Here's the entire EU debate in 9 words: Do you want to be a servant of Brussels?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I don’t care what the Queen thinks about British membership of the European Union. Her opinion on the subject, just like everyone else’s, is her affair. And it wouldn’t influence me one bit.

But if she’s as against it as some claim, then it’s odd that she allowed herself to become an EU citizen, a status which means she can’t legally be our Sovereign any more.

Her neutrality is a myth, though we have to wonder whether her Ministers press her to make contentious statements from time to time.

In this populist era, the monarch must either fight and face probable removal, or do as he or she is told.

Nobody really doubts that she sought to influence the Scottish independence referendum last year. And in 1998 she went out of her way to endorse the Blair Government’s surrender to the IRA.

In her 2004 festive broadcast she proclaimed ‘diversity is indeed a strength’ – a Royal endorsement of political correctness that a lot of us could have done without.

Last Christmas, five years after heaping praise on the timeless beauties of the King James Bible, she quoted scripture from an ugly, modern translation.

This odd record doesn’t suggest to me that she is hiding a fervent desire to return to the days of national independence.

I don’t think, when it comes to it, that many people do have such a desire. I have had it, for years. It is almost painful in its intensity, a choking, sometimes overpowering sense of loss.

But I have been struck by the normal response to the subject – shrugs and yawns. I am frankly baffled by the arrival in the ‘leave’ camp of so many people in politics and the media who never showed any sign of caring until the day before yesterday.

So no wonder their arguments are so uninspiring. David Cameron is dead right that people like me are prepared to pay a pretty stiff economic price, if necessary, for national liberation.

As a great Polish patriotic poet once said: ‘Your nation is like your health – only after you have lost it do you really appreciate its worth.’

I couldn’t care less what the CBI or the TUC or the Bank of England or the British Chambers of Commerce think about the EU. This isn’t a business transaction. You might as well go to the MCC or the British Federation of Lepidopterists, or a convention of stamp collectors, and ask them how to vote.

It isn’t about money or about jobs. It’s an instinct and an intuition. It is about that priceless thing, governing yourself, going out if necessary, into the biting cold – rather than staying warm and comfortable by being someone else’s servant or subject.

Each of us must decide this for himself or herself. If you need to know what anyone else thinks, then you don’t care enough and you’d be better off remaining the obedient citizen of a subject province that pretends to be an independent kingdom. No wonder this is such a dull campaign.

A THREAT FAR BIGGER THAN PUTIN

The noisy promoters of a ‘New Cold War’ rage and shriek at the wrongdoings of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, even though Russia has no designs on us and poses less of a threat to this country’s freedom and autonomy than Jean-Claude Juncker or Angela Merkel.

How odd that these people seldom if ever say anything about Turkey’s swollen and increasingly dangerous despot, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

President Erdogan, who rules his spectacularly corrupt country from a gigantic new palace, kills his own people by thuggishly suppressing peaceful demonstrations. He hates criticism. His political opponents are arrested at dawn and tried on absurd charges.

He throws journalists into prison and seizes control of newspapers that attack him. He has been one of the keenest promoters of the disastrous Syrian war, which has turned millions into refugees and hundreds of thousands into corpses.

He is an intolerant religious fanatic, and curiously unwilling to deploy his large armed forces against Islamic State. And now he seeks to blackmail Western Europe into allowing his country into the EU and dropping visa restrictions on Turks, not to mention demanding trainloads of money.

If we do not give him these things, then he will continue to do little or nothing about the multitudes of migrants who use Turkey as a bridge into the prosperous West.

And yet for years he has been falsely described as a ‘moderate’ by Western media flatterers, and his country has been allowed to remain in Nato, supposedly an alliance of free democracies.

He is a direct threat to us. Yet the anti-Putin chorus never mention him. Is it because they cannot pronounce his name?

Or is it because they have a silly phobia about Russia, left over from the real Cold War, and aren’t paying attention to what’s really going on?

A year ago we were all fascinated by the horrible crash of a Germanwings A320 jet, brought about by its suicidal pilot.

But now that the likely explanation has come out, there’s almost total silence. Could this be because that pilot, Andreas Lubitz, turns out to have been taking a gigantic dose of ‘antidepressant’ pills, among whose known side effects are terrifying dreams, suicidal behaviour and ‘severe thoughts of suicide’?

Just as nobody pays any attention to the presence of benzodiazepines and amphetamines in the flat of the San Bernardino mass murderers, or the use of ‘antidepressants’ by at least one of the Columbine school killers (the other shooter’s medical records, absurdly, are sealed), nobody wants to know about this either. Time we did.

Carol’, the anonymous accuser of the late Bishop George Bell, alleges this once-revered man sexually abused her nearly 70 years ago. Last week the same ‘Carol’ took to the airwaves to accuse Archbishop George Carey of ignoring a complaint of abuse from her, which she claimed to have sent him while he was in office (1991-2002).

This highly damaging charge followed Lord Carey’s attack, in The Mail on Sunday, on the way the Church has handled the case. Now ‘Carol’ has apologised personally to Lord Carey. It turns out that she had got the wrong archbishop, and was thinking of someone else.

Hurrah for the MPs who halted the nasty plan to make Sunday even more commercial. People need a common day of rest, when families can gather. Germany, which seems to have a far more successful economy than we do, still maintains a near-total ban on Sunday shopping. People somehow manage.

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David Cameron's Rush to War CAN be Halted ....if we try

I really don’t think anyone has any business being more pessimistic than I am. And while I’m grateful to, and cheered by, those of you have heeded my call to write to your MPs urging them to oppose British bombing of Syria, I am exasperated by those who have said (and many have)

 

‘It’s a foregone conclusion, and acting against it is a waste of time.’

 

 I even gather that some MPs who oppose the bombing have replied in this defeatist tone to letters from constituents.

 

May I remind those who say this that I was told exactly the same thing in 2013 when I also tried to mobilise opinion against Mr Cameron’s last attempt to go to war(on the opposite side) in Syria?

 

And then the votes were counted and lo! , Mr Cameron had lost his vote .

 

I believe he has been peeved about this ever since. Whenever he struts about at any international conference, he feels the other leaders are whispering ‘That’s David Cameron, the man whose Parliament won’t allow him to use his air force’, and sneering.

 

I believe he thinks this makes him a second-class statesman, that he’s not a proper leader unless he can order bombers to pound foreign places whenever he feels like it.  He clearly felt that Ed Miliband had wrongly robbed him of an opportunity to bomb, and he clearly resents it, as he shows every time he speaks about it.

 

I do wonder how that picture of him strolling past an RAF Typhoon jet at Northolt (where Typhoons are not normally based) on his return from Paris came to be taken.  As far as I know, Typhoons, are more or less useless type of air superiority fighter built at great expense some years too late for World War Three, in which they would supposedly have tangled with Soviet Mig-29s and Su-27s over Germany in ultra-modern dogfights.  They certainly have no current role to play in bombing ISIS. I gather they’re now to be modified for some other purpose, utterly unsuited to their design and capabilities, but that’s another story.

 

As well as Churchill syndrome, he seems also be suffering from a galloping case of Blair’s disorder, a desire to be seen alongside and among fighting men.

 

But since then things haven’t gone entirely to plan. People have noticed that the Defence Review was mainly notable for trying to undo stupid mistakes made by the Cameron-led Coalition a few years ago (the worst being the crazy scrapping of Nimrod maritime patrol planes, now to be replaced by expensive American equivalents) – but also for seeking to conceal the bad mess we have got into over Trident replacement, now badly delayed (like almost every major capital infrastructure project in the country) and overrunning its costs (like almost every major capital infrastructure project in the country). Not to mention trying to find something to do with Gordon Brown’s vast and unusable aircraft carriers (HMS White Elephant I, and HMS White Elephant II) which are as suited to the shrunken coastal defence force now known as the Royal Navy as a ten-gallon Texan hat would be to the actor Toby Jones.

 

They also fail to conceal the pitifully small Army which limps on after the dreadful cuts Mr Cameron himself imposed upon it.

 

Our national defence, truth to tell, is in a dreadful mess, hopelessly unbalanced by the ludicrous machismo of the unusable Trident, which frightens nobody and which we don’t even control, and poorly placed to respond quickly to the sudden dangers which are the main concern of any serious defence planner.

 

And in the midst of this Mr  Cameron wants to get us into another war. People have asked why our involvement in Syria is worth opposing, since it is likely to be politically and militarily ineffectual - see Patrick Cockburn’s superb article in today’s  (25/11/2015)‘Independent’ for a discussion of the uselessness of the plan here

 

http://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-independent/20151125/281522224998772/TextView

 

 

It is mainly because these interventions are often the beginning of something much bigger and longer-lasting ( as those of us who can recall British troops being welcomed to Londonderry in 1969 by Roman Catholic Irish families can recall) .

 

There is also grave danger of unintended consequences, as the Turkish destruction of a Russian jet on Wednesday showed. Which sides are we really on in this five-sided war of almost everyone against almost everyone?

Turkey and Russia are both ostensibly attacking Islamic State. Yet Turkey has shot down a Russian plane, and Turkish-backed militias claim (appallingly) to have killed the pilots as they parachuted to earth. Since neither Russia nor Turkey seems to have been wholly frank about their intentions, can we be sure Mr Cameron (whose selective loathing of President Assad is great and unassuaged) is being wholly frank about his aims? Has anyone really asked him what they are, in a place where he has to answer? I hope they do.

 

And to encourage those who have yet to write to their MPs asking them to vote against this adventure, I reproduce below the Monday article in which I explained the strong case against war :

 

Please Act Now to Oppose Irrational Intervention in Syria

Right. I have decided what to do about the Paris atrocities and ISIS, assuming (as everyone does, though evidence for this is so far scanty) that they are directly connected.

 

I would like to do something else, but I can’t. My influence on British foreign policy is non-existent, so that arguing for co-operation with Russia, Iran, Bashar Assad and the Kurds, and for serious action to bring about a peaceful settlement in Syria,  will make no difference.

