That robot at the checkout? It'll be taking your job next

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why do you do it? I watch you every day, nice, kind, respectable, generous people helping to throw your fellow citizens out of work and turn this country into even more of a bleeping, commercialised desert than it already is.
Do you really want every job in the world to be done by a robot – except your own? Why do you think you are immune? Once you give in to this, how long will it be before you, too, are replaced with a flashing, winking machine with an infuriatingly soothing voice? Unexpected person in sacking area!
In which case, how will you afford to shop at all the robotic stores and supermarkets which will sit in spookily staff-free colonies on the edge of every town, reached by robotic buses and patrolled by drones and robotic store detectives, who will mechanically detain anyone they suspect of shoplifting?
A rather good glimpse of this Blairite nightmare was provided in the recent Hollywood film Elysium, in which contact with commerce and the state was almost entirely through machines, and even a hint of sarcasm towards them earned you a whack round the head from a cybercop, followed by an offer of happy pills to cure your discontent with chemical peace.
Those who govern us, and those who sell to us, increasingly retreat into an impenetrable world where we cannot reach them. The last human contact is visibly dying. I went to the post office on Wednesday to send a letter by recorded delivery. Fifteen people queued interminably for two staffed counters, while an employee with a fixed smile tried to persuade customers to use machines instead, so helping to put herself out of a job in the long term.
I have refused to do this (with occasional lapses at railway stations when I am short of time) for some years. At first, it seemed quite fun to do it all yourself.
Then I caught myself, at an ultra-modern gas station in the endless Washington DC suburbs, rejoicing at how I was avoiding human contact. I was suddenly disgusted with myself for this anti-social laziness. Surely this bit of the world was quite lonesome enough already.
Now, I stand and wait, often for quite a while, for the luxury of doing business with a human being. This is not just because the supermarket isn’t paying you or me the wages it saves by using robots instead of people. It isn’t just because I think there are quite enough unemployed people already.
It’s because I sat back and did nothing while all kinds of people disappeared – bus conductors, patrolling police officers, park keepers, station porters – along with police stations and old-fashioned banks where they knew who you were. And the unstaffed world which resulted is bleak and dangerous, because nobody is watching except those cameras – and is anyone watching them?
It only happens because we put up with it and take part in it. It wouldn’t be that hard to resist, but (as in everything else) we don’t.

 

Last October I was grieved and angered when it was claimed – on the basis of a single, ancient uncorroborated charge – that the late Bishop George Bell was a child abuser.
I never met this austere, fiercely moral, self-sacrificing man, but he had stood in my mind as a rare example of goodness. If this charge is true, then that example dissolves in a mist of filth, and we have all lost something precious.
I do not think it is true. Since last October, despite much publicity, no further similar accusations have been made. And several other admirers of Bishop Bell, including an experienced judge, a top-flight barrister, academics and senior churchmen, have got together to examine the case against him.
They have found it was sloppily conducted, and failed even to look for, let alone find, a crucial witness, whose testimony strongly challenges the accusation.
This seems to me to be a powerful blow for justice, and especially that ancient English justice of which we should be so proud, but often forget.

 

Cheap shot at a German star

Germany’s new political star, Frauke Petry, is in trouble for allegedly calling on border patrols to shoot refugees.
Actually, she didn’t. Mrs Petry is not, in fact, Hitler. Though I suspect she wouldn’t be a reader of The Guardian either, there is quite a lot of ground between these two positions.
I’ve checked her interview with a Mannheim newspaper and she consciously tried to avoid saying any such thing. She repeatedly told her interviewers they were trying to lead her into saying something outrageous.
Eventually, pressed to say what a border policeman should do if refugees climb the fence and ignore orders to stop, she said: ‘He must prevent illegal entry across the border, if necessary even using firearms. This is the law.’
The reporter tried to suggest this was like East Germany’s hated policy of shooting anyone who tried to get out of that prison state. Mrs Petry replied: ‘No guard wants to shoot at a refugee. I don’t want it either. But in the last resort the use of firearms is appropriate. What is important is that we don’t let it get that far.’
She called for agreements with neighbouring Austria to slow the flow of migrants. I am told that Germany’s law on The Direct Use Of Force To Enforce Public Order By Law Enforcement Officials (Section 11) permits the use of weapons by border guards against those who ignore repeated orders to stop. This must have been passed by the same parties which now attack Mrs Petry, pictured right, for citing it.
But how far can Europe (all of it, not just the EU) go in defending its borders against the greatest economic mass migration in history? Countries surrounded by deep, rough, cold water used to be spared this problem, until the era of mass air travel. And we have that tunnel as well. Now, our frontier lies on the Mediterranean and the Aegean. These seas are not like those which surround Australia, nor are the countries from which the migrants come like the South East Asian nations. We cannot tow them back, or keep them on remote islands.
And I don’t think we can shoot them either. How long could we stomach such a thing, even occasionally?
Mass immigration has already happened. It began when we made our stupid interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It speeded up when we did the same in Libya and Syria. We are paying for what we did, and will pay for decades to come.

 

We are on the verge of giving the police terrifying and unjustified powers to hack into our private communications. The country should be convulsed with opposition. As it isn’t, don’t complain when you get hacked by the State.

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Some Thoughts on Germany's New 'Alternative' Party

I have learned to be careful with continental movements which at first appear to be conservative. In France and Belgium, I tend to find that such groups have unlovely origins, which they are unwilling to disown. The founders of France’s  Front National are, shall we say, ambiguous about the Vichy era and by implication the Hitler era.

Flemish nationalism in Belgium has similar problems with fully disowning the, er, questionable behaviour of some of its forerunners during the ascendancy of National Socialist Germany. And so on. When I describe Britain as being almost  the only virgin in a  continent of rape victims, this is, sort of, what I mean.

Almost every continental country experienced either a tyranny or a tyrannical occupation in the middle of the 20^th century, polluting its past. Even the democratic neutrals, Sweden and Switzerland, were compelled to make sordid bargains with the German Empire  (German troops crossed Sweden, German war materials crossed Switzerland, which was unable, out of self-preservation,  to offer much sanctuary to Jews, and  also offered a haven for money and gold whose origins were perhaps suspicious). Portugal, not then a democracy, was blown this way and that by the winds of power.   This past continues to pollute much conservatism, just as past associations with Stalin pollutes so much of the Left. People who won’t deal frankly with either (depending on which albatross they have around their necks) don’t, in my view, deserve to be taken seriously.

But the new anti-immigration party in Germany (not ‘anti-immigrant’ as the BBC and the liberal media so tendentiously claim in their unbiased way) may not be of this type, any more than UKIP is here. Not that I am necessarily inspired by its success, any more than I was by the gains made by  of UKIP.

I have made more than one voyage to Germany to examine various supposed revivals of neo-Nazi movements, none of which in fact turned out to be significant.  They are invariably knuckle-brushing movements led by idiots.  I think Germany has learned pretty thoroughly to avoid such things, which seldom get above 7% of any vote and swiftly sag into impotence, despite winning seats in local assemblies through proportional representation, and even qualifying for state aid, as they sometimes do (a good argument against state support for political parties).

These days such things tend to begin in the former East, partly because it is much, much poorer and partly because the old East German State did little in the way of de-Nazifying education, claiming as it did that it was the inheritor of the anti-Nazi part of Germany and so (unlike the West) did not need to do so.

