Some readers may be interested in this programme, in which I discuss the Junior Doctors' strike, the recent controversy about clergy in same-sex marriages, and the continuing argument about how we should treat migrants who wish to enter this country.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vcrzw
Some may not.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Now will we grasp that the United States is not our friend, but a foreign country whose interests are often different from ours?
President Obama’s blatant intervention in our internal affairs is not a sudden breach of a soppy ‘special relationship’. The USA’s only real special relationship is with Saudi Arabia, a 70-year-old hard pact of oil, money and power, welded together with such cynicism it ought to make us gasp.
Barack Obama’s open desire for us to stay inside the EU is by no means the first or worst example of White House meddling here in these islands. Bill Clinton forced us to cave in to the Provisional IRA in 1998 and his successor, George W. Bush, continued the policy by making us do Sinn Fein’s bidding afterwards.
Washington came close to scuppering our recapture of the F
alklands in 1982. And with the current state of our Armed Forces, which can nowadays do nothing without American support, I often wonder how the White House and the Pentagon would behave if Argentina once again seized Port Stanley.
If anyone thinks Hillary Clinton is a great friend of Britain, they’re in for a big surprise.
But surely the Americans fought with us shoulder to shoulder against the Kaiser and Hitler? Not exactly. The USA (quite rightly) fought for its own interest in both great wars, not for us.
When we ran out of money after the First World War, Washington seized the chance to force us to limit our Navy, and so began to overtake us as the world’s major naval power. We had feared Germany would do this. It is one of the great ironies of history that it was the USA that ended British sea power.
In the blackest months of the Second World War, just after the fall of France, the US Congress demanded almost every penny we owned before it would authorise the famous Lend- Lease programme.
Secret convoys of Royal Navy warships carried our reserves of gold bullion (estimated to have been worth £26 billion in today’s values) across the Atlantic – mostly never to return. Billions in negotiable securities went the same way, and British assets in the USA were sold off at absurdly low prices.
I don’t blame the Americans for this. In 1934, Britain had defaulted on her giant First World War debt to the USA. This is now worth up to £225 billion in today’s money, depending on how you calculate inflation.
We still haven’t paid it off, and never will, though it’s not considered polite to discuss it and it’s one of those facts so grotesque that most people refuse to believe it when first told of it.
During the Hitler war, the USA gave us enough aid to stay in the fight, but not enough to recover our former economic strength. The eventual peace was made on American terms, and Soviet terms, with us as onlookers. And after the war, Marshall Aid came with strings – open up the British Empire to outside trade, and then begin to dismantle it.
Not wanting to get embroiled in any more European wars, the USA also put a lot of effort into creating a permanently united Europe. Documents came to light in the 1990s, probably by accident, showing detailed CIA involvement in the European Movement.
I regard America’s behaviour as perfectly reasonable. It’s the sort of thing we used to do when we were top nation, and had more sense than to squander our wealth on idealistic foreign wars.
I like America and Americans, lived there happily for two fascinating years, and wish them well. But I never forget that the USA is another country, not a friend or even a cousin. Nor should you.
BRILLIANT HELEN IN THE FRONT LINE OF AN IMMORAL WAR
Best film of the year so far is Eye In The Sky in which Helen Mirren, in beautifully tailored camouflage, plays a British Army colonel trying to decide whether to launch a deadly drone strike on a terrorist safe house in Africa.
The late and much lamented Alan Rickman, in his last on-screen role, plays a red-tabbed general who has to deal with the politicians and their dithering.
The target house is crammed with front-rank terrorist commanders. But just outside it sits an innocent little girl, selling loaves of bread.
What do you do?
I won’t tell you what they do, but I am surprised we’re not much more worried about this form of warfare. Victims of ordinary bombing from the air are famously angered and frustrated by being subjected to an attack to which there is no defence. But this is much more alarming.
A woman at a desk in Nevada, by squeezing a trigger, can (without any risk to herself) obliterate or dismember another human being thousands of miles away, tearing them to shreds or dissolving them in a lake of fire.
An older generation than mine would have mumbled in mild tones ‘That’s not cricket!’ But today’s ruthless anti-terror macho man will reply: ‘We’re dealing with terrorists. The rules have changed. You can’t use chivalry when fighting with such people.’
