian casualties in modern war.'

 

 

So it would appear from that statement that we should only have bombed front line German troops. We should have left their war machine untouched until their troops were repelled to the cities.

 

 

I reply : there is nothing in what I have said which in any way justifies the above absurd piffle. I don’t think it and haven’t said it.

 

Mr Jacubs continues : He sadly accepts the “inevitability of unintended civilian casualties in modern war”. However when that does happen he accuses the war leaders of deliberately targeting civilians. I find that accusation shocking.’

 

I reply : Well, it is time that he stopped finding it shocking. Arthur Harris himself  (in words I first quoted here on 1st July 2012, made it quite clear (and no serious historian contests this anyway) that the policy involved the deliberate killing of civilians, and was not collateral damage. I am amazed that Mr Jacubs has not absorbed this simple point by now, running as it does through everything I have written. The killing of German civilians was deliberate. As I wrote in July 2012

 

‘Arthur Harris had no such excuse. Nor did the architects of the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes. That, by the way, is what we did. As Harris himself said, the aim of his offensive should be unambiguously described as 'the destruction of the German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany'.

 

TO REMOVE all doubt (and Harris was annoyed that Winston Churchill wouldn't admit the truth in public), [he said] it was aimed at 'the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale at home and on the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing'. He stated 'these are not by-products of attempts to hit factories'.  (Arthur Harris to Sir Arthur Street, Under Secretary of State, Air Ministry, October 25, 1943).

 

I am not going to answer him point for point as he would dearly like. This way the main issue gets avoided. Will I apologise for the use of various strong adjectives in my posting to him? No I will not because as he well knows this is avoiding the issue again plus it is being over pedantic. At no time did the wartime government set out to target civilians in their homes.

I reply : This is simply incorrect. See Harris quotes above.

He has no evidence to support such a claim.

 

I reply : Yes I do. See Harris quotes above.

 

 He knows full well that when targeting cities because they contained factories and businesses connect directly to the war that civilians would be killed – just as they were in London, Coventry, Liverpool and in the Baedeker raids etc.

 

I reply, but in this case, we deliberately sought to kill civilians. see Harris quotes above.

 

 Yes I believe we retaliated in the only way open to us and in hindsight it is so easy to say we over retaliated.

 

But had he been here in 1940 to 1945 Mr Hitchens would have seen people cheering our bombers on their way to Germany night after night. I saw it from my birth town in East Anglia. In 1940 we were at the mercy of the Third Reich waiting for the coming invasion, then came the Battle of Britain and the blitz. All we had was the remnants of our defeated army and the beginnings of our bomber force. We out produced the Germans in heavy bombers which we had developed solely (I have to keep saying this) because it was all we had to hit back with until as we hoped the Americans would join us in defeating the Nazis. This is the justification Mr Hitchens asked me for. He keeps going on about moral codes. Tell that to the survivors of the Holocaust. Tell that to the relatives of those bombed in their sleep like my neighbours. I watched as the ambulances took away the bodies and was too young to fully understand at the time.

 

I watched a film on TV some years ago when a German woman survivor in I believe Cologne said she understood why they were bombed simply because they did it to us first. She even admitted her original worship of Hitler. I do not have any idea how many shared her view but how honest of her. He keeps coming up with alternative targets for our bombers. This is typical of history re-writers, they are forever saying “why didn't we do this or that?” We did what seemed right at the time. If we had had months to think out all our tactics in trying to win this dreadful conflict we would undoubtedly have done many things differently. He then implies I might be suggesting he doesn't condemn the appalling massacres I mentioned. He knows full well I did not say or imply that. If I thought that I would not entertain a discussion with him. His inference that I might be doing so is insulting to me and I would expect an apology from him about that.

 

 

My reason as he well knows for mentioning all those horrors was to emphasise my point about his continually picking on what he sees as the horrors committed by the British.

 

 

I reply: I have answered this. I have reproduced my answer above in very large letters. It is time he acknowledged this.

