Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 292

A Narrow but Important Victory - the Exeter Debate, and some other matters

I am not yet sure if there will be a filmed version of Thursday night’s cannabis debate in Exeter. It was streamed live by XTV, the Exeter University TV station, but I cannot find out if they plan to put a version on the web.

 

Nor do I know of any independent accounts of it, or of accounts by people hostile to my position. Organised by the University of Exeter Debating society, the contest took place before an audience of about 240 people in a large modern lecture theatre. The proposition was ‘This House would legalise Cannabis’, proposed by Peter Reynolds, my old adversary and leader of the Cannabis Law  Reform party CLEAR. I spoke against. Mr Reynolds was seconded by Stephen Davies, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and I was seconded by David Raynes, a former senior Customs officer who now works for the National Drug prevention Alliance, one of the few bodies which does not accept the fashionable doctrines of ‘harm-reduction’ , appeasement and retreat, and which as a result is rather short of establishment cash and also of publicity.

 

Others who were there may wish to give accounts of the exchanges. All regular readers of this blog will know the arguments well enough by now.

 

 

I’ll only record what indisputably happened. A vote taken at the beginning showed a fairly strong majority in favour of the motion. At the end (the society, in my view rather sensibly,  forbids abstentions on final votes, and urges members to vote according to the quality of debate rather than because of their opinions, though of course this is impossible to enforce or measure) there was a narrow majority against – so narrow that the chairman asked those present to vote a second time. But even so, it was a majority.

 

I think this shows that, where the arguments against legalisation are strongly and clearly put, rather than ignored or treated as if they are already defeated and no more than a historical curiosity (which is the attitude of most of the media to this debate), people can see their merits. And that when people have the moral courage to ignore fashion, they can reach interesting decisions. Had the students of Exeter voted the other way, it would have been a great boost for the rich and powerful forces which seek legalisation. Their decision to divide almost equally, with a  small majority on my side, will be an annoying defeat for those forces, who thought some time ago that they had captured the British national consensus and have been frustrated by the insistent , undaunted opposition they still face  

 

This debate, a rematch after a rather poorly-attended clash between me and Mr Reynolds, will probably be the last I shall do for a while on this subject. I have now argued this topic so many times, often but not always while promoting new book, that I plan to give it a rest.  

 

It is interesting to note that the organisers had to struggle very hard to find an establishment figure prepared to speak alongside me, and Mr Raynes, who swims hard against the tide, is not really an establishment figure any more.  I am not as surprised by this as they were. Most of the British establishment have gone soft on this issue, for reasons many times discussed here, and you can certainly expect little help from the ‘Conservative’ Party.

 

I would like to add here a small personal footnote about Steve Abrams, one of the originators of the campaign to legalise cannabis, particularly of the famous advertisement in ‘The Times’ of 1967, which led to the Wootton Report and to the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act which gradually and unofficially decriminalised cannabis use in this country.

 

Mr Abrams is the author of a number of interesting historical essays on this matter, quoted and referred to in my book, and I was much struck by his crisp writing style, his humour and his considerable honesty. During my research for the book, I spoke to him on the telephone and exchanged e-mails with him (he was by then quite seriously ill) and he drily discussed the matter with me, knowing me to be an opponent. I sent him a copy of the manuscript, and very much hoped that he might at some stage review it.

 

Alas, Mr Abrams has died before he could do so, and I wish to record here my sorrow at the passing of a generous and thoughtful opponent. I have reason to believe (from a person who spent some time with Mr Abrams during his final months, who has very kindly written to me)  that he largely accepted the historical analysis of my book (while of course not agreeing with me about other matters).  I regard this as a great compliment as he was very much there when the reforms were under way. It is not necessary for opponents to dislike one another. I have always thought this one of the most important facts about life, and I wish more people realised it.

 

Why, I don’t even dislike ‘Bert’, though I must say I am irritated by him. He still doesn’t get the point about bins. It’s nothing to do with my (undoubted) irritation at having to endure less frequent and more complicated rubbish collections. I can cope with that. It’s to do with the unwillingness (probably better described as ‘inability’) of ‘Bert’ to accept that he comprehensively lost an argument over facts.  He just can’t do it. The cause of the infliction of fortnightly collections, slop buckets and the rest of millions of people is without doubt the EU Landfill Directive, and the huge fines it imposes on those who continue to use landfill to dispose of rubbish.

 

 ‘Bert’, like many people, didn’t know about this. He hadn’t read Christopher Booker’s articles about it, or looked into it. But rather than saying he didn’t know, he asserted it was not so. When I established, in detail, that it was, he faded form the scene, returning alter to pester me in his Olympian way about a completely different subject. But I shan’t let him forget it. When he said that he had ‘never heard’ of any huge campaign to feminise the Fire Brigade, I was reminded of this. The statement seemed to me to suggest that if ‘Bert’ hadn’t heard of it, it was the campaign’s fault, not the fault of ‘Bert’.  This is, it seems to me, his general attitude to facts of which he has not heard. And then, if, when he has heard of them, he doesn’t like them, he thrusts them down the memory ole and never mentions them again, or changes the subject when anyone else does.

 

Now he complains: ‘On teaching Christianity as a truth you say that I wrote that ‘it would be an assault on their freedom to teach it to them as if it were the national religion, and foundation of the civilisation in which they lived’. This is ridiculous – I never wrote, nor implied, any such thing’.

 

 Ah. Well, first he wrote : ‘You write 'I strongly believe others should be free to believe what they wish'. How do you square this with your statement (you will correct me if I've got this wrong) that Christianity should be taught as a truth to our children in schools?’

 

I took this – quite justifiably, I think - as a claim that my proposal was a threat to freedom , and replied,  pointing out that those who objected would be guaranteed exemption.

 

But this (to me, a complete answer to any suggestion that my idea threatens freedom of conscience) did not satisfy him. He wrote: ‘Thank you for your reply, but it has not answered my question since most parents will be pretty apathetic on this. My question referred to your apparent support for the indoctrination of children’.

 

When I said that the freedom to opt out, whether exercised or not, was still available, and it could not be dismissed on the grounds that people weren’t as fervent about it as ‘Bert’, he narrowed his point to thing that had been the issue all along. He thought that the teaching of Christianity to children, in a country in which Christianity was the established and historic religion and the foundation of law, morality, art, music, architecture etc. a s a religion in which they should believe, was wrong. He thought it was wrong because he didn’t like it. He dressed this up as a campaign for ‘freedom’ and pretended that a state neutrality on the subject was not (as it obviously is in a Christian society) an active measure to dethrone Christianity and popularise secularism.

 

He said ’rant and bluster all you want but I still don’t think that you have addressed my point. You seem to say that belief in Christianity is a personal matter: it’s up to each individual, in the absence of evidence to ‘choose’ whether or not to believe. Fine. But given this is such a significant decision, surely it should be taken by adults, whose minds have matured, who are able to think and reason for themselves? The state should have no role in telling children that one particular side of the choice is correct. To be clear, of course schools should teach children *about* Christianity – it’s a very important aspect of who we are. My issue is with your desire that they should be taught that it is true. Let them make their own minds up when they’re grown up. ‘

 

I think the details of the exchange above demonstrate that he did indeed imply that it would be an assault on freedom to teach children Christianity as truth.

 

A footnote to this, in a very tricky post, in which my views are subtly misrepresented (it’s also claimed that ‘I don’t believe what’s written in the Bible’ as if my selective reading of its varied and very different  books is a general rejection of everything in it) a contributor who says he is called ‘Mr White’ writes : Peter Hitchens admits that if people are taught about Christianity objectively (the facts, rather than the propaganda), they will not believe its claims. Unless we continue to indoctrinate people at a young age, Christianity will die out.’

 

Well, I don’t know about ‘admits’ It seems to me to be obvious that what one encounters in one’s formative years is what leaves the deepest impression, and what is most remembered. No civilisation which intends to last fails to instruct (the word ‘indoctrinate’ is pejorative and slanted) its young with the truths it hopes they will carry through life. Why, our own society instructs them (or ‘indoctrinates’ them if you are hostile to its message) in equality, diversity, sexual liberation, multiculturalism and so forth.  The same goes for history, national geography, poetry, songs, literature, landscape, tastes in food.  This is not because children are easy targets but because they are receptive, interested and inquisitive about matters which adults, once past their early twenties, cease to care about until they are sick, destitute or in danger.