Bystanders will see these attacks for themselves, or may be scorched or wounded by them. It is more than possible, for it happened to a wedding party in Yemen in December 2013, that entirely innocent people will be vaporised by mistake. Will their relatives be more or less likely to turn against us, once they have witnessed such events?
Precisely because it is so risk-free to us, it is outrageous and infuriating to those who see it on their own streets, who will feel as if we are treating them as insects to be casually swatted.
No doubt it will allow us to kill, by remote control, all kinds of people we don’t like. But is this moral? Would we send someone to walk up to them in the street and shoot them without warning or any kind of judicial process?
And would we accept it if a foreign power launched such attacks on our soil? I find it especially interesting that governments (such as ours) which sniffily refuse to execute convicted murderers, and so defend us from armed violence, are content to support this form of warfare.
How can arbitrary killing from the sky be right, and execution after a fair trial be wrong?
*******
Glad as I am to see the long-delayed decision to support some of what’s left of our steel industry, I grind my teeth in fury that nothing was done to help the honest, hard-working steelmen of Redcar, who now miserably face the loss of their homes as their murdered town sinks into enforced idleness.
Here’s a solution. Most members of our Government seem to regard the industrial areas of Britain as a foreign country. Fine. Then let them admit it openly, and so include Redcar and the rest in the swollen, uncuttable foreign aid budget. Simple, eh?
*******
Graffiti attacking the regime has begun to appear in North Korea. This is the beginning of the end. Nothing so undermines authority, stability and order as the appearance of these hideous scribbles.
While visiting the decrepit, bankrupt Hermit Kingdom a few years ago, I concluded (after observing several citizens prone and unconscious in the street) that its people survived mainly by drinking too much rice wine. Perhaps they have now run out of that, too.
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This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
How on earth did I end up on friendly terms with Howard Marks, the drug-smuggler and pro-cannabis propagandist who died last week? Yet I did.
You might think we would loathe each other. He stood for almost everything I am against. But not quite. He was a fierce and instinctive defender of free speech, a rare and precious quality.
I learned this one long-ago evening in Blackpool, when a squawking rabble of ignorant, intolerant students succeeded in having me driven off the stage at a debate.
As a snivelling official of the National Union of Students switched off my microphone and ordered me from the room, Howard got up, put his arm around my shoulder and said quietly and firmly: ‘If he’s going, I’m going too.’ He walked by my side as we left through a knot of hissing, hostile zealots.
I vowed never to forget it, and I never have. He loathe
d my opinions, and I loathed his, but we both knew there was something higher and better than that – the freedom to argue without hate or rancour.
I debated against him four times. He was wholly frank about his aim – the legalisation of selfish pleasure and the profits to be made from it. He was a criminal – but had served prison time for it without complaining.
never did I hear him produce the sort of pious, oily rubbish you usually get from the advocates of the Big Dope lobby. He listened to my arguments. By the next time I met him, he would have read up the facts and prepared a thoughtful response. I cannot tell you how rare that is. Most Big Dope advocates never listen to a word their opponents say.
What a pleasing contrast he was to the pitiful Nick Clegg, who ceaselessly calls for drug law liberalisation with the ingratiating smarminess of a newly hatched curate. He was at it again on the BBC’s Newsnight last week.
The programme, which recently gave the ridiculous Russell Brand a free platform for his wet opinions on drugs, filmed Mr Clegg wandering around Colombia, mouthing pro-legalisation pieties.
The former Deputy Prime Minister clearly knows almost nothing about the subject. He’s never met a cliche or a fat, juicy slab of conventional wisdom that he doesn’t like.
He actually said that many people in this country are ‘forced to steal to fund their drug habit, because both drug dealing and drug use are illegal’. Forced to steal? By whom? No, they choose to do so because they are selfish and cruel and don’t care about wrecking other people’s lives. And beside the fact (seemingly unknown to the former Deputy PM) that the police are rapidly giving up enforcing the laws against drug possession, how does this follow?
If cannabis was legal in this country, the big producers wouldn’t give it away free. In fact it would be more expensive because it would be taxed. Which is why there’s so much crime in the UK surrounding smuggled but legal alcohol and tobacco. So why on earth would dishonest, greedy people stop stealing to pay for it, just because it was legal?
The absence of thought here is amazing, as is Mr Clegg’s complacent lack of interest in the growing correlation between cannabis use and mental illness, not to mention horrible, violent crime.
