Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 82
July 31, 2019
July 28, 2019
PETER HITCHENS: Don't be duped by cheery Boris Johnson... it's your duty to be glum
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
I am a Doomster and a Gloomster, and proud of it. I am always suspicious of anyone, in politics or business, who demands permanent optimism and treats doubt as disloyalty.
If Dooming and Glooming were bad, then the worst offender in British history was one Winston Churchill, supposedly the hero of our new premier, whose warnings of growing German power were models of doom.
Take, for example, his speech of March 24, 1938: ���I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly the stairway which leads to a dark gulf.���
Or recall what he said on October 5 the same year: ���I will, therefore, begin by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing. I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.���
To insist on chirpy cheerfulness amid bad times (and I think we will come to remember these as bad times) is a sort of totalitarianism.
Like Al ���Boris��� Johnson���s face, relentless optimism seems to be smiling and humorous. But catch that face in repose, and you see something altogether grimmer. I wonder how quickly the jolly joshing will turn to anger.
Mr Johnson���s path to power began with his choice of the unlovely Gavin Williamson as his campaign chief. He made it clear to Tory MPs that only immediate and total loyalty would save them from career death.
The appointment of the new Government, with some Ministers clearly axed purely because they had backed Jeremy Hunt, kept that promise. It looked more like a Balkan putsch than a reshuffle.
Loyalty, not quality, was plainly the test. I mean, look at some of these people. I have no great sympathy with anyone involved. I wrote off the Tory Party as a dead loss many years ago.
But I can recognise a ruthless, overweening drive to power when I see it, and it gives me the creeps. As I���ve said before, this is the kind of Nixonian government which has an enemies list, in which case the honourable person really needs to be on that list.
As so often in modern times, especially since the Blair era, people have the whole thing totally wrong. Those who ought to love Mr Johnson, loathe him. Hundreds of socially liberal media metropolitan types are (weirdly) enraged by the coming to power of a man just like them, who, for instance, seeks an amnesty for huge numbers of illegal immigrants and, in theory and practice, regards monogamous marriage as a ���bourgeois convention���.
Those who might do well to mistrust him, on the other hand, fall at his feet. He is acclaimed (weirdly) as ���Britain Trump���, whatever that means, by the President of the United States, who seems to think that Mr Johnson and Nigel Farage are more or less the same thing.
And he is cheered by those who have come to think that leaving the EU is an objective in itself, without any specific purpose, and it will be fine, even if it actually collapses the economy.
Do these people know that he once wrote of them, in The Spectator of July 2, 1994, as ���Euro-Ultras��� these men and women have black, black hearts���. He said they lived in hope that the EU would demand so much of Britain that it would bring about our departure from the then European Community.
It is an interesting article. I do not think its author greatly sympathised with those ���black-hearted ultras���. Does he now?
Instead of trying to have a war with Iran we can���t win, why don���t we stand up to China? The Peking despots have now hired gangster thugs to intimidate and beat peaceful protesters in Hong Kong. This is a direct breach of the agreement we signed with them. We must insist that they cease this sort of thing, or we cease to be a serious country.
A chance to save our useless police
The conviction of the pathetic fantasist Carl Beech, whose contorted lies damaged so many lives, is a great relief. This is not because I wanted harsh punishment for Beech. I don���t. His heavy sentence is cruel. Others are far more to blame for the harm done by his crazy lies.
It is because those lies are now officially recognised as such. So I can and will call for retribution and penitence for all those in positions of power and responsibility who chose to believe this swirling pigswill.
These people publicly visited misery and shame on wholly innocent men and their families. Some of them lost homes and jobs. All were wounded to the very heart by being paraded as alleged paedophiles. They trashed the presumption of innocence, one of the most precious possessions of a free society, and assumed guilt without the slightest effort to seek proof.
Think of it. If Field Marshal Edwin Bramall is not safe from the baseless bullying of deluded, self-important police officers so thick and prejudiced that they thought the blatant liar Beech was ���credible��� and his lies were ���true���, then who is safe?
You certainly aren���t. The principal politician involved, Tom Watson MP, is protected because he is a valued member of the anti-Corbyn campaign which unites Blairite Labour and Tories in politics and media.