 

We are all free to reject what we are taught in childhood. Many do, and when they do at least they know precisely what they are rejecting, rather than the embittered caricatures of religion which so many of our cultural leaders like to spread.

 

 But if a child is taught no religion, it has nothing to reject later, and far less chance of discovering faith if it has never encountered it.  In an atheist society, such as the old USSR, this is a readily understandable policy (though in my view a cruel and horrible one). The trouble arose, in the USSR, when the materialist gospel which the state *did* seek to teach broke down utterly (as such things do) leaving Russia the moral wasteland which  it now is.

 

In any case, you would think from the tone of the attacks that I were some sort of panjandrum sitting here issuing decrees which would instantly be obeyed, whereas I am merely arguing for a policy which, alas, is being negated as I write.

 

My critics, on the other hand are defending the policy of those now in power, and disingenuously pretending that it is in some way ‘neutral’ and ‘free’ to deprive children of their religious heritage, and to expunge from the national consciousness the beautiful, moving and unselfish precepts of the faith that has created our civilisation ( and without which our civilisation will, in my view, slowly perish).

 

But, as such people usually do, they lack the courage to admit the true nature of their destructive plan.                                                                                      

On Being a Bad Loser

Peter Hitchens says 'I have lost more votes at more debates than most people living'.

I like to think this has something to do with my willingness to embrace unfashionable causes, though of course there just might be other reasons. In any case, I like to think that I am fairly indifferent to the result when it goes against me, even if I get a warm glow on the rare occasions when I find myself on the winning side.

Am I deluding myself about this? ‘Tarquin’ seems to think I am . He comments , in his usual ungenerous and hostile manner on ‘A Narrow but Important Victory’ in which I briefly summarised the victory of my side in a debate on drugs at Exeter University last Thursday  (By the way, I have a good hope that there will soon be a recording of this available).

 

'Tarquin' said : ‘I'm fairly certain that Hitchens has previously dismissed the results of similar debates where he has lost the vote, and there are many good reasons to do so - and yet this one is 'an important victory' even when he admits you are supposed to vote on the quality of the argument rather than opinion on the subject Sadly I'm unable to get a quote because of the nature of this blog, I won't find it without wasting several days, if anyone can remember it would be helpful (it was one in a large hall or auditorium and was available online’

 

Well, I can’t find it either. Can anyone else? I’m not saying that I have never been guilty of such an act, but I can’t recall it just now.  In general, where I can, I provide links to, or direct readers to sites where they can see a recording and make their own minds up. I’m well aware that a participant in a  debate is unlikely to give full or fair account of it.

 

But (using the blog’s archive and a well-known search engine) I found the following accounts I had given of several debates on this subject. 

 

‘Regular readers here will be familiar with Mr Peter Reynolds, leader of the Cannabis Law Reform Society, who has tried to take me to the Press Complaints Commission for being rude about Marijuana, and has from time to time turned up at public meetings to heckle me.

 

Some months ago he challenged me to a debate on cannabis legalisation, and when I accepted, the excellent Salford University Debating Society swiftly stepped in to offer a venue for our titanic battle.

 

This took place on Tuesday evening, and – though I’ll leave it to those who were there (apparently a televised version will find its way on to the web) to give their own impressions,  I would say in general that it was fair, courteous, thoughtful and educational for all involved, and that the audience was intelligently receptive to the arguments of both sides.

 

I lost the vote (as I usually do, though I did once win the vote on the same broad subject after a tremendously high-octane clash with Howard Marks, of which I fear there is no recording ) but rather more narrowly (the margin was six votes) than anyone had expected.  All of which , I think, goes to show that the case for legalisation is not as clear cut as many silly members of the British liberal establishment think it is.’

 

(October 2011)

 

‘I can’t possibly give a full account of my encounter with Howard Marks in Oxford on Thursday evening, as you can't take notes on a debate when you're taking part in it, but I thought readers might appreciate a few notes on the event.

First, I should explain how it is we came to be debating. Mr Marks and I first met on a windy evening in Blackpool more than ten years ago, when we were both speaking at a National Union of Students event, on drug laws, in the vast and rather lovely Winter Gardens.

It was quite a big meeting and we were having quite a lot of fun arguing when some commissar from the NUS marched on to the stage,  switched off my microphone and told me I had to leave. When I asked why he told me that I surely already knew. I said I had no idea. I then foghorned my protest to the hall, not needing the microphones, and rose rather angrily to go.

Howard (as I have ever since called him) behaved magnificently. He scooped up his notes, took me by the arm in a very friendly way and said ‘Well,  if he’s going, I’m going too!’

We were besieged, as we went, by a very small crowd of angry, heavily-pierced people, who shrilled various incomprehensible but plainly critical remarks at me. (It turned out later that they had been fed, and willingly believed, a rumour that I had said I was a racist and proud of it, a false claim which later led me to threaten a lawsuit against the individual responsible for spreading it,  the only time I have done this. The person very swiftly retracted and apologised).

 I was then intercepted by a (very cunning) police officer, who led me into a side room. He offered me an escort to the railway station. I was, it seemed, actually being run out of town.

Oh come on, ‘ I said ‘Don’t be silly. They’re only Trots. I used to be one. They're all mouth and no trousers.  I’m not afraid of them. I’m quite happy to walk out there and brave whatever they want to say to me.’

‘Ah’ replied the subtle officer. 'I quite see. But you may have noticed – who couldn’t - that there’s rather a lot of glass in this building, some of it quite old and valuable? ’

I admitted that this is so. The Winter Gardens are a majestic Edwardian palace of glass and wood, the glory of Blackpool, if you like. I’m rather fond of them.

‘Well, sir, you see, if there were serious damage to that glass, I’d be held responsible for failing to keep the peace, which wouldn’t be very nice, would it? You’d be doing me a great favour if you let me slip you out by a back way I know, and on to the railway station’.

When it was put like that, I’d have been a heel if I’d refused. So  just said ‘ Oh, all right then. But no need to go to the station. I’m sure I’ll be safe in Blackpool till the morning’. And so I did.

But I never forgot Howard’s chivalry, and his instinctive rally to the side of liberty, even the liberty of an opponent he didn’t know, and had no reason to like.  If ever I seek a definition of magnanimity, I recall that evening.

A little while later we found ourselves debating again, this time in Durham.  Once again, we enjoyed the encounter, without conceding anything to each other in the argument. There was a vote, and to my surprise I won it, as Howard is a hero in the student world . Something similar happened in Exeter.

So it occurred to me to seek a rematch (I think the vote last night was more or less even, to the extent these things matter. My view is that a debate without a vote is like tennis without a net) .

Howard’s argument rested heavily on the fact that the old League of Nations had been panicked into banning cannabis by the more-or-less hysterical urgings ( as he described them) of an Egyptian delegate, plus the more usual points about the bad effects of illegality on users and on the purity etc of the drug, and the point that many eminent scientists and others had used cannabis without ill-effect.  Regular readers here will be familiar with Malcolm Muggeridge’s rather more measured description, in ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time’(and quoted in two of my books, 'Abolition of Liberty' and 'The War We Never Fought'),  of the baleful effect of widespread cannabis smoking on the Egyptian people in the 1920s. There was clearly something bad going on.

My case will be familiar to regular readers here and I won’t rehearse it. I suspect Howard is broadly right that the dangers of hashish, as it then was, were in some ways misrepresented to the League. That is because in those days we knew so little about this drug, which was then almost unknown in the western world, and in fact we knew very little about any drug. Like the exaggerations of ‘Reefer Madness’ so often mocked by the pro-dope campaign, such arguments now look foolish.

But they contained, for all their crudity, an essential truth – that  the ingredients of cannabis which we have now isolated and studied, are powerful psychotropics which can have unpredictable and long-delayed effects. Just how bad those are, and what action they justify, are the real issues for our time.

Each of us teased the other a bit, but without malice.

We then had an all-too-short period of questions, again quite like the sort of subjects which come up here. I think, at the end, many there felt that they could easily have gone on for longer. But bookshop staff have homes to go to, and we couldn’t stay there all night. We meet again on Monday 29th October, in Bristol, but I’m told that’s sold out.

Perhaps we might do it again. I’ve no doubt our discussions serve the cause of truth, and the cause of free speech. And they demonstrate that opponents in this matter can behave towards each other with humour and personal generosity (unlike reviewers in ‘The Observer’) . I’m also meeting Peter Reynolds of CLEAR at Exeter University on the evening of Thursday 29th November, and Tim Wilkinson ( see www.surelysomemistake.blogspot.com) in London on 14th November.’