Howard Marks looked like what he was, the ravaged, ruined advocate of a very bad cause. Mr Clegg, with his nice suit and his sweet tones, is far more dangerous, and a lot harder to like.
Another foul-up vanishes into thin air
Have you noticed the way that news suddenly stops happening in various foreign parts? After months when it produced far more news than it could consume locally, Ukraine went dark and silent. But bad things kept on happening.
This always takes place in countries where the fashionable Left triumphs. South Africa, now a swelling disaster of disorder, mismanagement and corruption, is another example. The second act, where the liberal utopia goes wrong, just doesn’t get reported.
Well, last week the Ukrainian premier resigned, mainly because of his utter failure to tackle the real corruption (vicious and viral, affecting every corner of life) in which that country is neck-deep. Even The Economist, a naive cheerleader for the February 2014 EU-backed putsch in Kiev, admits: ‘Corruption is still rampant. Key reforms are incomplete… the oligarchs are still entrenched.’
Of course they are. The overthrow of the elected government, by a supposedly spontaneous foreign-backed mob, was always about pushing the EU eastwards. The rest was propaganda. I hope you didn’t fall for it.
***
Worrying? That’s what dads are for
There’s a single, very moving moment in the new film Midnight Special that makes the whole rather odd story worthwhile. The small boy at the centre of the plot, who is being sought by angry armed men, turns to his father and tells him to stop worrying about him.
His father replies: ‘I will always worry about you. I like worrying about you. That’s the deal.’ In a world where fathers are increasingly being written out of the script of life, it’s a rare mention of an important thing.
***
Electronics shops are selling huge numbers of dashboard cameras to guard drivers against false accusations, something that happened years ago on Russia’s lawless roads.
Meanwhile, carers who steal from old people are being caught thanks to tiny surveillance devices hidden in smoke alarms. When are we not under surveillance? How many cameras will it take to entirely replace our shrivelled consciences and the dead Christian religion that once sustained them?
****
Well, so much for Jeremy Corbyn, who I have defended here for not being an Establishment mouthpiece. Tony Benn, who taught Mr Corbyn all he knew, was a patriot thrilled by England’s long struggle for liberty. He knew that the European Union meant the end of a thousand years of English history. He loathed its unaccountable power.
By taking away our freedom to make our own laws, the EU knocks the stuffing out of any serious political movement of Left or Right.
Mr Corbyn, by ignoring this lesson, turns out to be just another bureaucrat after all. He’d have done better to go down fighting. Having crushed him on this, his enemies now know that they can first bend him to their will, and then destroy him.
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Here’s an interesting consequence of people knowing more about your private life than you would ever have told them. In general, I have tried not to follow the modern fashion of saying much about my private life in public. What I have said, in such places as my eulogy of my late brother, or in a Radio 4 programme called ‘The House I Grew Up In’, has generally been in some way a response to the things my late brother made public long before.
This is why I sympathise with Justin Welby’s mother, following the recent revelations about the Archbishop’s true parentage. Your private life and secrets are known to other members of your family. If, for whatever reason, those other members decide to make them public, then you lose control over your own privacy. It may suit the one who has made the revelation. It may not suit or please you. Sometimes, as in my case, you find out that these things are public after it’s already happened. In my case this happened in an American magazine article, subsequently included in an anthology published in the UK, followed by elaborations in interviews and in on-stage remarks at literary festivals. To begin with, these weren’t widely known, but became more so as our varying celebrity increased. In the Welby case, there was plainly plenty of warning and consultation, which is of course different.
Now, here’s an interesting consequence of my brother’s repeated revelations about my parents’ marriage and characters. It takes the form of a comment from a contributor rather amusingly calling himself ‘Kevin’ . There are no giveaways there. We don’t even know for sure if ‘Kevin’ is actually called Kevin at all, is a he or a she, genderfluid, old or young, married or single, childless or a parent. Yet he or she knows a lot more about me than I would ever have told her or him, if the choice had been mine. And he or she uses it in argument.
‘Kevin’ (or, for all we know, Katie or Keith ) writes : ‘Peter Hitchens is opposed to divorce under ANY circumstances. I can understand that his brother's honest and frank description of their mother’s unhappy marriage to their father would upset the idealistic view that PH has of marriage and his desire to deny the escape of those who cannot stand it no longer for justifying reasons. He is wrong, but entitled to his view.’