The recent Pegida  (‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West’) Movement certainly began in the East and was quickly found to have nasty elements in it.  Actually crude hostility to outsiders is to be found all over continental Europe, where the racial and cultural tolerance common in post-colonial Britain is often absent, as I have been privately told by Polish immigrants explaining why they come here rather than to other EU countries. I have myself directly encountered this bitter loathing (directed against North Africans)  in Rotterdam, the heart of supposedly liberal Holland. One of Pegida’s leaders was certainly guilty of using contemptuous and hateful language about migrants as such, rather than simply opposing immigration.  I think it’s pretty much disqualified from serious politics. Any such movement in Germany has to be about 100 times cleaner than it would need to be anywhere else.

But the Alternative fur Deutschland is not quite so easily dismissed, which is perhaps why it did so well in Sunday’s provincial elections (though far better in the former East than in the West) .

The AfD began, much as did UKIP, among academics, economists and rather grand journalists concerned at the threat to German independence from the EU and to German prosperity from the Euro. It did quite well, but not well enough to win seats, in the 2013 federal elections. 

But in 2015 it switched to much stronger emphasis on immigration (unsurprisingly) and found in Frauke Petry a new and persuasive leader. Mrs Petry, 40,  is not a Farage figure, but a young woman in the modern style, educated and very much in tune with the world of today, not especially socially conservative in her life or opinions. She is a chemist who studied in Britain, at Reading University,  but got her Doctorate from Goettingen. She is estranged from her husband (a Lutheran Pastor) and now living with a party colleague. She still takes her four children to church. She was born in the East but moved to the West in 1990 at the age of 14.

But she does have dangling round her neck the claim that she once called for border police to shoot refugees. Did she? I am genuinely unsure.  I have yet to see a complete unedited version of what she said.  Does anyone have one?  

This is one of the newspaper stories about it

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/german-police-should-shoot-refugees-says-german-party-leader-a6844611.html

I thought I knew less after reading it than I felt I’d known before. What exactly did she say and in what sequence?!’  I want to shout at the reporter.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to put off a lot of voters in Germany on Sunday. There have been many analyses of these votes. Where did they come from? Often from people who hadn’t voted previously, and not necessarily from Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. But the AfD is now established as serious threat to Germany’s suffocating consensus, in which the equivalents of Labour and the Tories openly embrace each other in coalition government, instead of pretending to be hostile as they do here.

The AfD may come to threaten both major parties, if the migration problem is not somehow got under control.  It also reflects a growing discontent with falling standards of living among Germans who had once been used to stable jobs and rising incomes. It might not help anyone to see this as a kind of revival of the Nazis. By doing so, you might miss the real point.

Personally, I think the moral impossibility of civilised countries using violence to guard their borders against migrants is one of the most complicated issues facing us. We're not as nice as we like to claim we are. For instance, a border featuring razor wire is itself a passive but severe threat of violent injury to anyone who seeks to cross it illegally. So is the presence of armed border patrols. What are we saying when we erect such fences and employ and deploy such patrols? Or even when we rely implicitly (as we in Britain do) on the depth and danger of the cold sea to keep our coasts secure from unwanted arrivals?

Yet in the end we are compelled by all we hold dear to weaken when the choice is to do so or to use violence, or to abandon people to drown in the sea. We will let people in, and rescue them. We have to, or we would not be the civilisation we are. Once it has got to this stage, I can see no alternative.

Australia, almost alone, is spared these dilemmas, because it has entirely maritime borders, composed of deep and inhospitable seas, and also because the countries from which migrants headed for Australia come have functioning governments and can be compelled to take them back . So it can repel unwanted illegal migrants by using measures (mainly interception on the high seas, towing back to point of departure or detention on extra-territorial islands) well short of lethal or even injurious violence. Not that these methods escape criticism.

The EU and the USA simply cannot do this. They have unenforceable land borders,  which can be overwhelmed by numbers and cannot conceivably be adequately patrolled. And they face an unending migration across the often calm waters of the Mediterranean, from Libya which has no central authority, and across the narrow seas from Turkey, which isn’t prepared to exercise its authority and, even if it does accept returned migrants, can’t be expected to try very hard to keep them from trying again. Both EU and USA also lack  extra-territorial islands on which to place unwanted migrants.

It might have been possible, 30 years ago, by exerting influence on nearby states, to persuade them to prevent mass immigration across the Aegean, the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande. But it’s my belief that many influential people  in the US actively supported mass migration from Central America , as the USA was transformed into a low-wage economy (this caused a notable split in the US conservative movement in the early 1990s, in which social conservatives were pretty much flattened by Reagan-Thatcher-Murdoch economic liberals who had snatched the body of conservatism there much as they have done here) .

And I also suspect, but cannot prove, that many in the higher reaches of the EU felt much the same way. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi made no secret of his ability to open the gates of migration if he so chose, and blackmailed the EU by doing so, as I’ve mentioned here earlier. How odd that Britain and France should choose to overthrow him without having a clue what would replace him, and made a similar ill-planned assault on Syria which has been almost as disastrous from the migrant point of view. The most absurd thing about this has been the monstrous, ludicrous claim that Russia(!) is ‘weaponising’ Syrian refugees, when the whole problem has been caused by Western and Gulf  actions. If it hadn’t been for Russia,  Syria would be just like Libya only a lot worse and millions more of its people would be heading our way. Whereas if we and the Gulf states had stayed out, Syria would be peaceful. Is this what Freudians call ‘projection’, accusing others of the things you’re guilty about?

But getting anyone to say anything sensible about Russia is almost completely impossible. Even quite intelligent people are determined to see Moscow as the seat of all villainy, and this distortion makes it hard for them to see what is wrong with our own societies and governments. Perhaps that’s why they do it.

Think Dave's won? I bet you believe in flying saucers too!

 

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

David Cameron is now paying the price for making a promise he thought he wouldn’t have to keep. Sure that he wouldn’t get a majority last May, and genuinely afraid of losing office, he promised a referendum to try to win back votes from Ukip.

It didn’t turn out like that. The cheque he dashed off for a bet he was sure he’d win has now been presented at the bank, and he lacks the money to pay for it.

And so the Prime Minister has been forced into mounting a ridiculous pretence of real negotiations.

David Cameron (pictured in Brussels on Friday) made promises to the electorate in order to win office that he simply cannot keep and has been forced into the ridiculous pretence of real negotiations on Europe

First, he tried to look as if he wanted something he doesn’t want. Now he has to look as if he has won concessions he hasn’t won.

Anyone who genuinely thinks that this is an important change in Britain’s relationship with the EU probably believes in flying saucers as well.

But I can understand how many people will pretend to be convinced, because they are afraid of the alternative.

It was fear of shrivelling into nothingness on the edge of Europe that got us into the European Union and I suspect fear of leaving will keep us there.

Quite how we will be able to keep up a fake debate about the subject till late June, I have no idea.

 

I long ago concluded that I would rather leave, whatever the economic and political cost. I think most of this country’s unique laws and liberty grew up after our break with the Continent under Henry VIII nearly 600 years ago. I think they are worth preserving at practically any cost and, given the chance, I can probably get quite tearful about it.

