Surrender, Deterrence and Drugs

Some responses to contributors: I’m angrily told that it’s ‘nonsense’ to say that this country surrendered to the IRA  in 1998. Right.  Let’s go through this:

So, we released hundreds of convicted criminals. We dismantled the Royal Ulster Constabulary, including its highly effective Special Branch,  replacing it with a neutered, politically corrected UK-style ‘Police service’. We dismantled costly and effective surveillance equipment all over Northern Ireland. We permitted Sinn Fein, uniquely among all UK political parties, to raise funds overseas.  We withdrew almost our entire military presence from Northern Ireland. We made it illegal to fly the United Kingdom’s national flag from public buildings except on a few designated special days. We allowed Sinn Fein into government. We said that a referendum could be held at any time on the transfer of Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic. And that if there was a ‘yes’ vote our Parliament would immediately and without question transfer a large piece of our national territory to the sovereignty of a foreign country.  Voting would then cease. On the other hand, in the event of a ‘no’ vote, the referendum can be held again every seven years until it comes up with the right answer.

 

In return we got:   An unsigned promise of non-violence, followed by the Omagh bombing (the single worst atrocity of the Irish conflict), an unverified and non-transparent alleged ‘decommissioning’ of IRA weaponry , plus a number of violent bank-raids, the McCartney killing, a great deal of unrestrained protection racketeering,   smuggling etc by persons, er, connected with the IRA,  and the mysterious activities of the various ‘Continuity’ and ‘Real’ IRAs (sometimes extending to bombing attacks in mainland Britain) , which have never been punished by the Provisional IRA (a major breach of tradition in that movement, which in the past has never been slow to enforce unity with the gun , see Irish Civil War). Activities of these deniable outfits tend coincidentally to intensify whenever Sinn Fein wants more rapid movement in its direction in political matters in Northern Ireland. As an added ‘malus’ (can this be the opposite of ‘bonus’?), similar concessions were made at the same time to the self-styled ‘Loyalist’ gangsters.

 

Thus, the British state openly and verifiably disarms, disbands and withdraws its armed forces, their weapons and intelligence systems.  It disbands an effective police unit. It hauls down its flag and increasingly restricts expressions of loyalty to the flag, while permitting the widespread display of the flag of the Irish Republic. It also introduced, in street signs and public buildings (see the new railway station at Newry for a striking example of this) , the increasing use of the Irish language, a tongue not widely spoken in Northern Ireland but of great political significance for the Republican movement.   A part of the United Kingdom’s national territory has since 1998 been placed under provisional, conditional sovereignty, under notice of transfer to the control of a foreign power following a referendum which can be indefinitely repeated until this transfer is effected, and which cannot, once effected, be reversed. The rule of law is systematically violated to suit the enemies of the British state.

 

In return, the principal beneficiaries of this agreement, the Provisional IRA, are not even required to sign it, and do not so. Nor do their political representatives, Sinn Fein.  Many of their most effective operatives are freed from imprisonment. They are allowed to retain the weaponry, and its deterrent and menacing power, which has gained them the concessions they seek. Though they are one of the most bloodstained and effective terrorist organisation of modern times, they are entirely exempt from the measures directed against Middle eastern and Islamic terror groups and their political front organisations in the ‘War on terror’, and are welcomed in the White House.

 

Well, if this is how we treat Sinn Fein after we have ‘defeated’ them, how would we have behaved if they had defeated us?

 

By  the way, what does it have to do with the issue whether the surrender saved lives or not? The French surrender in 1940 saved hundreds of thousands of lives , but few would argue that made it a victory, or a good thing. Sometimes things are worth fighting for. Sometimes things are worth fighting against. As for the prosperity of modern Northern Ireland, most of that results from temporary subsidies. Let us see how things look, when they dry up.

I ask you. I cannot help it if people aren’t paying attention, but I decline to be told off by Mr ‘J’ because of his weird Marxoid fantasies about bankers and the ‘fanatically Left-liberal and philo-Unionist southern Irish state class, government and media.’  Fanatically left-liberal *and* philo-Unionist? One or the other, surely. But not both. Anyway, I seem to remember SF fighting doughtily against the Lisbon Treaty in the referendum campaign on that subject. Credit where it’s due. The point remains, Britain surrendered in 1998 by any rational measure, and it is time we recognised it.