Well, I accept the challenge. If we’re to debate on this level, at least I know that the lower, rougher holds and tricks of verbal wrestling are not off-limits. Having delivered this nifty surprise kick to my, er, shins, Kevin would have no real basis for complaining if it got a little bumpy. But let’s see if we can manage without any of that stuff.
First, I wonder how he knows with such certainty that my brother’s description of this matter is ‘honest and frank’. Was he there? I don’t remember him being present under that name. Perhaps he had the place bugged. It seems unlikely. Thus his use of the words 'honest and frank' means only that he himself chooses to think them so. I shan’t enter into a detailed discussion of this, only say that it is not uncommon for memoirists to emphasise the, um, light and shade of their own lives to make them more entertaining and to serve their own narrative purpose. This is the point of memoirs, and the reason for the old publishing saw that 'autobiography is fiction, and fiction is autobiography' . Not to mention the old problem of memory being deeply unreliable.
Possibly I was unobservant, and both of us spent much of our childhood away at boarding schools, to which I wasn’t suited but which were perfectly bearable once you got the hang of them. But I spent most of my childhood in what now seems to me to be a dream of safe contentment, left largely to my own devices, confident that I was loved and, in the end, given opportunities through education which far too few people are offered. My parents, like most married couples in that rather rackety pre-affluence era, had problems enough – not least the great blow which fell on my father when, after the Suez disaster, he was forced to retire from the Navy years before he had wanted to or expected to. I think ‘Kevin’ may grasp the point I am making when I say that I did not become aware of the pain and trouble this put him through, until after he had died. I was completely protected from it at the time. I can remember no parental rows in front of us children during my childhood, though I was the guilty cause of some in my adolescence.
Indeed, most of the family secrets (especially the one about my mother’s partly Jewish antecedents about which my brother made the most fuss) came to light long after we had become adults. I was in fact the person who discovered this, and I kept it from my brother (and everyone else) for many years because my grandmother, who told me, asked me to do so. I have sometimes wondered whether I should have kept it from my brother completely, and once made him very cross by saying I sometimes wished I had done this. My mother’s death, about which my brother wrote several times, was briefly public at the time. Unlike many journalists, I know what it is like to be telephoned by the News of the World seeking details of your private life. But as nobody had then heard of us, it sank into obscurity, where I would have left it. But as it is, ‘Kevin’ knows about it and so feels free to write (I repeat his posting) :
‘Peter Hitchens is opposed to divorce under ANY circumstances. I can understand that his brother's honest and frank description of their mothers unhappy marriage to their father would upset the idealistic view that PH has of marriage and his desire to deny the escape of those who cannot stand it no longer for justifying reasons. He is wrong, but entitled to his view.’
I will now turn to this argument. It is the Christian Church, to which I belong, which is opposed to divorce. It's a doctrine based on the actual recorded words of Christ himself and so rather inescapable. Christian marriage is for life, though I should note here that my parents’ marriage, in the last weeks of the war against Hitler’s Germany, was a civil ceremony at Caxton Hall in Westminster. I do not know what precise promises they would have made. I have no ‘idealistic vision’ of this union. Nor does the Church, which notes in its Solemnization of Holy Matrimony that marriage is ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health’, which seems well short of idealism to me, and is a pretty large warning on the box for anyone who undertakes it lightly.
As for the ‘escape of those who can stand it no longer’, ‘Kevin’ makes a basic error common to all such critics. Separation is perfectly possible without divorce. Divorce is permission to remarry, and so to break the unambiguous oath sworn at the marriage ceremony that only death ends the marriage.
Who can doubt this is pretty tough on the adults who make the promise? But marriage break-ups, almost unknown in my childhood, are pretty tough on the children involved. And once there is a sign at the foot of the mountain saying ‘Steep and rugged pathway, this way, great views from top, but is tiring, difficult and may be slippery when wet’ , next to another sign saying ‘But you don’t need to take that wretched steep and rugged pathway, cafe and gift shop are down here, plus easy access to car park’, a lot more people will take the easy exit. The Christian view is that the steep and rugged pathway is in fact the road to goodness and, more often than not, happiness as distinct from pleasure. If it is easy and acceptable to step off it and go another way, more people *will* step off it and go the other way. But while this will give them *pleasure*, it may (almost certainly will) hurt others, and it will turn our society into a different place, as we have seen.