 

(October 2012)

 

 

‘It always gravely saddens me to see Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a distinguished doctor who has dedicated his life and mind to the cure of disease and the easing of pain, supporting the dangerous campaign to soften our drug laws. If successful, this will lead to greatly increased pain, misery and disease.

The pro-drug lobby – much like Big Tobacco when the link between cigarettes and lung cancer was first made – is hostile to any facts that contradict its claims. I fear Sir Ian’s allegiance to this cause has affected him in this way.

During a London debate on the subject last week, my ally Dr Hans-Christian Raabe tried to hand Sir Ian an article from the New England Journal Of Medicine that supported a point he had just made – that deaths due to legal prescription drugs (eg methadone) far exceed deaths due to illegal drugs (eg heroin) in the USA. Sir Ian flung it to the floor.

Is this what we should expect from a former president of the Royal College of Physicians?’

 

 (May 2011)

 

Wednesday night’s London debate (I’ve posted an independent account elsewhere, and would be happy to post others)  was an unusual experience for me  in that the audience largely supported me on the drug issue. How ‘typical’ this is I have no idea. Either way it was perhaps a little unfair on my opponent, who may not have shone as much as he would have done if he’d felt he had more of a home crowd. I won the vote at the beginning and the end, and few minds can have been changed. I’d only say that this couldn’t have happened if my side didn’t at least possess a coherent moral and political case.

 

(November 2012)

 

 

The good ship 'Tory Party' is finished - please keep calm and head for the lifeboats

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

It is quite clear to any thinking person that the Tory Party is now a corpse. Any idea that David Cameron could or would revive it must have died at the Rotherham by-election.

This astonishing result must surely be the most humiliating treatment of a major political party in modern history.

The ‘Conservative’ candidate came fifth. He was beaten by Labour, which is reasonable. But he was  also shoved aside by three other organisations.

The first was UKIP, the Dad’s Army of politics; the second was the BNP, that care home for the incurably stupid and nasty; and the third was George Galloway’s Respect.

Their candidate was Yvonne Ridley, pictured right, a former journalist who converted to Islam after she was held hostage by the Taliban. I quite like her in a way, but she can hardly be said to be part of the mainstream, especially since she adopted her adventurous version of the hijab.

If I were the candidate of a national party beaten by Yvonne in a by- election, I would go into hiding.

I don’t think this comical failure can be dismissed as a mid-term blip. I think this is the moment at which it became obvious that, in the North of England, where Tory MPs used to abound, people have noticed what many in the South have yet to see.

They have realised Mr Slippery’s Party has decayed so much that the best place for it is the nearest skip. No amount of paint, glue, sparkle  or varnish will ever make it look good again.

Tory insiders know this too. They know that the true party membership is falling faster than Jimmy Savile’s  reputation, that without cheques from dodgy millionaires it would long ago have gone into receivership. On top of that it has come to stand, in many people’s minds, for concreting over the countryside, unrestrained mass immigration, terrible state schools, being nice to criminals, starting foreign wars in places where we have no business to be, and high taxes.

Of course, there are people who think all these things are wonderful.  But they already have two political parties on their side, and so there’s no earthly point in them  voting Tory.

This is what comes of punishing your friends and rewarding your enemies, year after year after year.

In Rotherham, you get fewer votes than Yvonne Ridley and her hijab. You barely get 1,000 votes in the whole of Middlesbrough. And even in Croydon North you get only 16 per cent of the vote. 

Now, I did tell you all this some  time ago, when far too many of you were swooning into the arms of Mr Slippery. Well, look what you got  for that. He couldn’t win last time, even aided by the wave of hate he created against Gordon Brown. He certainly can’t win next time. By 2020 Tory candidates in the North will be coming in behind the Monster Raving Loonies.

Face it, the whole thing’s got to go. If the Tory Party ran foreign holidays all its customers would be stranded abroad in unfinished hotels. If the Tory Party were a cruise ship, it would be sinking on a jagged reef because the captain was too busy conducting a gay wedding and not looking where he was going.

If it were any kind of consumer item, people who bought it would take it back and ask for a refund. They wouldn’t get one, of course, just a harsh Australian voice telling them to get knotted.

But because it’s a political party, for some bizarre reason, the more its voters are betrayed, the more they cling to it. The only result of this is that the honest, productive, thrifty, patriotic people of this country have nobody to protect them from their enemies.

Desert the Useless Tories now  and for ever. Put them out of their misery. And then build something better before it is too late.

It’s not yet compulsory to vote, and why would you vote for people who despise you?
Teenaged brains trapped in flabby, balding bodies

There is something deeply disturbing about Mick Jagger, but even more so about the old people who throng to his weird if astounding circus performances.

You can understand a mouthy teenager being impressed by Mr Jagger’s demeanour, which is easily summed up as ‘I’ll do what I like, and it’s my business’.

What else does the band’s trademark, those lips and that tongue, mean? As Mr Jagger himself once put it, long ago: ‘Teenagers  the world over are weary of being pushed around by half-witted politicians who attempt to dominate their way of thinking and set a code for their living.

‘They want to be free and have the right of expression, of thinking and living without any petty restrictions.’

Well, he got his way. The codes and petty restrictions have all gone. We’re all free now, whether we want to be or not.

It’s Mr Jagger and the rockocracy who dominate our thinking.

These occasions, when pensioners struggle into denims and pay hundreds  of pounds to be made even deafer than  they already are, are not concerts.

If you really want to listen to this stuff, it  sounds a lot better on headphones.

They are partly celebrations of a  kind of pagan cult of eternal youth, by which you may be bald and have a bulging gut, but your brain stays teenaged; and they are partly political rallies for the cause of self-worship.
Anyway, I hate them.

Wow Kate, your hair's exactly the same!

The sexual revolution only works one way. I’ve no doubt women can be bishops, but men will never understand fashion.

The Duchess of Cambridge’s hair looks exactly the same as it did last week. What’s the fuss about?
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Of course former SAS man Danny Nightingale should never have been charged, let alone locked up for his accidental possession of a gun.

He was a victim of our law’s wild unthinking frenzy against guns, a miserable substitute for  the moral counter-revolution we really need.

Before 1914, anyone in this country could legally buy a gun and ammunition in a hardware shop. It was quite safe because we knew how  to behave.
   **************************************************************************************

All that needs to be said about the Leveson Report, and its threat to the freedom of newspapers, is this: the Government and the courts do worse things to people, every day, than the press has ever done to anybody.

In most cases, the victims of this indifference and injustice have nowhere to turn, except the press.

Politicians aren’t interested in protecting the McCanns or the Dowlers. They are interested in protecting themselves, and these people provide them with the pretext.

Besides, Alastair Campbell, the man who bamboozled this country into the stupidest war in its history, likes Leveson.

That should be a hint, if nothing else is.

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Another Debate on Religion - is Society Less Civilised Without God?

I am grateful to Premier Christian Radio for providing this podcast

 

: http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/7d14e3e1-5297-4394-9830-1167e3fdfb2d.mp3.

 

It is a recording (the sound is, alas, not always of very high quality) of a debate a couple of weeks ago in which I argued about the effect of religion on society with the Atheist, Alex Gabriel.

Some of you may find it worth listening to, as I think it deals with a number of questions which come up here, in a reasonably thoughtful manner.

 

 

Freedom of the Press in Danger?

I’ll come back to this subject when I’ve got properly to grips with the enormous Leveson Report. But here are a few thoughts on the basis of what I’ve been able to gather. A lot of the press has been behaving very badly.

I have said here before that I did not, when I started work as a reporter and obtained my membership of the National Union of Journalists, imagine for one moment that I was joining the Sisters of Mercy. That didn’t mean we were all barbarians. Most of us thought we were doing some kind of good. In a way we did good simply by existing. Someone, somewhere, was afraid we might find out what they were up to. But perhaps we had different priorities.

In my early years in the trade, I read a lot of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective stories, and came to admire Marlowe’s cunning and his justified mistrust of authority, though I can’t imagine Lord Justice Leveson approving. I wasn’t, as a snotty graduate, quite so fond of the side of the business so wonderfully portrayed by Evelyn Waugh in ‘Scoop’ ( a manual, not a novel) when he described the three sordid old hacks ‘Shumble, Whelper and Pigge… [who] had loitered together on many a doorstep and forced their way into many a stricken home’. On the other hand, if I was strictly honest with myself, I knew that the bits of the paper I wrote were subsidised by the bits that Shumble, Whelper and Pigge wrote. They always have been and always will be.