 

So instead I have decided to concentrate on the urgent task of trying to prevent David Cameron getting a majority for British military involvement in Syria. This would undoubtedly make matters worse, has no good reasoning behind it, and may well contain long-term dangers we can barely conceive.

 

So I must ask all my readers in the United Kingdom to write or e-mail their MPs, as soon as possible, politely, concisely and cogently,  urging them to vote against any such intervention. This may conceivably affect events. I believe similar action may have done so the last time David Cameron wanted to go to war in Syria (apparently for the opposite reason for which the seeks to do the same now, but this is not wholly clear) , in September 2013.

 

I offer the arguments below, in case they wish to link to them in their e-mails, as a summary of the case against.

 

Why Change our Minds Now?

Emotion is a poor guide to strategy. Recent events in France, Sinai and elsewhere have rightly angered and distressed civilised people. But our emotions don’t excuse is from thinking. Some of the worst decisions in history have been taken on the basis of emotion. What is for certain is that there is no good reason for Parliament to change its mind on the subject.

 

Indeed, action was opposed by a recent (2nd November 2015) report by the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the only up-to-date dispassionate examination of the matter in this country. You may read it here

 

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmfaff/457/45702.htm

 

 

The Committee argued only a few weeks ago that such an intervention would be legally questionable, militarily marginal, politically unpredictable, diplomatically complex and perhaps incoherent.

 

Some may argue that last week’s UN Security Council resolution changes this to some extent. However, the resolution was vague, not operational, and did not authorise military force.

 

As the New York Times pointed out here….

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/world/europe/un-security-council-approves-resolution-urging-countries-to-combat-islamic-state.html?_r=0

 

…..the resolution offers ‘no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes the use of force.’

 

 

Downing Street briefings have not directly contradicted this, but have somehow managed to give a rather different impression, suggesting that the new resolution changes the legal position when in fact it does not. This, er, confusion about the legality of action and the meaning of UN resolutions gives me a strange sense of déjà vu. Perhaps someone should ask Lord Goldsmith about it.

 

The full text of the resolution may be found here (scroll down to reach it) :

 http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sc12132.doc.htm

 

Those who genuinely think that British participation in the bombing of Syria would instantly change the balance are living in a world of fantasy. Our forces are small, and will make little difference ( assuming they share the same aim) to the efforts of the US and France already under way.

 

See paragraphs 22  and 23 of the Foreign Affairs Committee report:

 

‘In military terms, we noted that although our witnesses believed that a decision to extend airstrikes into Syria would be welcomed by Coalition allies, some said that it would not have anything other than a marginal effect. The experts told us that it would not be likely to involve extra aircraft but would simply re-focus existing assets; that the UK was already contributing valuable surveillance in Syria; and that the ability to conduct airstrikes as well would not have a decisive effect. Sir Simon Mayall concurred, adding:

 

“There are not that many of them, actually. This is not an air campaign anything remotely like the scale of 1991 or 2003. We need to be very clear about this. This is not a war-winning air campaign, by any stretch of the imagination.”

 

‘23.As a result, several witnesses concluded that there was little reason for the UK to change its policy. Julien Barnes-Dacey was strongly against the proposal and told us that the airstrikes make the threat from ISIS worse (my emphasis, PH) because they “feed a sense of radicalisation”:

 

“Sunnis say, ‘Look, the West is not helping us against Assad, but they are fighting ISIS.’ […] We become direct parties, all the while contributing nothing meaningful, in terms of military numbers or capability. I really fail to see how air strikes against ISIS will not do more harm than good.”

 

In paragraph 33, the reasoning of the select committee is quite clear: ‘…we believe that there should be no extension of British military action into Syria unless there is a coherent international strategy that has a realistic chance of defeating ISIL and of ending the civil war in Syria. In the absence of such a strategy, taking action to meet the desire to do something is still incoherent.’

 

In paragraph 35 it seeks the answer to several important questions, which I think the government will have some difficulty in answering if there is any sort of coherent questioning and debate in the Commons.

 

Enabling the House to reach a decision

 

35.The Government should explain the following points before asking the House of Commons to approve a substantive motion authorising military action:

 

a)On an international strategy:

 

i)How the proposal would improve the chances of success of the international coalition’s campaign against ISIL;

 

ii)How the proposed action would contribute to the formation and agreement of a transition plan for Syria;

 

iii)In the absence of a UN Security Council Resolution, how the Government would address the political, legal, and military risks arising from not having such a resolution;

 

iv)Whether the proposed action has the agreement of the key regional players (Turkey; Iran; Saudi Arabia; Iraq); if not, whether the Government will seek this before any intervention;

 

v)Which ground forces will take, hold, and administer territories captured from ISIL in Syria.

 

b)On the military imperative:

 

i)What the overall objective is of the military campaign; whether it expects that it will be a “war-winning” campaign; if so, who would provide war-winning capabilities for the forces; and what the Government expects will be the result of extending airstrikes to Syria.

 

ii)What extra capacity the UK would contribute to the Coalition’s actions in Syria.

 

36.We are persuaded that it is not yet possible for the Government to give a satisfactory explanation on the points listed above. Until it is possible for the Government to address these points we recommend that it does not bring to the House a motion seeking the extension of British military action to Syria.’

 

Whether your MP is Tory, Labour or SNP, she or he really ought to be aware of these arguments, and able to explain why she or he plans to ignore them if she or intends to support the new rush to war.

 

There is no excuse, if you write to your MP, for any of these politicians to claim afterwards that they were unaware of opposition to the plan, or misunderstood the effect of the UN resolution, or were unaware of the severe political and military drawbacks listed so recently by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

 

The recent atrocities have not in fact changed the material position. So why would a responsible, informed or thoughtful MP, whose decisions can in the end lead to the dropping of bombs, the drawing of this country into yet another endless and insoluble foreign conflict in which its aims are, to put it kindly, unclear, suddenly switch to supporting intervention? Bullying by the government whips or a desire to please Mr Rupert Murdoch and his media should play no part in such matters of life and death.

 

Please act now. For all the government’s claims that it is still pondering the matter, I believe there is a strong chance that it will ambush the Commons with a vote soon before it rises for Christmas on 17th December. That gives those who oppose this hasty and ill-considered action only a very little time to mobilise the forces of truth and reason against those of emotionalism, bombast and irrational panic.

 

I note that Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill are already being invoked, a clear sign that Munich Syndrome is raging in Whitehall, and especially fiercely in Downing Street itself. This is the delusional and historically illiterate belief that all crises are identical to the Czech crisis of 1938,  that all this country’s enemies are identical to Hitler,  that the sufferer is Winston Churchill reincarnated (he tends to growl in the later stages of the complaint) and that anyone who criticises him is Neville Chamberlain resurrected.

 

There is no known cure, but lying down in a darkened room with a cold compress on the brow and an umbrella to hand can relieve the symptoms.  

Some Immediate Thoughts on the New Crisis in Syria

Just who is fighting whom in Syria? I should have thought this was the thing we most need to know before getting involved. Some years ago, before this war was a cause, I began receiving private letters from a worried British woman married to a Syrian Sunni Muslim, then living in Latakia.  Her main motivation was fear about the danger to the quiet, contented life which she and her family were then living and now are not. They are now, like so many others, refugees. I think she hoped that some discussion of this in the media might avoid such an outcome. I only wish it had been so.

 

After some checks, I believe them to have been authentic. She described the worrying appearance in that country of armed, heavily-bearded militiamen speaking Arabic in a way quite different from that in Syria.

 

I was an unlikely choice for Syrian state propaganda. I had for some years been writing rude and disobliging articles, when the opportunity arose, about Syria’s habit of massacring rebels, its discrimination against Jews, its harbouring of the Nazi refugee Alois Brunner, a  mass-murder of children,  its undoubted involvement in the attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard an El Al jet at Heathrow and its probable (in my view ) involvement in the Lockerbie bomb, strangely attributed to Libya. I thought the cosying up to Syria which followed its support for the anti-Saddam coalition in 1991 was absurd. I thought the West’s use of Syrian torturers to interrogate suspects, taken there on rendition flights after September 11^th 2001, was disgraceful. My main motive for these articles had been Zionist. I am a strong supporter of Israel’s continued existence, and had long regarded Syria as one of the main threats to that.

 

So when a certain Tory MP (whose career has since exploded amid farcical revelations about his private life) accused me of being some sort of Syrian patsy, I was actually astonished, and sought (but did not get) a retraction.

 

My interest in this issue was motivated by puzzlement  - and also by a pained sympathy for the lady who wrote to me from Latakia. I have also found it all too easy to imagine myself becoming a refugee, driven from my home by war. It has happened in my lifetime to far too many people who thought themselves quite safe, as we do, and as you probably do. You are not. Some fool may even now be devising the plan that will eventually force you out on to the road with a few belongings, leaving your house in ruins or in the hands of strangers. It makes me angry that people behave in such a way that this sort of thing happens.

 

It seemed clear to me that there was a strong lobby for ‘democracy’ in Syria, with powerful supporters in Washington DC. This had been pressing for worsened relations between the USA and Damascus for some time before the protests began. I have learned to be suspicious of such lobbies for two reasons. One, they are generally selective about their desire for democracy (the lovers of democracy in Syria seem pretty unmoved by its total absence from Saudi Arabia, its suppression in Bahrain and its defeat and erasure in Egypt), and therefore must have other real motives. I have since heard that French diplomacy underwent a similar convulsion, with Paris demanding a strong anti-Assad line against the doubts of some of its experienced diplomats. I strongly suspect that something similar has happened in London. It is possible to guess that the reason for this is the strong alliance, based upon oil and arms sales, between some Gulf states and those three countries.  Those states are Sunni Muslim, whereas Syria was broadly secular and on good terms with Shia Iran.

 

 

Two, their allies are unconvincing.  I have no doubt that the various factions which formed the Free Syrian Army and other Syrian opposition groups have genuine grievances against the Assad state. Almost everyone in Syria does, It is a cruel, and presumably corrupt, despotism with little to be said for it save that it had until recently been internally peaceful, and that it maintained unusual levels of mutual tolerance among its varied peoples.