Actually, my view on this is not, as far as I know, even slightly influenced by my parents’ lives, about which I believe I have no business moralising or pronouncing. The more I find out about them (and I shan’t share any of it here, except to say that their lives were often extremely difficult in ways which would reduce most people in this age to quivering jelly. But my parents laughed in the face of their adversity) , the more I realise how enormously hard it was for people of that generation to do the things that looked so effortless at the time, and which I took entirely for granted. Now that does influence me.
I half-expected my remarks about litter in my bike-basket to excite the religious bores who congregate in the nice warm bar on the ground floor at the back of this blog, with its agreeable coal fire, worn leather armchairs, patient staff and well-kept ales, and above all the ready audience and the reliable regular wiseacres who can be relied to give them the sort of argument they want. No wonder they never leave. Other members of the club flee upstairs when they see them coming and hide in its stately, austere library, where they can read in peace.
But I didn’t expect them to pile in to the extent that they actually did. Most of those who expressed views on this entirely missed the point. First, I was not talking about picking up litter as such. Under the laws of common decency, anyone might reasonably pick up litter in his own neighbourhood (I do, from time to time, and I don’t expect any praise or credit for it, as I recognise that my motives are selfish). Litter near one’s home encourages more litter, vandalism, graffiti and other bad behaviour. By picking it up we make these things less likely, and maintain the price of our houses and the good character of the neighbourhood on which these prices, and many other good things, tangible or intangible, depend. Some of us do this, though you will find, when you do, that you get some funny looks from the silent majority, who find such actions incomprehensible.
We might also pick up the occasional bit of garbage left disfiguring a rural beauty spot or park which we are visiting, so making the experience more pleasant for ourselves. Few of us, by contrast, will bother to pick up litter dropped on a busy city street which is already liberally scattered with rubbish, blobs of gum, used tissues, fag-ends and disgustingly grease and sauce-smeared fast food containers. We’d need a barrow to cart it away, and the bins are often overflowing , if there are any. So please don’t lie about this. Hardly anyone does it.
I wasn’t talking about any of these things, though I cannot see why an atheist would think it ‘good’ to do any of them since atheists have no basis to define any action as ‘good’. That’s the whole point about being an atheist. Good and bad shrivel into ad hoc relativism and cease to have any meaning. Why else would anyone bother to embrace this spiky, arid faith, lacking as it does any consolation or aesthetic joys.?
I was talking about an entirely specific thing, quite different from litter being left thoughtlessly on the ground (I’ve seen people doing this. It falls from them or emerges from their cars much as sleet falls from the sky, impersonally. They are wholly unaware that they are doing anything wrong and, if challenged, are often enraged).
It was about finding, in the basket of my bicycle, litter left there by people who both lack the nerve to dump it on the ground and the manners and consideration to put it in a bin. Not merely that. They know perfectly well that my bike basket isn’t a bin, and that they have passed to me the burden of disposing of these objects, which are quite often unfinished buckets of sickly sweet fluids, or grease-dabbled remnants of fast food meals. Sometimes it’s just free newspapers they have abandoned.
This takes place just off a busy street in one of London’s richest boroughs, but (and this is their only defence) one very poorly provided with litter bins. I know this because I now know exactly where they are, having to visit them so often.
The streets are pretty untidy, partly as a result of this shortage. One more cardboard cup, one more cigarette packet, one more handbill, one more wrapper, won’t make much difference. The street cleaners (who are quite active and busy) will eventually come along and take it away, just as hugely expensive devices will trundle by every few weeks trying to remove the gum. The vaguely ‘good’ (those who know that dropping litter is sort-of wrong but have other things on their minds) often give up before they find a bin. The same kind of garbage is left on sills and in corners and doorways.
Putting this muck in my basket is a deliberate act of petty spite, aimed against me as the owner of the bike. I imagine them sniggering as they do it. Under the rules of common decency, why should I do what these people aren’t prepared to do, and take their muck to the bin for them? It wouldn’t make the streets any filthier or any more untidy than they already are. I reckon I’m absolutely entitled to take it out and put it where they lacked the guts to put it themselves, on the pavement.