Popular journalism, which doesn’t really exist in any other country but ours, is a form of showbusiness, mingled with information in which you must entertain if you wish to inform. It doesn’t need to be as rough as it got. I do think that the arrival of Rupert Murdoch needlessly vulgarised the popular papers.

 

It’s astonishing to visit the British Library’s newspaper archive (soon to leave its old home at Colindale) , and to look at ( say )the Daily Mirror of 50 years ago – the very high level of much of the writing, the density of the text, the restraint of the headlines – and it was selling four million copies a day. The mid-market papers of that time would make today’s Daily Telegraph look trivial and vulgar. As for the Telegraph of that time, I can still remember when it had triple-decker headlines, seemed to be mainly about the Second World War despite its having finished fifteen or so years before, with its indecipherable photographs and advertisements which explained the possible respectable use of chewing gum (though certainly not on the cricket field or the golf course). As for the Times, it really did put the assassination of President Kennedy on an inside page.

 

Anyway, the point is, we got carried away. We did wrong things. They were avoidable and matters of choice. And this has now come to a very abrupt stop. That is not just because of the many prosecutions now pending, about which I(quite rightly) can say nothing. Nor is it because of Lord Justice Leveson, whose inquiry was set up to get Mr Slippery out of a hole he had made for himself, through excessive closeness to the Murdoch empire, rather than because the need was specially urgent. It is because we have learned no end of a lesson. Of course, it doesn’t show as much as it might. We can’t put articles in the paper saying ‘This week we turned down the following or refused to pursue the following, because we are so much more careful than we were five years ago’.

 

In any case, justice and restitution for the victims (who in many cases were able to get such things through the existing law) is a different thing from placing permanent restrictions on the press. And the government is far more of a threat to most people than the press will ever be, with its secret courts snatching children, its cruel taxes on the old and poor, its fatal hospitals and stupid wars.

I don’t blame the McCanns or Christopher Jefferies for wanting to see the press punished (not that a weaker press will do them any good) . But I do blame politicians and other establishment person for exploiting this justified feeling. They are using the victims of the press, to get something they have long wanted anyway. I’m a First Amendment supporter, anyway, or would be if our constitution permitted such a thing. To me, regulating newspapers is like regulating the wind, foolish and unlikely to succeed. I think the press has enough regulators already – the readers who are free not to buy it, the businesses who are free not to advertise in it, the libel courts, the criminal law and the contempt rules (now, I’m glad to say, being properly enforced, as they weren’t for years) .

 

It’s not a monopoly – broadcasting and the Internet constantly undermine it. And I suspect that most of its political enemies are really motivated by a loathing of ‘the Right Wing Press’, that is to say the one major force in British public life which still stands up for social, moral and cultural conservatism. Regulation, as I’ve long stated here, is far more menacing to a free society than nationalisation, because government can appear to stand at arm’s length from it, and because it can be introduced into areas of life that the state could never previously have touched in a free, western society. If we have to have regulation, and for our transgressions it seems as if we must, then it is very important to me that the government has no hand in it.

How will it work? I’m not sure. Let’s see the legislation. I suspect that the vital battle, over the principle of state-underpinned regulation, is the one that really matters. Let them in and they will, by hook or by crook, increase their powers.

 

That interesting man, Mick Hume (Author of the newly published book ‘There is No Such Thing as a Free Press…and we need one more than ever’, has a specific worry which also concerns me, since many of the things I write annoy various lobby groups, who love to claim to be ‘offended’ or ‘insulted’ by legitimate expressions of dissenting opinion. He is worried about the ‘arbitration’ which (if I have this right) Sir Brian Leveson recommends in Chapter 7 of his conclusions , pp 1768 and 1769 (the whole thing is available on the web, and the conclusions are in Volume 4).

Mr Hume says : ‘One legitimate criticism of the press in the past has been a reluctance to publish corrections and apologies swiftly and prominently enough when mistakes are made. Leveson’s proposed ‘independent’ arbitration body would use that as an excuse to throw the press open to anybody with an axe to grind or a taste for self-publicity. ‘The arbitrator would hear complaints, not only from individuals alleging mistreatment, but from ‘representative groups’ and third parties who don’t like something they have seen or read. Expect a weekly list of complaints from lobby groups …. What is more, the hearings would be heard in the ‘inquisitorial’ style of a French court, where the judge simply hears the evidence, rather than the English adversarial system with its rigorous cross-examination of witnesses. The inquisitorial system was used during the hearings of the Leveson Inquiry itself, where tabloid-bashing witnesses were rarely cross-examined … …If the judge figure on the arbitration body sides with the complainant, the regulator will then have the power not only to order the publication of a correction or apology, but to determine how and where it should be printed in the paper. Are the front pages of our newspapers to be edited by judges rather than journalists in future?’

 

Well, when they come to consider the legislation, or the new body, I hope someone pays attention to that . Such a system, if Mr Hume has understood it aright, could kill off a lot of legitimate comment.

Advent Reflections, Mostly

Before I reflect on the thrilling, disturbing season of Advent, a few responses to comments. I really do wish that my message about the Tory Party would get through. I noticed that a Twitter contributor yesterday claimed I had had an ‘epiphany’ about the Tories, after reading this week’s column. He had genuinely thought that I was a Tory supporter. I think I have been attacking the Tory Party, and urging its destruction, for nine years now (I thought it was seven, but when I checked, it was nine). How interesting to be abused and despised by so many people who can’t even be bothered to make the most basic effort to find out what I think.

 

Well, for those who are surprised, or want to know more, here is the most complete statement of my position on that awful party, published here first in October 2007:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/the-tories-are-.html

 

They might also note the following simple points.

 

Voting is not compulsory, and voting for your enemies is a definition of madness
Why worry about ‘Keeping Labour out’ unless you can produce a single significant difference between the Brown government and this one? Go on. What is it? (actually, Brown was less likely to join the Euro. That’s about it)
You can’t start a new party in the British two-party system unless one of the dominant two is collapsing or has collapsed. Simple eh. You have to get rid of (or badly damage) the old one before you can begin the new one. Not so difficult when it has its current leadership, eh?
UKIP does no harm, but will not do any good either. It has no real intellectual centre, and looks to me as if it has cribbed a lot of its ‘policies’ from newspaper columnists. What do grammar schools (a fundamentally authoritarian conservative concept) have in common with decriminalisation of cannabis?  UKIP is just Thatcherism in exile,  confused and directionless, and wholly lacking in any understanding of the New Left.
Yes, I do mean that about the BNP.

 

Now, to Advent. Being a northern person who greatly prefers a frosty morning to a sunny afternoon, who loves to see  storms beating on the coast and trees shaken by the wind,  I enjoy this time of year, which seems to me to be full of promise and immensely exhilarating.

 

There is something about the long light of the low sun (when it appears)  which is particularly thrilling, and the rapid dusk of the short afternoons intensifies the pleasure of homecoming from a long walk in the crisp, open air.

 

On my way to and from last week’s debate in Exeter, I was able to have the long train journey in a winter landscape without which this time of year never feels complete to me, something of an adventure thanks to floods, landslides and a heating failure, which gave the return journey (which began before dawn) a bit of a wartime, adventurous feel .  It was all the better for that. Apart from ancient memories of childhood rides home behind steam engines, with the red sun caught in the bare trees and the steam flying past the window, my best memories are , in no particular order, of a polyglot lunch of schnitzel and beer with German travelling companions in the Mitropa dining car on the run from Hanover to Berlin, through East German territory, but sealed off from it; a great sweeping passage across the deserts and mountains of Chinese Turkestan, on the way from old Kashgar (still running with blood from the Korban sacrifice of thousands of sheep) to Urumchi, under something very like martial law, where I wouldn’t have been surprised if I and my companions had been arrested on arrival; a nervous passage from the Hungarian border to Bucharest at Christmas 1989, past shepherds in long sheepskin cloaks, and down to the capital through the oilfields, often imagining I could hear gunfire – and then realising I really could; and passing through County Durham at twilight , with the castle and Cathedral of Durham itself mysteriously and melodramatically highlighted by new-fallen snow. It looked much as Arcangelo Corelli’s ‘Christmas Concerto’ sounds.