This is a mistake. They should drop him and find another champion. He has demonstrated appalling gullibility and cruelty. He has not shown anything like the necessary contrition. He should never be trusted anywhere near real power.
But the real problem lies in the police, that vast body of men and women, largely absent from the streets we pay them to patrol. In the last week, I have not seen one police officer on foot, anywhere, and I have looked out for them.
They have become a closed society, quite Left-wing, pursuing their own politically correct agendas, uninterested in their main job of deterring crime by being present on the streets.
If we have 20,000 more of them, they will be the same. It is no good just hiring more of them, until they are reformed.
The Beech episode gives us a chance to reverse the absurdities imposed on the police after the Macpherson report.
Our once-great navy is sinking - just like Russia's
The bitter and sad new film about the tragedy of the Russian submarine Kursk portrays the Russian navy, correctly, as decrepit and broke, and so unable to save its own men trapped in the deep.
Britain���s fleet, personified by the reassuring Colin Firth, is shown by contrast as modern, competent and can-do.
But in the 19 years since the Kursk sank, the Royal Navy ��� savaged by governments of both parties ��� has shrunk in power, wealth and competence.
In my view, we should not imagine that what happened to the Russians cannot happen to us.
Soon, we'll all be extremists
I mistrust the word ���extremism��� and think the phrase ���Right-wing��� means little. But just at the moment it seems to me that the British State is trying to build the foundations of a secret police force which will devote much of its time to pursuing ���Right-wing extremism���, and that you might be surprised by what this means.
The Home Office announced last week that risks from ���Right-wing extremists��� are to be included for the first time in the national system for alerting the public to the scale of the threat from terrorism.
What we also learned was that Al Johnson���s new Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, once told a constituent that he thought Christian teachers who said they were opposed to same- sex marriage should be subject to ���Extremism Disruption Orders���. Yes, he really did. Who needs Harriet Harman when you have the Tories?
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July 27, 2019
Capital Punishment, almost discussed
Here is a rather odd discussion on the death penalty which I had on the LBC radio station last night (Thursday 25th July). It bis especially odd because of the inclusion of the other guest, a man convicted of manslaughter, whose insights on the death penalty (not imposed for manslaughter, or in existence at the time of his crime) seemed to me to be limited :
https://vocaroo.com/i/s1gxHdimmwvM
Let us not forget the other anniversary on July 20th, the 75th anniversary of the attempt to kill Hitler.
How odd it is that the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing should coincide with the 75th anniversary of another deeply important event now largely forgotten, the attempt to assassinate Hitler at his headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, on July 20th 1944. (The two are actually connected, awkwardly, by the involvement of the Nazi appaartchik Wernher von Braun in the American space programme, best not forgotten, though a matter for another time).
I had a particular reason to remember the attempted rising against Hitler because I helped in a small way to mark it, a few days ago.
One of the great joys of the campaign to clear the name of the late Bishop George Bell is that it has brought me into such good company. So many brave, decent, honest, unflashy people, whose lives were touched and illuminated by this great man, were and are involved. It has been a privilege to work with them
But perhaps the most exalted company of all, even if they were all ghosts, came my way last week when I was asked to read the lesson (I���ll say which passage form scripture it was later) at Oxford Cathedral, at a service to mark the 75th anniversary of the attempt to overthrown Hitler. Some of the conspirators had studied at or visited Oxford and in all probability were familiar with the small, rather intimate cloisters, arches and vaults of that cathedral, hidden amid gardens, a place of calm and grace which must have seemed very far away on the day of their fiery, doomed action.
This is complicated in Christian terms. Can it have been right to use violence to destroy Hitler, while still holding to Christ���s own words in the Gospels? Yet how can it have been wrong, when the alternative was to do nothing while a terrible war continued, whose sole driving force was the person of Hitler?
Or was the action in fact not political at all, but a demonstration of courageous virtue in the midst of evil, whose actual purpose was not immediate but eternal? As I often quote form Chesterton ���What we do here matters somewhere else���. We often see the pattern of life from the wrong side, and misunderstand the meaning of our own words and actions, which only becomes clear later, perhaps after we ourselves have gone into the dark..