And yet my conscience told me this was wrong, and in the end I heeded it. There is, as I say, no serious prospect of being caught or prosecuted. The action makes no material difference to the general squalor of the street. It is just a small, civilised act which I do only because I believe my action is absolutely good and right regardless of these immediate effects. And if I were an atheist, I’d dump the stuff on the pavement with a flourish, and enjoy doing so because it would help me express my anger at the people who have put me to this trouble.
As I said, this is just one of the millions of things people do (and don’t do) , which are right and good absolutely in themselves and have no other evident purpose, and no conceivable advantage to those do them or restrain themselves form doing them, and if they were all left undone, or all done without restraint, you’d notice.
The atheists often erect a particularly silly straw man to avoid this argument, and claim that the believer is saying that there can be no morality without religion. I say nothing of the kind. Common decency and the golden rule can be observed without any religious impulse.
But these forms of morality, based on enlightened self-interests, involve no conscience (a concept which is meaningless if there is no God, for if it is not divine in origin, why should you pay any more attention to such promptings than you pay to your bile-duct, your appetites, or your bladder?) or knowledge (on the part of God ) of the true state of the human heart.
And so in practice the golden rule amounts to ‘appear to do unto others what you would wish them to do unto you’.
As I said in the interview, this has many weaknesses; ‘If we exist in eternity, then what we do here matters somewhere else, and at some other time, and the immediate consequences of our actions aren’t the most important things about them. It might lead to more public acts of self-publicising ‘goodness’, but this is the problem of all Godless ethical systems. They rely on the appearance of goodness rather than on the inner heart seen only by God, and anyone who has attended a school or worked in an office will know that people are not always exactly as they seem to be.’
This is why I get into so much trouble when I say, quite candidly, that morality is about how you behave when you think nobody is watching. People really dislike hearing this, because they know in their hearts that it is absolutely true.
Of course this doesn’t mean that a post-Christian society immediately descends into a cauldron of murder and robbery. These things are initially only available to the strong and rich, who will in many cases hire others to do the killing and robbing for them. But they spread down the scale of strength and wealth, in the end. Don’t be weak or poor in the society to come. Neil Kinnock was dead right about that, at least.
You end up with the situation so evocatively described by W.H,Auden in what may be his greatest poem, in my view, 'The Shield of Achilles'
'A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.'
Finally, why am I so exasperated by the dingbat response ‘But where should I go?’ to my point about emigration? Because it is a stupid, trivial response to an important point. I am actually saying, as graphically as I can, that a whole civilisation is finished. And people want travel advice? It’s like asking if there’s a dining car on the train to the gulag.
Anyone dim enough to respond in this way has entirely missed the point of what I am saying, and will as a result ignore my advice while it is valuable, and so possibly be among those clutching the sinking dinghy and wondering whether he will get ashore wherever it is that a harsh fate has driven him when the moment comes, and his education, savings and status are all so much shrivelled paper and thin, cold, air. Work it out for yourself, who may take you in, if you get the point. This is truly serious.
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.
THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN
I’m always a bit suspicious of the sort of person who argues by saying ‘What would Jesus have said?’ They usually mean that they are quite sure Jesus would have agreed with them.
My favourite example of this was always the Blair creature, reproved by Cardinal Basil Hume for taking Catholic communion when he wasn’t a Catholic. The then Labour leader peevishly responded: ‘I wonder what Jesus would have made of it.’
My guess is that Jesus would have told Mr Blair (who converted to Rome once he’d left Downing Street) to decide whether his faith or his political career came first. But it’s only a guess, based on Our Lord’s known retorts to one or two other uppity lawyers. And, of course, it’s what I think.
Now we’re being asked, by the Dean of Durham, what Jesus would do about the migrant camp at Calais. This is because of the BBC’s plan to broadcast in today’s Songs Of Praise sections filmed at a makeshift church in that camp.
This is not by any means the only such lecture from that direction I’ve heard recently.
I’m not bothered much by the broadcast. BBC bias is a fact of life and that’s that. And I can’t say that screening film from such a place on Songs Of Praise is a bad idea in itself. Christians ought to be thinking about such things.
But thinking is what these prelates and preachers are not doing. Is it as simple as they claim? I am far from sure. The founder of the Christian church was not actually a guerrilla fighter or a Russell Brand-type demagogue. He had nothing against people obeying laws or fulfilling their obligations. I’d say, rather the opposite.