 

Trident was absolutely no help in resisting the pressures which forced us to do so. Nor could it have been.  Nuclear weapons had one simple purpose – to counter and neutralise the enormous conventional forces deployed by the USSR in central and eastern Europe. These – especially the GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces in Germany -were a serious and genuine threat. I have always enjoyed this post-Cold War revelation by Vice Admiral Ulrich Weisser, after plans were found for the Communisation of West German Cities :

 

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930316&slug=1690795

 

Of course, everyone knew that the weapons were unusable. It was their unusability that paradoxically made them effective.  Most sensible people in positions of power realised, after reading accurate accounts of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that a general nuclear war was an absurdity. While there is a  theory that , if you build a big arsenal, you are bound to use it, this does not really work with nuclear weapons. It often didn’t work in othr instances either, because the conditions for its use passed, or because it became obsolete. The indecisive Battle of Jutland, for instance, showed that both sides were too scared of losing their fleets to engage in a full-scale trial of strength. Admiral Jellicoe was rightly described as ‘the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon’, a burden he clearly felt very strongly. All admirals knew of and were haunted by  the catastrophe of Tsu Shima, a Russian national defeat which can be said to have led eventually to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the only truly decisive combat of the battleship era.

 

 His opponent, Admiral Scheer, had more to gain and less to lose, since Germany, even without a fleet, would have remained in the war. But neither man could fully risk the enormous investment of national treasure and prestige under their command.  The horrible humiliation of the battleship and battle-cruiser, at Taranto by us (this forgotten British naval triumph is said to have given the Japanese the idea for Pearl Harbor)  , and then at Pearl Harbor itself and off Malaya by the Japanese,  put an end to that era forever. The last great naval battles, at Midway and Leyte Gulf, confirmed the superiority of the aircraft carrier.

 

 Once Mutual Assured Destruction was established (its misleading acronym, MAD, has tended to blind people to its essential sanity) , nuclear weapons placed a roadblock in the way of war which frustrated politicians all the time. We know (see Suez, Syria, Libya, Mali, Yugoslavia) how much democratic politicians love to go to war, and we also know that dictatorships and despotisms have quite a taste for it as well. But once MAD was established, war in Europe was pretty much impossible. Everyone knew that, once they began a move towards war, it would inevitably lead to a nuclear exchange which would be the end of the world. So they never did. What movements there were (the walling-off of Berlin, the crushing of rebellion in Budapest and Prague) were done with the cynical consent of NATO, which had implicitly accepted that Europe beyond the Iron Curtain was none of its business, in return for an implicit recognition by the Warsaw Pact that events west of the line were not its concern either. By the 1980s, the West was becoming worried about the obvious economic decline of the East, and wondering how to manage it rather than how to conquer the other side’s territory. They still haven’t really cracked the problem, as is shown by the mass migration westwards of so many former subjects of Leonid Brezhnev’s failed empire.  

 

I have often wondered whether there ever really were functioning nuclear warheads in our Polaris and Trident missiles. I have also wondered whether the boats’ captains and second-in-commands would actually have launched their weapons in retaliation if the moment came. As their missions (essentially a bluff)  would by then have failed, what would have been the point of destroying the only source of possible reconstruction?  

In one of his last reasonably good books, ‘The Russia House’, John le Carre speculated on whether the Soviet nuclear deterrent was really as accurate as we liked to claim on its behalf. For MAD had by then become a sort of industry sustaining the unending modernisation of American weapons at huge expense, and it would have – as it is said to be in the novel – deeply unwelcome to many Americans if this turned out to be true.  

 

I still have copies of a wonderful Pentagon publication of the Cold War Era, ‘Soviet Military Power’ full of beautifully-clear and impressive reconnaissance photographs (or, where unavailable, imaginative paintings) of Soviet warships, bombers, missiles and advanced radars,  giving the impression of a sleek, modern military machine. My own direct experience of Soviet military equipment, after some years of glasnost and perestroika, was that there was a lot of it, that it worked in a crude sort of way, but that I had some doubt about its reliability or modernity in matters of high technology.  The helicopters were particularly alarming. Had they been serviced by a drunk man, or a sober one? You couldn’t know, but your life would depend on the answer. I hated getting into them.