Unsurprisingly, it is now little-noticed just how strong the Christian impulse was in the small, impossibly brave group who embarked on this action, probably knowing that they would not only fail but be horribly murdered when they were found out and caught, as of course so many of them were. One, Henning von Tesckow, believed specifically that he died as an assertion of conscience in a land without conscience, saying ���God once promised Abraham that he would not destroy Sodom if there were but ten just men in it. I hope that God will not destroy Germany. We cannot complain about our death (he was dead within 24 hours of the plot���s failure) .Those who joined us were prepared to face death. The moral strength of a man begins at the point at which he is ready to give up his life for his convictions���.
I hate to admit it, but of course those final words are true, and how uncomfortable that must be for us all.
Hans-Bernd von Haeften, who sadly for him survived until August, in the hands of Hitler���s torturers and the evil People���s Judge, Roland Freisler, , asked those who loved him to pray for hm ���in the words of the 126th Psalm . It was the text of the last sermon I heard in our village church, on the day of my arrest. And along with it, offer in prayer the 103rd Psalm, give praise and give thanks���.
And that is why a superb choir sang from both these psalms, including, from the 126th :���Turn our capitivity, O Lord, as the rivers in the south. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that now goeth on his way weeping and beareth forth good seed shall doubtless come again with joy and bring his sheaves with him���.
And from the 130th (De Profundis): ���Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice ���if thou, Lord, be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord who may abide it? For there is mercy with thee: therefore shalt thou be feared. I look for the Lord. My soul doth wait for him: in his word is my trust. My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch���.
Sometimes I understand why the Church of England has almost entirely squeezed these beautiful, angry, perplexed poems out of its modern worship. They are just too potent for our bland minds.
These resisters, alone and weak against the devil in human form, knew that there was nothing but God which they could place between them and evil. Also they knew death for what it was. A thing which would come. A thing to be faced. These were men.
Helmuth-James von Moltke, who had opposed the assassination plot itself, but who died in the savage round-ups afterwards wrote to his wife ���Nothing more; it is for this and this alone that have been condemned���Your husband���stood ���not as a Protestant, not as a landed proprietor, not as a nobleman, not as a Prussian , not as a German ��� but as a Christian and nothing else���. He wrote of this ���the treasure that spoke from me and filled this earthen vessel���. The service also commemorated the wholly peaceful resisters such as the extraordinary Sophie Scholl, beheaded by furious Nazidom for her gentle, calm public opposition.
We were in Oxford because Christ Church has maintained, with an unflinching honour and determination, its connection with George Bell, who once studied there. In a small but lovely corner of the building, beneath some Burne-Jones windows, stands what is called the Bell Altar, a great block of black oak out of which has been hewn a solid cross.
Next to it, carved into the stone floor, are the dates of Bell���s life, a mention that he was a ���Bishop, scholar and tutor of Christ Church��� and the disturbing words (from a broadcast bell made in Germany after the war) ���No nation, no church, no individual is guiltless. Without repentance and without forgiveness there can be no regeneration���. Both stone and altar have stood untroubled through all the years during which allegations of child abuse have been made against George Bell, allegations which I think can now be said to have been thoroughly dispelled, to put it at its mildest. The Cathedral in Oxford, so very unlike Bell���s own Cathedral in Chichester, where he is buried, kept faith with their old friend and scholar and held to the presumption of innocence. Chichester, by contrast, removed references to Bell from the official guide book, placed ���safeguarding��� notices by Bell���s memorial, removed flowers left there, and stripped his name from a building in the Cathedral close. It has not marked his own October feast day for several years.
Bell���s concern for German Christians, and for German Jews was expressed early and practically, when such things were obscure or unpopular. Later, after war had broken out, he would be approached by German Christians (they managed to meet very secretly in neutral Sweden) who wanted to know if Britain might make peace with Germany if Hitler could be overthrown. Perhaps this was very naive but it was surely hard to ignore, and Bell responsibly passed on their message to a dubious British Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden. It is this direct connection between Bell and the July plot, and Bell���s abiding connection with Oxford itself, which led to the holding of the 75th anniversary service in Oxford.
Here is the sermon given at the Cathedral by The Revd Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, University of Oxford, Canon of Christ Church Cathedral. I have emphasised two passages which I felt especially telling. More than one member of the congregation was in tears during this sermon.
