The Usual Abuse - Number One in a Series

 Ah well. I know that a number of people will accuse me of ‘complaining’ and having a ‘thin skin’ simply for writing what follows. There is nothing that can be done about them, except to advise them not to bother, and to say once again that all I am trying to do is to set down the facts, and explain to my readers how the modern world works. I am used to it. I am not surprised by it. I am not specially wounded or bothered by it. But I continue to think that it is fundamentally wrong, even so. By describing it carefully and justly,  I hope to make it less likely in future.

 

In this case, we have yet another example of the closed minds of much of the media, and the difficulty of getting any sort of dissenting ideas even discussed, let alone accepted.

 

When I finished my new book on drugs, ‘The war We Never Fought’, I ended the preface by saying: ‘I can only hope that this book manages to open a few generous minds to the truth, while preparing myself for the usual abuse’. I was remembering in particular an intemperately hostile review of my book ‘A Brief History of Crime’ in the ‘Observer’, about 10 years ago, whose author has subsequently apologised to me.

 

Now, in today’s ‘Observer’ I find the following review here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/14/narcomania-review-war-never-fought

 

It is by Nicholas Lezard, an entertaining writer whose articles in the New Statesman I quite enjoy. I have never knowingly met him, have never reviewed any of his books (if he has written any)  nor have I run over his cat on my bicycle, or in any other way given him cause to lower me into a vat of slime. Yet his ‘review’, if it can be granted this status, is, how shall i say? Not necessarily intended to be helpful?.

 

There’s no Court of Literary Appeal to which I can go to get Mr Justice Lezard’s ruling modified or reversed. The last time a writer in that newspaper attacked me, my brief letter in response was not published the following week– a rather shocking breach of a pretty basic convention that you should at least be able to defend yourself, promptly if briefly,  in the letters column when personally assailed in the pages of the paper involved. So, while I shall write in rebuttal, I don’t expect that it will necessarily be published, and I know that if it is, it will leave much unsaid.

 

So I will explain here why this review was inadequate and unjust.

 

I will begin with the sound of the clock striking thirteen, repeatedly, usually a sign that all that has gone before must be mistrusted, and that all that comes hereafter needs to be treated pretty cautiously as well.

 

Mr Lezard first shows that he is slapdash with facts when he says that I work for the Daily Mail. This is an elementary mistake. Lots of uneducated and ignorant people make it, but he has no excuse. He has since tried to explain this by saying that my work appears on the same website as the Daily Mail’s output. I might - sort of - accept this from a half-educated student dwelling in a bedsit in Middlesbrough. But Mr Lezard is a Metropolitan journalist, who well knows the difference between the two papers, and must have noticed that his ‘Observer’ Review  appears on the ‘Guardian’ website. Does this mean his review appeared in ‘the Guardian’. No, it doesn’t.  And the frontier between the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday is far more distinct than that between the Guardian and its Sunday sister paper (Mr Lezard, for instance, writes for the ‘Observer’ and for the ’Guardian’. I have never written anything for the Daily Mail).   

 

I think he has made this error because in the earlier part of the review, as full of praise for a book he agrees with as he is full of bile for mine, he makes a crowd-pleasing and juvenile attack on the Daily Mail.

 

But then Mr Lezard’s grandfather clock strikes thirteen again. And this is rather more serious. He writes ‘By his own account [he means my own account], he [me] has not even touched a drop of alcohol since he was 15’.

 

Regular readers here will know that (to the horror of one contributor, who views this as a monstrous debauch) I was until recently consuming half a bottle of red wine a night. And I have often discussed this matter here, if anyone wanted to check. Or he could have rung me up if he wanted to check. I’m easy to find. True, in recent years I’ve found I don’t have the capacity for so much wine any more, and can barely manage a glass, perhaps two or three times a week. But ‘not even touched a drop of alcohol since he was 15’? What is the origin of this claim? And worse, what is the origin of the suggestion that I made this claim? I really must ask Mr Lezard to explain. And I will keep on asking until he does.

 

Now, there’s another thing about reviewing books. I try, as hard as I can, to read from cover to cover any book I plan to review. Sometimes this is technically difficult, as with a book of Philip Larkin’s poetry , interspersed with other writings, that I recently reviewed  for an American magazine. In the end I wrote an essay about Larkin, and praised the book for its valuable, unique resources. But if it is a book of sustained argument, biography, history or (come to that) fiction, then you have to read it properly before you review it. This is particularly important if you want to give it a pasting. Heavens, how I struggled to get through the denser Marxising of Eric Hobsbawm’s last collection. But I did, till my head hurt and my brain glazed over.

 

You will now see why this is important.

 

Ding! The clock strikes thirteen again. For Mr Lezard haughtily takes me to task for referring to ‘this clique of “modern unconventionals” (the clumsy coinage is Hitchens’s, and wears thin even sooner than you might have expected)’.