 

Then there’s Kay Harker’s fictional journey home in the opening chapter of John Masefield’s  glorious book ‘The Box of Delights’. A book I had read to me (in part) by a teacher at the age of seven, and finally completed 40 years later (I hadn’t known the title, and had hunted for the ending for years till I found it by accident) with some of the most evocative descriptions of winter weather and its romance that I’ve ever seen. Though I might add that J.B.Priestley’s ‘Angel Pavement’, which I’ve just read for the first time,  has a similarly astonishing depiction of the sensation of an winter afternoon in London (amongst many other fine things).

 

How very proper it is that such a time should also have a celebration to mark it. The Godless or indifferent world only recognises Christmas now, and has turned it into a month-long period of feasting culminating at the Nativity itself.  But the Church has advent, which (inconveniently in this season of browsing and sluicing) is a fast, like Lent only shorter and so easier to stick to.

 

It is also a time of great music. In my home city, Oxford, the University Church (St Mary the Virgin, owner of the great spire that stands over the High Street) holds each year a service in both English and German, to mark the season. Lessons are read in both languages (it is interesting, if you have a smattering of German, to listen to Luther’s Bible and catch the moments where it falls into step with Coverdale and Andrewes).  It opens with Palestrina’s tremendous, coldly lovely Matin Responsory for Advent, which belongs to all cultures and all ages, features The English Advent carols ‘O come, O come , Emmanuel’ , ‘Lo, he comes’ and ‘Hills of the North’, Cranmer’s Advent Collect (‘put upon us the armour of light…’) , ‘Wachet Auf!’ sung one verse in German and one in English, and a glorious mixture as the English sing ‘Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates’ and the Germans sing ‘Macht hoch die tur, die Tor macht weit”,   (by the third verse the Germans are usually winning).

 

The history of this is that a number of German Lutherans, many of them converts from Judaism, fled from their homeland in 1939, found their way to Oxford and were offered the University Church’s hospitality. The connection has continued ever since, and has been reinforced by a  substantial number of German Lutherans working at the Joint European Torus, a tremendous scientific project, at nearby Culham. And before someone says to me ‘But you’re an anti-European xenophobe’, I will here point out that the cultural, scientific and musical unity of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals,  all delight me, and are completely achievable without a supranational Eurostate or lax, wide-open borders. I might add that if you think we’re all the same, the difference between Bach and Tallis or Gibbons is as great as that between Weimar and Oxford.  If ever you’re in Oxford round the beginning of December (and many would-be undergraduates and their families are, as it is the interview season) it is well worth coming to this event, especially now the church has just undergone a rather fine restoration. Too late this year, though.

 

But the thing is, as the people stream out having consumed large quantities of German Christmas sweetmeats, that the music is perfectly suited to the season – cold, clean, exhilarating , full of anticipation of the coming feast . Of course, the Advent scriptures are also rather alarming, and seem to speak of tribulation to come. But when the promised King arrives he appears (as God so often does in people’s lives) in the surprising form of a helpless infant.

 

I wish I could communicate this part of the Christian religion to critics such as Alex Gabriel (whose argument with me is posted elsewhere on this blog) .

 

Thumbing My Nose

One or two contributors seem to think they are entitled to demand that I assent to some sort of oath of purity, to satisfy them that I am not a 'racist', whether on or off my bicycle.

Well, my response is similar to that of the American general in charge of defending Bastogne, Anthony Clement McAuliffe,  during the 'Battle of the Bulge', when called upon by the Germans to surrender, which was 'Nuts'.

Not merely do I have no need to prove my innocence of this charge. I have a positive need to thumb my nose at people who think they are(yet) in a society in which people are under any obligation to make public assents to the ruling ideology. We are not. And those who think that they can behave in this way are helping to bring closer the day when we shall have real Thought Police among us, examining our words and probably our facial expressions (FaceCrime!) for keys to our inmost thoughts, and making windows into our souls.

They ought to be ashamed of themselves. One of the worst things about them is that they're not ashamed of themselves, but zealous and confident. Not merely do I not care if they wish to believe bad things about me. I am actively anxious to court their disapproval. They are the harbingers of totalitarianism, and while I cannot keep them away from this place as long as they abide by the rules, I can treat them with the open contempt which we shoudl all show for enemies of liberty.

 

***A small footnote. One of my critics on 'Twitter' says that, by reading comments about me on that site, I act like a person who goes around searching lavatory walls for scribbled, insulting comments made about him.

This person therefore states that he believes that making such comments is the equivalent of scrawling rude messages on lavatory walls. I don't actually agree. It's reasonable and normal for people to seek to know what others are saying about them on a site that is frequently quoted on mainstream media and which plainly influences the current of opinion. As Lord McAlpine has shown, there are other reasons for doing so, too.  But this person himself comments on Twitter, and yet believes that it is like a lavatory wall. What does that make him? I asked him. He didn't answer.

It is interesting that when I have tried to make rational and polite (and, as I believed, private) responses to those who have posted hostile comments about me on Twitter, the retorts have almost invariably been infantile and/or unresponsive, and sometimes combined with public jeering at me for getting in touch at all.

 

I obviously haven't bothered with the people who write 'Peter Hitchens is a ****ing ****', or who say, imagining this is original and clever, that I should have died instead of my late brother - a version of this appears about once every ten days, or more often if I have recently been broadcasting.

But it seemed worth trying some of the others.

So far, not much use. There's an element of surprise that I am prepared to communicate with them at all, and also of mistrust, perhaps born out of their own half-hidden or wholly hidden identities.

Even so,  I thought that, where there was some sign of a reasoning mind, I might see if I could discover what motivated their attacks, and perhaps take them on in debate (as I do here, and indeed in general). Should I bother?  I am unsure. I think there is something about Twitter which encourages a sort of hit and run verbal mugging or happy slapping technique. And of course it is easy for anyone who is challenged to run away and hide, or to attack me , to their electronic friends, for responding at all. Can it be effectively challenged,  or is its nature such that reason and politeness must lose?

 

 

 

 

 

Orderly and Humane?

Some time ago I decided to wrote a book about the damaging and deluded cult of national victory which has done this country so much damage since 1945. No doubt it will receive the usual mixture of abuse and  silence which most of my books receive. But I shall write it anyway, as it seems to me to be a truth urgently in need to being expressed, especially as we shall soon be marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the supposedly ‘Good’ Second World War. It is now possible to have more-or-less grown-up attitudes towards the First World War, whose last remaining justification – that it was ‘The War to End All Wars’ - crumbled into dust and spiders’ webs in September 1939. But the 1939-45 conflict is still wreathed in delusions, delusions often employed to try to justify modern wars which are alleged to have comparably ‘good’ aims.

 

The belief in its goodness is in fact ludicrous. Our main ally (rejected at the beginning with lofty scorn, embraced later with desperate, insincere enthusiasm) was one of the most murderous tyrants in human history, whose slave empire we helped him to extend and consolidate, and to whom we afterwards handed thousands of victims, to whom we owed at least a life, though we knew he would murder them.

 

Our purpose in joining the war was not only not achieved, but the country whose independence we claimed to be ‘saving’ sank under successive waves of horror, cruelty, lawlessness, murder and despotism, to emerge 60 years later and many miles from where it had been when we ‘rescued’ it.

 

The main effect of the war on life in Britain (apart from the physical damage done by bombing, considerable though far less than the damage inflicted by us on Germany)  was to bankrupt our economy,  raise taxes to previously unheard-of levels, make state interference in all aspects of life more prevalent, wreck countless families, popularise divorce, weaken families,  engender crime and delinquency, and subject the native culture to an invasion of American customs and language from which it has never recovered. The main effect of the war on Britain as a state and as an economy was to destroy her hold over her Empire, permanently weaken her currency and end her status as a first-class diplomatic and naval power.  In the process, in Singapore at 1942, this country suffered the gravest defeat of its armies at any time in its history, a defeat so disastrous and irreparable that to this day most British people are – at best – dimly aware of it, though they are reasonably well-informed about the horrors which befell the captured armies.

 

During and immediately after the war, as I have discussed here, we employed methods which would have disgusted our forebears and which ought to disgust us, but which were so frightful that we still lie to ourselves about them, or hide them from our consciousness.  Nobody who truly understood them could defend them, which is why the critic of these policies has first to confront a great wall of ignorance, sometimes wilful, sometimes not.