He was himself a genuine refugee, hiding in Egypt from the real, murderous wrath of Herod. But when the danger was past, his family didn’t settle in Egypt but returned home.
Nowhere in the Beatitudes did Jesus say ‘Blessed are the queue-jumpers’, trying to gain an advantage at the expense of others. This is what the people at Calais are.
They are not prepared to apply for asylum or seek visas and work permits in the normal way. Their actions make people in this country less willing to grant any asylum, or to welcome any migration.
They force their way into lorries and trains, or break down a lawfully constructed fence, sometimes clutching drawn knives as they do so. Many destroy their passports so that the truth about their origins and claims can never be proved. Why precisely is it Christian to endorse this behaviour?
As the Left-wing media have rightly been pointing out, only quite a small share of the migrants arriving in Europe from Africa and elsewhere actually end up at Calais. They are already out of danger (if they were ever in it) and have chosen to be there.
As for the parable of the Good Samaritan, the hero of the story didn’t tell other people to be compassionate and generous. He did it himself. I am full of admiration for any individual who offers to take such migrants into his own home indefinitely, and to bear the charges (as the Good Samaritan did) of their housing, food and medical treatment.
But I have none at all for the pulpit Samaritan who tells others in our overcrowded country that they must suffer for the sake of his own peace of mind.
Amnesty's now a lost cause
After what must be at least 30 years, I’m finally going to stop being a member of Amnesty. I joined because I thought it was a good deed in a wicked world, working to free prisoners of conscience from the dungeons of Right-wing and Left-wing despots.
Prompted by Amnesty, I wrote polite letters to such despots, urging the release of people I often disagreed with, because I thought then and think now that nobody should be imprisoned for expressing an opinion.
I must admit it has been a while since I did that (or was asked to do so), but the end of the Cold War did not end the need for such a campaign. China, Asia and the Muslim world still have plenty of political prisoners. But Amnesty seems to have developed other ideas.
A few years ago, it began to campaign on behalf of convicts on death row in the USA.
It’s a perfectly reasonable cause – though I don’t happen to agree with it, being a convinced supporter of the death penalty in free countries. But it has absolutely nothing to do with prisoners of conscience. The USA, for all its faults, does not execute people for holding opinions.
What’s more, it’s politically partisan. Left-wing people tend to oppose capital punishment, Conservative people such as me tend to support it. The whole point of Amnesty was that it was a place where we could forget our divisions in the cause of liberty.
I protested, uselessly, and carried on paying my dues. But now Amnesty has decided to support decriminalisation (they mean legalisation) of prostitution. Once again, it’s a political, partisan position. Even if I agreed with it (which I don’t) I really cannot see what it has to do with prisoners of conscience. I suspect it will make it harder for Amnesty to campaign for such people, its real concern.
Like so many other once-noble charities, Amnesty has lost its way. I’m sure it’s not remotely interested in what I think of its behaviour and I’m sure it won’t make any difference. But that’s enough. I’m very sorry, but I’m off.
*******
An exasperated Sherlock Holmes would often scold Dr Watson with the words: ‘You see, but you do not observe.’
His point was that the clues were all there in front of us, if only we had the sense to see what mattered and what was connected.
Take the horrible stabbing of the teacher Vincent Uzomah by a teenage pupil. Much fuss has been made about the boy’s use of a racial insult.
But far more important is the fact that the knife-wielding child is, at the age of 14, a cannabis user (when arrested for the knife crime, he was also charged with cannabis possession). I more or less knew that he would be as soon as I heard of the crime.
The correlation is incredibly strong. Why is it not investigated?
*******
Given our recent record of pouring petrol on to the flames of war in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, may I suggest we are very careful about training Ukrainian soldiers? There are some pretty sinister people in Ukraine’s chaotic army. We may not want to be associated with some of the things they are going to do.
******
Do all the attackers of Jeremy Corbyn not see that his supporters thrive on their assaults? This is a great revolt by those who are sick of being told what to do by people like Alastair Campbell.
