Some of you may be interested in this interesting essay on the Quadrapheme social conservative site, about Aldous Huxley's prophetic book 'Brave New World' and the ways in which it is coming true.
http://www.quadrapheme.com/aldous-huxleys-twenty-first-century-utopia/
On most Sunday mornings I swim up to consciousness while listening to BBC Radio 4. The thing that forces me into full wakefulness is an almost comically correct programme called, with great wit and originality, ‘The Sunday Programme’ . This hour is supposed to be about religion. But whenever I concentrate it always seems to be mainly about sex – sexual abuse by priests and leaders of religions of almost all denominations, or the travails of overt homosexuals who insist on adhering to, or seeking to be ministers in, churches which disapprove of overt homosexuality. Yesterday was no exception to this rule, so reliable that is actually comical.
But for a few brief moments it actually did discuss religion. An atheist (I forget his name) was pitted against the author of a new book on the 'New Atheism’ from which we suffer so much here on this blog, whether I write about it or not.
This was Andy Bannister, of whom I had not heard before. Nor have I read his book ‘The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist’ .
I was astonished (because these discussions are usually hopelessly narrow) to hear him referring to Thomas Nagel, the courteous and thoughtful philosopher who gives Atheism a good name and who openly discusses the fact that he and his fellow believers in Nogod *want* God not to exist. This is a point I tirelessly seek to make about the whole argument. It is indeed the only interesting part of it, which Mr Bunker and others decline to discuss.
Anyway, he mentioned that Aldous Huxley had also written on this point. I have always admired Huxley’s bleak clarity and honesty, and made a brief Internet search to see what he might have been referring to.
I found a book called ‘Ends and Means’ , subtitled ‘An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realization’, published in London in 1937 by Chatto and Windus. There’s a 1941 edition online here
The interesting bit , for this part of the argument, begins at the bottom of page 269, where Huxley is discussing the reality of the ‘meaning’ which we like to give to the world and our actions within it.
‘This is a question’, says Huxley, ‘which, a few years ago, I should not even have posed. For, like so many of my contemporaries, I took it for granted that there was no meaning’…
‘…I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption...
‘Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know *because we don’t want to know*(my emphasis). It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless…’
There then follows an interesting reflection on the Marquis de Sade (one of whose disciples was Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer), perhaps the ultimate example of the man who wanted to live free of restraint (and ended up being restrained by authority as a result) .
‘De Sade’s philosophy’ Huxley writes ‘was the philosophy of meaninglessness carried to its logical conclusion. Values were illusory and ideals merely the inventions of cunning priests and kings. Sensations and animal pleasures alone possessed reality and were alone worth living for. There was no reason why anyone should have the slightest consideration for anyone else.’
Of course almost all of us recoil from such a view of the world, and , even if we wished God and hell out of existence, can construct systems of mutual solidarity, or at least apparent mutual solidarity, which keep us and our fellow-creatures from raging down De Sade’s path, or Brady’s.
Yet like all pure, unashamed and unrestrained versions of any idea, he is valuable in assessing its essence, just as one must know about Robespierre and Lenin when dealing with any Utopian, however mild and restrained. What if the restraints come off? As Huxley says ‘ Sade is not afraid to be a revolutionary to the bitter end. Not content with denying the particular system of values embodied in the “ancien regime”, he proceeds to deny the existence of any values, any idealism, any binding moral imperatives whatever… De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.’
A little further on comes this ‘No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behaviour, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community.’
And then ‘The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.’
And (remember this is 1937) ‘The voluntary, as opposed to the intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines of materialism, for example, may be predominantly erotic’. As is usual in Huxley this is followed by an example, drawn from his immensely wide reading, typical of a pre-1914 educated person (such as Huxley was – his poor eyesight saved him from a muddy grave in Flanders) but rather shaming for those who pose as intellectuals in today’s world.
Huxley (after a justified swipe at Christianity’s frequent willingness to endorse things it shouldn’t) continues ‘For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. *We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom* (my emphasis); we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust.'
