Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 81

Why do I spend so much time looking at pictures?

Why do I spend so much time looking at pictures? I will come to that, but must admit to have been doing a lot of it lately. I have a growing, sneaking feeling that the weeks and months after ���Boar-iss���, the People���s Hero,  achieves his No Deal Exit may be turbulent. I also suspect that my favourite portal into the European continent, the Eurostar train service to Paris and Brussels may be, if not actually shut, a good deal harder to use.

 

So I have for some time been making swift dashes to much-liked continental destinations, especially art galleries and architectural marvels. As the Paris rail link already seems a little shaky, with long delays reported frequently from the (already pretty horrible) Gare du Nord, I���ve been tending to turn left at Lille, and to head into the Low Countries or even further North.

 

I have long sneered at silly people who make jokes about ���famous Belgians��� and laugh at that country as ���boring���. Countries which people classify as ���dull��� -  Belgium, Canada and Switzerland especially - are in fact fascinating and full of beauty of various sorts. Did you know, for instance, that Belgians made  what was ( as far as I know) the only attack on a rail transport of Jews bound for Auschwitz, holding it up and allowing dozens to escape, many successfully . This took place near Haacht on 19th April 1943. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_the_twentieth_convoy

Even if they were not the only ones to do this,  it is a notable act of courage and enterprise which any red-blooded person must admire and salute, and it should be better known. Jews in Belgium were, as it happens, far more often rescued or saved from persecution and murder than those in the next-door Netherlands, which probably flies in the face of what most people think of these two countries. William Shirer, in his Berlin diaries, also noted that there was much more evidence of hard fighting in Belgium than in the Netherlands, when he, as an American correspondent in Berlin, was allowed to follow the German Army into these newly-conquered countries.

 

I intend no slight on the Dutch people, who can hardly be blamed for the smallness and vulnerability of their country .  I have never faced battle, and hope I never shall. Some of you may remember the tribute to Dutch bravery in Lynne Olson���s recent book ���Last Hope Island���, in which she recounted the utterly selfless, steadfast modest behaviour of the women of Arnhem who took in General Sir John Hackett, a story which ought to move anyone who reads it to tears. See https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/07/a-review-of-last-hope-island-by-lynne-olson.html

 

I just think the Belgians deserve a better press.

 

 

Anyone who stands with his face towards such an enemy, as he comes across the fields to meet him arrayed with evil, and fights him, deserves admiration. Neither of these small nations could possibly hope to do more than delay the grey steel monster that came stamping across their quiet farms and woods, breathing destruction and melting the bowels of the kind and peaceful? Did you know that the German Stuka dive-bombers were actually fitted with sirens on their wingtips, to emit a terrifying scream as they hurtled towards their targets? It was called ���The Jericho Trumpet���, an allusion everyone in that age would have understood. You might like to think you would not have cared, but every personal account of those who faced this for the first time contains the same thing ��� everyone thought that the Stuka was aiming its bombs at them personally. People got used to it after a while, but the first encounter melted the bowels, even of experienced soldiers.

 

Enough of that, though as I wander (as I like to do) in the nondescript suburbs of Flemish towns, perhaps pottering by an old canal, and I look eastward, I always feel the pulse of power coming from that direction, and a faint, shapeless speculation about how it feels to live with that always over the horizon, and no sea between me and it.

 

But this is one of many things that gives an edge to my travels in these parts. After my recent dash to see the Rembrandts in Amsterdam (and a visit to the Van Gogh museum which persuaded me that I had been right all along to regard Van Gogh as the Hippies��� painter, beloved for his misfortunes and chaotic life rather than for his over-rated works) I went last week to a beautiful, picturesque and fascinating city in Belgian Flanders. Oddly, its English name ���Ghent��� is more foreign-looking than its local name, ���Gent���. In French it is called ���Gand���, though I don���t think there are many French-speakers there. This perhaps explains its older English name of ���Gaunt���, as in ���John of Gaunt���, who came from there. I was there largely to take another look at Van Eyck���s astonishing encompassing of the whole world, visible and invisible,  ���The Mystic Lamb , see https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/ghent/ . On a second visit I found myself overcome by the power of Van Eyck���s depiction of the Virgin Mary, one of the most beautiful depictions of the human face anywhere, ever.  You only realise its unique skill when you look at the attempts of others to copy it, which look like cheap plastic images at some small-town shrine.

 

But I also wanted to renew my acquaintance with the picture of Christ on his way to Crucifixion, attributed (in my view a bit shakily) to Hieronymus Bosch, which is one of the treasures to be found in the Ghent Fine Art gallery. Part of this picture, showing Our Lord serene amid the grotesque, rage-distorted faces of a hostile crowd, formed the cover of the English edition of my book ���The Rage Against God���, so I feel I should keep an eye on it.

 

 

 

This area is both like and unlike the Netherlands just next door ��� unlike in feeling poorer, less modern, brickier and darker (the Netherlands are still suffering from an almost frenzied modernisation, much of which involves very bad, flashy, gigantist cuboid architecture which overpowers the small brick cities - especially The Hague -  and abolishes much of the wistful countryside Dutch landscape painters recorded for us).  See https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/07/a-few-days-in-the-low-countries.html

 

Belgian Flanders, where the city streets have many closed shops or obvious short-lease low-rent establishments, is (I suspect) much less tightly integrated into the German Euro economy than the Netherlands, and, perhaps cannot afford the aggressive development going on there.

   

It is also unlike the Netherlands in being much more Roman Catholic in culture (I don���t think religion is especially strong) ; but it is very like its neighbour in language, and in the almost universal ability to speak English well enough to be effectively sarcastic in it.

 

I made a couple of dashes (Belgium has a very comprehensive and cheap rail network) to other places. One was to Antwerp, where I had two destinations in mind. The first was the station itself, which made a deep impression on me when I saw it first, while on assignment 15 years ago (to do with the growth of Islam in this part of Europe).

 

The Antwerp Central station is astounding. When I first saw it, in a winter dusk, you approached it at high level along a sort of causeway decorated with sculpted stonework like a processional way. It seems to me that this has now been in some way curtailed, though much of it is still there. It leads you into an enormous relic of the pre-1914 age, opulent grandeur piled upon opulent grandeur, with a big dose of complacency attached, great arches, much glass and marble and stonework decoration, commercial magnificence as it was before the age of concrete and the age of chrome, all done in a sort of dull, somnolent red.

 

I suspect it is best experienced in fading light, at the end of a moderately long journey spent largely in the dining car, where you have lingered over the Armagnac until very late in the dark afternoon. The ghosts of innumerable ticket inspectors in peaked caps and gold braid haunt its bare platforms, puzzled by a world that no longer wants or needs them. It is comfortable, placid, tranquil, deferential, formal, enjoyably pompous architecture, a last relic of a continent prosperous and at peace, ruled by a comfortable and (so it thought) secure middle class, any idea of war or danger thought to be safely in the past. Who would risk all this for war?

 

Modern travellers on the oddly-unsatisfactory Thalys train (which somehow manages to lack the grandeur and style of a real international express, while also lacking the easy step-on, step-off convenience of an ordinary intercity train) do not see it. The Thalys, which hurries between Paris and Amsterdam, is inserted into deep concrete tunnels beneath the old station, and then ejected on the other side without affording travellers so much as a glimpse of its staircases, designed for processions of giants,  and enormous arches. If you did not know it was there, you would not know what you were missing.

 

Then there was the Rubens House Museum, one of those clever exercises in imagination, in which the painter���s actual house, an island of antiquity in a modern city, with a lovely, serene stone courtyard and garden,  has been filled with credible furniture and paintings, some of them by the master himself. My favourite was a very jolly Annunciation, utterly different in form and mood from Van Eyck���s in Ghent, made even more light-hearted by the depiction of a sleeping cat in the corner, snoozing on as the Archangel Gabriel (looking a good deal less stern than usual) offers his earth-shaking salutation to a remarkably undismayed Virgin.   

 

These pictures, so many of them Biblical or mythical, are a constant reminder and education. Not only can you find huge pleasure in the artist���s skill (try painting,  just once, and see how hard it is to achieve these effects) in the portrayal of light (along with water the greatest source of life and inspiration) , in the feeling of a clear voice speaking directly to you from another time, without the need for an interpreter.  You learn the meanings of certain flowers and birds in the days when men read paintings and stained-glass windows but could not read words. You see, by the way the painters of the past inserted the great events of myth or scripture into landscapes and cities like their own, how they lived in the constant close knowledge of belief which has deserted us (or which we have deserted). I suppose Stanley Spencer���s portrayal of the day of resurrection in a 20th century English churchyard (which shocks us greatly) tells us how much we have changed.