 

Well, if Mr Lezard will turn to page 70, he will find that the coinage was not in fact mine, but Richard Crossman’s, and that I had a purpose in using it, because of its application to a significant and influential section of Britain’s leftist intelligentsia, who in the 1930s had privately begun to adopt the morality for which radicals propagandised in the 1960s, and which is regrettably common today. He will find that, in a letter to Zita Baker (with whom Crossman had an adulterous affair, and who aborted his baby before the pair eventually married), Crossman described them both as ‘modern unconventionals’. Not long before this, Crossman is thought to have had an affair with the poet Stephen Spender. Adultery, abortion and homosexuality - modern and unconventional indeed, in 1938. I am sorry Mr Lezard doesn’t like the expression, but he will have to find some way of communicating his disapproval to its inventor, Richard Crossman.

 

Alas, wrongly blaming me for the phrase in a slapdash review, and then hilariously attacking me for a ‘clumsy coinage’ which is specifically not my own, will not achieve this. Mr Lezard needs to explain. I shall keep on asking him to do so, until he does.

 

Ding! Now it is thirteen o’clock yet again. He partially quotes me as saying ‘It would be wrong to attribute Crossman’s moral attitudes to the entire Labour intellectual hierarchy.’ He then (without in any way giving the context) finishes the statement with the words ‘But not wrong to attribute them to some, or most of the intellectual hierarchy’. He then denounces this as a ‘weaselly formulation’ (well he , says ‘formation’, but I am sure he meant ‘formulation’).

 

Why does he do this?

This is how the passage actually continues :  ‘But it would be fair to say that most of them would have been happy with the label ‘modern unconventionals’, and – like many of their equivalents today – would have seen nothing very wrong in a little self-stupefaction. But they would not have wanted to say so in public.’

 

This passage follows a reference to the famous episode when Crossman was among several leading Labour Party figures who, having been correctly accused of drinking heavily while at a conference in Italy, sued the Spectator magazine for libel, perjured themselves in court and won substantial damages. Crossman confirmed the truth of the allegations in his own diaries (and elsewhere, see below) . Thus those involved were drunk, sought to conceal it to avoid the wrath of voters, and then lied in court for gain.

 

As Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote in the ‘Guardian’ of 18th March 2000 ‘In 1957, an article in the Spectator skittishly suggested that three Labour politicians had been drinking a good deal at a Socialist conference in Venice. The three, Aneurin Bevan, Richard Crossman and Morgan Phillips, sued, testified on oath to their sobriety, and won large damages. Fifteen years later, Crossman boasted (in my presence) that they had indeed all been toping heavily, and that at least one of them had been blind drunk.’

 

I see nothing weaselly in drawing conclusions from that about the moral attitudes of the Labour elite. Nor, given the drinking involved, is it irrelevant to attitudes towards drugs.

 

Ding! Mr Lezard’s clock strikes thirteen again. In a crude and abusive summary of my argument, he suggests that I rely on the concept of the silent majority (‘of which he presumably includes himself, not that silence is the overwhelming impression one has one contemplating him’, oh ha ha).

 

Nowhere in the book do I use the phrase. In fact I strive as hard as I can to avoid it all times, being unconvinced that my view is held by the majority, and unconvinced that a majority validates an opinion. Nor do I think I am part of any such thing. What I do say is ‘despite decades of propaganda for decriminalisation and “harm reduction” policies, many voters refuse to accept that the legalisation of cannabis is a wise or good aim. They are supported by several international treaties, which still bind the British government to maintain laws against certain named drugs. That is why the legalisation of drugs in this country has been pursued so dishonestly, and so stealthily.’

 

Note the ‘many’. Not ‘most’. Not the ‘silent majority’. Just ’many’. Also note the point about the treaties. Does Mr Lezard doubt the truth of this?

 

Now we come to the single nastiest part of the review. It runs thus, first quoting me : ‘I think it is fair to say, in the light of these facts" (says Hitchens, although none of the reality-based statements made in the previous few pages have anything to do with what he goes on to say) "that the current campaign for legalisation, or what is euphemistically described as 'regulation', of some illegal drugs is based either on grave ignorance of the issues, or upon deliberate dishonesty."

No, it is not fair to say. As I have said, Hitchens is an honest man. But he knows nothing whereof he speaks; ‘

 

Right.

 

The passage in question appears on page 59. This is the sixth page of a chapter entitled ‘what about alcohol and tobacco, then?’, addressing an argument often put forward by defenders of drug liberalisation. Immediately before this passage I discuss the reasons for the failure of American ( and Iranian, and Soviet) alcohol prohibition, the dismantling of alcohol restrictions in this country, the former success of the temperance movement here, the 1915 licensing laws, the government’s ‘harm reduction’ approach to cannabis, the contrasting flint-like nature of the state’s campaign against cigarettes.

As for the pages before that, they deal with a rebuttal of the 'Harm Principle' argument, a diuscussion of the connection between cananbis and violence, a comparison of the present pro-cannabis campaign with the 1950s and 1960s attempts to defend cigarette smoking from evidence that it was dangerous, and a discussion of the connection between cannabis use and mental illness.

If Mr Lezard cannot see what these things have to do with the issue of legalisation  (so often advocated on the basis that ‘prohibition does not work’) then he needs to pay a bit more attention.  I think he needs to pay more attention in general.

Readers of his ‘review’ will have little idea of what the book is about or of what it contains. Can that possibly be good?