Then ‘The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever’.
The next section, dealing with man’s later attempt to rediscover meaning in class or nation, should send a shudder down any spine. For once again, it is 1937. I think I had better read the whole thing when I get the chance, but this passage shone with such startling and honest brilliance (compared with most of the dreary repetitious stuff which passes for debate on the subject) that I thought it worth reproducing here. Thank you, Radio 4.
I know from sad experience that a lot of left-wing people (and a lot of right-wing people) still think that socialism equals nationalisation equals socialism, and that Thatcherism equals conservatism. Oddly enough, their views are matched by a lot of golf-club Tories who thought that Anthony Blair was ‘The Best Tory Prime Minister We’ve Ever Had’. They really did say that. I remember the despair I felt when I heard it, just as I still feel despair when left-wingers moan moronically that New Labour never did anything for them. They even think that their ‘principles’ entitle them to be morally opposed to globalist anti-sovereignty wars like the Iraq invasion, which was always a left-wing war. Most wars these days are left-wing. Nobody’s keener on getting the bombers out.
It was largely to combat this absurd misunderstanding that I wrote my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’ back in 1998, and I have struggled ever since to get anyone to read it. My later ‘The Cameron Delusion’ was another effort in the same direction. I couldn’t even get anyone to review that.
I fear that lot of the copies of my books that have actually been sold have been more in the nature of relics and souvenirs, as British conservatives are not great readers and I often find that people who say they are great supporters of mine are still stuck in the political categories of 1955, or 1915 come to that. I am quite sure that almost none of my political foes or critics has read any of my books, as it is very easy to tell from the ignorant attacks which they make on me. Only this week, a contributor here has hilariously accused me of being ‘Pro-Tory’, presumably because I attacked the Labour Party; and a left-wing ‘comedian’ has insinuated on Twitter that I am some sort of racial bigot (he has, to his credit, now apologised). I have (reluctantly) forgiven him, according to the rules by which I must abide, and have been chided on Twitter for my reluctance. To which I say, if forgiving were easy and painless, we wouldn’t need God to make us do it. I have also followed Brigadier Gerard’s old rule, that before forgiving one’s enemies, it is only fair to give those enemies something to forgive you for.
But I digress. Like all truly crazed and gigantic delusions, the idea that the Left has not changed its aims and methods since 1945 is much harder to combat with facts and logic than more minor deviations from the truth, which are generally easy to acknowledge. Most people, however proud, can eventually be persuaded that they have taken a wrong turning, misread a map or got an answer wrong in a quiz. But it is more or less impossible to get anyone to abandon a tribal political loyalty. Even UKIP is really the Tory party in exile rather than a true alternative (one of the reasons it is doomed to fall to earth at about the time the first stage separates from the main rocket).
What is the deep reason behind the fact, known to propagandists since Hitler , that a big lie is more likely to be believed than a small one? Hitler’s explanation in Mein Kampf was that the masses would themselves be ashamed to lie on such a large scale as their leaders do, and so cannot believe that their leaders are doing so.
There’s obviously something in that, though in the 1920s, when there was a good deal more deference towards politicians than there is now, it probably made more sense. It is the common currency of the masses, nowadays, that politicians are liars by trade. And yes, even as we say this, we vote for them (Or you do. I don’t).
My explanation is that most people do not think about big things at all, or see them clearly. They experience government, and policy, and even war, in small intense brushes and scuffles, from which they get strong and often mistaken impressions. The edifice of power it is so big that it cannot be examined without a great deal of cool detachment. Try taking a photograph of one of the huge Pyramids just south of Cairo. Unless you stand a long way back, your entire lens will be filled with dusty masonry. It does not begin to make sense, or reveal its true shape and nature, until you have moved far from it. Most of us get used to the presence in our minds of certain ideas, and never examine them. We are surrounded by mental pyramids, looming in our path. In trying to navigate among them, we seldom look at any of them as a whole. Once you have barked your shin on one, that will be your main experience of it.