THE SEVENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE JULY 1944 PLOT TO KILL HITLER
���Standing in the middle of what remains of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the northern outskirts of Berlin, as I did some years ago, I found myself sympathising with those who keep their heads down. During the Nazi period Sachsenhausen held political dissidents and prisoners-of-war, tens of thousands of whom perished. But as I looked over to the neat suburban bungalows that lined the street leading up to the camp���s front gate, I thought to myself, ���Suppose I had lived over there, and suppose the dreadful reality of what was happening in here had begun to press itself upon me, what, exactly, would I have done? What, exactly, could I have done? And what, exactly, could I have done that would have made any difference?��� The answer: probably nothing. And so I understood why so many, there and then, decided to draw the curtains and turn away. After all, they had families to take care of, jobs to hold on to, and lives not to waste on futile heroics.
The territory here is morally grey. The lines between prudence and cowardice, valour and recklessness, are not clear. Sometimes, discretion really is the better part of valour. And yet, somewhere there is a bottom-line, on the far side of which valour becomes the better part of discretion. So, while we may sympathise with those who avert their eyes, keep their heads down, and go with the flow, we cannot but admire���and be challenged by���those who don���t.
���And in Nazi Germany some didn���t. One of the most moving sites in Berlin is the Memorial Museum to the German Resistance on Stauffenbergstrasse, which comprises a dozen or so rooms, each devoted to a different group of active dissidents���here church groups, there the trade unions; here youth organisations, there student groups; here the military officers, there the communists���and in each room, the walls covered in photographs, snapshots of men and women, adults and adolescents, most of them perfectly ordinary.
But one dissident, who came at least within a stone���s throw of this cathedral, was not so ordinary. Helmuth James von Moltke was a great nephew of Bismarck���s greatest general, and an aristocrat, albeit a socialist one. Since his mother was a South African Scot���hence his second name ���James������he had connections with Britain, and in the mid-1930s he considered removing his family here. To that end he spent several periods in London preparing for the English bar, during which he made regular forays to Oxford. Indeed, when, in Oriel College���s Senior Common Room in the mid-1990s, I started talking about my new-found interest in von Moltke to a long-retired don, he stopped me and, pointing at the fireplace, said, ���I���m sure I remember him standing just over there���.
Although von Moltke knew many of those involved in the plot to kill Hitler in July 1944, he wasn���t among them. He believed that Germany���s salvation required much more than a coup d�����tat by conservative soldiers; it needed unambiguous, catastrophic defeat to clear the way for radical reconstruction���a very, very terrible thing for a patriot to have to will. To that end, he hosted a series of religiously and politically ecumenical meetings on his estate at Kreisau���then in Silesia, now in south-west Poland���to plan for the rebuilding of his country after the fall of the regime.
One of his several impressive features is the acute guilt he felt over his own passivity. In October 1941 he wrote from Berlin to his wife, Freya, as follows:
���A woman known to a friend of mine saw a Jew collapse on the street: when she wanted to help him up, a policeman stepped in, stopped, and kicked the body on the ground so that it rolled into the gutter: then he turned to the lady with a vestige of shame and said: ���Those are our orders���. How can anyone know these things and still walk around free? With what right? Is it not inevitable that his turn will come too one day, and that he too will be rolled into the gutter? If only I could get rid of the terrible feeling that I have let myself be corrupted, that I do not react keenly enough to such things, that they torment me without producing a spontaneous reaction. I have mistrained myself, for in such things, too, I react with my head. I think about a possible reaction instead of acting.���
When to act, and when not to? When to hold back, and when to stand out? When is prudence not cowardly, and courage not foolish? To his great credit, von Moltke didn���t let his feeling of impotence dull his conscience. He didn���t relieve the tension by drawing the curtains and turning away. He allowed his conscience to go on tormenting him.