 

I could not resist, while changing trains in Brussels, a quick dash to the Musee des Beaux Arts where W.H.Auden pondered on Bruegel���s ���Fall of Icarus��� in the sinister, tense December of 1938 when everyone knew they were living a few months from war. It is still there, almost 81 years later, just as strange and perplexing, its figures just as indifferent to the tragedy taking place in their midst. Does anyone know what happened to this painting during the German occupation? Astonishingly, after all the turmoil and plunder which followed, it is there now, roughly where Auden saw it, with several other beautiful Bruegel works close by.  

 

On the way back to the station, I paused to admire the Egmont Palace, where on a January day in 1972, Edward Heath signed the documents that took us into the European Union, and where an angry person rather prophetically splattered him with ink. That scene would make a good painting, if anybody still painted that sort of thing.

An Elegy for Didcot Power Station - or , Why Closing Britain's Coal-Fired Power Stations Makes no Sense

I was shaken from my Sunday morning Radio-4-induced doze by what could not have been thunder (the weather was all wrong). I worked out very quickly that what I had heard was the demolition of the last cooling towers of Didcot ���A��� power station, around ten miles from my home. I���d known it was coming, but I still felt a grim sense of foreboding.  

 

I watched, as an Oxford townie teenager, as Didcot ���A��� was built. (Didcot ���B��� still continues as a gas-fired plant, for now).  I have many times been amazed by how far away it can (or could) be seen, from the southern spur of the Chilterns near Ewelme, from the Wittenham Clumps or (most astonishingly) from south of the Berkshire Downs north of Newbury, where the top of its 650-foot chimney can still be seen above the line of the hills, puzzling until you have worked out what it is. It is not as thrilling as the huge northern power stations I used to admire as I travelled to and from York by train in my student days ��� Ferrybridge and Drax. But it was an expression of peaceful power and developed civilization, and a sign that somebody somewhere had planned intelligently for our national future. I���ve never thought it especially ugly. Didcot was never a beauty spot. Windmills on previously unravaged moors and hills offend me far more.  

 

I visited it in the early 1970s when it was new and was impressed by its size and force, outdone for me only by the white-hot controlled fury and danger of steel rolling mills and the thunder of the old Daily Express rotary presses in Fleet Street. The Didcot turbines, in those pre-EU days, were built by the once-great British engineering firm Parsons, long ago swallowed up by Siemens.  I remember passing it daily during Arthur Scargill���s kamikaze summertime coal strike, noticing that it continued to run undisturbed. It���s a feature of my daily journeys to and from work.  Since 2014, it has been less of one as the first three cooling towers and the enormous turbine hall were demolished by high explosive. This morning it was less still. It���s one of the few bits of Britain���s deindustrialization that I have watched in real time (the others are the old Morris and Pressed Steel factories in Cowley, on the eastern side of Oxford), rather than discovering on return visits that places which were once familiar are now unrecognisable.

 

 

 

That great chimney is next for the demolition men, and the thought of its inevitable destruction makes my heart sink, as it would to watch the disarming of some valued warship or regiment, as part of a surrender. In this case we are surrendering common sense and taking the yoke of a dogma that does not even make sense on its own terms, as I shall explain.  

 

I wonder if we could even build such a thing any more, if we ever realise our mistake.

 

The immensely costly and delayed electrification of the Great Western railway line, and the surprisingly poor service which has resulted, does not fill me with confidence.

 

I recall reports that a former worker at the coal-fired power station, who had been there from its 1970 opening and who was asked to switch it off in March 2013, confessed that he felt there was something wrong about closing it.

 

 

I agreed. It seemed to me to be an act of dogmatic self-harm, to shut down a modern, efficient generating station, which could easily have been modernised to make its emissions cleaner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didcot_power_stations

 

Its entire capacity, 1,440 MW (1.44 gigawatts) is as nothing beside the gigantic and ever-expanding capacity of China���s coal-burning generation. An enormous 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China (in such a way that central government can disclaim responsibility for them when it goes to Climate Change conferences). That���s on top of the 993 gigawatts (that is, I think,  equivalent to 690 Didcot power stations) of coal-burning capacity China already possesses.

The new stations which are to be built to achieve this increase will have the same capacity to produce electricity as the USA���s entire array of coal-fired generation stations. For details, see http://bit.ly/Chinasoot .

 

The UK���s whole electrical generation capacity, in all forms of power, is 85 gigawatts. If we gave up using electricity entirely, it would make no difference to the impact of Chinese coal burning, fuelled by enormous new coal fields in Inner Mongolia. I have seen the mile-long, frequent coal trains which thunder ceaselessly from this area to the rest of China. If we completely abolish all our fossil-fuel generation, it would likewise not matter in the slightest. We are electrical hedgehogs next to China���s electrical elephant.  China���s planned increase in coal power, alone, is three times the size of our whole electricity generation industry.

 

If you believe that global warming is man-made (and I am not even going to bother to discuss this contention on this occasion, for it is irrelevant to my argument, so please don���t try to tempt me) , then Britain���s coal shutdown will make absolutely no difference at all to the outcome you fear.

 

On its own terms, the closure of coal-fired stations such as Didcot is futile, an act of puritanical self-flagellation, as weird as tying barbed wire garters round your thigh, except that you���re tying them round other people���s thighs as well, by bringing about power cuts that disrupt their lives and endanger everything from hospitals to traffic, not to mention food storage, the computers which supply vital information to all parts of our civilisation and govern our communications, and transport itself.

 

How fitting, in a way, that all this should happen less than a fortnight after the still-mysterious major UK power cut of Friday 9th August. Since then, it has emerged ( as I wrote in my column) that power companies were boasting that they were approaching 50% wind generation , only a few minutes before the fuses blew and a large part of the UK was blacked out.

 

Were these things connected? I doubt we shall ever know. There is, as far as I know, nobody non-partisan in the power industry or the government, who is prepared to examine the facts without worrying about upsetting the state dogma of warmist fanaticism.

 

But I have read several articles by people who know more about this than I do. Yesterday my Mail on Sunday colleague Helen Cahill wrote this https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-7367413/Renewable-energy-blackout-risk-warns-National-Grid-outage.html

 

It begins ���National Grid had evidence that the shift to renewable energy was putting Britain's electricity supply at risk months before the biggest blackout in a decade, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

 

���The company, which is responsible for keeping the lights on, has downplayed the role of wind energy in the power cut that caused widespread chaos earlier this month.

 

���John Pettigrew, chief executive of the FTSE 100 firm, described the outage as a ���once-in-30-years��� event and said there was ���nothing to indicate there is anything to do with the fact that we are moving to more wind or more solar���.

 

���Yet in April, National Grid published research warning that using more renewable power sources posed a threat to the network's ���stability���.���

 

Today, Monday 19th August, there is one in ���The Times���, alas behind a paywall, by Emily Gosden, the paper���s energy editor.  It suggests that power generated by coal or gas possesses more ���inertia���, and is therefore more resistant to fluctuations in frequency, than either wind power or power sucked into this country through the connectors which supply us with power from France (mainly nuclear), Belgium (heavily nuclear)  and the Netherlands (which I believe is largely fossil fuel, but my information may be out of date) . Ms Gosden writes that when demand is low and many big power stations are not running, ���the system is particularly fragile��� because ���unlike traditional plants, neither interconnectors, nor wind farms provide ���inertia��� or resistance to the change in frequency on the grid. That means frequency tends to be more volatile.���

 

She adds ���If frequency drops very rapidly, as it did on August 9, there may not be enough time for back-up plants to start up before it gets dangerously low. A rapid drop can also make other plants trip off, exacerbating the problem���.

 

As I said in my Sunday MoS column, there have been three near misses in three months before the recent cut.  See https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/12/three-blackout-near-misses-in-three-months-says-national-grid

 

We are far closer to major energy trouble than politicians, industry chiefs or many in the media (all lost in a fog of dogma) seem to have realised, though I (along with my friend, the late Christopher Booker) have been predicting power cuts for ages.  I half expect to hear reports of sarcastic laughter from Christopher���s grave in Litton churchyard, Somerset.  

PETER HITCHENS: Remember those useless A-Levels? The people who took them now run the country���

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If you want to tell the truth in modern Britain, you need to be very patient. More than 20 years ago, I discovered just how badly English school exams had been devalued and hollowed out. I had suspected it for some time, and had noted the dilution and then the gutting of the old O-level back in the 1970s, and its 1980s replacement by the feeble GCSE. But direct evidence came my way that showed me the change was disastrous.

Proper knowledge was no longer required. In fact a child who had real, deep knowledge of the subject might actually be penalised for going off the script. The new exams were more like tests for Scout badges than the punishing papers I had taken in my own schooldays.

And the grades that were being issued were like 1920s German billion-mark notes ��� with a face value that bore no relation to their real worth.

I began to say so. I was immediately attacked for being unfair to the children involved. I was told sternly that they had all worked very hard for their worthless bits of paper, and shouldn���t be discouraged by cruel newspaper columnists. Actually, I don���t doubt that they had worked hard. The boring slog needed to prepare for these tests was hard without being useful, the educational equivalent of the treadmill.