Habits of mind and conventional wisdom about the world, once acquired from parents, teachers or church, are now acquired from TV and from teen peer groups, so that those who would once have been vaguely and ignorantly conservative are now vaguely and ignorantly leftist. Hence neither group understands why it believes what it believes, or much wants to think about it. Both groups will respond much more readily to tribal appeals than to reason or facts.
That, I think, is why what I do must , so far at least, be regarded as an almost total failure. I comfort myself that I have helped speed the inevitable collapse of the Tory Party, and that I may have slowed down the legalisation of cannabis. I like to think that the case for grammar schools has grown stronger and better-understood thanks to me. I played a small part in the fight to stop us joining the Euro, to prevent the betrayal of Gibraltar and in holding off the campaign to force us on to Berlin Time. But in general my impact on national life, given the tremendous pulpit I possess, is rather disappointing.
My main defeat is my failure to get across the simple fact that the Left’s chief aims are now moral, cultural and sexual, nothing to do with state ownership and very little to do with trade unions or the working class, which has more or less ceased to exist in the advanced countries.
Even quite smart people can get these things hopelessly backwards. And even those who grope towards the truth sometimes balk at it when they find it. Sir Simon Jenkins (who is gravely wrong about drugs, for reasons I can’t really understand, but is otherwise one of the smartest commentators in the business) had the most astonishing near miss a few years ago when he described J.Major, A.Blair and G.Brown as Mrs Thatcher’s progeny in a book called ‘Thatcher and Sons’.
Sir Simon had earlier helped deconstruct the Iron Lady myth of the Falklands and had annoyed a lot of Tories by pointing to Lady Thatcher’s penchant for nationalising things, especially local government and education. I might add that, with Arthur Scargill’s help, she also pretty much nationalised the police, though Roy Jenkins had begun that process with his forced mergers.
It only took one small step to reach the appalling truth.
If Major, Blair, Brown (and now D.Cameron and N.Clegg) were Thatcher’s sons, then she was their mother. And if she was Blair and Brown’s mother, then can she possibly have been the right-wing monster of legend?
Of course she wasn’t. She inherited much of the legacy of the Wilson and Heath governments (and remember, she was in the Heath government, not unwillingly) and left much of it essentially untouched. Her government was heavily statist. It taxed and spent heavily, drove Britain deeper into globalist and international and supranational bodies and alliances, weakened national laws and useable armed forces, declined to protect strategic industries form foreign ownership, centralised wildly and substituted regulation and exhortation for civil society.
Of course the hopeless ‘national curriculum’ for English schools is one of the best examples of this. No proper conservative could support such a monstrous idea, on principle. Schools should be independent bodies, institutions with their own self-government, staffed by properly-qualified and educated teachers with minds of their own, helped by the state to flourish and subject to external examinations. The idea that Monsieur le Ministre can tell them in detail what to teach is, well, Continental, not British.
And , given that it was instantly hijacked by the cultural revolutionaries who run British schools, and used to further their purposes, it was even worse.
Then there were ’grant-maintained’ schools. The fascinating way in which these schools were financed – a national, centralised body – was seldom if ever mentioned in public. But there it was, a nationalised state school system – now much swollen in the ‘Academy’ programme, which has now scooped up quite a lot of grammar schools and has even begun to swallow private schools (why are they joining? What do they think will happen to them when the government, into whose hands they have delivered themselves, is not just passively pro-comprehensive, but once again actively so?) .