 

But I have huge doubts as to what sort of state they would create, were they to overthrow Assad. We are repeatedly assured that they are quite distinct from Islamic State, a body to which we attribute almost supernatural powers of horror and intolerance. They need to do this, or people might notice its very strong similarity to the current government of Saudi Arabia, also given to ferocious religious intolerance, beheadings and so forth (and currently engaged in a pretty appalling aggression against Yemen) , though less inclined to publicise them on YouTube.

 

But I am not wholly convinced by these assurances that these people are our friends and allies. I do not think that Christian and Shia people in Syria are convinced by them either. They back Assad not because they love him but because the alternative is a Sunni theocracy in which their lives would be enormously worse. Quite a few Sunni Muslims, the famous moderate Muslims of whom we hear so much, seem to have taken the same view, since they continue to play such a large part in Assad’s Army. He would have fallen long ago, were this not so.

 

To me it seems absurd to imagine that defeat for Assad would not pretty much immediately mean that the Islamic State extended its power to Damascus and Aleppo. The supposedly non-extremist fighters against Assad are certainly not pro-Western, and the divisions between them and ISIS seem to me to be slight.

 

Of course, a compromise peace would be good. Like all conservatives I believe very much in such arrangements. But the main obstacle to such a peace has been the absolute refusal of the rebels to contemplate any deal that left Assad in power. Every conference which has attempted to bring about a deal has foundered on this point. As I have many times pointed out our righteous modern insistence on trying and imprisoning (and sometimes hanging) overthrown tyrants, has made them  understandably reluctant to step down, so losing the sovereign immunity that keeps them safe from being hustled into a cell. The shocking and barbaric murder of Colonel Gadaffi in a Libyan drainpipe (an event which launched new horrors in that country) might also encourage any embattled head of state to battle on rather than show any weakness. Those who genuinely wanted peaceful amelioration of Syria would see this, make a deal and get all the concessions they could pocket while allowing Assad to stay.

 

But his foes, and the supposedly wise and responsible great powers of the West, have pursued a policy of all or nothing. They have got nothing, except unending and terrible war.

 

And now Russia has joined it, attacking Assad’s enemies, not necessarily ISIS. My heart sank when I heard this news, as I cannot see it ending well. I had hoped an agreement was still possible. Now I fear a limitless conflict, with ghastly implications for our peace and prosperity.  Russian exasperation is understandable. But unilateral action of this kind is just wrong, and destroys any prestige Vladimir Putin had gained from his behaviour at the UN.

 

It sank even further when I heard the American response, full of machismo and entirely lacking in caution or subtlety. I immediately contrasted the American reaction to Turkey’s supposed decision, some months ago to join the war against ISIS. This was naively welcomed by western politicians and media. In fact Turkey has barely attacked ISIS at all, but has instead launched repeated attacks on the Kurdish forces who have been inflicting serious reverses on ISIS in Kobane and elsewhere. This is all to do with Turkey’s dismal internal politics, often discussed on this blog, and nothing to do with the safety of the Middle East from murderous fanaticism. Yet the hostility and scepticism which greeted Russia’s attacks on people whose victory would help ISIS were quite absent when Turkey launched attacks on people whose defeat would help ISIS. Why?

 

Here’s a question to ponder. If (and I think this is the actual choice) you had to choose between Syria being run by Assad or by the opposition to Assad; and if the victory of the opposition was highly likely to benefit ISIS; who would you then want to win? And if the answer is ‘the opposition’, how can those who seek that end claim in reality to be opposed to ISIS, which will benefit so much if their wish comes true.

 

Russia may have thought this through more carefully than the USA. But the Kremlin has still made a terrible mistake. The USA is no longer run (as Russia still is) by disillusioned cynics seeking the least worst outcome. It is in the hands of Utopian idealists and there is no limit to the horrors they can unleash upon the earth in the names of freedom and democracy. Ask anyone in Baghdad. Meanwhile the British government is in the hands of political teenagers whose combat experience –if they have any at all – was gained at the dinners of the Bullingdon Club.

What's really criminal? The way our 'leaders' let thugs walk free

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The crevasse between people and politicians is matched by a bottomless chasm between official figures and the truth about life in modern Britain.

Like all ruling castes in the grip of dogma, the Government responds to trouble by pretending it doesn’t exist.

There’s an economic boom that leaves most people feeling poorer, and lots of new jobs that turn out to be empty self-employment.

There’s a massacre of unborn babies that conceals the utter collapse of sexual restraint and responsibility. Even the dwindling marriage figures are artificially boosted by people faking wedlock to get citizenship.

There are schools whose victims walk away dazed after 11 years in full-time ‘education’, barely able to read or count the sheaves of alleged qualifications with which they have been issued.

Some of them are then persuaded to go deep into debt to attend grandiose ‘universities’ which will at least keep them out of the jobless figures for another three years.

And then there’s crime. The simplest way to reduce this is to decide that lots of crimes aren’t crimes any more, so the police stop trying to prevent them and they become normal.Then, you fiddle the figures – until the fiddles are exposed.

Now, a new form of deception is being employed. It is called ‘Out Of Court Disposal’, and it’s just a way of magically making crime disappear by not doing anything to the people who commit it.

In some police areas almost half of crimes are dealt with in this way. The lowest figure is 26 per cent – a minimum of a quarter of all reported crime, swept under the carpet and unpunished, throughout the country.

Generally that means the transgressor gets a ‘caution’ or some other vacuous non-penalty. More than 7,000 of the offences written off in this offhand way last year involved violence. There were 82 robberies and 20 rapes.

Even the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, a body so decayed in mind and force that it recently listened with rapt attention to the ‘evidence’ on drugs of the supposed comedian Russell Brand, recognises that 30 per cent of these outcomes are ‘inappropriate’, that is to say, utterly inadequate for the crime involved.

The truth is that, if the police and courts tried to enforce the laws of England as they stand, we would need about a million police officers, hundreds of new courts and a Gulag-sized penal colony in which to house the resulting prisoners.

The whole thing has been out of control for years. The poorer you are, the more you will know this. The closer you are to the political elite, the less you will know it. It is only when the drug-addled robbers begin hammering on the front doors of the elite that they will stop pretending this is a ‘moral panic’ and recognise that there is something wrong.

Well done in China William - now go and shake hands with Vladimir Putin

Prince William, quite rightly, has been consorting with the bloodstained tyrants of China, still up to their unapologetic armpits in gore from the Tiananmen Square massacre, and still cramming critics into an enormous unjust empire of prison camps, the Laogai.

We have to deal with these people because that is what the world is like.

Similarly, we maintain our alliance in Nato with Turkey. That wildly corrupt country’s increasingly erratic President Erdogan persecutes and imprisons his opponents, and has just moved into a megalomaniac 1,000-room palace in Ankara, costing £400 million and 30 times the size of the White House.

It contains a special laboratory in which five experts analyse President Erdogan’s meals for suspicious substances, a 21st-Century version of the food-tasters of ancient times.

In light of this, how can we get so hoity-toity about President Putin of Russia? His crimes are undoubted, but our faked-up moral outrage is as absurd as Mr Erdogan’s palace.

Alliances, royal visits and trade missions for some despots, sanctions and sermons for Mr Putin. It makes no sense.

You’re being fooled, as you were over Iraq 12 years ago. Please don’t be.

Yet another attack on your pension pot

Gordon Brown was rightly loathed for his state-sponsored raid on the pension savings of Britain’s thrifty classes.

Well, who would you like to blame for the latest version of the same thing – six years of state-imposed flat interest rates that have cost the country’s savers £130 billion?

This vast theft of cash from the careful and responsible will mean a pinched old age for many of its victims, who foolishly thought they lived under a government that supported and protected people like them.

Don't fall for Cameron's school con

Gove and Cameron have both turned their backs on having academically selective schools in every town

How strangely our attitudes change.

When Anthony Blair got his sons into an exceptional, elite state school, much of the world howled in derision.

He pretended to support comprehensive schooling, which he knew in his heart was a failure. And then he pretended he wasn’t pretending.

Now, by some strange alchemy, Tory politicians are doing the same thing, and are being praised for it.

David Cameron and Michael Gove have both turned their backs on the one reform of state schools that would put good education back in the reach of the poor – academically selective grammar schools in every town.

Yet both have sent children to a school that selects instead through the public embrace of faith.

Yet is it Christian for rich professionals to fight with sharp elbows for sought-after places in rare good state schools?

Grey Coat Hospital is a comprehensive only in the sense that Number 10 Downing Street is an inner-city terraced house.

Is it so wonderfully egalitarian, to send your child to a school whose uniform must be bought from a Chelsea department store, and where fewer than one in six pupils qualifies for free school meals

I found out a few months ago that Nick Clegg is astonishingly ignorant about the drug laws in this country.

He really believes that the police cruelly persecute drug users (if only they did).

Ignorance of this kind is wilful. The truth is readily available. He remains ignorant because he does not want to know. Why?

As evidence piles up that cannabis is a dangerous drug, those like Mr Clegg and the businessman Richard Branson should be incessantly asked what their interest is in backing the risky cause of decriminalisation. It is certainly not in the interest of the young people of this country.

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

An Article in the Spectator on the Russia-Ukraine crisis

The London Spectator has today published this article by me appealing for more reason, and fewer adjectives, in coverage of the Ukraine crisis (or as Mr Jaremko prefers: 'London Spectator has today published this article by me appealing for more reason, and fewer adjectives in coverage of Ukraine crisis').

 

 

http://bit.ly/1EigWry

 

 

 

What Do We Know About the Paris Outrages?

I thought I would try to tot up what we know about the Paris murderers. We know what they did. We presume  we know why they did it. But are we right to treat Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly as a co-ordinated unit? And if not, what did motivate them?

 

I would stress that I do not claim to know. What follows is simply interested speculation, informed by my own known views on this subject. I offer it for discussion and examination, not as a solution. Our knowledge is imperfect, and may always remain so, since the main actors in this horror are dead.