As a consequence, it did propel him to take risks and to step out alone. On 7th March 1940 he described a fraught day at the office in the Department of Military Intelligence:
There was a big row [about the treatment of prisoners-of-war] ���. Once more I was defeated on a decisive question. When the meeting was over, I asked permission to exercise the right of every official to have his dissenting opinion put on record. Big row: I was an officer, I was told, and had no such right but simply the duty to obey. I said I was sorry, but this was a question of responsibility before history, which to me had priority over the duty to obey. The matter came before the admiral, and after five minutes he endorsed my opinion. He obviously had shared it all along, at any rate had wavered, and my resistance had strengthened his courage. Result: the Admiral [Canaris] will have his personal dissent recorded in the minutes and will also speak to these minutes before Hitler.
On this occasion, as it turned out, his protest was effective: it stiffened the courage of his boss, who relayed it to Hitler. Overall, however, von Moltke was ineffective. In the vengeful aftermath of the assassination plot, which we commemorate this evening, he was arrested and in January 1945 tried and hanged at the age of thirty-eight, leaving behind him a wife and two young children. His brave efforts didn���t stop the murderous onward march of the regime, any more than did the efforts of Hans and Sophie Scholl, the July ���44 plotters, or any of the other dissidents poignantly displayed on the walls of the Berlin museum. The Nazi juggernaut crushed them all, and proceeded on its way.
But von Moltke understood this. And that���s a third of his impressive features���not only his persistently troubled conscience, not only his courage in standing out alone, but his appreciation of the value of doing what���s right, even though the prospect of success is almost negligible. As he wrote in October 1941:
At four o���clock I woke up and thought about Kreisau, my family, and the war. I became aware of a change that has taken place in me during the war, which I can only ascribe to a deeper insight into Christian principles. I don���t think that I feel the suffering of mankind less than before, and yet I find it easier to bear: it is less of an impediment to me than before. The realization that what I do is senseless does not stop my doing it, because I am much more firmly convinced than before that only what is done in the full recognition of the senselessness of all action makes any sense at all.
���Only what is done in the full recognition of the senselessness of all action makes any sense at all���. The remark is cryptic, but the meaning it struggles to express, I think, is this: that the significance of what we do doesn���t lie so much in its effectiveness���in what it effects or brings about or achieves���as in what it says, in what it points to.
This abstract point takes on flesh in the final letter that von Moltke wrote to his wife just after the trial in which he been condemned to death and a few days before his execution. Here he speaks of how he now sees, with wonderment, the whole of his life as a journey of preparation, bringing him to a place where he can affirm, clearly and unequivocally, not just with words but in his very person, what is true and just and of enduring value:
���Just think how wonderfully God prepared this, his unworthy vessel. At the very moment when there was danger that I might be drawn into the plot to kill Hitler, I was taken away, so that I should be and remain free from all connection with the use of violence. Then he planted in me my socialist leanings, which freed me, as a big landowner, from all suspicion of representing interests.... And then your husband is chosen, as a Protestant, to be above all attacked and condemned for his friendship with Catholics, and therefore he stands before Freisler [the rabidly Nazi judge] not as a Protestant, not as a big landowner, not as a nobleman, not as a Prussian, not as a German but as a Christian and nothing else. ���The fig leaf is off���, says Herr Freisler. Yes, every other category was removed. ���
Von Moltke���s trial was a revelation to him, for in it he discovered the meaning of his life, which lay not in what it had produced or built, so much as what it enabled him to say���in its witness. In that moment his life was disclosed as a long and subtle process of preparing him to be in a position to give a clear and utterly unambiguous answer to Freisler���s questions. This is why, in spite of the fact that he was about to die violently and unjustly at the hands of a triumphant tyranny, he was able to conclude his last letter thus:
My life is finished and I can say of myself: He died in the fullness of years and of life���s experience. The task for which God made me is done. I end by saying to you by virtue of the treasure that spoke from me and filled this humble earthen vessel:
The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ
and the love of God
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with you all.
Amen.
Christ Church Cathedral
19 July 2019
The lesson which I read was Abraham���s plea to God to spare Sodom, referred to abover by Henning von Tresckow:
It runs, in the Authorised Version from which I read:
(NB, the underlining of the passage has no significance. It is a weird computer glitch which I have tried repeatedly to overcome, but cannot)
The First Lesson is written in the first book of Moses called Genesis, the eighteenth Chapter, beginning at the twentieth verse.
And the LORD said, ���Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know.���
And Abraham drew near, and said, ���Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?