No wonder so many schoolchildren were being drugged to make them sit still, with official encouragement, with pills almost indistinguishable from illegal amphetamines ��� the perfect way of getting someone to endure tedious tasks, if you don���t care what happens to their bodies and brains afterwards.

Bit by bit, the truth oozed out, though never officially acknowledged. Grandiose plans to ���toughen��� exams were produced by Ministers ��� a tacit admission that they were too flabby.

Universities began to offer remedial courses ��� now common and known as ���foundation years��� ��� for entrants who were simply not ready to cope with college. Others checked the records and found that grades simply no longer meant what they used to. And employers increasingly hired Eastern Europeans who had been to proper, disciplined, knowledge-based schools, instead of semi-literate British school products who didn���t know it was important to turn up on time. This was in spite of the fact that the Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians mostly spoke poor English.

More and more I think it was our failed schools and fatherless homes that led to this wave of migrant labour. If our own young people had been as brilliantly educated and well brought-up as the official announcements said, why did nearly a million of them linger among the jobless (���not in employment, education or training���, as the phrase goes) while Poles arrived to do the jobs they should have been doing?

Well, after two decades of lies, we now have the absolute proof. Just 54 per cent is required for an A grade in this year���s OCR maths A-level exam. Remember that this includes the over-rated private schools (which only look good because the comps are even worse) as well as state schools.

You don���t need a maths A-level to see what that means. And if maths, where it is clear what���s right and wrong, is judged so feebly, imagine what it���s like in the softer subjects.

Will anything now happen? No. Our teenage Cabinet (and Shadow Cabinet) are made up almost entirely of people who are themselves victims of the educational catastrophe of the 1960s, and know no better. As we shall see during the next few months.

A crowning example of fake history

I shan't be watching the third series of The Crown, in which the fashionable thespian Olivia Colman will try to impersonate the Queen.

I didn't watch the other series either, because I was sure that a great deal would be untrue.

I am highly suspicious of these attempts to make melodrama out of the lives of real people, and was so infuriated by the parade of falsehoods and mistakes in the film The King's Speech that I decided not to bother with them any more.

The worst thing about them is that many come to believe that they are seeing the truth about the past, which is almost always portrayed in these things as modish Left-wing people like to think it was.

Foolish myths are created and perpetuated, the more useful truth is buried.

Books are better.

Drug deaths prompt fashionable calls for more ���treatment��� for criminal users of illegal drugs. This thoughtless tripe is an insult to the genuinely sick. 

Truly ill people cannot choose whether to be ill, and certainly don���t need to break the law to become ill. They and their families wish to heaven they had the choice which drug abusers have.

Is Nigel Farage either a conservative or a patriot? Or is he just a cheap crowd-pleaser? 

I���ve never been especially keen on the Brexit Party leader, especially since he mused in public (on the pro-drug BBC) about decriminalising drugs. Now he makes personal attacks on members of the Royal Family in heavily republican Australia.

As al ���Boris��� Johnson has swallowed every stupid clich�� that there is about crime, punishment, police and prisons, you may be absolutely sure that, just like Anthony Blair���s before him, his promises to tackle crime will turn out to be ���an attractive policy with which I can be personally associated���, rather than any use.

One step away from a banana republic

I once said that only two things kept us from qualifying as a banana republic ��� the fact that we don���t have regular power cuts, and the fact that we don���t grow bananas.

It now emerges that the recent collapse of our electricity grid was not, as claimed, a fluke. There had been three ���near misses��� in three months. These may well be connected with unwise reliance on wind.

I am not in the last bit surprised, and I have been predicting it for ages, warning that our dogma-driven closures of perfectly good coal-fired power stations were worthless even on their own terms.

I suspect that it is highly significant that the recent cuts came minutes after power companies were boasting that they were on the verge of achieving 50 per cent wind power for the first time. Did a dash to achieve this futile propaganda target blow the nation���s fuses? If so, don���t expect an official confirmation from our warmist establishment, where green dogma affects everyone right up to the First Girlfriend, Carrie Symonds. But I think a lot of people will be buying ungreen petrol-driven generators in the next few years, as power becomes less reliable.

And what is it all for? Green campaigners Coalswarm reported last year that China then had a giant 993 gigawatts of coal power capacity, but approved new coal plants would increase this by 25 per cent. These vast, innumerable, soot factories overwhelmingly cancel out any effect from our own daft closures of coal stations, microscopic compared to China���s huge CO2 output.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

A Review of Paul Lever's 'Berlin Rules' and Fritz Fischer's 'Germany's Aims in the First World War'

I have spent the past few weeks reading two utterly different books about Germany . The first is Fritz Fischer���s ���Germany���s Aims in the First World War��� a dull title, by contrast to its original German edition which was published as ���Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914���1918��� which means, roughly ���Grab for world power: the war aims policy of imperial Germany 1914-1918���.

 

So much for German sobriety versus British sensationalism.

 

Fischer's book leaves no serious doubt that Germany contrived the First World War, by egging Austria-Hungary on in its conflict with Serbia, knowing that this would force Russian mobilization and provide the pretext for an ostensibly ���defensive��� declaration of war. (Bizarrely, France was likewise longing to be attacked by Germany, so that it could launch its long-planned attempt to recover Alsace and Lorraine in the guise of a defensive war). 

 

It leaves no doubt that Germany���s motives were not defensive, as claimed, but systematically aggressive and acquisitive. This, plus the clear description of Germany���s detailed plans for territorial gain from war produced rage in his home country. It was all right to blame Hitler for aggression. It wasn���t really possible to deny this. But the Kaiser���s war was still protected by patriotic myth, the nonsensical idea that the war blundered itself into existence by accident.

 

Fischer���s publisher���s offices in Hamburg were firebombed, which just goes to show how history can engage the passions when properly tackled.  Amazingly, there are still people who insist, despite Fischer���s mounds of archive evidence to the contrary, that the First World War was a collective accident into which Europe sleepwalked.  I am amazed how many people still believe this comical absurdity. There was absolutely nothing accidental about the Schlieffen Plan to smash France in weeks, nor about the enormous Krupp siege guns which were revealed to an astonished world, the nuclear weapons of their time, when it became necessary to pulverise the Belgian forts at Liege. (There is a wonderful description of these terrifying engines of pure unfettered human power trundling into the light of day for the first time,  in Barbara Tuchman���s ���The Guns of August���).

 

Such guns (and plans) are the product of years of careful research and development, testing and retesting. Special steels have to be made and forged, enormous shells designed to be fired from them. This is not done by sleepwalking. Nor could anyone claim these things were defensive, without looking a very big idiot. Smashing a neighbour���s border defences, their sole purpose, is not a defensive action.

 

Mind you the British people certainly sleepwalked into their own doom (though some of their leaders were party conscious of what they were doing), which may be why the sleepwear theory is still popular here. The deluded leaders of Austria-Hungary and Russia might also have been asleep for all the sense they showed. But Germany and France were both itching for war, and Germany engineered one. 

 

The second book is ���Berlin Rules���, by Sir Paul Lever, born 1944, a former British ambassador to Germany (1997-2003) and all-round high-flying diplomat. The title, as you see, is capable of being read in two ways, as a description, and as a statement. Well, the description fully justifies the statement. I mention Sir Paul���s birthdate because the book reads as if it was written by a much younger man. Why?

 Much of the book is an entirely justified and correct defence and description of modern Germany, its constitution and political system, from which any British person would benefit.  He cleverly notes the close parallels between the constitutional structure of the EU and of the German Federal system, which function almost identically. And he explains why the German Bundestag (Like the EU Assembly) is wholly different from our adversarial and Parliament. 

 

The style is wonderfully clear and the book is very easy to read, usually a sign of an equally clear mind and a lot of hard work, especially in revision (���It reads easy because it was writ hard���, as I believe Hemingway once said to Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald). But there is only the slightest sense that Sir Paul is especially interested in the years before 1945. Like the Germans themselves, he tends to begin history at that date. He must, given his vintage, be well-versed in the 1870-1945 period, and where he does allude to it he is knowledgeable. Yet how can we explain the pervasive fear which all Europe feels for Germany, how can we explain the urgent desire not to risk another war, if we are not constantly thinking (if seldom speaking) of Verdun and Vichy, of Longwy-Briey, of Brusilov and Barbarossa. of Tannenberg and Stalingrad, of the Sealed Train, Brest-Litovsk, Kursk and Babi Yar? The Germans have not forgotten, as Helmut Kohl���s notorious speech at Leuven, studied here

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/06/some-thoughts-on-german-domination-of-the-european-union.html showed beyond doubt.