 

 I wonder also why Mr Hitchens is “troubled” “by these things” as he grows closer to his grave. By “these things” he appears to talking of all things to do with the war including the use of the atomic bombs. I am not troubled by anything from the past but I am certainly troubled by the prospects for the future. I am annoyed and upset by people like Mr Hitchens when because of their world experiences, their education, their reading etc. they feel equipped to re-write history. When I said “they” tried to kill me and my family by “they”, I meant (oh God do I really have to spell this out?) the Luftwaffe, the German military machine, the German government, all those who supported the German war effort, all those who voted Hitler and the Nazis and their supporters into power. Why does he keep on about the suffocated and burned to death of Hamburg and Dresden?

 

 

I reply : Precisely because the majority of these people did not vote for Hitler, or support his government, or desire war, but were powerless civilians, in many cases anti-Hitler Social Democrats who continued to oppose Hitler even after the unleashing of the Brownshirt terror (Would Mr Jacubs have had the courage to do this? I wonder) . More conclusively still, m any of them were children, whom no reasonable person could blame for the misdeeds of a government. . Hamburg (for example) was the most anti-Hitler city in Germany. These people did not try to kill Mr Jacubs. Yet he supports a policy which deliberately sought to kill them ( see Harris quote above, for clear evidence that it was dleiberate) .

 

 The German aircrew can come and kill us in our homes but – he implies - that does not give us the justification to bomb a distant German city? We should just sit in our bombed out homes and say we must behave in a civil and Christian way about this. We must not let our airmen retaliate even though it is our only means of doing so.

 

As tired as I get of saying this I will never the less continue to do so. Mr Hitchens was not here sitting in the rubble of his home having lost his family. I am talking all the time about how we felt here at home being bombed in the war. This is the point lost to Mr Hitchens. In the war. Not seventy years after the war but in the war. I find it hard to get into the mind of someone obsessed with the horrors of bombing in a country which started by bombing us. The obsession goes on when he talks of the baked corpses of their children in suitcases. Where did he get that from? No doubt he read it somewhere. It's all what we the British did to the poor Germans. I know I am wasting my breath here – that's obvious but his continual digging out of these what I find sick clichés nauseates me. Yes so does war in all its forms.

 

Had the Germans remained neutral after WW1 and Europe remained a united force for good of course there would have been no burnt corpses or suffocated families in their cellars but they didn't – did they? They started a war and committed some of the worst crimes against humanity in all of history. However – for the umpteenth time – we were the innocents – Hitler and the Nazis were the criminals and all Mr H can do is call us criminals because we retaliated in kind. He says he has re written nothing! Yes he has. Anyone who claims we fought a bad war is to my mind re writing it. He is perpetually looking at the war from the point of view of a survivor of British bombing who is carrying the dead burnt corpse of their child in a suitcase. He never does it from the standpoint of an English survivor of German bombing. I thank God that I and my family survived (just) and that I had not been born a German living in a bombed German city. It was war – Germany started the bombing and I survived. I am tired of him keeping on telling me how they suffered – we suffered because of them.

I reply. I have answered all this many times.

 

I am not surprised he has suffered a great deal of anger from our veterans but as he so often says he is a hate figure and he sure revels in it. Yes he has attacked the veterans for when he attacks their leaders – Harris for example who most aircrew admired

 

I reply : How do we know? Horrifying numbers of aircrew died as a result of Harris’s profligacy with human life. How can he say with such certainty that they admired him?

– he attacks them – that is why he had abuse from them.

 

I reply : I do not attack them, and have clearly stated this many times, and every time Mr Jacubs repeats this false allegation he diminishes his case in the eyes of all reasonable people.

 

I have had no abuse from anyone who served in Bomber Command. I tend to find that actual veterans of dangerous combat are a good deal less enthusiastic about warfare than those who were not there. My father, who served in what many believe the worst theatre of war, was certainly no jingo.