 

The first was the deliberate bombing of the homes of German civilians, not just in the famous incidents at Hamburg and Dresden, but all over Germany for many months, which has morally inexcusable and , as it happens, remarkably militarily ineffective. Most British people are either unaware of this operation, greatly underestimate it or refuse to believe that it was an act of deliberate policy, wrongly believing that the bombers were seeking to destroy military and industrial targets and only accidentally killed or mutilated civilians. The undoubted bravery and sacrifice of the aircrews in this operation, acknowledged unconditionally by me, has no bearing on the guilt of the politicians and commanders who authorised and executed it.

 

The second was the atrocious but still largely unknown ‘ethnic cleansing’ of perhaps ten million Germans from their former homes across Eastern and Central Europe, authorised and planned before the war’s end, approved by the victorious allies at Potsdam, and falsely portrayed – then and since  - as ‘Orderly and Humane’. Those who ordered and authorised it knew perfectly well that it would be nothing of the kind. Those who carried it out made little effort to mitigate its chaos and cruelty, which well served their purpose - of driving their neighbours from their ancestral lands by mass terror and robbery.

 

These words,  ‘Orderly and Humane’ which featured in the Potsdam document which authorised the atrocity, also provide the coldly bitter title of a new book by R.M. Douglas, recently published by Yale University Press.

 

Cold bitterness is the first reaction of any person who reads it, who claims to be in any way civilised. I have , night after night, sat in my homebound train reading this catalogue of horrors, unable to find any way of expressing or properly articulating my emotions.

 

The book takes us through several stages, the first being the deliberate planning of the expulsions, by civilised civil servants and politicians, who found very quickly, as they looked into the matter, that the thing could not be done without cruelty.

 

What of those who were there at the time? Many protested, notably the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, that fine journalist Eric Gedye, and our old friends from the campaign against bombing Germans in their homes, Bishop George Bell of Chichester and Richard Stokes MP.

 

But as usual when something wicked is going on , the ‘mainstream’ consensus was complacent and defensive. Winston Churchill, who had urged the plan for years, and had ignored warnings of its dangers,  started making hypocritical noises about its cruelty long after it was too late. There is a fashion these days for according sort of sainthood to Clement Attlee, the post-war Labour Prime Minister. Well, Saint Clement, confronted with advice that the plan would run into grave problems, notably severe human suffering, said ‘Everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their defeat is worthwhile in the end”. Winston Churchill, who had urged the plan for years , started making hypocritical noises about its cruelty long after it was too late.

 

Everything? We shall see.

 

I have removed the nationality of the victims and of the soldiers from the following description. See if you can guess who they were, before I tell you, further down :

 

‘In a single incident, 265 *********** , including 120 women and 74 children, , were killed on June 18 by ****** troops, who removed them from a train at Horne Mostenice near Prerov, shot them in the back of the neck , and buried them in a mass grave that they had first been forced to dig beside the railway station.’

 

Well, if I tell you that the year was 1945, when by June 18 the war was over, perhaps you will be able to work out first of all who the killers were *not*. Yes, you are getting warm, they were not ‘the Nazis’ or even ‘The Germans’. The dead (mostly women and children) were Germans. The killers were supposedly disciplined troops of the Army of nice, friendly Czechoslovakia.

 

Two points emerge here. One, which Professor Douglas drives home repeatedly, is that these disgusting slaughters were not ( in general) the result of enraged civilians taking their revenge, which might at least mitigate the crime. They were state-sponsored and centrally controlled, and are to this day defended by the states concerned, rightly nervous of any suggestion that they might be subjected to legal investigation, or demands for compensation.

 

The second is that the authors of these filthy inexcusable things were the ‘decent’ Czechoslovaks and ‘gallant’ Poles,  for so long treated with sentimental admiration by Britain (perhaps to make up for the fact that we betrayed them in 1938 and 1939).

 

I will also deal here with the muttering I can hear at the back, that ‘the Germans had done this first, and were being paid back in their own kind’, coupled with catcalls of ‘Wot are you then, some sort of Hitler apologist?’ and (no doubt) thought-police insinuations that I am a closet racialist.

 

Well, some Germans certainly had done such things and worse  (though we let most of them off as we needed them to run the country after the defeat of Hitler) , but most of the victims of these incidents were women and children, and some of the others were (for instance) Czech German Social Democrats who had themselves resisted the Nazis. This was a racial purge, combined with a colossal mass theft of property, money , houses and land (those refuges who survived could take almost nothing with them), horribly comparable to German National Socialist Actions. Anyone who (rightly) condemns the German National Socialists as barbarian murderers cannot really, in all conscience, fail to condemn the authors of these actions too. (this point is addressed later)

 

Professor Douglas accepts that the expulsions did not sink to the level of the extermination camps(though on occasion, as we will see, they got remarkably close to it).

 

But he argues ‘Nonetheless the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime. With the exception of the war years themselves, Europe West of the USSR had never seen, nor would it again see, so vast a complex of arbitrary detention- one in which tens of thousands, including many children, would lose their lives. That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see.’  

 

By the way, one of the reasons why this monstrous action went ahead was because of a widespread belief that the (bloody and chaotic, and economically and socially disastrous) compulsory population swap between Greece and Turkey, after the cession of Smyrna to the Turks by defeated Greece (1922), had been a success.  The silence about the post 1945 expulsions must not be allowed to create the same false impression. It was sheer hell, and anyone who proposes to repeat it should be told so.

 

Out of the many pages of notes I took from this hugely important book, I shall reluctantly set out only a few of the most striking, while urging all readers to buy or order from their local libraries this necessary work of compelling historical truth.

 

At Linzer-Vorstadt, close to the Budvar brewery, a cmap for Germans had inscribed on its gate the words ‘Oko za Oko, Zub za Zub’, which being translated means ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’.

 

New inmates were stripped, compelled while naked to run a gauntlet of guards who beat them with clubs, shorn of all their hair and forced to don humiliating uniforms. The experience of a Catholic priest, Josef Neubauer, in thus place of misery is too long to recount here, but it is simultaneously moving and shocking.

 

At Auschwitz, there was less than a fortnight between the departure of rhe last surviving Jews and the arrival of first ethnic German inmates.

 

One Czech opponent of the persecution, Dr Bedrich Bobek,  is quoted as warning in a letter ‘Let nobody fall back on the excuse that the Germans have done the same things. Either we are qualified to stand as their judges, in which case we cannot conduct ourselves as they do, or we are no different from them, and give up the right to judge them’, a sentiment with which I heartily concur.

 

A few more episodes, often involving slovenly callousness which amounts to murderous negligence. A train arrived in Germany in December 1945 from Czechoslovakia, a period of predictably freezing weather. . It carried 650 people. When the doors were opened, it was found that 94 passengers, including 22 children, were dead of cold.

 

Another description, this time of a train from Poland ‘….Most of the passengers, after their stay in Polish camps, were emaciated to the point of starvation, covered in lice, and suffering from a variety of infectious diseases.’ Thirty-nine passengers ended the journey as frozen corpses.

 

The description of the fate of a train from Luben, on page 196,, simply has to be read in full to be believed.

 

As always happens, the intense darkness of these events ( during the entire time I read this book I felt myself to be surrounded by a sort of dusk, and imagined every event  described, even those I later realised had happened in summer daylight, to have gone on in conditions of smog and dusk, night and fog) is sometimes illuminated by the blazing light of individual good deeds, done against the tide.

 

 

The story of the Czech Premsyl Pitter (who had laboured to save Jews from Nazi murder during the occupation) shows that small individual acts of human courage and kindness can counterbalance enormous weights of state necessity and cynicism. After rescuing a thousand German detainees from a secret prison in Prague, Pitter recounted ‘As we brought emaciated and apathetic children out and laid them on the grass, I believed that few would survive. Our physician, Dr E. Vogl, himself a Jew who had gone through the hell of Auschwitz and Mauthausen,  almost wept when he saw these little bodies . “And here we Czechs have done this in two and a half months!”, he exclaimed.’

 

Readers are invited to guess to which system of thought and belief Premsyl Pitter subscribed.

 

The Czech, Polish and Yugoslav authorities knew what was resulting from their policies (just as the Allies, who planned and permitted it knew what  would happen in general, and had been warned by their own officials of the perils of such action) . They did almost nothing about it . To have spared the women and children from internment would have been to undermine the whole programme. I might add that when the refugees arrived in Germany, everything was made a thousand times harder and more miserable by the colossal destruction of housing, by British and American bombing.