Then of course there’s the nationalisation – expanded by every government for 45-odd years – of parenthood, with more and more mothers married to the state rather than a husband, and more and more children acknowledging the state, rather than an absent father, as chief provider. Not to mention the state encouragement of wage-slave motherhood at the expense of full-time mothers, and the resultant nationalisation of child-raising (so that nursery places are subsidised by the taxpayer, whereas full-time mothers are not). This leaves the natural parents, themselves exhausted, to put the poor mites to bed after long hours in day-orphanages with paid strangers. Wouldn’t it be simpler to go the whole way into Brave New World, and cut out the parents completely. They’d spend more on consumer goods if they weren’t stuck at home trying to do quality time with exhausted infants, doing their homework for them, or vainly trying to compete with the attractions of computer games, Facebook and the rest.
Old age, too, is becoming a state-sponsored experience for more and more people, and a very expensive and labour-intensive part of the nationalised sector it is too, which is perhaps why new ways are constantly being sought to shuffle the old off into the next world.
As for claiming that the state sector shrank in the Thatcher era, do those people who claim this not count the NHS and the local authorities, and endless, amoeba-like replicating quangoes, as being part of the state sector? The shifting of workers from direct to indirect state employment, kept going by the taxpayer but evading parliamentary accountability, was a masterstroke of Thatcherism.
The difference between the new nationalisation and the old is this .The new one does things that were far better done by individuals, small local institutions or even private bodies. The old one did things that were in many cases better done by national corporations, and have not in general been better done by private ones. Or it tried to rescue industries that had already been destroyed by incompetent government economic policies, and got the blame for their failure.
BT’s main advantage over the old Post Office telephones comes purely from the fact that its foundation coincided with the general availability of some fine new technology. But if the nationalised body had been able to introduce that technology, most people would have associated these ‘improvements’ with the nationalised corporation.
AS for the railways, often discussed here, a very useful corrective to the smug pro-privatisation propaganda of the neo-liberals can be found in this document from Manchester University’s Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)
From this it is clear that the change is not a true privatisation at all, but a taxpayer-funded pretence at private railways, which costs far more (and is less efficient and much more heavily subsidised) than the nationalised BR it replaced. Nothing except a desire to follow neo-liberal dogma at all costs justifies its existence, but without the state discreetly holding it up, it would collapse. The current situation, in which the East Coast line is being run directly by the state and is certainly doing no worse than any of the ‘private’ train operating companies, is extremely interesting. If this is so, why do we need these train operating companies at all? Also fascinating is CRESC’s discovery of a huge secret subsidy to the train operating companies, engineered via Network Rail’s low track access charges, and the indefensible arrangements which govern the rolling stock leasing companies. Without the taxpayer to guarantee it , the whole thing would fall down in a heap. I cannot see what is conservative about this, or why conservatives should support it. But I can see that the New Left, anxious for state power to pursued its real agenda of globalisation and cultural revolution, would be willing to continue with such phantasms for pragmatic purposes. Because the globalisation and cultural revolution are what the Left really care about, so they are quite willing to sacrifice the railways for that cause.
Precisely because the left used to be in favour of nationalisation, it is now debarred from renationalising the railways, even though it would be the best course of action. Chesterton’s Law of the Truthful Paradox operates once again. The most ridiculous and unlikely things are often true, for a perfectly good reason that most people have not noticed.
Meanwhile the neo-liberals, who by claiming to be ‘Conservatives’ maintain the loyalty of their tribe, are happy to connive at the destruction of one of Britain’s greatest treasures( one which it invented and gave to the world and which would be a source of patriotic pride to any proper conservative) because by doing so they can persuade the deluded masses that they are in fact conservative. That’s also Chestertonian. Precisely by doing something profoundly unconservative, a group of people who are not conservative persuade another group of people (who really are conservative) that they (the fake conservatives) are real conservatives.
The facts, when stated, are so ludicrous as to be unbelievable. The truth is too big and too blatant to be seen, except by those who stand afar off. And so, when I advise the young to emigrate, my readers and listeners always think I am joking.
I’m not, you know. I really, really mean it.
Today (Monday 21st January) is the anniversary of the death of George Orwell (Eric Blair) in 1950, at the painfully early age of 46. One does wish so very much that he had lived on to see Suez, the Hungarian uprising, the Chinese Cultural revolution ( and its pale British imitation), the coming of the European Union and the speech codes of political correctness.