 

Their own various claims seem to me to mean little. Why should such people be assumed to be telling the truth about themselves, in the middle of a crime?  Claims of membership made either by them or by various organisations are uncheckable and could easily be empty boasting.

 

And are we right to treat them as highly-organised and trained jihadis? And what about Hayat Boumedienne, wife of Coulibaly, niqab-clad crossbow-wielder etc? She is now reported to have been in Turkey, presumed to be on her way to Syria, before the outrage took place.  Reuters have reported :’The suspected female accomplice of Islamist militants behind attacks in Paris was in Turkey five days before the killings and crossed into Syria on January 8th, [Turkish]Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was cited on Monday by the state-run Anatolian News Agency as saying.’

 

Those dates would put Boumedienne in Turkey before the violence in Paris began, leaving for Syria while the attackers were still on the loose.

 

 

In the first days of any event such as this, reporters struggle to get hard information, rumours and unconfirmed reports rush through the air. It is very difficult to get reliable facts. I understand this.  The first proper acccounts of the Septeebr 11th 2001 massacre did not emerge for a long time after the event. Much is still secret or 'redacted, nearly 14 years later.

 

But there’s also, it seems to me,  a bit of a desire to find a pattern, one which makes the events fit the idea (common in governments, security services and newsrooms) that we face a co-ordinated Islamist conspiracy against our ‘way of life’, wich can be countered by increased surveillance, restrictions on liberty, and greater so-called 'security'. 

 

The alternative, that most European capitals now contain an underclass of chaotic mentally unstable drifters, drug abusers and petty criminals, sometimes employed in dead-end jobs such as pizza delivery, sometimes not, whose empty lives can, alas, be given meaning by Islamic utopianism, is less explored.  It’s less exciting.  It gives much less support to lobbies for ‘tough’ laws, ‘crackdowns’ and surveillance. I think it should be considered. Careful, attentive  policing of these parts of society might yield more than any amount of crackdowns and surveillance on the rest of us.

 

This, by the way is *not* precisely the same argument which I apply to the ‘lone wolf’ attacks of Woolwich, Sydney and Ottawa. 

 

The Paris murderers can more properly be referred to as ‘terrorists’, though Coulibaly less so than the others, because his initial crime – the random shooting of a jogger at Fontenay-aux-Roses - was so utterly wanton.  His later murders of hostages were likewise acts of utter stupid cruelty, not even explicable by the fanatics’ own perverted code. (Note to would-be twisters and misrepresentation merchants: I am not, by saying this, excusing or condoning more politically purposeful murders. I am simply making a distinction between different types of despicable, indefensible crime, because I think that distinction may one day help us prevent similar outrages).

 

When Coulibaly murdered a policewoman at Montrouge, which might in his twisted mind have had a political or religious purpose, he also shot a roadsweeper in the face, leaving him critically injured (I have been unable to learn more details of his fate) . That action (like the shooting of the jogger, linked to Coulibaly by bullet casings found at the scene (though the victim says his assailant wasn’t Coulibaly) is inexplicable by any political or religious creed, and cannot have been connected to or ‘synchronised with’ the Charlie Hebdo massacre, nor done in response to alleged ‘orders’ by any supposed terrorist High Command.  

 

It is just random, moronic, inexcusable,cruel violence. Given the unending possibility of my being misrepresented by my critics,  I must point out once more, quite explicitly,  that my selection of these crimes for special mention is not aimed at in any way excusing or lessening the condemnation of the more obviously political crimes against journalists or Jews.

 

I mention them because , like the Kouachis’ initial attempt to enter the wrong building in their attack on Charlie Hebdo, and their shooting of a maintenance worker when they first entered the building, and their failure (for which we must be grateful) to kill all those they found in the editorial office, they suggest that we are dealing with not-especially-competent or well-trained killers, who have not properly planned their crime  or prepared their escape.

 

We must also be pleased that one of the brothers was so incompetent at terrorist crime that he actually left his identity card in the car they abandoned.  What sort of terrorist ‘training’ would leave someone able to do this, I am not sure. It cannot be very thorough. I do not know how much longer the French authorities would have taken to track them down without this clue. One expects that fingerprints, or CCTV images, or purchase records will eventually allow police to track culprits down. But an actual identity card in the getaway car! This discovery may have saved days. 

 

It is quite clear from the reports that both Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly had been in contact with Islamist preachers of various kinds, and one or both Kouachis travelled at least once to the Yemen though there is less information about what exactly they got up to there.

 

I do get a bit exasperated with all this talk of terrorist ‘training camps’.  Once you’ve mastered the use of a gun (and a distressing number of modern petty criminals have done this quite easily), no particular ‘training’ is required to murder defenceless journalists, or indeed to kill unprepared police officers taken by surprise. Training would be required to confront professional soldiers. But almost any fool can kill a defenceless human being, especially if he has the advantage of surprise, which terrorists almost always do.  

 

You have to be in some kind of abnormal circumstance, eitehr externally imposed or internally driven, to kill a stranger in cold blood. This isn’t at all to excuse such acts. People still know such killings are evil, and that they shouldn’t do them. The question is, how they persuade themselves that, in this particular case, it’s justified. If they’re drug abusers (again, no excuse, this is a voluntary act with known consequences) , their senses may be so dulled and their minds so clouded with hallucinations, persecution mania and phantom voices that they do not fully grasp the horror of what they are doing.

 

Evidence now suggests that this was the case with Michael Adebowale, one of the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby . I have noted before that we know for certain that Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor. A psychiatrist found him 'paranoid and incoherent', and said his symptoms were worsened by 'heavy use of cannabis'.

 

This may have been the case with other terrorist killers in recent incidents, and also with some non-terrorist killers whose crimes, though non-political, were similarly horrific. But a general lack of interest in this aspect, in the police and the media, means that we do not have enough information to say. Hence, in my view, the need for more curiosity about this problem. (Note for Ben Goldacre: by ‘curiosity’ I mean that police and media should routinely inquire into the drug habits of suspects and culprits in cases of violence, terrorist and non-terrorist. And no more).

 

Fanaticism can certainly do this, especially one which allows the killer to think that his victims are not fully human, But some other source of unreason is more than likely. The combination of fanaticism and drug abuse is plainly particularly dangerous. But, given the layers of society, in Britain and France, from which terrorist killers are drawn, fanaticism will in many cases be allied with drug abuse.

 

I have found no reports of previous blatantly irrational or unhinged  behaviour by any of the killers, though some of Coulibaly’s criminal record and his actions during his final murders seem to me to suggest a person not wholly in charge of his own actions.  Again, note that this is not an excuse. His previous life, a very wicked one, had led him to this point and he had chosen that course.

 

Of Cherif Kouachi we know that he was arrested in 2005 on the way to Iraq via Syria.  His lawyer insists that he did not  actually want to go and was glad to be caught. In prison  (where, on the Continental system, he spent more time in pre-trial detention than he did serving his sentence) he met Coulibaly, though no doubt he also met plenty of other people and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that the meeting was particularly significant.

 

The ‘radical preacher’ under whose influence he allegedly fell, Farid Benyettou, discouraged him from attacks on Jews saying that France was ‘not a land of jihad’.

 

Court records show Cherif Kouachi said he didn't consider himself a good enough Muslim, and said he had only been to the mosque two or three times before he met Benyettou, and he had been smoking cannabis.

 

Said Kouachi, Cherif’s elder brother,  was in Yemen in 2009, and there shared a flat with Abdulmutallab, attempted bomber of Northwest Flight 253, ‘for one or two weeks’. It is hard to tell whether this is significant.  ‘Intelligence officials’ quoted in various stories say he went to Yemen again in 2011 for terror training. The source is an unnamed US official quoting an unnamed French intelligence source. But the French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told Christiane Amanpour in an on-the-record TV interview that one brother travelled to Yemen in 2005. Oddly, she would not say which one.

 

Here are one or two interesting notes about the culprits.

 

 

‘Orphaned at a young age, they [The Kouachi brothers] drifted into a life of smoking drugs, petty offending and rap music ‘   , Cherif had a ‘minor criminal record’

 

 

Said Kouachi was ‘ …the only one of the three who had not been in prison in France. But he had been questioned by police and released over the Buttes-Chaumont jihadi cell in 2005.  Yemeni security officials confirmed that he had spent several months in the country, was suspected of having fought for al-Qaida and was probably among a group of foreigners deported from Yemen in 2012. Both brothers were on US and UK no-fly lists.

 

 

On Amedy Coulibaly:

He had a criminal record   “The first case was the armed robbery of a sports clothing shop. It stood out because his getaway car was in an accident and rolled off a bridge, but Coulibaly nonetheless got out of the car, badly bruised, and went straight back to school where he just sat down and got on with his class.” This does not suggest a particularly organised or co-ordinated individual.

 

 

A lawyer, Damien Brossier later defended him for an armed bank robbery. “There was a mad-dog element about him,” he said. “He was friendly, he was not unpleasant, he wasn’t hard to talk to, there wasn’t a tension. One created a superficial relationship with him.”

 

Coulibaly served  another prison term for a drugs offence before training to be a television fitter, settling in Grigny, back in the south of Paris. (Times 10/01). He has a record of small drugs and theft offences. One of 10 children and the only boy, Coulibaly became a delinquent at 17 and a repeat offender for petty thefts and drugs crimes

 

 

Coulibaly said at 3pm (to a radio station) that he had already killed four people in his attack on the supermarket - suggesting that the final assault by police was relatively successful. He also said that he had worked "in synchronisation” with the Charlie Hebdo killers. He claimed to be working for Isis. Kouachi said that he was "sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen".

Why does NATO still Exist? What does it stand for, exactly?

When I first published ‘The Cameron Delusion’, under its original title of ‘The Broken Compass’, the distinguished parodist Craig Brown tried to satirise my index in ‘Private Eye. Since the index itself is satirical (I love doing my own indexes now computers have made the job so simple) he didn’t do all that well, and , annoyingly, he didn’t mention the name of the book. But never mind.