You cannot expect the Tories to do anything about this. They have never recovered from the day they destroyed us as a great nation by mounting their mad, futile attack on Egypt in 1956.

That was when they decided we couldn’t manage on our own any more, and started whimpering to be let into the then Common Market.

By far the best, wisest and most far-sighted warning against the European project came from Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell in October 1962, not long before his untimely death.

In a speech that still stands up well more than five decades later, he rightly said two things that should be carved in stone in the heart of our capital.

The first was: ‘Of course, the Tories have been indulging in their usual double-talk. When they go to Brussels they show the greatest enthusiasm for political union.

‘When they speak in the House of Commons they are most anxious to aver that there is no commitment whatever to any political union.’

And the second was: ‘We must be clear about this: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it.

‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say, “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought.’

For much of my life, I have watched his prophecy come true around me. And I have watched a heedless people accept a slow, salami-sliced subjugation they would never have borne if it had been imposed by force of arms.

Do we really, really have the guts to leave now?

A friend of mine who bravely goes to terrifying war zones, but has a lot of common sense even so, is amused by the Western media’s continued belief (encouraged by David Cameron) in ‘moderate’ Muslim groups supposedly fighting against Syria’s President Assad.

My friend asks: ‘If these journalists really believe these people are moderate, why do they not go into the zones they control and report from there?’

And he answers his own question with a wry smile: ‘Because they know perfectly well that within ten minutes of arriving, they’d be trussed up in a car boot and well on their way to the badlands of Syria or Iraq, never to be seen again.’

Even menacing Maria can't shine a light on this mad, bad world

Communist East Germany was so mad and odd that I was always afraid that future generations would refuse to believe the truth about it – such as that its policies on education and women were almost identical to David Cameron’s.

That’s why I thought the Disney company should have bought the whole country and kept it going as a theme park – and as a lasting warning of what human beings can do, given the chance.

Alas, as the disappointing Channel 4 thriller Deutschland 83 has shown, even Germans are forgetting what it was like.

Despite featuring Maria Schrader as the best female villain since Cruella de Vil, the series simply failed to recreate the sheer hopeless, baggy dinginess of the German Democratic Republic – every curtain yellow, every wall and ceiling stained, nothing repainted since about 1942, even the air full of coal dust and rasping fumes.

And without that, it couldn’t really recreate the menace of it, either.

This matters. As we forget it, I begin to see much of it being resurrected all around us.

Even menacing Maria can’t shine a light on this mad, bad world.

Remember we were told that the great Kiev ‘spontaneous’ protests of two years ago were all about ending corruption? Well, corruption in chaotic Ukraine is now so bad that the economy minister, brought in from abroad to combat dishonesty, has just resigned in frustration. The International Monetary Fund is threatening to cut lending unless more is done to fight corruption. Fat chance. Ukraine is corrupt, much as the Atlantic Ocean is wet. The 2014 outbreak was a putsch and its real target Russia. Now it’s gone wrong, coverage in the West has virtually stopped.

Now we’re addicted to stupidity

Can nobody think any more? The word ‘addiction’ is plainly meaningless, as supposed ‘addicts’ so often give up the things they are said to be enslaved by, using willpower.

And it is surely obvious that when someone says he is a ‘gambling addict’, there is no possible chemical or biological explanation for his behaviour. He’s just looking for an excuse for his selfishness and greed. So what ninny decided it was a good use of our money to prescribe such people a pill – Naltrexone – which is normally given to drug abusers and heavy drinkers?

People who do bad things are not ill, and should not be treated.

They are wicked and should be punished.

As I travel home by train on Saturday evenings, my heart often sinks at a major junction when I hear the aggressive shouts of football fans. Imagine my surprise the other day when the shouts turned out to be coming from uniformed police officers, all got up with clubs and baseball caps, who seemed to be nerving themselves up for some sort of combat.

Poland, once again, Produces More History than it can Consume Locally

If you have consonants to spare, prepare to use them now. This is about Poland. a country that so often produces more history than it can consume locally. A new and fascinating crisis is erupting on the eastern fringes of the German Empire, sorry, European Union. As the Ukraine crisis, provoked by US-backed EU expansionism, sinks into torpor and stalemate, Poland is now pushing at the boundaries of ‘limited sovereignty’.

 

So let us begin with a quick rummage through the Cupboard of the Yesterdays:

Now, ‘limited sovereignty’ was formulated 100 years ago by Richard von Kuehlmann, the Kaiser’s Foreign Secretary. He was trying to put a landmine under the Russian Empire in Poland, the Baltic states and Ukraine. In the middle of the 1914-18 war,  Berlin invented a pseudo ‘Kingdom of Poland’ to try to win over Poles who lived under direct Russian tyranny.  Then came the collapse of Imperial Russia (brought about by the Bolshevik putsch in Petrograd, financed by German gold and prepared by the German agent Ulyanov,  codenamed ‘Lenin’, smuggled into Russia under the supervision of the German general staff).

Germany’s intervention, and its decision to hire Lenin, was not idealistic and didn't even pretend to be (as its equivalent would nowadays) . The Bolshevik putsch followed the February revolution, a genuine political convulsion from below, which had overthrown the Romanovs and would have led to a constituent assembly, elected by what is almost certainly still the most free and democratic poll ever to have taken place in Russia. The Bolshevik coup destroyed the first non-autocratic government Russia had ever had, as that government wished to continue the war against Germany. 

 

The German-backed Bolsheviks and their armed Red Guards then surrounded and dispersed the constituent assembly, postponing Russian constitutional democracy for at least 70 years. The resulting Russian military and moral collapse led to the peace treaties of Brest Litovsk (now on the border of Poland and Belarus, see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/07/where-east-really-meets-west-and-you-can-stay-in-the-hotel-bug.html ).

And these created the new, wholly German-dominated state of Ukraine. That was limited sovereignty, if ever there was such a thing. How all this would have worked out we shall never know, since Germany’s defeat in the West (by no means foreordained) cancelled the Brest-Litovsk Treaties.

Soviet Russia eventually grabbed back Ukraine by force. Poland became a French client state, and the Versailles jig-saw - supposedly a barrier against a revived Germany - replaced the former empires of the region with new states based on national self-determination. But it was complicated by the presence of awkward, unenthusiastic national minorities within their borders. As always, such minorities came in very handy when aggression needed to be justified.

Few recall the bitter months between the Munich agreement and the outbreak of World War Two, when both Poland and Hungary opportunistically took bites out of the corpse of Czechoslovakia. Poland’s seizure of Zaolzie (with tanks, not cavalry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie#/media/File:Polish_Army_capturing_Zaolzie_in_1938.PNG)

is especially forgotten (as is the anti-Semitism that was rife in that country at the time) because it upsets the ‘plucky little Poland’ myth, part of the general myth  in which World War Two has been transformed into a simple struggle between good and evil, by ignoring large quantities of actual history.

I make no apologies for this history lesson. These things, along with the bodily westward shifting of Poland to satisfy Stalin in 1945, the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn (subject of an official lie maintained in Poland and the Soviet bloc until the fall of Communism) , the very violent and cruel mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from the region after 1945 (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html )

are not forgotten in these regions and still influence thought and speech.