But today we should remember, above all, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and one of its central (and least noted) predictions about the modern state’s need for a permanent war against someone.
As I’ve said before, Orwell was completely wrong about the future, and above all about sex. He was so annoyed by the repression and inconvenience of his own age that he decided that a future IngSoc tyranny would include an anti-sex league and a general loathing of sexual liberty. This is nonsensical. Slaves have often been allowed to copulate, but seldom to marry. The Nazi elite were sexually libertine and had little respect for marriage, especially Goebbels. One of the Bolsheviks’ earliest actions (then considered shocking) was to make marriage about as easy to dissolve as it is in modern Britain. There is no connection that I know of between sexual licence and liberty of thought, and rather a strong connection between sexual self-discipline and puritanism, and political liberty (see the Roundheads and the original American Pilgrims).
Actually Orwell partly contradicted himself by predicting that this would only apply to the Party elites. The non-party proles would be bombarded with pornography and the sort of trashy ‘bread and circuses’ rubbish we are very familiar with : ‘There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.’
Julia, Winston Smith’s lover and companion in rebellion, has actually worked in this dingy part of the Ministry of Truth: ‘There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls’ School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal. “What are these books like?” said Winston curiously. “Oh, ghastly rubbish. They’re boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.”’
Men are believed by the Party to be in greater danger of corruption, so most of the work is done by unmarried women. But I digress. Actually, as Aldous Huxley warned, a truly repressive modern state would happily encourage untrammelled sex, while destroying marriage and parenthood , as part of its general effort to make men ( and women) love their own servitude.
But Orwell got closer to the truth when, from Goldstein’s secret book, the mysterious text which he is given in the course of being entrapped by the Thought Police, he learns in Chapter III (‘War is Peace’) that war between the three great states of the world is permanent . In 1984 this war has an economic purpose (Which I suspect comes from James Burnham’s works, now I think shown to be fallacious) but also a political one .
‘All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires
of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared
ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.’
Readers of the book will remember that one of the most oddly worrying passages in it concerns the huge amount of work needed in the Ministry of Truth when Oceania , having been at war with Eurasia, suddenly switches sides and goes to war against Eastasia instead. The whole Ministry is in turmoil as every single published work needs to be altered to pretend that this has always been the case. The canteens work day and night, exhausted people, shattered by the ignoble effort of inserting lies into every file and archive in the country, and deleting the truth from them, sleep on mattresses in the corridors.
‘In so far as he had time to remember it, he [Winston Smith]was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the Speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect.’
Despite the utter squalor of the work, there is a sort of warm comradeship – the comradeship of shared adversity, very hard work and wartime, well evoked, thanks to the intensity and urgency of the task. It is one of the paradoxes of the book that this wicked episode should be one of the few more or less innocent moments of the narrative.
How very fitting that we should remember the author of this mighty book on the day that our Prime Minister is recorded in most of the newspapers as declaring that we shall now begin a new war in North Africa, which, he warned, could last for decades. It is a ‘new front’. I am told that some media in France are describing the Algerian episode as ‘Europe’s 9/11’.
Well, I yield to nobody in my disgust and loathing for murder, and for the individuals and organisations responsible for murdering workers at the Algerian gas plant.
But haven’t we taken leave of our senses here, just a bit?
Two weeks ago, I doubt if David Cameron could have found Mali on a map, or that he had heard of the one-eyed cigarette smuggler, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, whom we are now invited to regard as the very embodiment of wickedness and a Major Threat to our Way of Life (whatever that is, apart from eating too much, driving about in cars, watching too much TV and voting for politicians who despise us ) .