 

One of my favourite entries was under ‘A’, and along the lines of  ‘Afghanistan, a very long way from North Atlantic’ (I’m in the middle of an internal office move and can’t lay hands on an actual copy). The point was simple. What was a body called ‘The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ doing intervening in a complex tribal struggle on the edge of the Himalayas? The location really couldn’t be further from the North Atlantic, either in miles or in nature.

 

It is odd that nobody (except, occasionally, me) really seeks the answer to this question. The reinvention of NATO is one of the strangest and most instructive changes of the post-Cold War world.  It sits in the middle of the diplomatic landscape, a great looming monolith. Why is this? What is it for? Whom or what is it against?

My explanation for the lack of curiosity is the usual one. People are, for the most part, willing propaganda-swallowers. Some of these such as Mr ‘P’, the Wiki Man, actually like the taste so much that they can’t easily be weaned off it.  I’ll pause for a moment to illustrate this, before continuing with the main topic of NATO.

 

Mr P’s struggle to avoid the truth about Ukraine has now become heroic. For instance, in a  recent contribution he wrote:

 

‘Aggression usually is, and in fact is defined as, an action detrimental to the aggressee and against the aggressee's will.’

 

But he still can’t somehow acknowledge that Ukraine’s change (following a violent foreign-sponsored mob putsch)  from being a non-aligned country to being a member of an anti-Russian economic and political alliance is not detrimental to the interests of Russia and against Russia’s (openly and repeatedly expressed) will.  

 

Mr ‘P’ also competes for the Obtuseness Olympics when he writes:  ‘In response to my point that tanks rolling over borders *is* aggression, Mr Hitchens, wafting this thought aside, merely opines, Humpty Dumpty-like, that aggression can mean many things, and in this case what Mr Hitchens wants it to mean.’

 

This is not what I say at all, and he knows it. I say that Russia’s actions are a defensive response to aggression, and that to pretend that the realignment of Ukraine through foreign intervention and the violent overthrow of its government is not aggression is to deceive yourself and (perhaps) others.

 

I’ll reproduce here part of Richard Pipes’s interesting summary of the traditional European Christian diplomacy (based on the Stoic concept of the Law of Nature ) which the Bolsheviks overthrew in 1917 ( having themselves been put in power by a German-financed putsch, which could be described as ‘aggression’, and was certainly an act of war).

 

‘International relations are confined to contacts between governments: It is a violation of diplomatic norms for one government to go over the head of another with direct appeals to its population’.

 

We all know this in any case. How many times have I asked the following questions and received no answers to them from Mr ‘P’ or his allies. How would we in Britain react if EU politicians appeared among pro-independence crowds in Edinburgh or Glasgow, distributing biscuits to them and affirming their solidarity with them?

 

And how would the EU and NATO and the State Department react if Russian politicians appeared amidst Russian-speaking crowds in Riga or Tallinn, handing out biscuits and urging a new Association Agreement with the Eurasian Union?

 

They do not answer because they know that such behaviour would be greeted by all right-thinking persons with rage and protests, and rightly so. And that it is directly comparable to the behaviour described in these links, which actually took place:

 

 

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/08/04/EU-millions-paid-for-Ukrainian-groups-behind-Yanukovych-overthrow

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-victoria-nuland-wades-into-ukraine-turmoil-over-yanukovich/

 

 

http://eastbook.eu/en/2013/12/uncategorized-en/two-days-in-the-hottest-scene-catherine-ashton-visits-ukraine/

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10518859/John-McCain-in-Kiev-Ukraine-will-make-Europe-better.html

 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/12/04/uk-ukraine-idUKBRE9B20BV20131204

 

 

Mr P also says ‘Mr Hitchens here concedes that Ukraine desires to join the EU, which is central to my overall point. ‘. I am not sure that I ‘concede’ any such thing.  Many Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs undoubtedly wish to join the EU, because they hope it will provide an unceasing pipeline of money from which they can, er, benefit.  The elites of many poor and bankrupt countries likewise believe, rightly or wrongly, that EU membership will lead them to prosperity.

 

I should have thought that Greece was a good example of the general dangers of this belief. As or the peoples of these countries, they are, alas, as ill-informed and as easily-manipulated as people generally are. Personally, I have always thought that the aim of the EU was political, not economic, and I have found that most informed continental people agree with me. It is only in Britain that we persist in seeing the EU as an economic project.  The adventures of the Euro seem to make this point quite well.

 

Whether the Ukrainian people are any better-informed about the meaning of EU membership for their lives than other populations rushed into the body by their elites, I do not presume to know. The word’ Ukraine’ is not in fact synonymous with ‘Government of Ukraine’. I have no doubt that the current government of Ukraine, installed following a violent unconstitutional putsch, favours the closest possible relations with the EU.  But, given that this putsch was backed by the EU, this is hardly a surprise.

 

Mr ‘P’ makes some silly remarks about Cuba, which is plainly in the USA’s sphere of influence, and whose problems for the past 50 years stem from Soviet meddling in the Caribbean.

 

This was comparable in provocative irresponsibility to current American meddling in central Europe. It is precisely because the USA regards Cuba as legitimately part of its sphere that it has invaded and then blockaded that island. Is this aggression, or legitimate response to provocation I should say the latter, while describing Soviet Russia’s behaviour in Cuba as aggressive, even before the installation of the famous missiles.

 

Russia’s current interests in Cuba are vestigial and, I suspect,  no more than mischievous retaliation for American meddling in the Caucasus. On my last visit to Cuba, Chinese involvement, and of course Venezuelan involvement, were miles more significant.

 

Also his reference to Humpty Dumpty is (as I have pointed out to him before, but he paid no attention) wrong. The point about Humpty Dumpty’s use of words was that he used them to mean whatever he liked, and for purposes wholly unrelated to their original use. Thus ‘There’s glory for you’ meant, in Humpty-speak ‘There’s a nice knock-down argument for you’.

 

My dispute with Mr ‘P’ is not a semantic one and certainly does not involve the total misuse of English. We agree about what aggression *is* in general.  Our difference concerns the question of whether there is any other form of aggression apart from the despatch of tanks and troops across a border.  Of course there is. But Mr ’P’ knows that his argument will collapse in ruins as soon as he acknowledges this, so he doesn’t acknowledge it. There is a word for this sort of behaviour, but I have forgotten what it is. Let’s just describe it as ‘self-serving anti-thinking’.

 

 

Mr ‘P’ offers Russia some good advice about its economy (I can’t imagine why they haven’t taken it, can you? Perhaps it isn’t as easy as it looks), thus : ‘producing goods people want to buy and opening up markets into which people want to sell. A step in that direction would be to rid the system of ex-KGB mafioso politics and oligarchical economics, get to allowing free expression throughout the media and in public discourse’ (actually speech in Russia is more free than he seems to imagine, the problem being much more that of access to major media platforms, much as it is here only more directly state-influenced).

 

Actually, this is advice that Britain could just as readily take to heart, since our indebted economy, with its miserable manufacturing base, its poor exports and its over-dependence on the City (plus its long insulation from reality by North Sea Oil)  is really not all that much more healthy than Russia’s, and couldn’t withstand the sort of attack on it now being made on Russia’s economy.

 

 

But his final paragraph enables me to slip back into the general discussion of NATO. Mr P’ writes  (first quoting me) : "The even deeper mystery is why anyone in Britain thinks that EU eastward expansion is something this country needs to or should support. What’s in it for us?"

 

 

Mr ‘P’ asks :’ What does one make of this? Is there something 'in it for us' if we don't support it? Russia won't attack us if we don't support it. Is that what's 'in it for us'? We'll get a good deal on gas prices. Is that it, or something like it? Is Mr Hitchens an appeasement-monkey?’

 

I respond that this is just a smear. Foreign policy is generally conducted for the benefit of the country involved.  Why then is Britain so keenly joining in on the side of Brussels against Moscow? I cannot myself see what direct interest Britain has in taking the EU’s side in its dispute with Russia. Britain buys very little gas from Russia, relying  far more on Norway, and has no strong commercial ties with Russia which would be affected by this conflict. I recommend, as I have always recommended, staying out of a quarrel that isn’t ours and discouraging dogmatic hotheads who seem to think it as a contest between the Shire and Mordor.

 

Mr ;P’ is one of these, it seems. He says :’ Why should we support it? Well for one thing we would be supporting the aspirations of the former and courageous Soviet satellites, understandably still nervous of the ghosts of politburos past, now rapidly becoming a very real apparition of Tsarisms past. ‘

 

People in this part of the world are indeed understandably nervous, but not just of politburos (vanished) and tsars (even more defunct). They have reason to be nervous of Germany and its ‘federative empire’  too, and if Mr ‘P’ had spent much time in that region he would know that the fear and the pressure are not always in one direction only.  

 

I am not sure what makes these former Soviet satellites, now EU satellites,  so ‘courageous’. What have they done that is so brave?  They and their people behaved just as we would behave in the same circumstances – sharing a bed with a hippo on one side and an elephant on the other - very carefully.

 

Having gained, briefly, actual independence from one empire, they have scuttled, almost as one, under the skirts of another. I should have thought it would have been braver to stay out of both. In any case, I fail to see what it matters to me, whether they look to Moscow or Brussels, as long as the conflict isn’t pushed to the extent of war.

 

But here we are again at NATO. Lord Ismay famously described its original purpose as keeping the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out …in all cases the preposition referred to Western Europe.

 

Implicit in NATO’s whole existence was that it accepted absolutely the Soviet domination of the continent from Marienborn eastwards. NATO ignored the 1953 crushing of the East Berlin workers’ rising, the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian rising, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961,  the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring,  the crushing of Polish Solidarity in the 1980s.  

 

It also had no interest in anything outside Western Europe. It had nothing important to say about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (other people began a long and dangerous process by seeking to oppose that) , nor about China’s crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests.