So bear them in mind when you study Poland’s new government, described in tones of maidenly horror by Europe’s liberal, pro-EU media,( and in tones of absolute loathing by Ryszard, a Polish acquaintance who works in a coffee shop near my London office and who is utterly horrified by what has overtaken his home country).

I myself do not much like this government. Its main strength flows from the fact that it has an absolute parliamentary majority, with which it is seeking to impose its will on the courts and the state broadcaster. The things about it which I quite like (a combination of social conservatism and resistance to mass immigration, with social democratic welfare measures and a real concern for the unemployed) are cancelled out by its unreliability on the key issues of law and liberty.

The best critical articles about it come from my old friend Tim Garton Ash, who (despite being a bit liberal) knows more about Poland than almost any English person. Tim was fairly relaxed to start with

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/26/poland-election-survived-worse-orbanisation

But is more worried now

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/07/polish-democracy-destroyed-constitution-media-poland

The EU, having been burned by intervening in Austrian politics some years ago, and has had similar difficulties with the Orban government in (much smaller) Hungary,  is probably itching to put pressure on this wayward member. But the EU is also constrained by the fact that it is nowadays rather obviously dominated by Germany, a country which is debarred by history from intervening too openly in Polish internal affairs. Martin Schulz, the German President of the European ‘Parliament’ , probably hasn’t helped get Poland to conform by describing events in Warsaw as having ‘the characteristics of a coup d’etat’:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/12051752/EU-parliament-head-refuses-to-apologise-over-coup-comment-after-Polish-PM-request.html

Maybe a French politician could have got away with this. But a German? Such interventions only strengthen the Law and Justice Party, and allow it to preen itself as a patriotic force. You’d think Germans would realise this, but they don’t always seem to.

Germany’s EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has said there is a ‘a lot to be said for activating the mechanism of the rule of law and putting Warsaw under supervision’. Supervision! So much for EU members being truly independent states (which of course they are not, but which, under ‘limited sovereignty’ they must be allowed to pretend to be).

I don't ,as I say, much like Law and Justice. 

But then again, I did not much like its forerunner, which was pathetically pro-EU, though it wisely kept out of the Euro) and accepted huge quantities of EU money while its own native industries shrivelled and a low-wage economy more or less forced huge numbers of young men and women to find work abroad to support their families. It also imposed the EU’s secular, politically correct ideas on a Poland where many people are still conservative Roman Catholics.

What Tim Garton Ash notices about the Law and Justice government (and what I find most fascinating about it) is this. It is a new combination, deeply dangerous to the modern consensus. It is Corbynite on the welfare state, but conservative on culture and migration:

‘PiS [the Law and Justice Party’s rather unfortunate acronym in Polish] represents a large part of Polish society: patriotic, Catholic, conservative inhabitants of small towns and villages, especially in the poorer east and south-east of the country; people who don’t feel they have benefited from the transition to market democracy. It promises a strong state to protect them from the cold winds of economic and social liberalism. It is rightwing in culture, religion, sexual morality (no abortion or in vitro fertilisation), xenophobia (no Muslim refugees please, we’re Polish) and nationalism, but almost leftwing in its economic and social promises to the poor and left-behind’.

I am puzzled that no such combination has yet arisen in Britain, and can only explain it by the Labrador-like devotion of British social conservatives to a Blairite Tory Party which repeatedly kicks them in the ribs with its well-polished brogues, laughing as it does so. I have tried to challenge this barmy, servile devotion, but found it impenetrable.

The other thing is this. The EU has coddled Poland (with aid which will total  100 billion Euros by 2020) and not pressed it too hard to join the Euro. It has seen it as a star member, compliant, and an example which Ukraine might one day follow. And now, after a long period when it seemed to be on a smooth flight-path to ever-closer union, Poland’s national sentiments, previously buried under layers of Euromoney,  have reawoken, partly thanks to harsh economic conditions and partly because a nation which has only recently re-established itself feels particularly threatened by Angela Merkel’s relaxed policy onwards Muslim migrants.

These are fundamental problems, not easily resolved either by negotiation or by pressure. Europe’s bitter, difficult history has come back once again to poke the idealists in the eye. The debts of 1914 have not yet been paid in full, and the damage it did is not yet repaired. Watch with interest. 

You need Dinosaurs to Defend the freedoms liberals love

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Every educated and intelligent person glories in the freedom of women in Western societies to exercise their talents to the full, and their freedom to walk safely in the streets of our great cities.

So what are the enlightened minds of the Left to do when news comes of revolting assaults on women in front of Cologne Cathedral, one of the jewels of European Christian culture in one of Germany's proudest cities? And how are they to react when growing evidence suggests that at least some of the culprits are newly arrived migrants from the Muslim world?

With mumbled embarrassment and nasty jibes against those who have long opposed uncontrolled mass migration, that's how.

 

 

Police drive back right-wing demonstrators with a water cannon in Cologne in the wake of the sexual assaults around Cologne's main station on New Year's Eve

As an illustration, I had a radio clash with the Guardian writer Gaby Hinsliff on Friday (details here http://dailym.ai/1K6xp0W )

 

after she admitted that 'liberals like me are reluctant to talk about it'. While rightly chiding her own side, she couldn't resist dismissing opponents of mass migration as dinosaurs and their views as 'frothing rage'. Here is the news, Ms Hinsliff. Those who for many years warned against non-selective mass immigration (and were dismissed as bigoted dinosaurs by people like her) were concerned about just this sort of problem.

If migrants from other cultures arrive too fast and in numbers too great for society to absorb and integrate them, they begin to impose those cultures on the host country. Germany is witnessing this now, and so are we. 

The louder our governments shout about their dedication to fighting Islamist extremism, the readier they are to Islamise our own society. The sheer size of the Muslim population compels them to do so.

 

 

 

 

 

That is why exams in England are to be moved to accommodate Muslim pupils taking part in the Ramadan fast. And it is why the Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, reacted to the first reports of women being molested in her city by advising them: 'It is always possible to keep a certain distance that is longer than an arm's length.'

Of course she has now been mocked so much that she has backtracked. But the point is that it was her first instinct, and what she really felt.

Radical multicultural types will in the end destroy the things they claim to like, because they don't understand that liberty and reasonable equality are features of stable, free, conservative societies based on Christian ideas, which guard their borders and are proud of their civilisation.

The people who really want to defend our enlightened society, in the end, are dinosaurs like me.

****

 

Where's the fury about these beheadings?

I have endured endless pious lectures about the wickedness of Vladimir Putin and Syria's President Assad from supporters of the Government's wild and ignorant foreign policy.

So how startling it was to see the same people mute themselves when Saudi Arabia, now seemingly Britain's closest ally, killed 47 people on one day, many by beheading.

Some of these victims were no doubt real criminals, though the expression 'Saudi justice system' is a grim and bloodstained joke, so we cannot be sure of the guilt of the condemned. But some were political dissenters.

Yet a government that squawks mightily over every Islamic State death video was strangely measured over these very similar events, which incidentally menace the peace of the Middle East.

I took a careful look at Government statements. They all had the same odd, weak theme. We condemn the death penalty, whoever carries it out.

David Cameron said: 'We condemn and do not support the death penalty in any circumstances and that includes Saudi Arabia.'

The Foreign Office said: 'The UK opposes the death penalty in all circumstances and in every country.'