 

Why should he go to America? Because they don't tolerate criticism of their military in all wars as easily as we do. However I am sure he can produce some evidence to the contrary. One more point - perhaps the best way of summing up my argument. If the killing of civilians – deliberate as with the atomic bombs – or non deliberate – yes non deliberate as in the bombing of Germany results in the shortening of the war with the consequent saving of many more civilian lives it has to be justified. Ending any war as speedily as possible has to be morally right.

 

I reply. This is a highly dubious statement. Leaving aside the sudden conversion of Mr Jacubs to the saving of civilian lives, which most of the time he seems happy to expend, does he then think that the torture of PoWs for information, the mass slaughter of captured prisoners, to save food, time and guards,  and the use of atomic weapons on German cities would have been justified ,  because they brought a speedy end to the war? All these things would no doubt have accelerated its end. If not, why not? Once you cast aside moral principles and law, there is nothing you cannot do - as George Bell pointed out .

 

 WW2 was not just a war between Germany and the countries it attacked and invaded. It was a fight by the Allies to put an end to the atrocities being committed by the Germans on a massive scale.

 

I reply: This is demonstrably untrue, and this demonstrable untruth is a significant pillar of the myth of the ‘The Good War’ . No effort at all was made by the Allies to halt the atrocities of the Third Reich, even once reliable information on the death camps was available to the Allied leadership. Many of the casualties of our bombing were in fact slave labourers who ( as we knew) were already being maltreated by the Germans.  In any case, or principal European ally, the USSR was regularly committing atrocities throughout its conduct of the war, espcially intensively at the end. As I have written elsewhere, this country and the USA, in the Potsdam agreement, knowingly agreed to the mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from Central Europe, which predictably led (it was predicted by officials)  to terrible numbrs of appalling atrocities. This was a direct consequence of the war, as we had waged it.

 

Therefore the means we adopted in defence and attack had to justify the end. That is how I see it and it is the reason I find Mr Hitchen's views on the conduct of our war leaders reprehensible.

 

I reply : And it is precisely because Mr Jacubs has adopted the dreadful maxim that the means justifies the end (the immoral code of the wicked throughout all history, and the antithesis of Christianity) that I find his beliefs so reprehensible.

 

 

Below is an extract from The US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1945 which I feel offers some support for my views regarding the success of the bombing campaign. THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY September 1945 (Extract) The Survey has made extensive studies of the reaction of the German people to the air attack and especially to city raids. These studies were carefully designed to cover a complete cross section of the German people in western and southern Germany and to reflect with a minimum of bias their attitude and behavior during the raids. These studies show that the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack. The night raids were feared far more than daylight raids. The people lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. They resorted increasingly to "black radio'' listening, to circulation of rumor and fact in opposition to the Regime; and there was some increase in active political dissidence -- in 1944 one German in every thousand was arrested for a political offense. If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. In a determined police state, however, there is a wide difference between dissatisfaction and expressed opposition. Although examination of official records and those of individual plants shows that absenteeism increased and productivity diminished somewhat in the late stages of the war, by and large workers continued to work.

 

However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident.

 

 

I reply : I do wonder how bold Mr Jacubs would have been, under the eye of the Gestapo. It is easy to criticise the caution of others from a  safe place.

 

The city area raids have left their mark on the German people as well as on their cities. Far more than any other military action that preceded the actual occupation of Germany itself, these attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. It was a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson, both in Germany and abroad, could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.

 

 

I respond: I have dealt with this emotional and irrational stuff over and over again, and will not waste further time on it. Even children know that two wrongs do not make a right. The simple point is this ‘Was it right or wrong for this country to bomb German civilians in their homes as an act of deliberate policy?’ It may well be that the bombing left a mark on Germany. What about the mark that it left on this country, in which formerly civilised, gentle people spring up to defend the deliberate killing of civilians, including babes in arms? Can nobody see the moral danger of such opinions?

 

Below are my comments regarding Bishop Bell. I have been looking at the profile of Bishop Bell. To start with he was very pro German.