 

In some ways more interesting, it was pretty much of a spare part when two if its members almost came to blows over Cyprus in 1974. Turkey, then and now a member of NATO in good standing, invaded and seized North Cyprus.

 

This was a far more troubled event than Russia’s seizure of Crimea 40 years later, but it has some interesting parallels.   Like Russia’s action, it followed a violent foreign-backed putsch which installed a government in Nicosia that was as hostile to Turkey (and to Turkish concerns) as the post-putsch Kiev government was hostile to Russia and Russian concerns.

 

Its purpose was to turn Cyprus into a Greek island, rather than ( as it then was) an independent state carefully non-aligned between Greece and Turkey. Yet as far as I know, no Greek ships, planes, troops or tanks were directly involved. Was this therefore aggression?

 

Obviously it was, unless you are Mr ‘P’, who presumably attributes it to a desire by ‘Cyprus’  (the divisions in whose population he will not be able to acknowledge as real, if he applies to it the same lens he applies to Ukraine) to be aligned with Greece. But will he? I doubt it. For this was a putsch by the ‘right-wing’ .

 

At the time, Greece was of course a military dictatorship. Turkey was not, but the army stood behind the government in a pretty convincing way, and Turkish governments which annoyed the army tended not to last very long in those days.

 

Anyway, there were many atrocities during this affair, and large numbers of people were frightened or driven from beloved homes. An entire city, Famagusta, remains deserted to this day as a result. Nicosia remains divided, as does Cyprus itself.  Nobody ( apart from Turkey) recognizes the state of Northern Cyprus set up by Turkey.

 

But on the other hand, there are no sanctions against Turkey, and no attempts to destabilise the Turkish economy, just repeated patient attempts to reach a negotiated settlement. Greece and Cyprus have subsequently been allowed to join the EU (*in the original version of this post I wrongly stated that Turkey has been permitted to join the EU, which I knew perfectly well was not the case. I suspect this mistake just goes to show how the EU and NATO have become increasingly confused) , despite being in some ways party to this rather disgraceful running sore of a conflict.

 

Britain, which actually possesses large military bases next door, and was generally thought to have some lingering responsibility for an island it once ruled and had fought quite hard to hang on to, sat back and did nothing as the Turks parachuted down. Those who regarded the behaviour of the international community at the time as shameful were generally ignored. There was a great lack of blowhards demanding that we went on a war footing against Turkey.

 

Now, if our behaviour over Crimea and Ukraine is governed by any sort of universal law, advocates of the New Cold War and believers in the ‘Putin is the new Hitler’ theory will have to explain to me (once again) the lack of consistency in our approach here.

 

For it’s even more striking now. Some of you may have noticed the poorly-covered events in Turkey a few days ago, eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30468199

 

There is nothing new in this behaviour by Mr Erdogan . Yet his wickedness is little-known in this country (the other day a presenter of Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, who really ought to be in touch with such things, was so unfamiliar with him that she did not know that the ‘g’ in ‘Erdogan’ is silent.

 

I wrote this introduction to a speech I didn’t in the end deliver to the Cambridge Union a few weeks ago (there wasn’t time , alas):

 

 ‘His regime has imprisoned 70 journalists, does sinister deals with Islamist terrorists, uses ultra-violence against rebel ethnic groups,  railroads its political opponents into jail on plainly invented charges, brutally gasses, clubs and even kills peaceful protestors. He is a crude demagogue, given to violent and intolerant language. He has moved from being a parliamentary prime minister to an all-powerful directly elected president. His media are cowed or compliant  His troops illegally occupy another country’s sovereign territory, where he maintains a puppet government.’

 

No, it’s not Vladimir Putin. It’s our NATO ally, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey. 

 

 

While he is in many ways similar to Mr Putin, he has for years been the poster-boy of the Economist magazine, the head of state of a NATO member - and his misdeeds are barely-known to the noisy moralizers of the British media.’

 

Regular readers here will know of my interest in this NATO head of state, for example:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/08/mr-erdogan-changes-trams-.html

 

and

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/08/the-disturbing-picture-of-growing-repression-at-the-heart-of-eurabia.html

 

Some of you will have noticed Mr Erdogan's odd behaviour towards Islamic State and Syria in recent months, not perhaps the action of a close ally of the ‘West’.

 

Well, all of this would make perfect sense if we still confronted a potent Soviet threat, Admiral Gorchkov’s huge Black Sea Fleet (now mostly razor blades) , the Soviet Army parked up against the borders of Turkey in Armenia and of Iran in Azerbaijan, and all these powers devoted to the cause of establishing Soviet power across the globe, directed by a Communist Politburo. Against such a power, you aren’t too choosy about whose help you accept.

 

But we don’t. We face a declining, shrinking Russia whose principal sin is to complain when we try to diminish it further, whereupon we accuse it of aggression’.

 

What is NATO for? Why wasn’t it wound up, as was its mirror image, the Warsaw Pact, when the Cold War ended? Do you keep a mower when you don’t have a garden? Why then have an anti-Soviet alliance when there isn’t a Soviet Union?

 

In the years of Boris Yeltsin, as I understood it, Russia was generally regarded as a friendly power. We happily stood by, even helped, when Yeltsin retained power in a rigged election, and when he bombarded his own parliament with tanks, and sent troops into the state TV headquarters. So against what threat did we extend its umbrella into Eastern Europe and the Baltic states?  

 

What does it stand for, if Turkey can remain a member in good standing? Democracy? Sort of, though Turkey isn’t much more democratic than Mr Putin’s Russia.  Liberty and the rule of law? Hardly. Mr Erdogan is not very good at that, and nor (whisper it quietly) are some of the other members. Rigid adherence to International Law? Again, not while Turkey continues to occupy North Cyprus. Absence of corruption? Ha ha. Freedom of the press? Not exactly. And so it goes on. And what on earth was NATO doing in Afghanistan? Who knows? Didn't work out, anyway. 

 

In considering these anomalies, you may just begin to see the outlines of what may be happening, You will certainly, if you allow yourself to think about these facts , be liberated from the propaganda of the new Cold War’ advocates, and the people who think that one lot of oligarchs in Ukraine are princes of peace, love and beauty, while an equally unlovely bunch of Oligarchs in Moscow are from the nether pit of hell.

 

But, as we so often find, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think. Doesn’t the old saying go something like that?

 

Abolish the Lords! And lose all the creeps and dodgy donors

This is Peter Hitchens Mail On Sunday column

Let’s abolish the House of Lords. I never thought I’d say that, but when the facts change, I change my mind. And they have changed.

Before the Blair revolution, the Lords was full of independent minds, who owed nobody anything and could not be pushed around by Downing Street. There was no logic to  it, as there often isn’t in this country, but it worked.

It was such a good idea that even revolutionaries used to envy it. Until 1913, the US Senate was modelled on it – and so was not elected. I can’t see any signs that America has been better run since they started electing Senators. And I can  see plenty of signs that Britain has been worse run since the Blairites took over her.

Now it seems you can only  get into our Upper House after crawling to the big parties,  or after giving them piles of cash, or both at once. It’s just  a coincidence, of course, that crawlers and donors get peerages, but it’s so.

As a result it is now a worthless and rather shameful  relic, stuffed to the rafters  with exactly the sort of people who should have nothing to do with power.

 I hate it because I can remember what it once was. I can also recall the derision and mockery I received for warning that change would make it worse, and for defending the old hereditary system.

I am pretty sure that the  next Government will sweep it away and replace it with an elected senate. Unless we combine to thwart them with  a better idea, this will not be  an improvement.

Because such a senate will  be picked by the big parties, and guess what sort of people will be at the top of their lists  – why, donors and crawlers,  of course.

Just as in the House of Commons, you’ll be presented with bland, obedient pre-chosen candidates and invited to approve them in elections decided by big money and big media, in which independent minds won’t stand a chance.

They will then do what the Government tells them to do, in return for salaries and expenses that most people could never dream of. This is what we in this country call ‘democracy’.

The best thing would be to get the old hereditaries back, but our media and political classes are too stupid and malevolent to allow that.

So how about an elected British senate, but one utterly unlike the servile House  of Commons?

Here are a few suggestions: Anyone who has belonged to  or given money to any party within the past five years, to be absolutely disqualified. Any senator who later joins or gives money to a party, or receives any kind of pay, favour, title  or post from the Government,  to be automatically and instantly unseated.

I’d urge a minimum age of 50 and special allocations of seats to full-time mothers, war veterans, crime victims and pensioners, all despised and ignored by our existing Establishment.

But above all, we must destroy the tyranny of the three Zombie Parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory,  who speak for nobody but themselves and have wrecked the country.

Who'd want to be on a stamp with this lot?

Very odd postage stamps have just been launched, featuring strangely smooth Soviet-style airbrushed portraits of a very peculiar selection of Prime Ministers.

If I were the Monarch,  I’d ask for my head to be taken off these scraps of sticky paper from now on.

Who’d want to keep such company?

And I’m really not sure what’s Royal, or even British, about a former institution which has been forced into hectic privatisation by  the EU.

By rights our  stamps should feature the heads of Jacques Delors, Herman Van Rompuy and Mr Cameron’s high-fiving friend Jean-Claude Juncker.

Everyone will find someone to dislike in the gallery of Premiers provided. I’d be nervous about the fate of any letter with a Thatcher stamp on it – and it’s interesting that, despite immortalising Maggie, they decided not to risk a Blair stamp.

It’s not true that you have to be dead to be on a British stamp – several living footballers were honoured  in this way in February.

But it may well be that  Mr Blair has now become  the most unpopular living person in Britain.

And yet I remember when you couldn’t breathe a word against him.

Which of today’s admired figures face a similar reversal of fortune?

Most of them, I hope.

Strong borders save the world

Of course Sir John Major is right that immigrants generally come here to better themselves.

I have always admired the courage and determination of people who travel thousands  of often dangerous miles in search of a better life for themselves and their families.

But so what? The case against mass migration has nothing to do with the personal qualities  of migrants. It has to do with our desire to preserve our own culture, laws and language.  It also has something to do with our wish not to have wages forced down by a huge pool of cheap, easily exploited labour.