So, as far as Mr Cameron and the Foreign Office are concerned, the beheading of a political opponent after a jury-less, unfair trial in a country with no free press is just the same as the execution in Texas of a bloody murderer convicted after due process by an independent jury of free men and women under the scrutiny of a free press. And we condemn them both equally. And that's all we're going to say. Now, would you like to buy some aeroplanes?

Well, they don't speak for me. I'd much rather hang convicted heinous killers than bomb foreign countries (there's less chance of killing innocent people).

I have used the word 'feeble' so many times to describe this Government that the poor thing is quite exhausted and I have had to send it on holiday.

 

 

Dave and the invisible Tory disaster

Both our big political parties are badly divided, but somehow or other David Cameron's splitting pains get much less attention than Jeremy Corbyn's.

For instance, a BBC News programme last week arranged for some Blairite nobody to resign from his non-job, live on air. This event, plainly aimed at damaging Mr Corbyn, hardly fits in with the Corporation's duty to be impartial.

The fact that most Labour MPs can't stand Mr Corbyn isn't news. Next they'll be revealing to us that Ted Heath couldn't abide Margaret Thatcher. We know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr Cameron is an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal

What seemed like a century of speculation on whether Dave Who had been sacked to make way for Fred Whatsit wasn't really justified. But of course the BBC isn't impartial and its idea of what is news is tinged with pink. It's crammed with shameless Leftists from cellar to chimney. So if the BBC is actively helping the Tories, which it does these days, then that must mean the Tories are now the main party of the Left.

And that's Mr Cameron's problem. He's an EU-loving, pro-immigration, anti-grammar-school, politically correct social and economic liberal.

His MPs are mostly the same, though they do a bit of pseudo-conservative braying at elections. But his voters and his remaining party members are patriotic real conservatives. He hoped to bandage this rupture by promising the EU referendum. But now he has actually been forced to keep this promise, it isn't helping much.

If he does let Ministers campaign on both sides, it will quickly be clear that hardly any of the Tory top brass, and not many of the bottom brass, genuinely want to leave the EU. They don't mind criticising it a bit, but they won't quit, and they won't fight to do so.

Most of them would rather be gagged, so they can pretend to be straining against the leash. How long can the Tory Party stay in one piece, when its leadership and its core vote are so utterly divided?

 

"The EU is the Continuation of Germany By Other Means"

Here is a talk I recently gave to the Keele World Affairs discussion group, at Keele University, on ‘The EU is the continuation of Germany by other means.’

Some of you may be interested

 

http://kwaku.org.uk/Archive/Video/Peter%20Hitchens.html

 

We won't save refugees by destroying our own country

THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN

Actually we can’t do what we like with this country. We inherited it from our parents and grandparents and we have a duty to hand it on to our children and grandchildren, preferably improved and certainly undamaged.
It is one of the heaviest responsibilities we will ever have. We cannot just give it away to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves.
Every one of the posturing notables simpering ‘refugees welcome’ should be asked if he or she will take a refugee family into his or her home for an indefinite period, and pay for their food, medical treatment and education.
If so, they mean it. If not, they are merely demanding that others pay and make room so that they can experience a self-righteous glow. No doubt the same people are also sentimental enthusiasts for the ‘living wage’, and ‘social housing’, when in fact open borders are steadily pushing wages down and housing costs up.
As William Blake rightly said: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.’
Britain is a desirable place to live mainly because it is an island, which most people can’t get to. Most of the really successful civilisations survived because they were protected from invasion by mountains, sea, deserts or a combination of these things. Ask the Russians or the Poles what it’s like to live without the shield of the sea. There is no positive word for ‘safety’ in Russian. Their word for security is ‘bezopasnost’ – ‘without danger’.
Thanks to a thousand years of uninvaded peace, we have developed astonishing levels of trust, safety and freedom. I have visited nearly 60 countries and lived in the USSR, Russia and the USA, and I have never experienced anything as good as what we have. Only in the Anglosphere countries – the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – is there anything comparable. I am amazed at how relaxed we are about giving this away.
Our advantages depend very much on our shared past, our inherited traditions, habits and memories. Newcomers can learn them, but only if they come in small enough numbers. Mass immigration means we adapt to them, when they should be adapting to us.
So now, on the basis of an emotional spasm, dressed up as civilisation and generosity, are we going to say that we abandon this legacy and decline our obligation to pass it on, like the enfeebled, wastrel heirs of an ancient inheritance letting the great house and the estate go to ruin?
Having seen more than my share of real corpses, and watched children starving to death in a Somali famine, I am not unmoved by pictures of a dead child on a Turkish beach. But I am not going to pretend to be more upset than anyone else. Nor am I going to suddenly stop thinking, as so many people in the media and politics appear to have done.
The child is not dead because advanced countries have immigration laws. The child is dead because criminal traffickers cynically risked the lives of their victims in pursuit of money.
I’ll go further. The use of words such as ‘desperate’ is quite wrong in this case. The child’s family were safe in Turkey. Turkey (for all its many faults) is a member of Nato, officially classified as free and democratic. Many British people actually pay good money to go on holiday to the very beach where the child’s body was washed up.
It may not be ideal, but the definition of a refugee is that he is fleeing from danger, not fleeing towards a higher standard of living.
Goodness knows I have done what I could on this page to oppose the stupid interventions by this country in Iraq, Libya and Syria, which have turned so many innocent people into refugees or corpses.
But I can see neither sense nor justice in allowing these things to become a pretext for an unstoppable demographic revolution in which Europe (including, alas, our islands) merges its culture and its economy with North Africa and the Middle East. If we let this happen, Europe would lose almost all the things that make others want to live there. You really think these crowds of tough young men chanting ‘Germany!’ in the heart of Budapest are ‘asylum-seekers’ or ‘refugees’?
Refugees don’t confront the police of the countries in which they seek sanctuary. They don’t chant orchestrated slogans or lie across the train tracks.
And why, by the way, do they use the English name for Germany when they chant? In Arabic and Turkish, that country is called ‘Almanya’, in Kurdish something similar. The Germans themselves call it ‘Deutschland’. In Hungarian, it’s ‘Nemetorszag’.
Did someone hope that British and American TV would be there? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: spontaneous demonstrations take a lot of organising.
Refugees don’t demand or choose their refuge. They ask and they hope. When we become refugees one day (as we may well do), we will discover this.
As to what those angry, confident and forceful young men actually are, I’ll leave you to work it out, as I am too afraid of the Thought Police to use what I think is the correct word.
But it is interesting that this week sees the publication in English of a rather dangerous book, which came out in France just before the Charlie Hebdo murders.
Submission, by Michel Houellebecq, prophesies a Muslim-dominated government in France about seven years from now, ushered into power by the French Tory and Labour parties.
What they want, says one of the cleverer characters in the book, ‘is for France to disappear – to be integrated into a European federation’. This means they’d much rather do a deal with a Muslim party than with the National Front, France’s Ukip equivalent.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s amazing how likely and simple the author makes this Islamic revolution sound.
Can we stop this transformation of all we have and are? I doubt it. To do so would involve the grim-faced determination of Australia, making it plain in every way that our doors are open only to limited numbers of people, chosen by us, enduring the righteous scorn of the supposedly enlightened.
As we lack the survival instinct and the determination necessary, and as so many of our most influential people are set on committing a sentimental national suicide, I suspect we won’t.
To those who condemn reasonable calls for national self-defence as bigotry, hatred and intolerance (which they are not), I make only this request: just don’t pretend you’re doing a good and generous thing, when you’re really cowardly and weak.