 

The French have not forgotten either, though they speak less and less about it. And the Belgians,  Luxembourgers, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, the Dutch, Danish, Norwegians, Austrians, Hungarians, Serbs , Croats, Bosnians, Greeks and Italians have not forgotten either. Spain is hag-ridden by its special nightmare, but Germany features in that too. Portugal knows how much its neutrality would have been worth of the USSR had fallen to Germany. Switzerland too knows that neutrality, even armed and sustained by a defensive wall of mountains, could not indefinitely survive in a continent where Germany is the sole power. Sweden still mutters in an embarrassed fashion when its secret help to Hitler���s Reich (not forgotten in Norway) is tactlessly mentioned. There is no real mystery as to why Germany gets its way most of the time, and why nothing Germany rejects is ever pursued.

 

 

Fischer, who was born in 1908 and died in 1999, writes (at least this is how it feels in translation) almost like a Victorian. He is dense, relentless, severely referenced, almost like a prosecution brief.  He does not care very much how many people read his book, as long as the right ones do, and as long as it becomes the accepted version of events because of its great regiments of incontestable facts, which march relentlessly across its pages, trampling the exploded theories of others beneath their boots.

 

The world it describes is the slower, statelier, quieter one which the First World War destroyed. One imagines the conversations and decisions taking place in huge high-ceilinged offices with coal fires whispering in the grate and the darkening sky visible through tall windows. One sees the whiskery statesmen riding on the overstuffed cushions of luxury carriages in steam trains, peering at documents beneath shaded lamps, scratching their notes on thick, creamy documents with fountain pens, as they trundled slowly through the plains and forests of Mitteleuropa.

 

Sir Paul Lever���s is definitely the world of the airport, the snatched sandwich and the TV screen, noisier, faster, less contemplative, and also less burdened by history. Sir Paul���s book hardly seems aware of the great looming escarpment of the past which looms just behind the clean, uncluttered landscape of modern Germany. He notes Germany���s almost total renunciation of its own history, apart from a creditable, honest and effective examination of the Hitler era, and perhaps unwittingly joins in with it.

 

For Germany���s understandable rejection of its past is one of the reasons why Germans like the EU so much. ���The more that it becomes the vehicle through which identity is expressed, aims pursued and influence exercised, the less important is the historical baggage of its individual members��� Sir Paul writes,.

 

He then notes ���In the EU���s early days German politicians and officials would defend the European project ��� on the grounds that it was the only way to accommodate the reality of German power���.

 

Sir Paul attributes this to the rebirth, in the 1950s, of the German economy. But I think this is a much more important statement than he seems to realise. The rebirth of the German economy was indeed a major development and achievement, but was also the rebirth of German power of all kinds. A country so big, so rich, so well-ordered, well-educated, efficient and hard-working must generate power of all kinds. It does not need to be military in this age In fact it is a positive help that it is not. In Europe and the other rich lands ���aggressive war��� is outlawed by the United Nations. Its objects must be pursued by other means.

 

Well, and why not? War is a stupid and horrible (and expensive) way of resolving quarrels between nations. Why not force your will on others by economic and political means rather than with howitzers? And if you are frustrated, why not drop the occasional unsubtle reminder of what might happen if you do not get your way, as Helmut Kohl did in Leuven in 1996. The ultimate threat of violence has not entirely gone away. But it must be expressed in the maxim that the EU was ���founded to prevent war���? Oh, really, what sort of war would that be? How would it begin? Is Belgium going to attack Germany? Or Poland?  I do not think so. Yet for there to be a war there has to be someone who wants it enough to start it. Interestingly, what I regard as German priorities in former Yugoslavia and in Ukraine, and in Georgia, have led indirectly to war in these parts. I feel sorry for those who have swallowed the ostensible justifications for these outbreaks. How sad and puzzling it must be to live at such a level of naivety, glimpsing reality through a fog of sentimentality and propaganda.

 

 

 

 

Its neighbours will always feel German power. The world will feel it. Uncontained, unchannelled, where might that power go, and what form might it take?  As we see now with China and India, the increase of power leads inevitably to tensions, whether it be in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Tibet, Kashmir, The South China Sea or Sinkiang. (or Africa, or the Caribbean, or Latin America, or Greece where China is also active).  The genius of Germany���s dissolution of itself into the EU was that the power found an outlet which was, safe, controlled and benevolent. Yet it was still power, and in the end people were still afraid of it, and did what it wanted. They still do.

 

Sir Paul remarks somewhere that, just as NATO would never do anything the USA did not want it to do, the EU will never do anything Germany does not want it to do. These are simple statements of fact. In both organisations there is one overwhelming power, which may not always get its way positively, but which can never be defied. Ultimate power is negative. It is the power to stop anyone telling you what to do, the most valuable form of power in the world.   Germany has a veto in the EU, whether the rules say so or not (Sir Paul comes up with several instances where EU rules falter and disappear, or are simply not formulated, when they encounter German wishes, especially over a single market in services, which just does not exist in Germany.  Is anyone really surprised?). If the EU machinery ever did take a decision in defiance of Berlin, which is technically possible with the mathematics of the EU ���Parliament���, I don���t think that decision would stand.

 

Germany will never allow the debauchery of the Euro by turning the European Central Bank into a big lender. And if it���s not interested in any of France���s grand ideas, those ideas will never be adopted.  German self-interest, as Britain discovered in the ERM crisis, is absolute, cold, huge, indifferent, a large, broad back turned away, a deaf ear and a closed eye. Social security and standards rules which force other EU members to raise their standards and costs to German levels are fine. Similar measures which might force Germany to change its ways just don���t happen.

 

But the EU is a much more important body than NATO and quite different in character. The EU is an empire without an emperor or a capital. It is uninterested in trappings. Its subjects may have their flags, their Kings and Queens, anthems, Parliaments, even armed forces (though who controls these is a questionable matter). But they do not have borders, and they do not have their own currencies and economic policies. Because Germany has realised for almost a century now that these are the things that really matter.

 

And the realization dates form the final years of the First World War. The USA���s president Wilson had begun to prate about national self-determination, and the Allies liked to claim that they stood for it, doing immense damage as they did so. WE are still suffering the consequences of the Versailles settlements which ordered central Europe according to supposed principles of national self-determination.

 

Berlin���s smooth new Foreign Minister, Richard von Kuhlmann (who looked like a 1920s film star, moustache and all) realised that Germany could play the same game. The places it wished to conquer, until now the provinces of the Russian Empire, were to be offered an apparent independence, so as to legitimise their removal from Russian control. But it was to be an illusion, they were to be controlled, in all important ways, by Germany.

 

This very nearly happened. The Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, of 1918, detached Ukraine from Russia along with large chunks of what are now the Baltic States and Poland. But none of the new states was really independent.   As Fischer writes (pp 508-9, Norton edition  ������what innumerable documents in the German archives confirm, can leave no doubt that Germany���s aim was not to confer independence and national liberty on Poland , Lithuania,  Courland, Livonia, Estonia and the Ukraine, but on the contrary to fetter them closely to the German Reich and to Mitteleuropa by treaties which were only nominally international personal unions, economic and customs unions and military conventions���.    This was to have been the preliminary to a partition of Russia into four parts. (p.509). Germany in 1917-18 was also busy in the Caucasus, and especially in Georgia.

 

All these areas, plus of course the perpetually contentious zones of Romania and the Balkans, remain areas of ambition and interest for the modern European Union, whose members have an independence only slightly more real than that offered by Brest-Litovsk, even if it is far more gently limited, and much tact is used to prevent anyone noticing that this is so.

 

Brest-Litovsk, overturned by German defeat in November 1918, and largely forgotten, nearly became permanent. Germany, by aiding and financing Lenin, overthrew Russia���s first liberal democratic state and enthroned the Bolsheviks who were ready to drop oit of the war, so freeing huge numbers of German troops to head westwards for a final push in France.

 

This is a fascinating story, hardly known in the west. Lenin started the war as an Austro-Hungarian intelligence asset, active in promoting Ukrainian nationalism on behalf of Vienna (plus ca change���). Thanks to these connections, this horrible, clever destroyer of civilization avoided internment when the outbreak of hostilities caught him on Austrian territory, an enemy alien. But instead of being locked up he was shove don a military-postal train to Zurich, where he sat seething and plotting until���..

 

Well, until what?

 

 

Fischer���s book is remarkable in that it does not ignore this huge episode of German cynicism, in which a reactionary Imperial German government spent millions in gold on supporting and encouraging a revolutionary movement in Russia, a movement it despised and feared, in the belief that it could contain the bacillus in Russia, and get its enemy out of the war. As we now know, it was not that simple, in the end you might say Germany paid quite heavily for its cynicism).

 

Fischer details the discovery, by a clever German diplomat in Constantinople, of the sinister middleman Parvus Helphand, familiar through all the byways of European leftism, who was ready to make this marriage of cynics, and to launder the great stacks of Berlin gold that would be its dowry. In general, my rule is that anyone who deals with this era and does not feature Helphand in his index has not understood what happened. Yet hardly anyone in Britain has ever heard of him. Fischer has. The key events in modern European history, unknown and unstudied by most in the UKA and the USA are the German use of Marxist revolutionaries to destroy the newborn Russian democracy for wholly cynical aims, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in which an even deeper cynicism is involved. Most British people know so little about the Russian revolution that they actually think Lenin overthrew the Tsar. I caught someone who describes himself professionally as ���a historian��� doing this only the other day. Few could provide an accurate date for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

 

Amazingly, a slightly better-conducted propaganda against Lenin in Petrograd in July of 1917, when word began to get out in major newspapers that he was a paid German agent, might have saved Russia and the world from the Bolshevik tragedy. But this did not happen. The effort faltered. Lenin survived.

