The headline on last week's 'I am away' entry was 'A Short Break', which may have given the impression that I was on a beach (unlikely) or (more likely) rambling round Europe's historic cities by train. This was misleading, as I was actually busy in Pakistan, preparing the article which appeared on Sunday. As a result, my head is still full of impressions from that fascinating, complex country and I find it rather hard to get Britain back into focus.
This is disquieting. But it is also useful. I spent most of the period from 1990 to 1995 abroad, living in Moscow and Washington, or travelling - to South Africa, Israel, Somalia, Australia and China during the months in between. I became used to being abroad, a sort of state of weightlessness, exhilarating in some ways, very bad for you in others. When I came back from Washington in September 1995 Britain looked very strange. In fact it wasn't just me. Britain in 1995 was very strange indeed with the absurd John Major as Prime Minister. How even stranger that a new, re-tooled version of Mr Major is now widely praised as the answer to our problems.
But it was upon re-entry that I began to realise that something had gone seriously wrong with a whole list of national institutions. Most striking of all, after landing at Southampton on a lovely September day (which began with a long and heartbreakingly beautiful passage along the Devon and Dorset coast, perhaps the part of England that has changed least in the last century, and specially moving after two years among the big skies, hedgeless prairies, monstrous rivers and long straight highways of North America) I was looking out for a proper English police constable, in tunic and helmet, walking down the street. It was a fortnight before I saw such a figure, and he was carrying a briefcase to show that he was busy and not really on patrol.
From that experience came the impulse that drove me to write 'Abolition of Britain' and 'Abolition of Liberty'.
But it wasn't just that. It was little like revisiting an old childhood home. Buildings that had seemed vast, distances that had seemed immense, were diminished. People who had once seemed frightening or remote were now accessible and ordinary. On the other hand, there was a sense of lost safety. Tom Wolfe has a very good passage, in 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' about how parents try to pretend to their children that they can protect them from all danger, and do anything for them. But their children - if they are wise - gradually realise that this is just a comforting fiction which appears to be true, but isn't. They then have to provide the same comforting fiction to their own children, as best they can.
And of course the same is true of the history we learn in childhood - a fable that's heartwarming, reassuring and allows us to feel proud of being who we are - but one we have to discard when we put away childish things. As it happens, the grown-up story of Britain is still pretty inspiring, even once you have learned that there were many dark and evil things done amid that smiling landscape, and in our name.
Pakistan - a country whose existence is a result of our policy and many of whose problems are largely our fault - is an interesting example of this. Read the article if you want to know more. But I have now completely changed the way I look at foreign countries. Back in the 1980s, when I used to voyage quite a lot round the Warsaw Pact, I used to think that it was our job and our business to spread the blessings of our Way of Life across the globe.
This was easy when you came from the glossy safety of the English Home Counties to the oppressed, brown and grey wildernesses of Prague, East Berlin and Warsaw (though Prague in those days was in my view more beautiful than it is now, because under Communism nobody could afford to wreck it by modernising it, and hardly anyone from the West even knew it was there, let alone dared go there, or considered it for a second as a stag night location).
It was after the walls and fences came down that I began to see that it wasn't specially easy to give people freedom. They often weren't rich enough to afford it (for it comes at a high price), and they didn't have, in themselves, the habits of mind that made it workable. This was most obvious of all in Russia, which went from iron-bound Communist state to gangster nation in a matter of months with almost no interlude in between.
Yes, Russia is a 'democracy', in that they have elections. But it does not have the rule of law, or liberty of speech and thought, which are much more important and without which 'democracy' is just a ritual, signifying nothing but fooling such people as George W. Bush. Things are not quite so bad (they vary a lot) in the other former Soviet satellites. But democracy is a weak plant in all of them, and liberty and law weaker still.
For a lot of people, one form of oppression has been exchanged for another. Soviet Russia had crime, poverty, corruption, mass alcohol abuse, drugs and prostitution, plus routine abortion and pandemic marriage breakdown, and was in many important ways a very nasty society. The problem is not that it was good, but that what came after it was in so many ways very little better, and in some ways actively worse. Part of the reason for this is that it had spent 70 years under a totalitarian system which withered up the consciences of its people. And a law-governed state can only function if the law is loved and respected in the hearts of its citizens.
There are different - but equally strong -reasons why Iraq's sudden 'democracy', dropped on it from the skies, is just as futile. Maybe there are ways of helping other people's countries to attain a higher level of law and liberty. But I have long ago ceased to think that this can be achieved by destabilising or smashing the existing government from the outside.
What's really important to me now is this truth, gathered after years of looking at other people's countries, from China to Bhutan, from Cuba to Somalia. And that truth is that countries like Britain are utterly abnormal.
Normality is tens of millions of people crowding into jerry-built concrete cities and shanty towns, surrounded by sick dogs, open drains and drifts of litter. Normality is either a police state or openly corrupt politicians whose rhetoric is meaningless, whose only loyalty is to faction or tribe, and who offer favours in return for votes.
Normality is a thuggish, armed police force whose officers have the power to ruin your life merely by accusing you, who are uninterested in whether you are a good citizen or not and treat everyone but the rich with contempt, and whose indolent power is only mitigated by the fact that they can be bribed into leaving you alone, or into protecting you. Usually there's a secret police too, who you run into quite quickly if you show any signs of independent thought. Normality is an 'identity card' which denotes your status as a slave of the state. You have to justify your existence to them, when in a free country it is the other way round.
Normality is a controlled press and media. Normality is a rubber stamp parliament, biased courts, squalid, violent prisons run by their inmates. Normality is useless schools for the poor and good ones for the rich.
I could go on. But it seems to me, on viewing Iraq, or Russia, or Egypt, or South Africa, or Cuba, or India, or Romania, that the proper response is not to lecture them on their ills, but to be hugely grateful that we do not share most of their problems, and to bless our good fortune. And secondly to ask why it is that we are so fortunate. And thirdly, to work as hard as we can to make sure that we retain that good fortune. For it did not come about by accident. It came about through centuries of effort, vigilance, courage and refusal to be panicked or frightened into giving it up. And it has never been more threatened than it is now. Rather than going round invading other countries, we should be defending our own against the people who would become our despots if we let them.
Many of the things which are normal in other countries, and used to be abnormal here, are starting to appear amongst us. That, not panics about Islamic terror or Weapons of Mass Distraction, should be our main concern.
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