And he said: ���If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it.���
And he spake unto him yet again, and said: ���Peradventure there shall be forty found there.���
And he said, ���I will not do it for forty's sake���.
And he said, ���I will not destroy it for ten's sake.���
The second lesson, from the First Epistle of Peter, was read by Ruth Hildebrandt Grayson, daughter of the German Protetsant Franz Hildebrandt, arrested by the Nazis and then exiled, who was a great friend and admirer of George Bell.
��� Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you:
But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.
If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you: on their part he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified.
But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters.
Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.
For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?
And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?
Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.���
Another discussion of the death penalty, on Talk Radio
This is slightly better than the LBC discussion on the death penalty . It begins at 25 minutes
https://talkradio.co.uk/radio/listen-again/1564077600#
July 26, 2019
And Another Student Interview
Some readers may be interested in this rather aurally scratchy encounter, or at least may enjoy the recording of 'Jesus Christ The Apple Tree' which comes at the end.
https://www.mixcloud.com/edward-howard3/what-would-your-ideal-world-be-20-peter-hitchens/
July 25, 2019
Why I have Given Up Active Engagement in Politics - an interview with John Anderson
I recently gave this interview (the second I have done with him) to John Anderson AO, a former Deputy PM of Australia, and a prominent conservative in that country.
In it I explain how I came to realise that it was futile to expect that any conservative idea, however well-argued, however practicable and however well-based in fact, could gain acceptance in post-revolutionary western politics. I also speculate that the refusal of the Left Wing Ascendancy to listen to critics such as me had helped to create such figures as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, who are in fact pretty much what the left mistakenly imagine me to be.
https://johnanderson.net.au/conversations-featuring-peter-hitchens-part-ii/
July 23, 2019
Some Thoughts on a Fine New Film 'Never look Away'
I hesitate to recommend the film ���Never Look Away���. It is very long, it is German, and there are bits of it that even I don���t wholly like. On the other hand, it is one of the best and most moving films I have seen in recent years, full of beauty and horror, full of lovely music and full of Germany, that utterly fascinating country of which we British know so tragically little.
It is made by the same director who gave us that triumph ���The Lives of Others���, the polyglot Roman Catholic aristocrat Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. If any readers here have not seen that marvellous work of art and drama, please get hold of it, however much you may be put off by subtitles. You will very quickly forget that there are subtitles at all, and the story is so powerful and important that you will feel bereft when it ends. Although the story at the centre of the plot is in my view quite impossible, and relies on people behaving as they could not really have done, it is still a tremendous morality play and an uplifting human drama.
Something very similar could be said for 'Never Look Away'. Although it is loosely based on the life of a real German artist (Gerhard Richter - who, in my view understandably, declines to see it) it has an almost Dickensian reliance on coincidence and on a mighty central mystery which runs beneath everything and is at last revealed to destroy the villain and console and compensate the mistreated hero.
I have nothing against this myself, as I think we all seek justice, this desire being at the core of ourselves, and that art can reasonably do the same.
What is more, the stretch of the canvas, from Dresden in 1937 to the pretentious art world of rich, aimless 1960s West Germany, via a longish spell in a very interesting corner of the old East Germany, gives it a historical power all of its own.
So does the theme of art. It opens ��� and this is a brilliant idea which really ought to have been taken up before- at one of exhibitions of ���Degenerate Art��� which the National Socialists sent travelling round the Third Reich at that time, to reinforce propaganda against Communists and Jews, and to promote a new sort of German art, racially pure, austere and realistic. There was a risk in this. Opponents of the regime might, by their attendance at an officially-encouraged event ��� demonstrate doubts about the Hitler state without any risk. I expect some of them did. On the other hand, there was a risk for them too. I have no doubt that the Gestapo secret police kept a careful eye on those who attended, and on their deportment as they did so.
The young hero Kurt Barnert ��� at this time a small boy - is taken to the exhibition by his youthful, beautiful but worryingly disturbed aunt (a word which has never been applied, I suspect, to anyone so beautiful), Elisabeth . They listen together as a callow Nazi functionary explains what is wrong with modern art. At one point he uses the old ���a child could do it��� line, which I think we are meant to scorn.