 

Most are similarly ignorant of the Rapallo Pact between Weimar Germany and the Bolsheviks, and the secret military co-operation which resulted, preparing German rearmament long before Hitler was of any importance.

 

Likewise  unknown is Naumann���s plan for  ���Mitteleuropa���, the great scheme for a central Europe from Rotterdam to Kiev and from the Nordic nations to the Balkans, dominated by a unified Germany and Austria Hungary (Austria-Hungary,  realising the war had doomed it, sought desperately to make a separate peace in the final months of war, but could not escape its more resolute ally. Now it is reality a German province.

 

And then there is the September Programme, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg���s plan to Germanise much of western and northern Europe once France was crushed (which he wrongly thought it was at the time). Interestingly his initial ambitions did not really much concern Britain. Only later in the war did the German Naval and Army High Command demand the utter permanent subjection of Belgium and the takeover by Germany of Antwerp and other ports, as a direct and deliberate threat to Britain. All this would have happened had Germany���s spring offensive in 1918 (which came within inches of success) triumphed. And the only reason it failed was because Berlin was so afraid of losing Ukraine back to the Bolsheviks that it kept huge numbers of good troops there which,  thrown into the Western battle in 1918, would have turned the scale of war. Hardly anyone in Britain knows how narrow an escape this was, actually a far greater danger of defeat, subjugation, indemnity and powerlessness than we faced in 1940, when Hitler relaly wasn���t very interested in us.  Bizarrely, we owe our continuing freedom, in part, to Trotsky���s Red Army.

 

Germans had no especial feelings about Britain in 1914. At first they were just puzzled by our participation in a war where we had no obvious quarrel, then they grew angry with us, and by 1915 they blamed Britain almost exclusively for thwarting their (in their eyes) reasonable expansion, and later on still they hated Britain because of the deadly naval blockade which we imposed upon them and the real hardship it brought.

 

What is very interesting about Fischer���s account of the last stage of the war when, as late as spring 1918, Germany still thought it could win in the West, are the discussions about the arrangements for Belgium as a permanent German vassal. The officials involved, many of them military and naval officers, talk obsessively about economic aspects of this relationship, Belgium must be absorbed into a German customs union, Belgium must adopt German social legislation (Germany having adopted some of the most advanced and costly welfare measures in the history of the world), Belgium���s currency must be subjected to, if not replaced by, German marks and the German central bank. Does any of this seem familiar? It ought to. It continues now, enforced by smiling podgy men with soft handshakes, and oddly unrecognised for what it is. Of course it is better than war, but that does not mean it is innocent or even very nice. And you won���t learn how to cope with it, or steer your own country through it,  unless you try to understand it. And you won���t understand it if you know no history, or forget what you used to know.

August 2019

PETER HITCHENS : A Judge told a career crook to slim down and get a job. Guess who was punished...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

 

A Judge told a career crook to slim down and get a job. Guess who was punished...

 

Here is a perfect story of modern Britain. A Judge has been publicly reprimanded by a Tory Cabinet Minister, for advising a criminal to lose weight and get a job.

 

I do not know if the allegedly overweight offender took the well-meant advice, but I somehow doubt it. Having spotted the way power and morals are going in modern Britain, he made a formal complaint that the Judge had used ���abusive language��� - and it succeeded. I wonder if he is now also entitled to compensation.

 

The Judge, Recorder Julian Malins QC, flatly refused to agree that he had done anything wrong. Partly because he stood up for himself in this way, he was given a formal warning by the then Justice Minister and Lord Chancellor, David Gauke. Mr Gauke has since left this post but is, I believe, still a member of the ���Conservative��� Party.

 

The official public notice from the ���Judicial Conduct Investigations Office���(JCIO) , highly damaging to a Judge���s career, says that, in reaching their decision, Mr Gauke and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett, ���took into consideration that the recorder failed to acknowledge the inappropriateness of his conduct���.

 

The JCIO posted the reprimand on its website,https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/jcio-prod-storage-1xuw6pgd2b1rf/uploads/2019/06/Recorder-Malins-QC-JCIO-Investigation-Statment-1119.pdf but refuses to discuss the matter. I asked Mr Gauke to comment, asking him what was conservative about his action, and in what way he differed from the most politically-correct wing of the Labour Party, but he has so far chosen not to do so.  I do not know the identity of the criminal.

 

Mr Malins, 69, an experienced barrister, tells me he still has no regrets. 

 

He says the defendant involved, who is now in his fifties, had appeared in court 40 times in 35 years, had accumulated 60 convictions and served several prison terms including a lengthy sentence for GBH with intent. But on the day he came before Mr Malins, it was for a lesser matter and he was told he could go free. At that point the man interrupted proceedings to say a weight ���had been lifted from my shoulders���.

 

Mr Malins replied ���You had better not worry about the weight off your shoulders, but should rather worry about the weight on your body���.  The defendant then asked the judge to repeat himself, which he did.

 

Mr Malins, who tells me he is just over 5 ft 10 ins tall and weighs just over twelve and a half stone, says the man was so fat he had to be helped into the dock. He responded to the complaint by politely telling the defendant in detail that he needed to lose weight and get a job. He explained this was for his own sake and the good of society.  

 

As for the claim of abusive language, Mr Malins says ���I reject that suggestion absolutely. On the contrary, the advice which I gave him was sincere, well meant, and, I believe, very good.���  

 

At first glance, the thing is just ridiculous. You think that at some point you will wake up in the midst of this nonsense, and grown-ups will return, from wherever they have been hiding, to restore the country to sanity. But they don���t. The one thing you can be sure of in this country now is that the state, where it possibly can be, will be against common sense.

 

But it is deeper than that. We now have a state which, when asked to choose between a learned judge and a frequently-convicted criminal, sides with the criminal as if they are on an equal footing. There is no moral force and bite in our cardboard Criminal Justice system. It sees its job as to negotiate, neutrally between ���society��� and ���offenders��� whose misdeeds are not really their fault, but are explained by poverty, abuse or some other fashionable misfortune.

 

And it reserves special spite for anyone who tries to behave as if things were still as they used to be. The householder who defends himself against a burglar is more severely investigated than most burglaries. This is because his action threatens the monopoly of soft justice.

 

You are alone. If dangerous evil comes your way, do not expect our current establishment to take your side and defend you. If you dare to defend yourself, it will quite possibly be you who ends in the dock. As for the ���Conservative��� Party, can someone remind me, what is it for?

 

Cannabis means more crazy people

 

As the sickly-sweet stench of marijuana spreads ever further across the once-civilised western world, there is one universal result. There are more crazy people. Some of them are dangerous.

 

Many of them are crazy because they have fried their brains with skunk. Some are crazier still because baffled doctors have added to the cocktail with various poorly-understood prescription drugs.

 

But the chances that you will meet such a person grow daily, as our leaders refuse to enforce the laws against marijuana possession. They will grow still more if they are stupid enough to bow to the billionaire campaign to legalise this poison.

 

Yet last week I wrote to a prominent political figure to seek his help in fighting this mistake, and he said he was too busy. This may be deeply unwise.

 

Amid the usual emotional and incurious coverage of the latest US rampage killings, the news has quietly leaked out that the Dayton killer, Connor Betts, was (as I knew he would be ) a marijuana user. His girlfriend Lyndsi Doll has told the Washington Post that the shooter suffered hallucinations and menacing voices in his head, and feared he was developing schizophrenia. Why would that be? 

 

There���s a clue in the logo of Betts���s repellent rock band. ���Menstrual Munchies��� . It is a marijuana plant. But would you like more?

 

 

Well another former friend told the Post that Betts���s group of friends had a reputation at Bellbrook High School as ���the outcast kids that the cool kids didn���t really like.��� And what did they do at weekends? Why, they smoked marijuana. 

 

I have no doubt that something similar will eventually emerge about the alleged El Paso shooter too. Sometimes it takes months, even years, but it always does.  And it���s not just in the USA. You might wonder what role marijuana had in several violent episodes in Britain recently, and you would be wise to do so.

 

A correspondent recently wrote to me from Washington State in the USA, which went soft on users in 1971, fell for the ���medical pot��� scam in 1998 and ended up legalising it for recreational use in 2012. What happened? He describes matters:

 

���Seattle has hundreds of people who live on the streets who have been completely relieved of their mental capacity. They have no cognitive functions left apart from shouting incomprehensible nonsense. 

���I write this while one such person is wandering up and down the aisle of the bus I���m riding, screaming at the top of his lungs and banging on the windows.���  If only that was all they did.