 

 

I respond: This is a misleading statement. I can only hope that it is not intended to be misleading. Readers here must understand that the term ‘Pro-German’ here does not mean (as some might mistakenly suppose) that Bishop Bell was ever or in any way a sympathiser with the Nazi regime or the Third Reich. On the contrary, he was one of the first British people to discover the true nature of this regime, and his friends in Germany were its courageous opponents, many of whom died at Hitler’s hands for their principles.

 

 He had a great affinity to the German church, had close friends within the German church and greatly admired German architecture especially the churches. He was chairman for the International Christian Committee for German Refugees. He singled out German Jews for prayer and helped German church families to come to Britain before the war. During the war Bishop Bell helped German prisoners of war.

 

I reply . This  (that he helped German PoWs) is news to me, and I would be grateful for any reference to it.  He certainly helped German refugees from Nazi persecution who had been wrongly interned on the absurd assumption that they were secret pro-Nazis. Some newspapers falsely accused him of being 'pro-German' at this time, and falsely stated that he was seeking to help Nazi prisoners. This kind of lying happens a lot in wartime.

 

 and our own conscientious objectors.  I think that little lot proves one thing – Bishop Bell was definitely very fond of Germany and the German people. I am not for one moment implying he was pro Nazi for the complete opposite is clearly the case. But it does explain why he spoke as he did in the H of L about our bombing of Germany. Fortunately for this country and perhaps the wider world he was not listened to. Even the then Archbishop of York replied "it is a lesser evil to bomb the war-loving Germans than to sacrifice the lives of our fellow countrymen..., or to delay the delivery of many now held in slavery".

 

He wanted the resumption of “friendly relations” with Germany

 

I respond : He wanted this after the war. I think there is something disreputable about this segment of Mr Jacubs's posting, which is willing to wound but afraid to strike.  There is no suggestion that Bishop Bell was at any stage against the prosecution of the war to its end. He disputed the methods, a very different thing.

 

 and he opposed measures aimed to destroy the morale of Germany.

 

I respond. I do not know what he means here by ‘measures aimed to destroy the morale’ . Bishop Bell opposed the deliberate bombing of civilians (which he knew was taking place but which the government did not at the time admit  was its policy (though Harris did, see above) . Ministers might have portrayed the bombing as ‘measures aimed at destroying morale’. Bell also opposed the views of those such as Lord Vansittart who (much like Mr Jacubs) regarded the whole German people as being the enemy, and sought to distinguish between the state and the people.

 

What I wonder would his view have been if a close family member had been in say Auschwitz.

 

I reply : Much the same. His close friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazis in Buchenwald concentration camp and murdered by the Nazis in Flossenburg concentration camp. Bonhoeffer’s  biographer records: ‘ Bonhoeffer was led away just as he concluded his final Sunday service and asked an English prisoner (Payne Best) to remember him to Bishop George Bell of Chichester if he should ever reach his home: "This is the end — for me the beginning of life."'  

  Would his concern of German morale remained the same? Bell asked Anthony Eden to publicly explain that the British had no wish to enslave Germany – only to remove the Nazis. What a ridiculous statement - of course we had no intention to “enslave” Germany.

 

I reply. There were certainly those among the allies  (see the Morgenthau plan, formulated by the wartime US Treasury Secretary of that name ) who hoped for the more or less total dismemberment, humiliation and crushing of Germany and its people after victory. Morgenthau’s scheme would have been very close to enslavement. As Herbert Hoover pointed out : ‘ "There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it."

 

 

 

 We just wanted to save our country from enslavement. For Bell to have even thought he could influence the German population to get rid of Hitler by any means including assassination was so naive it beggars belief.