Of course, and this must be upsetting for a lot of us, some of what he says about some of modern art���s deliberate ugliness, pretentiousness, scorn for the ordinary person and lack of form is true (as we shall see again later) , though of course this is not an argument for the suppression of such art, or the persecution of those who produce it, which is what the Nazis did. Those of us who generally prefer representational to non-representational art have been cursed ever since by the fact that Hitler took the same view. Well, too bad. He was also very much against smoking, as I am, hated slaughterhouses, as I do, and a vegetarian, which I am not but which I can see the sense of. We just have to cope with these random convergences.
Some modern art, as Charles Ryder tells Cordelia in Evelyn Waugh���s ���Brideshead Revisited��� is indeed the most tremendous bosh. On the other hand, as Elisabeth herself explains in a rather startling way later that evening, some modern art can go tearing through the soul and the mind with enormous power.
But is at this time that the photograph is taken of Elisabeth and her nephew Kurt, who for some reason is pointing a finger out of the frame (at what or whom we do not know). It is a very moving picture, because of the great beauty and youth of both people in it, because they appear to be a mother and child ��� perhaps the single most recurrent theme of all Christian painting. It is based on a real picture eventually celebrated as the foundation of a major work by Gerhard Richter.
And here the pretty picture of 1937 Germany, the glories of an unbombed, serene Dresden, the happy countryside, the gathering of the white-clad girls, including Elisabeth, for what seems an innocent festival, turns poisonous.
The girls are the Bund Deutscher Maedel, the female Hitler youth, and Elisabeth has been chosen to present a bouquet to Hitler himself. Hitler's foul influence, from then on, is ever-present. Kurt���s father is driven from work as a teacher because he will not join the Nazis, but is under pressure from his more practical wife who urges him to make this little compromise for the sake of the family (as many must have done). It will, in the end, destroy him quite horribly, but I for one am unable to claim that I might not have done the same, in such times, with a family to support and the power of the Nazis seemingly stretching ahead into infinity. And then Elisabeth becomes insane. This again is based upon a true story, though we cannot know what was involved.
Here an ordinary middle-class family are rapidly shown that the Hitler state is not just a more efficient, neater Germany, but a hissing, unmerciful monster which turns ordinary individuals into demons. The doctor, with his Nazi Party badge half-concealed by a white coat, says that under new rules to safeguard the German stock and its inheritance, he must report Elisabeth���s illness to higher authority. The family, sensing rather than knowing that this means nothing but harm, have known the doctor���s father and grandfather as family physicians for years. They plead with him not to. He pretends to agree but as soon as they leave the room he lifts the telephone and begins a process of evil which will not reach its filthy, corpse-littered terminus for several years, but begins with the almost unwatchable kidnap of Elisabeth from her home by men in white coats, wielding syringes. This is the first point at which the film���s puzzling title comes into play - for Elisabeth has urged young Kurt never to look away. Nor does he.
And there the gigantic Dickensian saga of unlikely coincidence (some of it based on real events), apparently unpunished evil and an abiding mystery. Who has murdered Elisabeth? Will they meet justice? It carries us through the bombing of Dresden (which cleverly does not try too hard to be immense, but instead is portrayed by the sight of a child���s pram bursting into flames in a death-filled small apartment); it contains a particular, emotionally puzzling set of events after the Red Army have arrived, in which I found myself almost cheering a moment which I knew would allow a very bad man to escape justice which he very much deserved. He later goes on to do an almost exact reversal of this good act. If there is a pattern of justice in the early part of the film it is not one easily understood by men.
And then on into Communism, understood better than most people ever do, Socialist Realist Art, treated seriously, the settling of some scores and the avoidance of several others, a sweetly-executed scene at the Friedrichstrasse crossing point in Berlin, very much as I remember it from the 1980s, but in the days when East Germans could still (with luck) escape to the West that way. Just in time.
And so to the West we come, all moral storms seemingly over, nothing to aim for but success and money in the hazy sunshine of the High Sixties, in an affluent, unfriendly West Germany quite without purpose or morals, the rebirth of modern art a good deal more ���degenerate��� than anything the Nazis scorned, and our hero at the heart of it (often humiliated and thrown down by the new world in which he find himself) until a sudden twist of wind in the street outside the Dusseldorf art school at last reveals what that pointing finger has been aimed at all along.