 

Electric tale with no spark

I regard electricity as a sort of miracle, a mainly invisible force which we can measure, observe and use, but can���t really explain. So I longed to like ���The Current War���, a new film about the great and bitter battle between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison for control of the US power grid. But while it is sometimes beautiful and moving, and features the wonderful Cragside mansion of the British arms mogul William Armstrong, it is cartoonish and shapeless. It would have been better done 50 years ago.  I sometimes wish Hollywood would realise that not all of us are phone zombies, and some of us still have an attention span longer than five seconds.

Inconclusive Musings About Two Mass Killings in the USA

I do not think I know anything like enough about the two mass murders in the USA to have much to say about them yet. So here are some inconclusive musings.

 

But I note here that, as in all my writings on such subjects , stupid people are banned from reading what follows. If you don't know whether you are stupid or not, I also advise you not to read it. If you find yourself thinking that I am trying to excuse mass murder, then that means you are definitely stupid, for I am clearly not doing that. You should go and lie down until the mood has passed. Alas, the stupidity will persist. 

 

As usual, I wait for facts before reaching conclusions, which slows me down among all the others rushing to judgement. Sometimes, as I know from the case of the Quebec City mosque killer, Bissonnette, here��� https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/04/reposted-in-the-light-f-new-information-another-mass-shooter-turns-out-to-have-been-taking-mind-alte.html

���crucial facts do not come to light for long months, even years,  after these events - if they ever do. In my experience, police all over the world are sublimely uninterested (in Britain actively uninterested|) in the drug use of the perpetrators of such crimes, and often only stumble across them by accident.

 

But there are some features of the El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, killings on which I will comment.  As usual, the reporting concentrates upon the horror of the crimes, as it must. But it is then swiftly followed by editorialising about guns and gun control of the usual sort, which neglects to wonder whether, as mass gun ownership is not new in the USA, but dates back to the foundation of the country, whereas these sort of rampage killings only really began about 50 years ago, and have been growing more common in the past five years,  the free availability of guns alone can be blamed for these incidents.  

 

But in this case there is also quite a lot about the supposed ���right-wing extremism��� of one of the two accused, the alleged El Paso killer Patrick Crusius.  (Not the other killer though, see below) I have discussed the significance of such affiliations here in long posts on the Jo Cox murder here https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/04/my-reply-to-the-secret-barrister-.html

 

I would also draw readers��� attention to what I wrote about the Charlottesville killer, Fields, two years ago (the caveat still very much applies ) https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/08/on-the-miserable-events-in-charlottesville-virginia.html

My questions, as to what might have caused Fields to become mentally ill enough to be rejected by the US Army in the first place, were not innocent. I stick by my belief that, if you find a mentally-ill young person in the modern world, you will almost certainly find a current or former marijuana user.  But this grows harder to establish definitively, as police in many jurisdictions long ago gave up even cautions or diversion programmes for those found in possession of marijuana, and are not interested in probing it now. In fact they are positively uninterested, because the connection makes their abandonment of law-enforcement look foolish. So while five or ten years ago their drug abuse might have been recorded, it is not now.

 

More than a year after his crime, in November 2018, the range of drugs (potentially amphetamines, ���anti-anxiety��� medication and SSRIs) , which Fields may have been legally taking, possibly all at once, was briefly revealed at his trial: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/james-alex-fields-trial-deadly-charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-set-n939991 The key pasage reads : ���Fields later told a judge he is being treated for bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression and ADHD.���

 

'Treated', of course, means 'given drugs'.

I recently checked for the latest information on the mass murderer Dylann Roof, whose crime has been attributed to a political motive (though as usual it is hard to see how such a filthy act could possibly have aided any cause to which it is attached)  and found this https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-dylann-roof-20170202-story.html . His admitted problems include a 'Mixed Substance Abuse Disorder, a Schizoid Personality Disorder, depression by history, and a possible Autistic Spectrum Disorder.������

 

Well, that is pretty much evidence of substance abuse. Which substance or 'mixed substances' would you guess might be involved here?  Likewise the word ���Schizoid��� tends to be associated with drug-related mental illness. ���Depression��� is treated with powerful SSRIs, and Autistic Spectrum Disorder can be treated with Risperidone, an antipsychotic.  In modern America, none of these things would be considered abnormal enough to merit special note, especially once Roof's crazed action had been attributed to white supremacist opinions which he holds, insofar as such a person can be said to hold opinions. To me, and to anyone familiar with the subject of side-effects of legal medications, and indeed the problems associated with marijuana, they are flashing red lights. But they emerged quietly 18 months after he was arrested for the murder of nine people, and long after most people had lost interest in the case.

 

 

I have also addressed the subject of the supposed political affiliations of other violent, irrational, apparently politicised persons  in this article on the Leytonstone  knife attacker, Muhaydin Mire here . (���You ain���t no Muslim , Bruv!���) https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/08/the-man-who-thought-tony-blair-was-his-guardian-angel-yes-really.html

My point is that it is possible for people who are unhinged (usually by legal or illegal psychotropic drugs and sometimes by both in succession) to espouse ostensibly political views, but this does not necessarily mean that they can correctly be classified as political actors. I know too little about Crusius to say anything other than, can we wait for a bit more information?

 

But in reports that I have seen, the strong  interest in Crusius��� supposed right-wing extremism is not matched by concern about alleged left-wing opinions held (according to the ���Heavy��� website) by the suspect in the Dayton, Ohio killing, Connor Betts . See for example https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/connor-betts/

 

Attempts to analyse his Twitter feed found that ���he described himself as ���he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i���m going to hell and i���m not coming back.��� He wrote on Twitter that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, ���I want socialism, and i���ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.��� The Greene County Board of Elections lists his party as ���Dem.��� ���. When Donald Trump was elected President he is said to have tweeted that ���This is bad���.

 

I don���t propose to make anything of this in itself. Rather the opposite  

These vague semi-literate mutterings obviously cannot be used to attempt any link between the dead Connor Betts and the American left. And, by the way, I am not suggesting any equivalence between seething racial bigotry and peaceful mainstream Democratic Party leftism, in case anyone was hoping to pin that on me. They are obviously utterly distinct.  To make such a connection between Betts and the Democrats would obviously be absurd.  In which case, perhaps some similar caution should be observed in the case of Crusius, whose alleged actions  may well be as unconnected to his supposed politics as those of Betts,  though I doubt my plea for this will get much of a hearing. What I am saying here ( see especially the Muhaydin Mire case, referenced above) is that crazy people quite often adopt political causes to make themselves feel important and part of a movement. But they do this because they are crazy, not because they are really political in nature. The affiliation is part of their craziness, and can't be equated with the genuine, rational political affiliations of sane people.    

I still wonder what, if anything, these two alleged culprits will turn out to have objectively in common, when we know all that there is to be known about them ��� if we ever do. But until we do, I must be inconclusive, and speculative. So please don���t tell me I have reached any conclusions here. As Sherlock Holmes always said, it is a capital error to theorise without data. Not, alas, that it stops everyone else.

PETER HITCHENS: Our police are a bigger threat to your freedom than Putin

This is Peter Hitchens��� Mail on Sunday column

Reform the police now or regret it for ever. There will never be another opportunity like this to get back the police force we once had.

Equally urgently, this may be our last chance to stop the police turning into a dangerous engine of oppression ��� powerful, secretive and unjust.

I know we are distracted by the endless EU issue. But we should not let it keep us from dealing with this scandal.

I have been a national newspaper journalist for more than 40 years, and a pretty alert citizen for longer than that, and I can recall few incidents as shocking and urgent as last week���s astonishing public statement by the distinguished judge Sir Richard Henriques.

Judges try very hard not to attack the police directly in public. They know the public must have confidence in them. They are supposed to be allies. But Sir Richard is not just criticising them. He is calling for the prosecutions of some officers.

Sir Richard made a detailed and forensic investigation of the appalling ���Operation Midland��� three years ago.

He knows far more than he has ever been allowed to say about police failings and misdeeds in that idiotic pursuit of innocent men on the basis of mad, incredible charges from an obvious fantasist.

So if he thinks there should be prosecutions, there should be. There should be much more than that. It is time for a full inquiry into what the police do, what they are for and what powers they should have.

Parliament originally resisted the whole idea of a police force, 200 years ago, because continental gendarmes were terrible menaces to liberty, far too powerful.

They only changed their minds when Robert Peel devised the English system ��� unarmed civilians in non-military uniforms with few powers, serving the law rather than the state, expected to keep order by persuasion and example rather than by force. All this is now gone.

Instead we have regiments of armoured paramilitary social workers, jingling with clubs, Tasers, pepper sprays and often guns, schooled in political dogmas and vigilant for political correctness.

And we now learn they are also steeped in the mad conspiracy theories of the wild Left, notably the belief there is some sort of lingering conservative establishment which is implicated in a vast paedophile conspiracy. They believed this seething garbage because they wanted to.