 

Even if Hitler had been killed in some plot or other it is a certainty other top Nazi leaders would have taken over and been even more ruthless than before. A look at the reprisals after Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in 1942 and after the abortive attempt on Hitler's life in 1945 for example show clearly how the Nazis increased their reign of terror and determination to fight on with even greater vigour. It must be mentioned here that Roosevelt's insistence on Germany's unconditional surrender at Casablanca in 1943 created a situation where Germany would now fight to the bitter end. This undoubtedly lengthened the war and caused hundreds of thousands more deaths on all fronts and on all sides. Maybe Bishop Bell criticised Roosevelt's decision but if so I have yet to hear about it.

 

I reply: Well , he won’t be able to say that again.  Bell was a prominent critic of the ‘Unconditional Surrender’ policy.

 

A German surrender with acceptable conditions would have obviated the need for intensive bombing and also discussion like this need not have taken place. Bishop Bell was an undoubtedly good man who in my opinion was fortunately not listened to by the government of the day.

Don't Forget 'Great Lives' Radio 4 Tuesday 4.30

A final reminder that the 'Great Lives' programme, in which I commend Bishop George Bell for his opposition to blanket bombing of Germany in World War Two,  is to be transmitted tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday 2nd April) at 4.30 pm on BBC Radio 4, and again at 11.00 pm on Friday 5th April.

Jumping the traffic lights... and leaving our conscience behind

The big black car swept straight through a red light and on to the pedestrian crossing, just in front of me.

It was only thanks to luck and providence that nobody was hurt or even killed. The steady green man, which is supposed to mean that it is safe to cross, was clearly showing.

I called out to the driver, who looked guilty but drove on.

Then I saw, 20 yards away, a red police van, containing three officers in uniform. I tried to get their attention. By the time one of these surly public ‘servants’ had grudgingly wound down his window, the offender was well on his way down the road.

‘We’re doing something,’ the scowling constable said, with the air of an important person diverted from his important duties. It was true. They were doing something. All three of them seemed to be sending text messages on their mobile phones.

As it happens, this was one of three instances of drivers jumping red lights at pedestrian crossings which I saw last week.

One was a toffee-nosed Kensington lady (no doubt a stalwart of the Conservative Party) who was angry with me for catching up with her and rapping on her window. ‘How daih you touch my cah!’ she shrieked. Not a hint of shame or regret. How were these people brought up?

I can’t for the life of me see any difference between her and the foul-mouthed White Van Man who (later the same day) ploughed heedlessly through a different pelican crossing and swore unoriginally at me when I simply pointed at him.

Pedetrian crossings (and traffic lights) seem to me to be rather wonderful things. By stopping at them, we recognise that we are all subject to the law, and that other people are just as important as we are. By not stopping at them, we scorn the law and assert that we are special.

And these days lots of people do not stop at them, and I think it matters a great deal.
 
We are slowly becoming barbarians, even in Kensington, but not just there. It was the same week in which a teenage girl was mauled to death by a pack of dogs that no civilised person could possibly have wanted to own. It was the same week when the actor Clive Mantle had half his ear bitten off in a Tyneside hotel. Why? He asked some people in the corridor outside his room to make less noise.

And it was the same week the Government came up with its solution for the problems of the NHS. Make nurses do some actual nursing (you know, washing the patients). Make it a rule that hospital staff tell the truth (!). And set up yet another Stalinist inspectorate to check up on everyone.

Of course it won’t work. Like the useless police, the inspectors will always be ‘doing something’. The rules won’t be enforced. More people will die in filth and pain.

Because there is only one thing that really keeps us safe, on the roads, when we are ill, everywhere – and that is conscience. Conscience is what makes us observe red lights, what makes nurses do the dirty, smelly jobs, and tell the truth, and look tenderly after the helpless, querulous beings that most of us will one day become.

And conscience is dying among us, among Tory ladies and foul-mouthed White Van Men alike.

By a strange coincidence, conscience is dying more or less at the same time as the Christian religion is dying, and Easter is becoming just another chance to shop. Are these things connected? I suspect they are. While you wonder, take care crossing the road and don’t fall ill or get old, or ask anyone to be quiet.