For some reason that I cannot readily explain, Kurt���s pointing finger made me think repeatedly of Rembrandt���s great painting of Belshazzar���s Feast. This contains no such pointing finger itself, but a mysterious, disembodied hand writing in letters of fire. It is all about the revelation of horror, the coming of justice and discovery to one who thought himself above it.
As it is written in the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel, of Belshazzar, the Babylonian King who profanes the Jerusalem Temple���s plundered vessels by using them at a feast:
Belshazzar, whose bowels melt at the sight, summons Daniel to interpret the writing, which he does after a brief lecture to Belshazzar on his idolatrous ways:
���And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
2This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.
TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
���.In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.���
Well, it is not quite that final in the film, though I think the villain is utterly ruined and silenced by the realisation that his sins are discovered and have risen out of the grave to reproach him.
I���d add something else here. The National Socialist eugenics programme, which is really the bloody core of this drama, is one that is often treated as a prelude to the far greater mass-murder of Jews. Nothing wrong with that as such, as I���m fairly sure that it was partly used to accustom Germans to the violent disposal of those not viewed as part of the National Socialist ���Community��� The Nazis��� horrible cruel sneering at the mentally ill or otherwise imperfect was surprisingly open and noisy, and based on a selfish appeal to the common good ��� why waste precious resources, so badly needed for others, on such people. Importantly it also met very courageous public opposition from Archbishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, the aristocratic Bishop of Muenster and from the Lutheran Bishop of Wurttemberg, Theophil Wurm (both, surprisingly, survived alive).
Yet nearly 300,000 people, some mentally ill, some with Down���s Syndrome, died in this episode, many of them long before Auschwitz even existed. And this fact contains a whisper of difficulty for some people, in my view.
This is because eugenics was once a fashionable view on the European Left (Marie Stopes, heroine of the birth control movement, was a keen eugenicist, who wrote of her intention ���...to counteract the steady evil which has been growing for a good many years of the reduction of the birth rate just on the part of the thrifty, wise, well-contented, and the generally sound members of our community, and the reckless breeding from the C.3 end, and the semi-feebleminded, the careless, who are proportionately increasing in our community because of the slowing of the birth rate at the other end of the social scale. Statistics show that every year the birth rate from the worst end of our community is increasing in proportion to the birth rate at the better end, and it was in order to try to right that grave social danger that I embarked upon this work���. The organisation by which she hoped to achieve this was called the ���Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Mrs Stopes also (in August 1939) sent a copy of her ���Love Song for Young Lovers' to Adolf Hitler because ���Love is the greatest thing in the world���.
Nice, Social Democratic Sweden was also once quite keen on sterilising those it thought unfit to breed https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/mar/06/stephenbates
The great unmentionable now is that it is abortion which is used to get rid of the unwanted. The comparison was made here at the Church of England���s General Synod https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/10/rate-downs-syndrome-abortions-uk-europe-akin-nazi-eugenics-church/
Make of it what you like, but can we guarantee to see evil among us at the time it is going on? Others, who thought themselves as good and kind as us, have not. It does not always appear in the same guise. It is often done by apparently good people, and for seemingly good motives. I mention this because, like the Rembrandt painting of Belshazzar���s Feast, the thought more than once pass through my mind as I watched this vast, engaging history play.
Anyone who sees it will, I think, always remember Elisabeth, always remember the pointing finger, and (I hope) never pass a man or woman scrubbing stairs without wondering how they might have come to be doing that, how we might find ourselves doing that, and remembering that those we barely notice around us, doing menial things, are fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, wives and husbands. Do see it if you can.
***Soon, I hope to write about a service in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, which I recently attended, held to recall the brave men who took part in the plot against Hitler 75 years ago. ***
July 22, 2019
A new discussion about, yes, drugs on BBC's 'Sunday Morning Live'
Well, they invited me. You may watch it here. It begins at 19 minutes, with the presenter asserting as fact the questionable and contentious idea that marijuana is a 'soft' drug less dangerous than others. Just saying.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00071g4/sunday-morning-live-series-10-episode-6
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