It’s also worth considering that the countries from which these people come suffer from the loss of their bravest and most enterprising young men and women.

Globalisation is all about wealth. It knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Without borders the world will become – is visibly becoming – a howling desert of traffic fumes, plastic and concrete, where nowhere is home and the only language is money.

Didn’t we once say we had brought democracy to Iraq? Yet this week we combined with the Islamic Republic of Iran to support a silent coup against Nouri al-Maliki, that country’s democratically elected premier. The ‘democratic West’ also backed the overthrow by a mob  putsch of Ukraine’s elected President Yanukovych, and by a military coup (ssshh, we mustn’t call it that!) of Egypt’s elected President Morsi.

Meanwhile, Western media and politicians are full of praise for Turkey’s new and menacing President Erdogan, who is more repressive than Russia’s Putin and memorably once said: ‘Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.’ I think he’s nearly there.

I also think our rulers don’t really care about democracy, there or here. They just say they do.

My thanks to those of you who responded so kindly to my request to write to the Iranian President seeking the release of my friend  Jason Rezaian and his wife, still alas held in secret detention in Tehran since July 22. I will let you know of any developments.

To comment, please scroll down

Mr Erdogan Changes Trams

‘Paulus M’ rightly points out that the Spectator discussion on Iraq never got round to the huge, looming problem of Turkey.  I like to think that I have been ahead of most British journalists in grasping that something momentous is taking place in that fascinating and important country. I have visited it twice on assignment, and have long mocked the ‘Economist’ Magazine for its ridiculous description of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government as ‘mildly Islamist’.

 

Here’s an article I wrote four years ago ( I was amused that some readers disbelieved the description of  Fatih, or doubted that the black-clad women I saw – and who were pictured by the photographer accompanying me - were Turkish. In fact a Turkish colleague had taken me to the district to illustrate the growth of this sort of Islamic expression in Istanbul).

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/08/the-disturbing-picture-of-growing-repression-at-the-heart-of-eurabia.html

 

 

Even the ‘Economist’ has now dropped this absurd designation of ‘Mildly Islamist’ , though it has never fully acknowledged just how repressive and despotic Mr Erdogan is, and how much more so he is becoming. Funnily enough it was not his absurd show trials and accusations of ludicrous impossible plots (the ‘Ergenekon Affair’),  nor even the imprisonment of journalists and cowing of the media, which turned opinion among naïve Western liberals . It was Mr Erdogan’s repression of a protest against the destruction of a treasured and much-loved park, and his menacing behaviour when challenged, which seemed to alter matters. During subsequent protests, Mr Erdogan’s state, like that of our friends in Kiev,  has 'killed its own people’ but without producing the wave of righteous wrath which this action brings about when done by regimes of which we disapprove.

 

In which case, of course, it isn’t really our reason for disapproving of them. Always hunt for such anomalies. You will then be able to expose alleged reasons for action as what they really are, pretexts. And you will be able to penetrate the disguises in which history advances itself.

 

This has been a particularly strange disguise. When I wrote my article in 2010, Mr Erdogan seemed genuinely keen on good relations with Iran and Syria. Since then, he has veered in a completely different direction, more or less openly helping the attempt to overthrow Syria’s President Assad, having first had a public row with him. This, it seems to me, must put him much closer to Saudi Arabia than to Iran, and the two are pretty much mutually exclusive. Since Turkey is very much a Sunni rather than a Shia Muslim country (though it has an Alevi minority who are close to Shia Islam) , and since Turkey’s days of imperial glory gave it control over what is now Saudi Arabia (not to mention Syria, Iraq, Lebanon Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and a large chunk of south-eastern Europe) , and since Ottoman Istanbul was also the seat of the Sunni Caliphate until Ataturk abolished it in 1924, these are all profoundly sensitive matters.

 

The great paradox of Turkey was that its turn to the West under Ataturk was undemocratic and repressive. So when the EU began courting Turkey, it demanded the dismantling or weakening of Ataturk’s  army-backed Deep State – just the sort of bright idea the ‘Economist’ would support.

 

Alas, the more democratic and free from the army Turkey became, the more Islamic it became. And so democracy has been used ( as it so often is used) as a means to a stronger state, though of a different kind.

 

Mr Erdogan famously said a very important thing back in the mid-1990s when he was just Mayor of Istanbul (to a journalist from the newspaper Milliyet) : ‘Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.’ ( Istanbul, I should note here,  has some very fine trams, though they don’t actually go all that far before you have to get off and find some other less smooth and modern means of travelling).

 

Imagine the fuss that would be made if Vladimir Putin said any such thing. Turkey is just as important as Russia, and indeed many more British people are familiar with it than will ever visit Russia. But Mr Erdogan’s illiberal and cynical outbursts and actions are forgiven because he is (so far) a friend of the liberal globalist movement. Mr Putin’s are not because he is not. Here’s another anomaly, clue to another pretext.

 

Mr Erdogan’s words about the tram  are  even more startling than his verses about Minarets and Bayonets, featured in the article to which I link.

 

And now that he has (almost unnoticed by a one-track British media) become the directly-elected President of Turkey, with new executive powers ( potentially despotic) coming his way, I reckon he is unstoppable. In many ways his switch from premier to president parallels Mr Putin’s. But there is so much less concern.

 

He is already making messianic orations about how a new Turkey has been reborn from the ashes of the old.

 

One of the few accounts of him which really illustrates his menace appeared in a  leader in the ‘Independent ’  . It noted : ‘The polls put him well ahead of his two rivals, a septuagenarian ex­diplomat and a young ethnic Kurd, which is not surprising, as the public has not learnt much about either candidate. Figures for last month showed that while Mr Erdogan received 533 minutes of airtime on state television to make his pitch, his two rivals got three minutes and 45 seconds respectively.

 

‘That farcically lopsided allocation of media coverage is only one of many indications that Turkey is morphing into a Russian-­style "shell" democracy, in which managed plebiscites mask the essentially autocratic character of a system containing few or no checks and balances.’

 

It added : ‘Like Vladimir Putin, Turkey's strongman specialises in the rhetoric of "us and them"; in his case, railing against a strange and unlikely combination of Jews and supporters of the US­ based Sunni cleric Fethullah Gulen, who, he insists, are plotting to destroy him. Lest anyone dismiss this as hot air, it should be noted that Mr Erdogan has made good use of these alleged conspiracies to ram through key changes, purging institutions of his opponents, starting with the army and police. When he began putting generals on trial, Western governments were inclined to applaud, seeing the Turkish armed forces as over-­fond of politics and their own privileges. But the purges have continued to the point where the only serious resistance to Mr Erdogan's whims now comes from the judges, who in April bravely struck down his attempt to ban the use of social networks.

 

‘This is where Turkey's foreign friends should really start to worry, because if - or rather when - he becomes head of state, Mr Erdogan will be able to nominate judges and sap the Supreme Court's ability to oppose him. It gets worse, because Mr Erdogan also plans to transform the hitherto largely ceremonial presidency into the beating heart of government, with the power to appoint ministers and dissolve parliament.’

 

Isabel Hunter, writing in the ‘Independent on Sunday’, gave a flavour of the man which confirms much of what Turks have told me (in many cases in private conversations which they did not wish to have quoted) :

 

‘During the election campaign, state media has been accused of favouring Mr Erdogan. Yesterday, the editor of a leading Turkish newspaper resigned after Mr Erdogan criticised the news coverage of the paper's owner, Dogan Media Group.

 

‘In a separate incident last week, Mr Erdogan lashed out at correspondent Amberin Zaman, calling her a "shameless militant woman disguised under the name of a journalist". She was accused of insulting Islam and Muslims and told she should "know her place". Yesterday another prominent Turkish journalist, Mehmet Baransu, was detained, reportedly as part of a crackdown on dissenting journalism.’

 

If Vladimir Putin behaved in this fashion, it would not be on page 27.

 

I must confess to being puzzled by Mr Erdogan’s foreign-policy trajectory - swerving towards Teheran and then towards Riyadh, and incidentally crashing into Israel (once  a Turkish ally)  on the way - just as I am puzzled by his very successful moves towards integrating the country’s Kurds (previously a harried minority) into Turkey as a whole.  Does he hope to integrate them fully, or is he ready to contemplate a nominally independent Kurdistan under some sort of Turkish ‘protection’? I have no idea. It is a thing to watch, and Mr Erdogan is a man to watch. He’s nearly reached the end of his tram ride, as far as I can see. I wonder what sort of vehicle he will use for the rest of his journey?

Is the EU turning into a Colonial Power? And Other Vital Questions

Long, long ago, not far after the dawn of time ( well, May 2004 actually) , I wrote this article:

 

 

‘ THE worst dungeons in the world are created by people who think they are doing good. Their belief in the holiness of their aims excuses almost anything. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Marxist interrogators in Moscow's Lubyanka, the cruellest torturers have been the ones who thought they were saving souls or building a beautiful new world.

 

Now it is our turn. America and Britain went into the 21st Century torture business when they adopted their new ethical foreign policy, going round the world overthrowing wicked regimes.

 

In the case of Anthony Blair, all this saintly idealism may yet lead him into the dock of one of the international courts he now claims to be so keen on.

 

The people who nearly put General Pinochet on trial may before too long find the power and the will to do the same to a British Prime Minister, especially if the Iraq war turns as rancid as it threatens to do.

 

George W. Bush will not be joining him, since he, with more cunning than his ally, has refused to submit America to any foreign judges. It was a wise choice.

 

This could go very high indeed, now that Mr Blair and people like him have spread the idea that statesmen should answer in court for atrocities done on their watch.

 

But at the moment, everyone is concentrating on the poor bloody infantry of the jails and interrogation suites, the wretched little people who did the kicking and sodomising and other twisted humiliation. They are, as is usual in these cases, disturbingly ordinary.