 

You might not wish to know that at the Postoloprty camp in Northern Bohemia, in June 1945, five ethically German children were first whipped, then shot by firing squad, for trying to escape.

 

I could go on quoting from this book for hours. But you must read it instead. I will end with two other moments from it that left me feeling intensely ashamed of the human race, and immensely grateful that I live on an island which has for many centuries been safe from invasion, subjugation and arbitrary rule.

 

The first is this account of the conditions of life of Germans in occupied Berlin (by then crammed with refugees from the East,  many of them seriously ill and/or starving) in autumn 1945. ‘…women could be seen straining the waste water from the kitchen sink of a house where there was an Allied mess, to save from the drain small scraps of grease which could be used again in their own homes’.

 

You may be sure that, even a year before, none of those straining the drain water for scraps of grease would have had the remotest premonition of what would later befall them. Nor would they , in their police state, have had any serious say in the events and policies which brought this fate about. Those in free societies such as ours, who promote or permit wars,  have much to answer for. They should certainly cure themselves of any smugness about whether ordinary Germans ‘deserved’ what happened to them.

 

The second is an extract from a (literally) suicidal letter written by Gertrud Kostka to her husband Johannes, a conscript soldier in the German Army who had been taken prisoner by us . Their baby daughter, Barbara,  had died in the chaos of the Red Army advance across Poland. Gertrud had then been raped  by a fellow refugee and had become pregnant. Johannes Kostka tried to get first the American and then the British government, at least, to speed up his wife’s deportation from Poland so they could be reunited. The British authorities replied any such action might well be used in propaganda against us, and could make her position worse. (Both of these were of course genuine fears) and  that the deportation was ‘an internal Polish matter in which we have no right to interfere’, which I think is more dubious, given that we had sanctioned it and co-operated with it. We did nothing, understandably. I cannot find out what happened, in the end, to the Kostkas. I can guess, though.

 

She wrote :

 

‘I feel void and dead. But just as honest as our mutual life has been, may these last lines be. I have no guilt to confess. I have no tears to shed. I have only this belief that the Lord will help you to trust my words. After a short pain you will find happiness again. For me there will be bleak despair and the hope that the Lord will not leave me, and will call me to Him in my dark hour, uniting me with my child. Trusting upon His help I take farewell form you, and my life. I cannot write any more. I can only beg you, please, believe me, I am without blame.’

 

This tiny scrap of utter human misery, blowing across the desolate wasteland of the post-war world, together with the certainty that this is just one of thousands of personal woes about which we shall never know anything, and our knowledge that the pleas of the sufferers went unanswered, seems to me to contradict any claim that war can be ‘good’. Necessary, possibly, but be careful to be sure. Just, maybe at a pinch, though not as often as we like to think. But good? Never. 

Who are the Bigots Now?

As I smiled my way through this weekend’s harvest of attacks on me on Twitter (ranging from people wishing I was dead, apparently without any feeling of guilt or trepidation at expressing this view, to crude swearwords, via unreasoning assumptions that everything I say must axiomatically be wrong, because I write for ‘The Mail’, to a woman who, gathering that her son would be attending a talk by me at his school sixth form, sought to inoculate the poor child against me by showing him YouTube films of my late brother. I wonder if she also hung a clove of garlic round his neck. Heaven forfend that he might think for himself), I thought this was a good moment to examine the question of bigotry.

 

I am ceaselessly accused of this fault. Well, any reasoning person, with access to the facts, can reach his or her own conclusion about the justice of the charge, though I’m not sure how many reasoning persons interested in facts there are these days. I’ll just have to hope they’re on the jury (if there is one) when I’m eventually hauled before the Thought Court on charges of WrongThink.

 

I note that at least one long-term contributor here (who skulks behind a juvenile pseudonym, not having the courage to put his own name to his own opinions) has recently attempted to smear me by association, by suggesting (incorrectly) that I have never rebutted, rejected or criticised the racially-prejudiced contributors who sometimes post comments here.

 

The words used were cunningly formulated to contain the charge without nakedly making it and ran ‘If you are concerned that some people believe you are racist, why not try distancing yourself from those who use your blog to express what are blatantly racist views? If you don't challenge contributors who argue that people of different races actually belong to different species, it might send the message to others that you agree.’

 

Might it send that Message? How, exactly? And as for distancing myself, why not try it, eh? Why not try it? And how does he know I haven’t ‘tried’ it? Oh, no need to *know*. Let’s just *assume* that it is the case.

 

I’ve warned before against presuming that I (or anyone else) haven’t said, written or done certain things, unless the person making the statement also has total knowledge. Perhaps it would have been wiser to make some enquiries, or to seek knowledge on this matter first, before making this insinuation. If the accuser can’t be bothered to look back through several years of my writings, perhaps it would have been more prudent to stay quiet. But no, the innuendo must be produced anyway. Out of such slack-minded, and if I may say, bigoted folly is totalitarianism born.

 

Anyway, the affair of the UKIP foster parents, and the affair of the female bishops, both give us an insight into the intolerant fury of the modern left-wing mind.

 

I should say about the Rotherham fostering case that I am surprised that so many people are surprised, and see it as an individual case or scandal that can be corrected. No, this is simply what Britain is now like. Get used to it. It isn’t going to change. Most such cases never get into the papers and never will.

 

Look at the Prime Minister’s own long-ago dismissal of UKIP members as (amongst other things) ‘fruitcakes and loonies and and closet racists’. Rotherham Council’s social services department and Mr Slippery both share more or less the same view.  Despite what they now say, I should think the front benches of all three ‘centre’ parties, and the senior editorial staffs of the BBC and several newspapers do so too. They are closet bigots.

 

(By the way, it is amazing the way people delude themselves about politicians of all sorts. For instance I have been getting letters telling me that Alexander (Boris) Johnson is some sort of new Churchill. But as Mr Johnson showed on Sunday during his trip to India, his fabled ‘Euroscepticism’ amounts to two parts of nothing at all in practice. In any case, as I have often warned here before, a referendum on the EU is a worthless promise. What we need is a party committed unconditionally to secession from the EU, winning an election on the basis. Any government can ignore a referendum, or wriggle out of it, always assuming the BBC doesn’t rig it in the first place. I so wish people would grow out of demanding this dubious vote, and see ‘Euroscepticism’ for the worthless fence-sitting that it is).

 

But back to the bigotry of the Left. For a start, the left have increasingly embraced the racial determinism that (to their credit) they rejected back in the 1960s. Those who once saw the racial categories of National Socialist Germany, or later of Apartheid South Africa, as sinister and offensive , have now adopted the most elaborate schemes of racial categorisation ever seen.

 

You cannot apply for any sort of state service, let alone employment, without being confronted with questions about your ethnicity ( I always refuse to answer these, but how much longer will this be permissible?) . And the police, since Macpherson, have been instructed that ‘colour-blind’ policing is actively wrong and that people must be treated differently according to the colour of their skin. There have been dozens of attested stories about fair-skinned, middle-class, conventionally-married heterosexual couples facing insuperable problems over being allowed to adopt or foster, especially if they gave any sign of having socially conservative opinions, or of adhering to the Christian religion.

 

Since the reasoning, informed human being knows that (as Martin Luther King so powerfully put it) what matters about someone is not the colour of his or her skin, but the content of his or her character, these questions, and this behaviour are grotesque insults to reason. And surely bigotry is just that, the denial of reason, the refusal to use it, the dismissal of people , institutions, ideas on the grounds of a reasonless prejudice.

 

Now how does this apply in the debate about women’s ministry in the Church?  I am (reasonably) chided here for my feeble wishy-washy approach to this matter. But I’m sticking to it. The truth is that I think the Christian church is so essential to civilisation, unselfishness, kindness and justice, as the Embassy of the Kingdom of God on Earth, that I judge the importance of religious issues on that basis. Things which do not seem to me to be crucial for the survival and success of the Christian gospel , even if they trouble me personally, are relegated to the second or third order of importance.

 

The last thing I want to hear in church is some sort of sectional whining about who gets what job or under what conditions. I want help in discovering how we should live and die, not office politics with added stained-glass windows.

 

I am, as I keep insisting, very uninterested in theology. My religion can easily be summed up,  understood and either rejected or accepted, by anybody who listens to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ , who reads the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and who has seen the great English cathedrals.