 

As for the manpower, much of it was demoralised and slovenly.

 

This contest was a bit of a ‘noble lie’, in fact. It worked for our apparent benefit for many decades, keeping us in the front rank of nations, or seeming to be, despite the disappearance of our empire and the shrivelling of our wealth.  It did keep the peace in Europe (though not in the East, nor in the Middle east,  where terrible proxy struggles between the Cold War Titans were licensed to take place without any nuclear umbrella to restrain them).  Alas, as it now appears, we allowed this illusion to comfort us too much. If the Cold War had never ended, our national decline might have been slower (in fact I’m sure it would have been) , and our allies would have been less willing to betray or rob us than they have been in the past 20 years.

 

But the fundamental problem of who we are and how independent we can really be, would only have been postponed a little longer.

 

A Mr Kev King writes ; ‘I wondered if you would use the tragic and horrible death of a good man to make a point about drugs or the death penalty. You rarely disappoint, Mr Hitchens.’

 

I am baffled by this. Why did he wonder, if he did not himself notice the connection between the culprits’ drug abuse and the wholly irrational and extraordinarily savage attack on an innocent man going about his kindly business on Christmas Eve.  

Here is a bloody murder by a complete stranger, motiveless, explicable only by wild unreason. The man who unquestionably wielded the pickaxe handle was a cannabis user. To suggest a connection is not to ‘use’ the event, but to make a valid social criticism of an establishment which regards cannabis as harmless fun. On the contrary, as I showed here once before to the shrikes and squawks of dope’s selfish defenders, it is often associated with acts of appalling cruelty and violence. My point remains that, whatever its effects may be, however varied they may be, and however hard it may (or may not) be to establish the direct causal chain between the taking of a powerful mind-altering drug and the commission of a horrible crime, the public relations legend that cannabis is ‘soft’ and ‘peaceful’ is not supported by such episodes. Dispute that, you spokesmen for DopeCo .

 

It always amazes me that an exploitative commercial product of this kind attracts the keen partisan support of types who no doubt drink fairtrade coffee and rage against the exploitation of mankind by the makers of burgers and fizzy drinks.

 

Oh, and ‘David’ said : ‘Well no you didn't 'predict' that he was on cannabis you said they might be which is hardly a prediction.’

 

I’ll stick to my position. I could not *know* the killer was a cannabis user, since I did not know who we was, so I could not state it as knowledge. But I believed it was highly likely that the ‘peaceful’ drug was implicated(because of the irrational and ultra-violent nature of the crime, also because of the great prevalence of dope-smoking in the modern British underclass thanks to the collapse of law-enforcement) and so I kept a careful watch on the reports to see if I was right. I had no power to influence the trial or the investigation. Yet the fact eventually emerged.

 

'David’ further asks ‘Also how many times have you been wrong about predicting anti depressant use in Mark Saunders and Andreas Brevik? ‘

 

In what way was I 'wrong'about Mark Saunders? His inquest heard (Independent 21st September 2010) that ‘The barrister [Mark Saunders] had taken cocaine over the previous 48 hours and was on antidepressants at the time he died.( ‘The Times’ and ‘The Guardian’ of the same date confirm that he was taking antidepressants).

 

In the case of Anders Breivik  I wrote as follows :’It's the drugs, stupid. In hundreds of square miles of supposed analysis of the Norway mass murder, almost nobody has noticed that the smirking Anders Breivik was taking large quantities of mind-altering chemicals.

 

‘In this case, the substances are an anabolic steroid called stanozolol, combined with an amphetamine-like drug called ephedrine, plus caffeine to make the mixture really fizz. I found these facts in Breivik’s vast, drivelling manifesto simply because I was looking for them.

 

‘The authorities and most of the media are more interested in his non-existent belief in fundamentalist Christianity. I doubt if the drugs would ever have been known about if Breivik hadn’t himself revealed this.’

 

Again, in what way was I wrong?