Yes, East Germany was terrible. But Was it a Joke or a Warning?

Normal respectable people have almost no idea of the parallel world in which much of the British Left actually live, or certainly used to live.  It came as something of a surprise to me after I joined the International Socialists in the late 1960s and was slowly drawn into this strange zone.

 

Much of this came back to me at the weekend when I read the (to me) hilarious accounts of Jeremy Corbyn’s dinners of cold baked beans, and his austere, serious-minded holidays, spent chugging about on Warsaw Pact motorbikes. The man’s an obvious Roundhead, left over from the New Model Army, with all the unenviable virtues - and even more unenviable disadvantages - of those ferocious and magnificent old soldiers for righteousness. 

 

I know nothing more about the Corbyns than has been published, and have never been invited round for cold beans or hot ones. But the glimpse of his life summoned from my memory a whole world . Its boundaries were marked by great mounds of unsold left-wing papers under the bed, posters for forgotten demonstrations flopping off the walls, reefs and mountain-ranges of undistributed leaflets, surmounted with unfinished, rather horrible meals; more often than not,  a neglected lawn and a feeling of perpetual hurry, to a meeting, to a demonstration, to one of the hundreds of gatherings and episodes which the Left-wing faith demands of its scrawny, ill-dressed devotees. You might meet people who had lived in East Berlin or still had friends there,  or who had couriered gold and messages for the Comintern.  Sometimes in the midst of this there might also be quite a bit of unconventional sex going on  (by the standards of the 1960s, though rather restrained now) . In some cases there might also be quite a bit of drink taken, though abstention wouldn’t be frowned on, and in the more exotic, studenty outfits, drugs as well.

 

I realise that most normal people would be genuinely amazed by this way of life, this milieu in which people don't believe what everyone believes or behave as everyone behaves. 

 

I cannot tell from how deep into this world Mr Corbyn comes. Some sort of clue has been given by various profiles, which have mentioned Mr Corbyn's even more nonconformist brother, the weather forecaster and defiantly anti-warmist Piers, who is sensibly unconvinced by the view that climate change is man-made, an unusual position on the Left. ( I had always assumed they were related, but had never known whom to ask. They definitely are).

 

Simon Hattenstone, in the Guardian, was one of several reporters who showed that he wasn’t very versed in the language of the Left  when he recounted that ‘Corbyn grew up in a politicised family in Shropshire. "Mum and Dad met campaigning on the Spanish civil war. Both were active peace campaigners."'

 

Um. This is mildly puzzling on the face of it. Though the Corbyn parents are (and what a shame this is) no longer with us and cannot be asked, I don’t think anybody much campaigned for ‘peace’ in the Spanish Civil War. In fact a lot of previously left-wing pacifists (George Orwell among them) abandoned their pacifism about that time. The English left, to a man and woman, were for the Republic and against Franco, and wanted the Republic to win. This couldn't be done through peace.  Many went there and proved it with their lives. Others returned wounded and in some cases crippled for life. Such people could still be found in Left-wing London in the 1960s and 1970s, still vigorous and clear-minded.  

 

What about ‘peace campaigning’? Well, sometimes the term is misleading. In the post-1945 world, it generally meant campaigning against *Western* nuclear weapons, not Eastern ones.

 

This was not least because those who campaigned against Soviet nuclear weapons, in the only places where it mattered, did not usually stay at liberty for very long. Their ideas were greeted with scorn as well as hostility, especially by those Communist governments who were delighted by 'peace' campaigns in NATO countries.  Indeed, some of the  best pro-deterrence propaganda I have ever seen was posted up in East Berlin department stores in the winter of, I think, 1983 – a cartoon hedgehog wisely refusing a Fox’s smiling suggestion that he abandon his prickles, until the Fox has agreed to have his teeth removed.  The same message,  less elegantly expressed, was to be found as late as 1991 on banners on the main street of the secret city of Kurchatovsk in Kazakhstan, built by Beria as the headquarters of the USSR’s H-Bomb project.

 

This ‘peace campaigning’ in Britain took place mainly in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, founded in 1957.  I note that what I used to know as ‘the CND symbol’ (brilliantly invented by the English artist Gerald Holtom from the combined semaphore signs for ‘N’ and ‘D’ ) is now known as the ‘peace symbol’. This is a rather broader claim, which might be made for a number of other organisations and movements. If CND had succeeded in its aims,  I am not by any means sure that peace would have been the outcome.  

 

Anyway, in this world, life looked very different from most people’s. Irish nationalism was a sort of ally, with varying degrees of reservations. Israel was wrong and the 'Palestinians' were right. Any strike was good. The armed forces were suspect rather than a source of pride. There was, even among Trotskyists supposedly disenchanted with the USSR, an openness to the Socialist world, especially Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Eastern Europe, ruled by men in suits all too like our own governments and plainly unromantic,  tended to be only for the Communists.

 

Which brings me to a rather good first novel which I have just finished, Jo McMillan’s ‘Motherland’ http://www.amazon.com/Motherland-A-Novel-Jo-McMillan/dp/1473611997, the background to which is explained here http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/aug/01/lenin-mum-and-me-my-communist-childhood

 

From her girlhood, she lived in this odd backwards-facing world in which every loyalty was a disloyalty, and the other way round.  

 

The book (sometimes very funny, sometimes desperately embarrassing and sad, always absorbing and moving)  is full of her ineradicable love for her batty, determined Stalinist mother. That mother is a descendant of other Communists,  who counted it a betrayal to abandon her earthly faith just because everyone else was leaving and because the USSR kept invading other people’s countries with tanks. I do have a sort of admiration for this indomitable wrongness, never forgetting my own seduction, a conscious rejection and betrayal of everything I had ever been brought up to believe, and so in some ways worse than a false belief I had been born into and nurtured with.

 

East Germany, of all places, became the refuge of this intense and loopy two-person family, who spent most of the year failing to sell the Communist ‘Morning Star’ to the hostile and baffled people of Tamworth. In Potsdam and East Berlin they were suddenly normal and welcome for a few sunny weeks. Then they had to slog back to Staffordshire and be jeered at and suspected, outcasts for the rest of the year.

 

Of course, it was not an exact reflection, one world the mirror-image of the other. There was one vital difference.  During my many wanderings round the Communist world from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, I would occasionally fall into a feeling of normality. Look, there was food, there was beer, there were normal-looking people going about normal-looking tasks. And then there would be an idol of Lenin, that merciless murderer, or the urgent need to hush one’s voice while speaking, or a banner proclaiming a naked lie, or a parade of tanks with their barrels pointing West, restrained ultimately by the nuclear weapons that CND and the ‘peace’ movement wanted to abolish.