We are told repeatedly that this individual is ‘linked to Al Qaeda’ or ‘Al Qaida’ or ‘Alky Ada’ (as Gordon Brown used amusingly to call it, in the long tradition of British politicians pronouncing foreign words so hopelessly badly that it was almost magnificent, as in Churchill’s reference to the Nazi - or, as he would say ‘Narzee’ - secret police as ‘the Jesterpo’ and Ernie Bevin’s frequent request for ‘A Bottle of Newts’ when he desired to drink a few glasses of Nuits St George).
As a statement, this claim that someone is ‘linked with Al Qaeda’ automatically arouses suspicion. To the extent that Alky Ada exists at all, which is a murky area of epistemology, it lacks a central secretariat, a treasury, an address, a telephone number, a membership list, a headquarters, a constitution or a leadership structure. I don’t know how anyone could prove he was *not* linked to it, if enough people said he was. Some people in the Arab world have taken to using the name mainly to annoy and challenge the West. I don’t think men with briefcases turn up demanding a fee from those who seek to use it. There are many fast food franchises which are more coherently organised.
Mokhtar Belmokhtar is ‘linked to’ Alky Ada largely by the fact that dozens of newspapers and 24-hour TV channels have linked him to it. Also he looks sinister and is undoubtedly a nasty piece of work. I would have thought that the late Osama bin Laden, or indeed any serious Islamist, would have been pretty sniffy about associating with a cigarette smuggler. But what do I know?
But whether he and his fellows are really an ‘existential’ threat to our civilisation (whatever that means) has to be open to doubt, as is the idea that Britain or its people should care in the slightest about what goes on in Mali. As for this episode committing us to decades of conflict, perhaps we should be asked if we actually desire this, and have it explained to us why we should. I am afraid I have long had this feeling that incompetent and unsuccessful political leaders enjoy having ( and magnifying the importance of) frightening foreign foes, because they think it will make us trust them more. It also takes our minds off more inconvenient subjects, such as our total inability to control arrivals from Bulgaria and Romania, itself the result of our membership of the EU, a fact which Mr Cameron would love to be forgotten.
Spies and ‘security’ agencies also love this sort of thing, a new villain menacing us from afar, as it is good for their expenses and their budgets. So do the rather sad journalists who become the mouthpieces of these outfits.
In any case, if we are really so appalled by ‘Islamists’, as we endlessly say we are, then why have we given them so much help, in terms of BBC cheerleading , diplomatic encouragement and logistical help, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and now Syria, where the main actors in the ‘Free Syrian Army’ are generally acknowledged to be fiercely militant Islamists.
I might add that, as Mark Almond cogently pointed out in the Mail on Sunday this week, Algeria loathed the ‘Arab Spring’ which was so much praised and supported here. Why? Because the Algerian state crushed a (democratically backed) Islamic revolution of its own, and with quiet but firm Western support, some years ago. And having done so, its leaders were highly alarmed to see their neighbours being given over to the naïve hopes of Hillary Clinton and William Hague – who must be two of the least qualified foreign ministers ever to have headed the policies of their respective countries.
Mark Almond (who I should note does not share my complacency/ studied calm( you choose which it is) about the dangers of North Africa to us ) wrote :’ Unlike Gaddafi, the rulers of Algeria are not a flamboyant lot. They are mainly generals in and out of uniform. They regarded the Arab Spring as a threat to their regime. To them democracy is a bad idea not just because people might vote them out of power, but because it could mean chaos.
‘In 1990, when fundamentalist candidates looked set to win, the generals stepped in to stop the elections. A decade of horribly brutal civil war followed.
‘This explains why there was such a disconnect between Whitehall and Algiers over how to handle the hostage crisis. Our Government was bewildered by the Algerian decision to open fire without consulting us or other foreign leaders.
‘But the Algerian army had - and still has - three simple reasons for cracking down at once: it wanted to stifle the crisis quickly and to destroy the terrorists; they wanted to show their own people that the regime is still firmly in charge and they were also desperate to avoid any chance of Western special forces getting to play a role on their territory.’