But that���s not all. In all their lengthy training, nobody seems ever to have explained to them that in this country a person is innocent until proven guilty to the satisfaction of an impartial jury.

And so, if you ever wonder where the police are, as you walk the unpatrolled streets of this country, now you know. They���re busy being Left-wing.

They don���t need, respect or like you. They serve the state, not you. They have also created a system of publicised arrests and humiliating, devastating home invasions, in which they can, by the flick of a pen, ruin the life of an innocent man.

And that innocent man, if he tries to fight them, finds himself on the receiving end of a closed, sullen bureaucracy not all that different from what you might encounter in Russia or China.

So, not just useless for all practical purposes, too busy to bother with us, but also ��� because they are here, now ��� a much bigger threat to your freedom and mine than Vladimir Putin could ever possibly be.

I have to add that most of them are perfectly nice people, kind to animals and all that.

Alas, history shows that those who operate the apparatus of repression usually are nice in private. But it���s what they do in public that matters.

Dopes duped by cannabis kings

Observe this trio of MPs got up like 1930s babies. All they need are dummies in their mouths and they would look like enormous infants waiting for their next bottle feed. And, indeed, this is not a wholly misleading idea.

The three are Lib Dem Sir Norman Lamb, knighted because of his concerns about mental illness (of which more later), Labour���s David Lammy, and the ���Conservative��� Jonathan Djanogly.

All three are dressed in this daft way in case they contaminate the product at a huge, legal marijuana farm in Ontario.

They allowed themselves to be observed by the BBC (this now stands for British Boosters of Cannabis, I think) on a ���fact-finding��� mission to see how Canada���s legalisation of marijuana was going. Well, I could have told them. It���s going quite badly.

Big Dope campaigners always claimed the change would drive criminal gangs out of the trade, and pretended that legalisation, by allowing ���regulation���, would somehow lead to controls on its terrifying strength.

This has turned out to be untrue in Canada and the other testbed for this crazy idea, Colorado. In both places, legal shops have had to keep the strength of their product high because of competition from cheaper, untaxed criminal sellers.

And those criminals still prosper. Figures for the fourth quarter of 2018, from Canada���s state statistics bureau, show illegal sales totalled $4.7 billion ��� 80 per cent of the $5.9 billion spent on marijuana.

Even the BBC���s soppy and unbalanced programme filmed Canadians ordering, obtaining and smoking illegal marijuana with total ease. The individuals involved didn���t seem worried they would get into trouble.

So how could the three MPs come back and say in all cases that similar legalisation was bound to come to Britain in ten years, and in two cases that it should do (Mr Djanogly wasn���t sure)?

Mr Lammy came out with the nonsensical ���prohibition isn���t working��� claim as if the country wasn���t full of chief constables announcing they no longer act against marijuana possession. What ���prohibition���, Mr Lammy?

The ignorance and complacency of these people about the mental illness and the violence that often accompanies it is astonishing. Even legalisers reluctantly admit its use is closely correlated with mental illness.

Odd, then, isn���t it, that the knighted Norman Lamb seeks to legalise a drug whose users so often end up in the locked wards of mental hospitals, as their shattered families grieve for the people they used to be?

Shouldn���t he give the knighthood back, in that case? And has the BBC ever highlighted any of these tragic cases on a major programme?

How can grown men be so gullible? Much of the urgent pressure to legalise marijuana for general use is based on the heart-wrenching claims that it might be a useful medicine.

Well, maybe it is, but what justification would that be for allowing its open sale on the streets, where it will make many of its users incurably ill?

I look for any major figures willing to oppose this dreadful, irreversible mistake before it is too late, and I find none.

Are there no grown-ups left in our establishment? Are they all naive and brainwashed babies?

Still the nasty plague of illegal motorised scooters breeds and multiplies. A file photo of an electric scooter is pictured above

My crash course in scooter stupidity

Still the nasty plague of illegal motorised scooters breeds and multiplies.

One of these, ridden by the usual lawless idiot, ploughed into the back of my bicycle the other day, while moronically trying to overtake me on the inside.

Soon afterwards, a squadron of them ridden by youths in baseball caps turned nasty on me when I pointed out they were breaking the law.

The youths were not English, but they knew plenty of swearwords, and how to spit.

I was lucky, I think, that this was all they did. Call the police? What police? These foul things just underline how alone we all are.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Yes, OFCOM is quite useless when it comes to the BBC's left-wing Bias.

I have now come to the end of the BBC and OFCOM complaints system, which I attempted to use to complain about blatant, undeniable bias in the BBC drama ���Call the Midwife��� last February.

 

The outcome was, as usual, total failure. Interested readers can study my previous articles on the progress, or lack of progress, in this complaint  here

 

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/02/call-the-midwife-my-complaint-to-the-bbc-is-answered-feeble-and-redoubled-.html

 

here

 

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/02/curiouser-and-curiouser-the-battle-over-the-bbcs-promotion-of-abortuon.html

 

here

 

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/03/call-the-midwife-my-full-complaint-to-the-bbc-executive-complaints-unit.html

 

and here

 

 

 

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/03/call-the-bbc-my-continuing-attempts-to-deal-with-the-case-of-the-biased-midwife.html

 

 

Readers will observe that I have given full and exact details of the substance of my complaint, of the BBC rules which the programme broke, evidence of the BBC���s own recognition that the matter is a controversial one, evidence that supporters of abortion liberalisation regarded the programme as helpful to them and indeed helped in the making of it, and comments from left-wing media confirming my view that 'Call the Midwife' has become a vehicle for agitprop drama.

 

I have also responded to, rebutted and - in my view - refuted the various attempts by the BBC to claim that the matter was not controversial, that even if it was, TV drama matters less in terms of bias than other coverage, or that the item was not biased because of the possibility that a balancing drama might also have been broadcast, even though no evidence of any such balancing broadcast ever having been transmitted has been produced.

 

This was, as usual, of no avail. The BBC is judge and jury in its own cause and can bat away complaints, however justified, by simply refusing to accept that they are valid, as happened in this case. Personally, I think an academic somewhere should study this case as an example of the uselessness of the BBC's complaints system, from start to finish.

 

OFCOM was recently given powers to make judgements on BBC programmes (its powers to regulate broadcasters are extensive and tough, though they seem to be directed mainly against the Kremlin station RT). When OFCOM acquired these powers, I said I would try to use OFCOM to set the BBC straight. Many people said I was wasting my time. Privately I suspected that they were right. But it is no use just saying these things. You have to show them to be true in practice.

 

So, in this case and an earlier one about a disgraceful BBC news report on the United Nations Security Council, which suppressed an important truth about the actions of Russia, so giving a  gravely false impression of events,  I have used the OFCOM complaints system to see if it offers anything to the non-liberal complainer. 

 

It was certainly no help in the Security Council case. 

 

But the ���Call the Midwife��� episode was if anything even more blatant. There���s no doubt it was propaganda, in the form of drama , for the view that the only possible answer to back-street abortions was liberalisation of the abortion laws, on the lines of the changes adopted in Britain in 1967, thanks to a 'Private Members' Bill' never put before the electorate in the then government's manifesto.  As I have said, this of of course a valid point of view in itself, and one which is entitled to be aired, but it is not universally held and there are potent arguments against it. Such arguments, many of them rooted in Christian views of the inviolability of innocent life, would have been known to, held by and used by any community of midwife-nuns in 1964 London.

 

Yet OFCOM would not even consider my complaint , for reasons of blazing spuriousness (see the exchange reproduced below). So I think I can now say, with certainty, that OFCOM is indeed useless as a regulator of the BBC, and another , proper impartial regulator is needed.  

 

My complaint to OFCOM submitted 3rd June 2019:

 

���The programme portrayed an illegal abortion in early 1960s London. The portrayal of the event, and the sentiments placed in the mouths of the characters, all supported the idea that readily available legal abortion was the only solution to the problems portrayed. An uninformed viewer would not have known that abortion was in fact legally available at the time portrayed, with an estimated 2,800 'therapeutic' abortions performed in NHS hospitals in 1962 (and many more in private clinics) , the year before the one in which the drama was set. The conditional legalisation of abortion under strict conditions was not new at that time, as it had followed the Aleck Bourne judgement of 1938

Reason for dissatisfaction with the outcome of the BBC's final response:

The BBC simply avoided the substance of the complaint throughout my correspondence, and was unresponsive when I pointed this out. It made no attempt to deny that the programme was biased. It merely maintained that because the programme was a drama, bias was less important than in factual programmes, a questionable claim which is nowhere backed up by the BBC's own rules on bias. The BBC said correctly that drama series could not be expected to be impartial in each individual episode. I accepted this, but when I asked repeatedly for any evidence of any BBC programmes in this series or any other series which had balanced the pro-liberalisation stance of the February 2019 episode, I received no answer at all. I do not believe that any such programme has been transmitted in modern times (if ever) by the BBC. In fact, the reverse is the case. A programme in the same long-running drama series had been previously transmitted - an episode also favouring liberal abortion laws, on 17th February 2013. The BBC made no serious attempt to argue that the February 2019 episode was not biased, as it so evidently was. The February 2019 programme was actually *praised* by a group of pro-abortion campaigners (*references available). A letter from a group of pro-abortion lobbies to the BBC said: 'Call the Midwife has repeatedly handled this issue extremely sensitively and courageously���. A leading pro-abortion campaigner from the 1960s, Diane Munday, has revealed (refs available) that she was asked to help in research for the programme. No anti-abortion equivalent was consulted. The BBC also conceded, in correspondence with pro-abortion groups (refs available) , that abortion is a contentious issue. So by implication it accepts that it is a matter of public controversy on which it should remain unbiased.