 

My instincts (which oppose needless change) might suggest to me that the campaign for women ministers ( I don’t call them priests) might well have been some sort of egalitarian project designed to strike at the roots of the Church. But, as a favourite (male) parson in my part of the world is fond of saying, the Church of England is a tough old goose. And it has turned this change very much to its advantage.  In practice I have found that many women ministers are more persuasive, reverent, thoughtful and devoted, and perhaps less given to fussy fiddling with things best left alone,  than many of their male equivalents. It seems plain to me that the Church, short of good clergy as it is, and very short of money, could not have coped without them, and should admit that.  

 

I can’t see why the same thing shouldn’t go for Bishops. If they believe what they preach, and are on fire with the beauty of it, then let them be Bishops.

 

But I also know that plenty of my fellow-worshippers take other views. For them, women cannot be truly ordained. I disagree with them, but I understand that they believe this to be hugely important, and that it is not motivated by loathing of women. A recently-retired vicar of my acquaintance, who held to this view, was living, breathing proof of that, being amongst other things very happily married, saintly in his person, and ( as Anglo-Catholics often are)  rather left-wing politically. To keep him and others like him in his post, the church set aside a small corner where there would be no women ministers. Why not do the same with bishops?

 

You tell me. But when (as on the BBC programme ‘The Big Questions’ on Sunday, still available on i-player) I found myself facing the champions of change, it rapidly became obvious that they were not interested in having women bishops *as such*. They could have had that years ago. They were interested in having women bishops at all costs, without any conditions or limits, and with no binding concessions to  (perhaps) a quarter of Anglicans who, for one reason or another, are deeply unhappy about the idea. Well, as we know from history, if you want unconditional surrender,  you condemn yourself to a much longer and crueller war than if you are prepared to make terms.

 

Always suspect a cause that does not present itself straightforwardly as what it is. It has something to hide.  And always mistrust any movement which has universal approval.  It is precisely when ‘everyone’ thinks something that the thoughtful person needs to cry out ‘wait!’ and demand time to consider.

 

When the General Synod failed to agree on the specific proposal for the introduction of women bishops, last Tuesday evening, it absolutely did not reject the principle of appointing women as bishops, only the particular version of it under discussion.

 

An earlier version of the plan, containing much stronger protection for dissenters, was about to be voted on last July, during the normal meeting of the Synod at York. An amendment, drawn up by the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury in consultation with other bishops, was designed to deal with the concerns of traditionalists. Had it gone through then, there would have been women bishops by 2014 and possibly sooner.

 

The traditionalists wanted to have the undoubted right to be supervised by male bishops , even if they lived in an area headed by a female bishop. This wasn’t very different from the time-worn arrangement for parishes which didn’t want female clergy.

 

But Kaboom! A wave of  supposed ‘outrage’ swept through the meeting.  A petition with 5,000 signatures denounced Archbishop Rowan’s plan. One campaigner said (in what in my view is a ludicrous exaggeration) that it would ‘entrench discrimination against women in the established church and place a permanent question mark over the validity of women’s orders’ A whole phalanx of female clerics, announced that they were ‘dismayed’, that the concession ‘undermined’ women, and Christina Rees (whom you can see in action on the ‘The Big Questions’) said ‘the amendment has proved controversial because it puts on the face of the measure that people in the Church with certain views on women would have been protected in English law. It would have the effect of discriminating against people who believe women and men were equal’.

 

This is the same sort of logical judo-plus-origami which is used to transform kindly, hesitant old sexual conservatives, who wouldn’t ever be cruel to anyone,  into foaming, cruel homophobes.  It’s not that you have principles different from mine. It’s that you want to *discriminate* against a *minority* (voice rises).  After which, of course, you’re not fit for human society.

 

The Church is a very odd institution. Judged by purely worldly standards, it is absurd and pointless, and its rules and concerns necessarily barmy. But it shouldn’t be judged by those standards, or subjected to worldly rules. You might as well try to introduce equality and diversity into the editing of the Oxford Book of English Verse (what have I said?), or issue decrees on where bluebells and forget-me-nots should grow. 

 

The Sermon on the Mount is a pretty unfashionable doctrine, important because those who try to abide by it think (to the horror  and scorn of  materialists)  it came from the mouth of God himself, and many similar Christian beliefs, from the Virgin Birth upwards, are derided or greeted with sighs and groans by the majority of fashionable society.  I would argue that unless people were prepared to believe these odd things, there’d be no Church and much good would be left undone, which is currently being done.

 

But for many loyal sons and daughters of the Church these beliefs come in inconvenient, but internally logical packages. And among them are the passionately convinced opponents of women bishops, both Catholics and Bible Protestants. Note that these people no longer seek to prevent female ordination or women bishops. They simply ask for an accommodation, so that believers in absolute Biblical authority, and believers in apostolic tradition, can be given a small space in which to stay in the Church of their birth, baptism, upbringing, the church where they were married and expect to be buried.

 

But rather than approve that accommodation, the other side irritably deride their scheme as ‘discrimination’ against ‘equality’, which is near enough to a thought crime.

 

So instead of getting women bishops through compromise, the militants deliberately postponed the vote in July, and agreed instead to spend £210,000 of scarce church money on holding a special meeting in November – at which they expected to win.  

 

And then they lost, narrowly, but they lost - because their opponents have picked up a  trick or two about organisation and rule books.

 

They lost entirely according to rules they would have accepted, had they won.  The radicals would have been quite happy if their proposal had triumphed under the same constitution with the same narrow majority.  Those who complain about rules that they would willingly have benefited from, when others benefit from them instead, are surely inviting suspicion about their respect for the rule of law.

 

The original vote to allow women to be ordained was won by quite a narrow margin, and the Synod system is designed to protect minorities from majority tyranny.

 

What’s more, Parliament, 40 long years ago, gave up interfering in Church government. Parliament used to have the right to vote on measures put forward by the Synod’s forerunner, the Church assembly. But this led to a great crisis in 1928, when the Commons refused to approve a new Prayer Book. It was the memory of this crisis, among other things, which led to the creation of a more independent Synod. As one of the participants in ‘The Big Questions’ said,  it’s all a bit like Devolution. Once you hand over such powers, you cannot complain when they are used.

 

In any case, I look forward to Parliament legislating for total non-discrimination between men and women in the appointment of religious leaders.  The Roman Catholic Church in England might be resistant, and the spectacle of the British state insisting on the appointment of female Imams , and female Rabbis in Orthodox Jewish congregations, fills me with a strange satirical delight.

 

But that’s only a small part of the point I seek to make.  There have long been branches of the Christian church which accepted female leadership.  If this is a matter of overwhelming importance to you, might you not consider changing churches? If not, then what should you do? Well, you might seek to persuade your own church to change its mind.

 

But a church is not just a club or society , or a political party, where you can thump and shout your way to success by winning votes, briefing the media and forming factions to drive your opponents out. If you deliberately (or also in my view unintentionally) hurt people by winning, you have broken the fundamental rules of the whole institution.

 

For the Church is a mighty force for good, consisting of people who believe (or say they believe) above all things In unselfishness, forbearance, forgiveness and kindness.  I might add that it is a place in which the last shall be first and the first shall be last, where high office is deep service (the word ‘minister’ means ‘servant’). ‘Who sweeps a room as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine’, as one of the greatest of all Anglicans, George Herbert, wrote.

 

The pursuit of high position for its own sake is axiomatically disallowed. Any victory must be mitigated by magnanimity , generosity and consideration.  Those who become Bishops should really be those who least wish to become bishops, and when they do attain the mitre, they should be the servants, not the overlords, of those in their flock. Likewise, the winning faction in a struggle for change must show great consideration to the defeated.

 

Those who set out to change the church were surely the ones who needed to show such consideration to the other members of that church,. But when you watch the radicals, in the debate on ‘The Big Questions’, do you see any sign of magnanimity, generosity or consideration? Or do you see dogmatic campaigners seeking the unconditional surrender of their cornered and outnumbered opponents? I know what I see,  a contest between the ancient dogmas of unworldly Christianity, and the modern dogma of worldly power.  And while I still couldn’t care less what sex the bishop is, and I am not *for* the opponents of women bishops, I am certainly *against* their militant supporters. They remind me of some other people I don’t like, I can’t just now remember who.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Audio of Debate on Cannabis with Tim Wilkinson

Alas, it's a bit broken up and the end is missing, but anyone who wishes to hear an audio version of my recent debate with Tim Wilkinson about cannabis (organised by the Long March Forum), it can be found here

 

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLiJTouwr8zUxOpSJ1q2Xlg