 

Some of them turn out to have been private contractors, cooks and drivers who just happened to be available, about as far from the hooded, sinister image of the professional tormentor that it is possible to get. And yet they did these things, before clocking off for an ordinary American evening of hamburgers, beer and TV. Sooner or later, we are going to have to find out why they thought they were right to act like this, who wrote their training manuals, and why they believed they would get away with it.

 

They do not even seem to have heard of the Geneva Conventions, hardly surprising given their own Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has bypassed these time-honoured safeguards in his prison-camp at Guantanamo and his still-more-covert, night-and-fog cellblocks at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.

 

But they probably had heard of the suggestions, seriously made by respectable American lawyers, that torture should be licensed by the state to deal with the menace of terror.

 

Private Lynndie England and her friends, dim, pathetic people in any other circumstances, were transformed into fiends out of hell because they had reason to believe that politicians and their superior officers had in some way given them permission. When they come to trial it will be interesting to see who they try to drag down with them. For it is clear that a great free nation, based upon the rule of law, became convinced it was leading a righteous struggle against total evil and could do what it liked in this cause.

 

Britain, in its turn, led by a man who makes a public fuss of his Christian faith and imagines he can save the world, decided to join in this strange, limitless conflict.

 

AMERICA turned the ruins of the World Trade Centre into the foundation of a wild, uncontrollable conceit - the 'War On Terror'. Actually, and it is now just about possible to say this without being accused of treachery or callousness, September 11 2001 was a serious but highly limited terrorist attack. It did not cripple the economy or the power structures of the US. By the standards of modern warfare, the casualties were mercifully low.

 

But George W. Bush and his closest advisers chose to make it a cause for panic and fake apocalypse. It was they who went into hiding as if America had been invaded from space, they who closed their borders in a pointless spasm of meaningless security, they who inflamed their people into vengeance and a bonfire of many of their own liberties.

 

And it was they who created the conditions under which British soldiers could be plausibly accused of beating and kicking and urinating on hooded, bound prisoners; and the conditions under which Americans indulged in perverted sadistic behaviour and then proudly photographed each other as they did it.

 

We were not saints before this. British treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya in the Fifties was a lasting disgrace, and our retreat from Empire was nothing like as kind and gentle as we like to claim. But the ideas of European superiority that allowed such barbarity vanished long ago, along with the Empire.

 

All nations do filthy deeds in war -  through desperation, haste, clumsiness, rage, exhaustion or fury. They blow civilians to pieces with bombs and shells, shoot surrendering captives or leave them to drown in freezing seas.

 

Most of us have met the very decent, kindly men who found themselves doing such things between 1939 and 1945, hardened themselves at the time, and have quietly regretted them ever since. We do not wonder often enough why old soldiers are so reluctant to talk about a war we like to think of as glorious. They saw things no man should see and in many cases did things no man should do. They were in danger, fighting an enemy who could do the same to them and often did.

 

BUT the brutal humiliation of helpless, disarmed prisoners, miles from the rage of battle, can never be excused by the ferocity of combat.

 

It is done well away from any fighting front. It requires cold-blooded, calm determination, reflection and decision.

 

The beast within us has to be coaxed out and allowed to feel safe. I do not think there is any evidence that such methods were used by Britain during World War Two, when for many years our entire national survival was in doubt.

 

Nor did the US behave in this way during that war. And, while it was certainly guilty of atrocities in Vietnam, they were the result of pent-up frustration after years of fighting against an unseen enemy who hid himself in the midst of the population. This business of piling naked men into pyramids, or tying dog-leads round their necks, or putting women's knickers over their heads, or sodomising them with broomsticks, is something new.

 

And it is by no means the worst of it. Few now try to deny that in Bagram airbase, much more severe torture and degradation have taken place. And it is pretty much accepted that the CIA has recently subcontracted torture to various Arab regimes, including Syria and Jordan, who are used to the sound of screams coming from dank cellars.

 

Perhaps we shall have to get used to it too. Like the old Soviet regime, we now have clever, charming professional thinkers who take the view that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.

 

Listen to these words, written in April 2002 by Robert Cooper, a diplomat and foreign policy adviser to Anthony Blair: 'The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open co-operative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th Century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.'

 

'Whatever is necessary' was always the licence for those who believed the end justified the means. The law of the jungle turns out to be exactly what we have been using in Al Ghraib and probably Basra too. No doubt Mr Cooper, a kindly bicyclist and ballroom dancing-enthusiast, never imagined the squalid end of such thinking, but he should have done. So should Mr Blair.

 

But our Premier was already well launched on his romantic quest to save the world with bombs and bayonets. The Prime Minister made an astonishing speech in Chicago in April 1999. It justified intervention in Kosovo - and anywhere else - on the grounds that such interventions would do good.

 

FEW now visit the dismal mess post-war Kosovo has become, but apart from all its other problems of unresolved ethnic hatred and continuing ethnic cleansing, political instability and violent gangsterism, Amnesty International reported this week that the Western occupation there is directly responsible for a huge expansion of sex slavery, engulfing hundreds of women, many under-aged, in torture, rape, abuse and crime. So much for doing good.

 

By October 2001 Mr Blair was pledging to intervene all over Africa. 'The state of Africa,' he thundered, 'is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world, as a community, focused on it, we could heal it.'

 

Perhaps fortunately for Africa, he has not yet tried to do this. But in the glow of righteousness provided by September 11, he has joined in a general assault on real human rights unprecedented in modern history. His government was feeble in the face of the gross breach of civilised rules at Guantanamo. It constantly stirs fears of terrorist outrages here, and has for the first time in modern British history imprisoned people secretly and without trial.

 

In this general atmosphere of panic, we have also seen a sad collapse of the normal rules of justice.

 

Every few weeks groups of Middle-Eastern men are rounded up amid off-the-record briefings that a new terrorist outrage has been foiled.

 

Usually, the arrested people are freed without charge, as quietly as possible, a few weeks later.

 

Even if they were charged, it is hard to see how they could get a fair trial after the treatment they have been given. But the messianic struggle against the spectre of Osama bin Laden seems to justify almost anything.

 

If there ever is a serious terrorist attack on the British mainland - and it is pretty likely that there will be -  people and government will demand culprits to be tried and punished.

 

What methods might eventually be used against suspects in our police stations to obtain the necessary confessions, even if they are the wrong people?

 

Can we now be so sure the sort of moral pollution that has gripped western troops in Iraq will not seep back into our state at home?

 

Or that, in many ways, it has not already done so, if only in the form of institutionalised lying?’

 

There’s one major error in it, which I think was pardonable at the time. It’s now pretty much accepted that Britain did use forms of torture on some German captives, in a London building , during the later years of the war(I’ll try to look up references) .

 

But I looked it up because of the mention of Robert Cooper in this article in Friday’s ‘Independent’  by the thoughtful, level-headed and knowledgeable Mary Dejevsky (a former Moscow Correspondent for the Times, who did that job with great distinction): 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/does-the-eus-involvement-in-ukraine-amount-to-a-form-of-colonialism-9251779.html

 

This article is interestingly distinct from the standard-issue boilerplate of most commentators, in both observing and assessing the current behaviour of the ‘West’ in Ukraine, which I think should be called ‘soft aggression’. It also points out that EU membership, for East European nations,  is far from being a guarantee of economic growth and prosperity, as so many media figures and politicians assert. And Mrs Dejevsky dares to use the term ’colonial power’ in reference to the EU, a truth which I think has been waiting to be expressed, but which I preferred not to use explicitly because it would be dismissed as ‘extremism’ , and so not thought about.

 

But there’s also a gripping detail. I should have known, but didn’t,  that Robert Cooper had turned up in Catherine Ashton’s office. This is yet more evidence that the EU is an extension of Blair by other means, but it also entertains the possibility that the EU is a sort of colonialist or at least interventionist power, and that those nations which it approaches for ostensibly economic agreements are actually being involved in something much bigger. 

 

Let us re-examine that passage : ‘But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th Century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.'

 

Is Russia one of those ‘old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent’? Isn’t this just a way of defining any who don’t join the post-Chicago globalist consensus as backward and beyond the pale, not entitled to the normal considerations if diplomacy and law, and always exposed to the possibility of destabilisation?  Is it therefore legitimate use deception and ‘whatever is necessary’ against Moscow? And what, precisely *is* ‘necessary’?  And isn’t it interesting that John Kerry, the American Secretary of State also refers to Russian methods as ‘19^th-century’. Actually, Russia tried to use several 21^st-century methods to deter the EU’s aggressive grab at Ukraine, including many years of open and explicit protests at NATO’s relentless westward expansion,  its own aid package and the very postmodern gas threat. It was when these didn’t work that it used naked force.

 

By the way, I note that critics of Russia accuse it of ‘expansion’ into Ukraine. This raises an interesting question, one again, of title to territory and where it comes from.  Was French repossession of Alsace-Lorraine after 1918 ‘expansion’. Or was Czechoslovakia’s repossession of the Sudetenland in 1945 ‘expansionism’? Actually, both of these territories contain (or at the time contained)  national minorities who were not necessarily comfortable with the rule of their liberators. Both have complex histories (some might say that Strasbourg is now French because of ‘expansionism’ on the part of Louis XIV.  The main difference is that Ukraine was taken from Russia in 1992 by diplomacy, and by Russia’s absence of power,  rather than by naked force (though of course naked force had been used to take Ukraine from Russia twice in the 20^th century, events whichmost certainly influence all involved today).

 

Then there’s this gripping article for the same newspaper by the interesting and original Robert Fisk, which I mention just because it made my jaw drop:

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/turkeys-actions-in-syria-see-pm-recep-tayyip-erdogan-go-from-model-middle-east-strongman-to-tinpot-dictator-9252366.html

 

This is not just a welcome sign that the generally kindly coverage of Mr Erdogan is at last coming to a long-merited end (how lonely it has been, pointing out what he’s really like, though Robert Fisk has always been critical of Turkey) The suggestions it makes, or rather which it says Seymour Hersh makes, about the Sarin episode in Syria (you have to keep reading)  are absolutely devastating if they are true.