He added: ‘From Afghanistan via Iraq to Libya, the West has shown it can knock down tyrannical Humpty-Dumpties, but putting the societies back together again has eluded us - which is why Algeria sees the Arab Spring as part of the problem, not part of the solution.’
In the ‘Independent on Sunday’ the astute Patrick Cockburn wrote : ‘The speed of the jihadi retaliation [to France’s intervention in Mali] has led to doubts that the two events are connected, but the likelihood must be that French action in Mali precipitated a pre-planned assault on this target. It is a typical al-Qa'ida operation, in the tradition of 9/11, geared to attract maximum worldwide attention by a suicidal act of extreme violence.
‘Foreign leaders were swift to back the French action and pledge to pursue the perpetrators of the hostage-taking to the ends of the earth.
‘This is the sort of reaction al-Qa'ida intends to provoke, whereby a small group of gunmen is presented as a threat to the rest of the world. Recruits and money flow in.
‘Local disputes - in this case between the Tuareg of northern Mali and the government in the capital, Bamako - become internationalised. Foreign military intervention may restore order and even be welcomed by the local population in the short term. But the presence of a great power can be destabilising.’
He also wrote, with that depth of knowledge which is so important in these affairs: ‘Tuareg nationalist insurgency, not radical Islam, is at the heart of the crisis in Mali. What, for instance, are AQIM [(Al Quai’da in the Islamic Maghreb)] doing in northern Mali, which has never in the past been a bastion for fundamentalists? AQIM is in origin an Algerian movement that emerged from the civil war of the 1990s. Formed in 1998, its members moved to northern Mali in 2003, where the government saw it as a counterbalance to Tuareg separatists.
‘For all the French rhetoric about AQIM being a threat to Europe, the group made no attacks there over the past decade, being more interested in raising money through hostage-taking and smuggling cigarettes and cocaine. Algeria's links to AQIM are cloudy, but not so the movement's past connection with the Malian government. The strange truth is that it was the Malian government which, over the last 10 years, tolerated AQIM in northern Mali and allowed it to operate, taking a share in the profits of its kidnapping and drug-running operations. International military aid for use against al-Qa'ida was diverted for use against the Tuareg.’
Patrick also notes that 'The latest Tuareg uprising of 2012 was precipitated by the fall of Gaddafi in Libya a few months earlier. He had long kept a sort of order in the states in and around the Sahara. His defeat also meant the region was awash with modern weapons. Tuarge in the Libyan security forces, who knew how to use them, were coming home'.
Patrick Cockburn’s full article is here
and Mark Almond’s is to be found here
Given that the whole history of the Western world since September 11th 2001 is the history of supposedly adult governments rushing off into what are now almost universally recognised as doomed conflicts in largely irrelevant countries (Iraq anyone? Afghanistan, anyone?), I really do urge caution on this matter. I’d add that the paradox of Algeria, where the ‘democratic’ countries silently acceded to the very cruel suppression of a democratically legitimate, but very unwelcome, Islamist movement, makes a complete nonsense of our policy in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and above all, Syria.
Finally, this gives me another opportunity to recommend one of the best films ever made, which anyone who is at all interested in the subject of terrorism really has to see - ‘The Battle of Algiers’ , Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 account, very close to the facts, of the failed French attempt to keep hold of Algeria between 1954 and 1962. Nobody is romanticised. Anyone who sees it will be immune ever afterwards to the rhetoric of any side in such a conflict. War is hell, and don’t you forget it. It is readily available on DVD.
Before I go on my travels, I just feel the need to draw readers’ attention here to the weblog (on this ‘Right Minds’) site ) of Dr Robert Lefever. He has chosen to write about the very serious subject of ‘antidepressant’ drugs, a matter I have discussed here. I increasingly believe that the resort to these highly questionable chemicals, like the ‘treatment’ of the fictional complaint ‘ADHD’ with powerful mood-altering drugs, is part of the same cultural and moral sickness which has led to the de facto decriminalisation of drugs which were once despised, rightly feared, and properly banned by law.