Or one might glimpse , as one walked round East Berlin, granite-faced detachments of the Feliks Dzerzhinski (I won’t attempt the German spelling) Regiment, named after the bloodthirsty founder of the KGB. They had a marching chant whose chorus went ‘Feliks! Dzerzhinski!...You have taught us how to hate!!!”  The final word in German was ‘Hass!!!’ which was enunciated with a prolonged and menacing hiss. These were the palace guard of the ‘Socialist Unity Party’, loyal Marxist-Leninists ready to defend Communism to the end if required . They never were  required, though I suspect that if the East German leadership had decided to try the Tiananmen Square route out of trouble in 1989, it would have been the Feliks Dzerzhinski boys who would have machine-gunned the crowds in Leipzig. But those leaders – who lived in Western comfort in a compound at Wandlitz, north of Berlin, which was fenced off from their own country much as their own country was fenced off from the West – correctly decided it was wiser just to give in.  

 

Jo McMillan, not unreasonably,  did not observe this sort of thing, or the Stasi secret police ( at least as a named organisation, for those who lived under its gaze were wiser not to name it) ,  in her childhood and teenage visits. But lurking in her story are brief flashes of the true,  horrible and sinister characteristics of the ‘German Democratic Republic’,  like some deadly alligator glimpsed for the occasional moment among waterweeds, then invisible again, then a little closer.  You will find these for yourself if and when you read it, and I urge you to.  I think it is enough to say that her teenage East German friend, an elusive but very credible character in the book,  who jeers at the appalling dress sense of Western communists, whose clothes, she says, look as if they have already been worn by at least two other people of entirely different shapes,  has a better idea of what is going on this poisoned paradise than the narrator does, let alone her deluded but devoted mother.  

 

Even so, it would be wise not to forget that such a place existed, that real and well-intentioned human beings admired it, that (as I keep pointing out) many of its policies and characteristics (especially concerning secondary education and the family) have since been introduced here. A country, such as ours, which has a Ministry of Justice and a Ministry of Culture, which is increasingly being deserted by its educated professionals, which makes divorce easier than breaking a car-leasing agreement and which is dedicated to separating children from their mothers at the earliest possible opportunity, such a country should be careful about laughing at people who admired such things 40 years ago, but at least knew they were eccentric.  

Au Revoir les Enfants

Like a lot of English people of my class and generation, I went through a stage of believing that France was a sort of paradise. They did things differently there, but in general they did them better.  I followed French politics, struggled with French newspapers, and hurried across the Channel as often as I could afford to.  I never quite got over that thrill of anticipation and adventure as the steamer docked - usually in Dieppe, for the Newhaven-Dieppe route was the best way of plunging directly into France, and avoided the long and rather dreary train ride from Calais to Paris, providing instead a far lovelier and briefer run through the Normandy bocage , and the glories of Rouen, on down to the Gare St Lazare, as painted by Monet. The ships on that route were often French and sold drinkable coffee or – if I was flush – an enjoyable lunch.  

 

You knew you were there when mysterious portals opened on the main deck and burly Frenchmen appeared in those horizon-blue overalls, which you see nowhere else, growling ‘Porteur!’ Not that we ever had anything for them to carry. Just a minimal suitcase, a railway timetable,  a couple of guidebooks and a few paperback novels. The grey-green train, higher off the ground and generally bigger and less picturesque than ours, waited among the cranes for the last passengers to shuffle through customs. 

 

I viewed every part of it as a pleasure, including the marginally squalid hotels near the stations, with bolsters instead of pillows, brown lino floors, iron bedsteads and appalling wallpaper, the Moroccan sandwiches bought from dubious stalls in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the atrocious headache-inducing beer,  the ultra-cheap restaurants where they scribbled your bill on the paper tablecloth, the thuggish CRS men who hung around the Boulevard St Michel, fingering their billy-clubs,  in case of another 1968-style eruption,  the screeching short-distance trains that still, in those days, rambled into the depths of the countryside (the tracks have been torn up now, by a French Docteur Beeching just as bad as ours) . I don’t really miss much of that now, though I’m very glad I experienced it, and we couldn’t have afforded anything else anyway, which is never a bad thing to remember when you have got older but a bit richer.  

 

I do miss the far more distinctly French look and feel of everything, peculiar regional aperitifs, incredibly old-fashioned advertisements for weird French foodstuffs, medicines and soft drinks, the whiff of hot olive oil wafting from the high, blue Wagons Lits Dining Car, standing on the sunny platform with its crisp white tablecloths and its tempting bottle of wine on every table,  in which we would spend our very last Francs (no Euros then) on the journey to the ferry, the workman’s café next to the country railway junction near Autun, in my memory and probably in fact better than any temple of gastronomy,  which insisted on giving the Rosbif interlopers their ( excellent) wine in stemmed glasses, while everyone else was drinking it out of tumblers, the ancient, slightly-brown-tinged appearance of auberges and cafes, not really all that much altered since, oh, well, now you come to think of it, 1940.

 

Yes. Hmm. What did we think about that? Having visited Jersey and Guernsey, and seen the heavy traces of the German occupation of British territory where we were too weak to defend it, I was not inclined to look down on them from a great and British height. I knew that it was the Channel, not our valour, which had saved us from what had happened to them. I’d also rather liked H.E. Bates’s kind-hearted and touching novel,  ‘Fair Stood the Wind for France’, in which a young French girl turns out to be very much the same sort of person as the downed RAF pilots she helps to rescue.  They were ‘that sweet enemy’ . They were like us and yet they were thrillingly not like us.  America might easily have been theirs, not ours, if things had turned out differently on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. We liked visiting their country more than they liked visiting ours. They were more interested in us than we in them, readier to learn our language than we were to learn theirs. And they had no Channel, though I’ve always thought the (wrongly maligned) Maginot line was a half-hearted attempt to make France an island too. The world might be very different if they had finished it.

 

It never quite went away, this business of imagining how our lives would have been changed if this dreadful thing, invasion and occupation, had happened to us.  

 

All this came rolling back, like a long-dammed stream, when on Sunday I went to one of Oxford’s wonderful arthouse cinemas to see – for the first time – Louis Malle’s superb, heart-piercing film ‘Au Revoir les Enfants’. Somehow I managed to miss it when it came out in 1987 – it was a busy, even frantic time in my life when I couldn’t get to the cinema that often. And,  having missed it, in a sour grapes sort of way I persuaded myself that it didn’t matter, that it cannot have been that good anyway. But of course it was and is, and  you should see it, on DVD if you can’t find it at a cinema. The one where I went to see it, this being Oxford on a grey , wet Sunday afternoon, was almost full. I doubt if any of those present got to the end without weeping in the dark, quietly and privately.

 

It opens, all too fleetingly, with a dedication to (I think) four named people, three schoolboys and a man, a Roman Catholic priest and monk.  It ends with a scene which Malle himself said while he still lived that he would remember till the day he died, and I have no doubt he did.

 

I shall not reveal the plot in detail, not that its shape and ending will, in general, come as a shock to any educated person. It is of course quite beautiful to look at, the freezing winter of early 1944 evoked so strongly that on a July afternoon I actually wished I had brought a coat with me. A French middle-class boy going away by train to boarding school in the 1940s cannot have felt very different from an English middle-class boy such as I was, going away by train to boarding school in the 1950s.  Nor were the schools that different, the casual cruelty and spite of the boys to each other, the lack of privacy, the often superb teachers struggling with unformed lumps of intellectual lard in cramped and chilly classrooms, the silly playground fads and sudden fights, the pre-television reliance on books for entertainment and pastime,  the fumbling, fragile friendships  the awkwardness of parental visits, the subdued colours. We were Protestant, these are Roman Catholic, but both versions of Christianity, before they were modernised, had the same austere power and otherworldiness (now neither do)  .