 

 

OFCOM���s response 10th July 2019

 

Dear Mr Hitchens

 

Call the Midwife, BBC 1, 3 February 2019, 20:00

 

 

We are writing in response to your complaint of 3 June 2019 about the above programme. You complained that the storyline involving Jeanie, who died as a result of having an illegal abortion, did not fully reflect the law or practice on legal abortions at the time the drama was set. At the outset, we would like to make clear that, after carefully considering your complaint, we do not believe that it raises a substantive issue warranting an investigation. We will therefore not be pursuing your complaint further. We appreciate this issue is important to you and that you have invested time and effort into this process, so we would like to explain our reasoning. Our assessment Under the Communications Act 2003, Ofcom has a duty to set standards for programmes on television and radio in a range of areas. These standards are set out in the Broadcasting Code (���the Code���) in the form of rules that broadcasters must abide by. The Code applies to all broadcasters licensed by Ofcom and to content on the BBC���s licence fee funded television, radio and on demand programme services. The process for the handling of BBC complaints is reflected in our procedures for investigating breaches of content standards on BBC broadcasting services. You complained that the programme gave the impression that therapeutic abortion, i.e. abortion strictly on specific medical grounds, was unlawful in 1963 when at the time, many abortions were being performed in hospitals using a landmark court case in 1938 as a legal basis. Ofcom���s rules regarding accuracy only apply to news programmes. However, we recognise that harm and offence can be caused by the misrepresentation of factual issues within other programmes. We therefore assessed this complaint under Rule 2.2 of the Code which states: Classification: CONFIDENTIAL ���Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the audience.��� Whether a programme is materially misleading depends on a number of factors such as the context, the editorial approach taken in the programme, the nature of the misleading material and, above all, either what the potential effect could be or what actual harm has occurred (e.g. injury to health or financial detriment). In this case, we took into account that Call the Midwife is a drama. We also took into account that the draft legislation that formally legalised abortion was not given royal assent until 1967. Even in dramas that purport to reflect real-life situations, we accept that certain aspects of a story may be exaggerated or disregarded to develop a narrative or characters within a programme. We believe viewers would have understood that Jeanie���s circumstances and the options available to her were not necessarily representative of all similar scenarios in 1963. In addition, in view of the fact that in the era this drama was set, access to abortions was more limited than was the case following the 1967 Abortion Act, we did not consider the programme would have materially misled viewers. We therefore considered that the programme did not raise issues warranting investigation under Rule 2.2 of the Code. In your correspondence with the BBC, you also felt that the programme was biased in favour of the pro-abortion movement. Section Five of the Code sets out Ofcom���s rules on due impartiality. In non-news programmes these rules only apply if a programme is dealing with ���matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy���. However, paragraph 1.24 of Ofcom���s Guidance to Section Five makes clear that there are a range of instances where a programme would not necessarily be deemed to be dealing with a matter of political or industrial controversy or a matter relating to current public policy. This includes where references to political disputes and conflicts are used as descriptive backdrop to a historical drama, as in the present case. This reflects the fact that viewers are likely to appreciate that drama presents fictional stories, and therefore the need to understand different facets of an argument in such programming differs significantly from, for example, current affairs programming. We therefore did not consider the specific issues covered by this storyline raised issues warranting investigation under Section Five of the Code. Our decision not to pursue this complaint further will be published on our website in the fortnightly Broadcast and On Demand Bulletin. Thank you for taking the trouble to contact us.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Ofcom Standards Team

Speaking about 'The Phoney Victory' at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Tuesday 20th August

I shall be speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Tuesday 20th August at 11.45 a.m. about my latest book, 'The Phoney Victory' https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-fest...

Some Responses to Alex Stevens

Various drug decriminalisers have been retweeting a rather feeble set of ripostes to me by a Kent University academic called Alex Stevens, while carefully ignoring the replies I made to them at the time. Below are his Twitter messages and my replies to them (a computer problem over which I have no control means that you will have to go to his original tweets on his timeline yesterday morning (29th July) @alexstevenskent,  for the links he supplied, but this is not difficult, and I don���t challenge any of his facts, just the use he makes of them).

 

I met Stevens long ago, I guess it must be seven or eight years ago, at a debate at the University of Kent in Canterbury. At that time I still believed that those who campaigned for the relaxation of the drug laws were rational beings open to persuasion. I know now that this is not so, and that Big Dope is a huge, screaming juggernaut of selfishness and greed whose attitude towards opponents is that they must be shouted down and crushed lest they prevent the triumph of their lobby. My first real intimation of this problem was the debate against Stevens, in which it was quite plain to me, when it came to rebuttals, that he had not listened to a word I had said and ��� more importantly ��� did not think it necessary to do so. His case remained, absurdly, that there was a 'war on drugs' which had failed and that the law was engaging in serious repression of marijuana use. 

I must say  I had thought even the worst of the liberalisers had abandoned this now, just as most of them have been compelled to accept that there is a strong and worrying correlation between marijuana and mental illness ( a truth they jeered it only seven or eight years ago). It seems not. 

 

Stevens: Data from @MoJGovUk shows that there have been over 218,000 criminal convictions for cannabis possession in England and Wales since 2008. Over 3,800 cases where cannabis possession was the most serious offence led to a custodial sentence.

 

PH: Terrific, That means an average of 21,800 a year, in a country where the offence of possession is committed tens of thousands of times a week.

I commend to you 'Cannabis Nation' by James H.Mills, OUP 2013, esp pp 156-157: Notes that by 1979 (!) there was only one first offender... awarded an immediate custodial sentence...for a single offence of possession of cannabis'. Everybody but you knows perfectly well that marijuana possession has been de facto decriminalised for years. That's why London stinks of marijuana, and people smoke it in Hyde Park in front of the police, and nothing happens to them.

Possession is listed as 'the most serious offence' because of the very high theoretical maximum sentence of five years plus unlimited fine. But it will not usually have been the reason for the custodial sentence, as you well know. The interesting thing is why an apparently intelligent person such as you should continue to believe and peddle the comically untrue idea that use of marijuana is severely repressed.

 

Stevens: The UK does not use the harshest punishments in the world for cannabis possession. But, given the lack of evidence of benefit, these convictions and sentences are disproportionate and unjust. And they fall most heavily on black people

 

PH: I'm with you here. We should arrest many, many more rich white people for drug possession. I'm an equal opportunity prohibitionist.

 

 

Stevens: Mr Hitchens likes to point at some countries ��� like S Korea and Japan ��� that have harsher punishment. But ��� again ��� this is not how correlations are demonstrated in the social sciences. You need to look at a wider sample of cases, not just the convenient ones you select.

 

 

PH: No, of course, the existence of any actual examples which contradict legalisation propaganda must obviously be ignored. So sorry for mentioning them.

 

 

Stevens: And when we look across time in Europe, we do not find that changes in the punishment of cannabis users are associated with changes in cannabis use.

 

PH: A simple rather dim confusion of which an academic should be ashamed. It is not the theoretical penalties which make a difference, but the practical enforcement of them. Heavy theoretical penalties, unenforced as here, have no impact.

 

Stevens: And Mr Hitchens, as shown by

@Dave_Brew has a very limited understanding of Japan, where the law is less strictly enforced than he imagines

 

PH: What have I said which is contradicted by this article, such as it is? Give referenced direct quotes. Show where they conflict. [subsequent note. I have only said, repeatedly and simply, that Japan and South Korea continue to prosecute for possession, and have lower levels of consumption. I believe these facts are connected. That is all]

 

 

Stevens: And when we look at the most recent decriminalisations of cannabis in the USA, we do not see increases in use

 

PH: When have I said that they would? Decriminalisation of the drug generally follows a long period of lax non-enforcement, such as we have here. An immediate major jump would not be likely.

 

Stevens went on to slither out of a request by me that he should support my call for a proper judge-led inquiry into the apparent correlation between marijuana use and criminal violence.Why would anyone not support such an inquiry?  He also tweeted a blatant misrepresentation of the point I had made about the effects of decriminalisation on levels of use. I hope I shall have no further need or cause to deal with him. It is never a pleasant or uplifting experience.