We are a society increasingly unwilling to face, recognise or deal with reality.
In any case, I commend the Doctor’s article to you. I was especially struck by his mention of Aldous Huxley’s fictional panacea, ‘Soma’.
The tempest of raving, enraged and (in most cases) logic-free and fact-free comments on my criticisms of ‘Sir’ Richard Branson are most interesting to the intelligent and informed mind.
First of all, what is their purpose? It is plain that most of these people have been guided to this site by other sites, and urged to post abusive messages. They probably haven’t read what I actually wrote. Nor have they read anything written here before. As I write, the first of many dim and boring 'Wot abaht alcohol, then, eh? eh? ' comments has appeared, and its author is hugging himself in the belief that he has said something pithy and original. Oh dear. The index, the index, the index. It's all there.
Why do they respond like this? The pro-drugs movement has won almost every propaganda battle of the last 50 years and is accustomed to the faint-heartedness and cowardice of old-fashioned Toryism, and presumably hopes that it can browbeat or insult me into being quiet as well. And one contributor, in a very important unintended giveaway – actually calls for opinions such as mine to be banned by law.
I have no doubt that something of the kind will eventually happen. The only question is when it will come. I regard my life as a race between the grim reaper and the forces of political correctness – will I die before they can find an excuse to put me in prison? I am by no means sure which will win.
But this raises the fascinating question of why drug-abuse is not just a disgusting and rather shameful private vice, but instead is a political and social movement.
I first realised that this was a problem when people write to me saying they couldn’t understand how I could be in favour of liberty of thought and speech, and against identity cards, and simultaneously in favour of criminal punishments for drug users.
I grasped at that moment that drug abusers actually see the taking of drugs – especially cannabis – as an exercise of civil liberty.
This is plainly ludicrous. Drug-taking makes its victims passive, fuddles their ability to think and makes their speech incoherent. It is , in those ways at the very least, the ally of authority and the enemy of thought and speech.
I then found that Aldous Huxley had understood this many years before.
His fictional drug ‘Soma’ is actually a means of social control in ‘Brave New World’, Huxley’s extraordinarily accurate prophecy of the death of civilisation.
At one stage a riot is quelled when police spray vaporised Soma into the air and the rioters instantly become happy and begin weeping and embracing each other. In later works and lectures (as readers have told me) Huxley became convinced that rulers would use drugs and unrestricted sterile sex to persuade people to love their own subjugation, and this isn’t a bad picture of modern Western societies, where we all do as we’re told and think as we’re told, amid the ruins of free countries – Parliaments that don’t debate or decide, media that parrot the ruling party’s line, parties that represent the state to the people rather than the other way round. Meanwhile the principal occupations and diversions of the masses are internet pornography, banal social networks which incidentally provide the state with a window into our lives and souls, and various forms of bread-and-circuses drivel on the TV, not to mention the bizarre new paganisms of football worship and brand worship, with Las Vegas as a sort of Plastic Parthenon of this ghastly cult.
Well, if people love their servitude, and they do (for true liberty of action guided by morality and conscience is quite hard work, and often rather frightening) , what are they going to do to those who point out to them that they are serfs?
Lock them up, when they can. In the meantime, they’ll infest this weblog with insulting, brainless comments. Far from putting me off, it encourages me. I have recently restarted work, after a long interruption, on my book ‘The War We Never Fought’, about the ludicrous lie that our society is conducting a war on drugs, when in fact they are half an inch from being formally legal, and Britain probably has the most relaxed actual drugs regime (especially for cannabis) on the European continent.
I don’t suppose anyone will pay much attention, as both the new establishment and the masses have an interest in having as many people happily stupefied and passive as possible. But real freedom shouldn’t just go down without a fight, if it is ever to be revived in the future. Civilisations which go gently and willingly into extinction, as Winston Churchill once rightly pointed out, disappear forever. Those that go down fighting have some hope of rebirth.