 

And then, the difference that comes from having been beaten and occupied -  from not having a Channel,  finding that the great armies and weapons, in which they had trusted, were gone or in the hands of the enemy, and what an enemy he was. He looked like them, often behaved like them, could appear civilised and decent and act with kindness.  But he wasn’t really kind. Here, in civilised, light-hearted lovely France, thanks to the abolition of a border a couple of hundred miles away, see what creatures burst into what would otherwise be a normal life of lessons, meals and chapel services. See what they can do and how they do it. Find out what treachery, misery and fear are actually like, in this small, intimate and seemingly normal piece of the world. Find out what it is like when ‘Gestapo’ is not a word or a jibe, but a presence among you. And remember, as you watch, that this is all true, actually happened and will, in some form or other, happen again. You might be there when it does. You will probably just stand and watch, astonished that such things can take place and that nobody can stop them.

Our latest weapon in the war on terror? Organic free-range tripe

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Is David Cameron the man who will destroy freedom in order to save it? His strange, wild speech on Monday suggests that he is. Mr Cameron, as careful observers already know, has a surprisingly poor grasp of history and politics and does not seem to be very clever.

The reception given to his outburst was mostly friendly, all across what is supposed to the spectrum of media opinion – though increasingly it is not a spectrum but a monolithic bloc.

Did they read it? I did. It is full of seething organic free-range tripe.

He actually tries to pretend that Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War has had nothing to do with the development of resentful Islamist militancy here. He does this by saying that the September 11 attack on Manhattan took place before the Iraq War.

Indeed it did. It was motivated – as one of the hijackers, Abdulaziz al-Omari, made clear in his own recorded testament – by Arab fury over America’s support for Israel, and the continued presence of US troops on Saudi soil. And it succeeded in changing US policy on both.

Strong words: David Cameron gave a speech on terrorism on Britain on Monday and how the country will face the challenges ahead going forward

 

Terror is rational. Terrorists know that it works, or why has the USA started supporting the two-state solution in Israel which it long opposed, and why is Martin McGuinness invited to Windsor Castle these days?

If Mr Cameron doesn’t like terrorism, then he wouldn’t have met Mr McGuinness and the even ghastlier IRA mouthpiece, Gerry Adams, at Downing Street last week. But he did. How can that be if, as the Prime Minister says, ‘British resolve saw off the IRA’s assaults on our way of life’. Oddly, you only saw the pictures of this pair meeting Jeremy Corbyn on the same day. The Downing Street meeting was not, it seems, filmed.

But that’s only a part of the problem. Mr Cameron claimed that we have, in this country, a ‘very clear creed’. But do we?

He says: ‘We are all British. We respect democracy and the rule of law. We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of worship, equal rights regardless of race, sex, sexuality or faith.’

Little of this is true. Few regard themselves as British any more. Votes are bought by billionaire donations and incredibly expensive marketing. Democracy is surely not respected by the growing legions who don’t vote. And, as Mr Cameron acknowledged, there are now areas of this country where votes are rigged and voters intimidated for the first time since the days of Dickens.

 

Terror is rational. Terrorists know that it works, or why is Martin McGuinness invited to Windsor Castle these days?

 

Freedom of speech, for those who don’t accept multiculturalism or the sexual revolution, is increasingly limited, mainly by threats to the jobs of those who speak out of turn.

Mr Cameron is also plain wrong when he says our freedom stems from democracy. Democracy these days involves agreeing with whatever slogans the Murdoch press is shouting.

Our freedom comes from the 1689 Bill of Rights, which he doesn’t seem to know exists, from Magna Carta, which he can’t translate, from Habeas Corpus, which has been whittled away on the excuse of counter-terrorism, and from jury trial, which is fast disappearing. Freedom of speech certainly can’t be defended by banning ‘hate-preachers’, which Mr Cameron is so proud of doing. Freedom of speech is freedom above all for those whose views you dislike most.

Nor can it be strengthened by demanding that people publicly declare that they don’t hold certain opinions. Mr Cameron actually said: ‘We must demand that people also condemn the wild conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitism, and the sectarianism too. Being tough on this is entirely in keeping with our values’.

How on earth is he going to make this happen? Electric shocks until they get their minds right? Personally, I’d much rather know that such people held these frightful views, than have them forced to pretend they didn’t.

Then there is: ‘We need to put out of action the key extremist influencers who are careful to operate just inside the law, but who clearly detest British society and everything we stand for.’

Put out of action? If they are inside the law, which protects the freedom Mr Cameron so values, what does this foggy phrase mean? Sandbagging them as they come out of the mosque?

I’m also not very reassured that we have a Premier who thinks he can advise TV companies on who they should and should not invite on to the airwaves. I think we can all see where that leads.

Mr Cameron and Mr Blair, and their predecessors over decades, have gone a long way towards Islamising this country through uncontrolled immigration and state multiculturalism. They have begun to panic, because they at last realise what they have done, and rightly fear they cannot stop it.

 

 

For a moment or two, I thought my media colleagues were finally going to grasp the fact that cannabis use is now more legal in this country than it is in Amsterdam.

When an actual Police and Crime Commissioner can come out and say that he doesn’t think his force can be bothered to pursue small-scale cannabis farmers – and is not then disavowed or removed – that should be clear enough.

But the Billionaire Big Dope Lobby needs to make the false claim that we groan beneath a harsh regime of ‘prohibition’, under which harmless persons are ‘criminalised’ for supposedly victimless crimes.

By claiming this, it can win what it really wants – cannabis on open sale in the high street and the internet, marketed and advertised. Many politicians, frantic for new sources of money to service our gigantic national debt, also long to tax it. So the truth, that cannabis has been decriminalised in this country for decades, cannot be acknowledged.

And the other truth, that this very nasty drug is strongly correlated with lifelong mental illness, must also be suppressed.

Hardly a week passes when I do not hear a new story of a youthful cannabis user becoming mentally ill, his life and the lives of his family wrecked for ever.

How strange, in a country which frowns on greasy fast food and sugary drinks, and which rightly discourages alcohol and tobacco, that the legalisation of this dangerous poison is considered a noble and liberating cause.

 

 

A touching Tango on the road to Nazi disaster 

One of many good things about the excellent new film 13 Minutes – about a failed attempt to kill Hitler in 1939 – is its thoughtful portrayal of Germany and Germans as they slid relentlessly and unconsciously downwards into disaster.

Like us, they had their carefree moments – would-be assassin Georg Elser (played by Christian Friedel) is here shown dancing an impromptu tango with his mistress Elsa (Katharina Schüttler).

But power and evil march on regardless, ruining the lives of those who ignore them. 

 

New release: 13 Minutes is about a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939 with Christian Friedel and Katharina Schüttler, pictured

 

It is enjoyable watching the Warmist fanatics trying to cope with a 41 per cent increase (yes, 41 per cent) in the volume of Arctic ice in 2013.

According to their dogma of relentless man-made climate change, it shouldn’t have happened. But it did.

Any rigid ideology ends up not being able to cope with facts, and either suppressing them or bending them.

Meanwhile, we close perfectly good coal-fired power stations and risk blackouts, especially if it is, once again, colder than the Warmists expected. 

 

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