Eric Metaxas is an American broadcaster and author (notably of a biography of the German pastor and anti-Hitler resistance hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer). He is also an organiser of debates and public discussions(usually in New York City) under the ambitious but enjoyable title 'Socrates in the City'. Last week , as part of this programme of public events, he came to Oxford and interviewed me (among others) in the very evangelical church of St Aldate's .Here, in two podcasts, is the result. It covers quite a few subjects but is based on my reent book'The Rage Against God'. Some of you may be interested. Some of you may not.
http://www.metaxastalk.com/podcasts/
What a lot of twaddle we have had to read and listen to about a silly, meaningless film of Royal children giving the Hitler salute. Our understanding of the Hitler era, and of the war that followed, actually seems to get poorer as the years go by. The left-wing fantasy that the British upper classes were in some way Nazi sympathisers is somehow inescapable. No doubt a few boobies were initially taken in. Many others saw something admirable about the German revival, failing to notice, or hiding from themselves, the evil aspects of National Socialism. But the numbers who remained pro-German once war was certain were tiny. I am not sure this could be said of Soviet sympathisers (see below), who opposed the war against Hitler until 1941.
Many open-minded British people in the 1920s, including the (then) Communist sympathiser Graham Greene, thought Germany had been harshly and unjustly treated at Versailles. Winston Churchill famously had a few good words to say about the early years of Hitler as a national leader and a reviver of his country. Personally, I like to think (though I cannot know) that I would have realised from the first what sort of person Hitler was. I think it would probably have been quite difficult to do.
What is fashionable now was of course unfashionable then. This is a thought that one needs to retain in one’s mind when considering Atticus Finch in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. When it was fashionable to be racially bigoted and to ignore justice for that reason, Finch courageously resisted fashion. Now that it is fashionable to be unbigoted, Finch is somehow reclassified as a bigot, by people who might well have accepted the nasty conventional wisdom of 1935, had they been there at the time. The orthodox are always orthodox, whatever the orthodoxy is.
One of the few in Britain to realise and repeatedly warn of the full extent of Hitler’s murderous Judophobia was the highly conservative Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson. He did so before the outrages of Kristallnacht in November 1938 made it plain to even the semi-conscious that lawless homicidal race-hatred was on the loose, licensed and encouraged by the Hitler government. Henson was , I am told, treated as a bore and nuisance for ‘banging on’ about this subject. See http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/queen-nazi-salute-it-is-shocking-now-but-many-once-saw-hitler-as-funny-10400518.html
But the Left has always sought to divert attention from its own almost universal admiration for Stalin, which continued long after the crimes of the Bolsheviks had been exposed by émigré revelations, by alleging a matching admiration for Hitler on the right. There’s also the misrepresentation of the Chamberlain policy of appeasement as being motivated by some sort of sympathetic softness towards Hitler. Does Winston Churchill’s later much greater appeasement of Stalin (firmly backed by his Labour and Liberal coalition partners) represent sympathy with Stalinist Communism? I do not think so. Both Chamberlain and Churchill were motivated by what appeared at the time to be realistic common sense, at the time. I also have to add at this point that the British and French Left had no great enthusiasm for the rearmament which both countries rather belatedly embarked on , once they realised that a war in Europe was inevitable.
On the contrary, the Labour Party was voting against Defence Estimates and conscription as late as the Spring of 1939, and the French Communists (who after the Stalin-Hitler pact regarded war with Hitler as ‘imperialist’ and thus not worthy of support) may well have been responsible for the demoralisation of the French Army in 1939-40. The myth of the ‘Guilty Men’, and of British ruling-class sympathy for the Nazis, dies hard.
All of which brings me to the actual subject of this posting, the newly-released (in Britain) film ’13 Minutes’, about Georg Elser, who in November 1939 came very close to assassinating Adolf Hitler, but whose extraordinary lone action is little-known and little-celebrated, in his own country or abroad – in sharp contrast to the Stauffenberg Plot of nearly five years later, which is so well-known that it has even attracted the notice of Hollywood.
’13 Days’ is not a Hollywood production. Its title in German is ‘Elser – er hatte die Welt verandert’ (forgive my failure to include the important umlauts) which means ‘Elser – he would have changed the World’ (My thanks to PJS and others for corrcting my rudimentary and forgotten German. Though I haven't studied the language since I was 13, I really ought to have worked it out for myself). The Director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, was also responsible for ‘Downfall’, the tremendous film about the last days of Hitler in his bunker, whose scene of Hitler driving away the truth with molten rage has been abused in many a subtitled spoof.
It is almost as good as ‘Downfall’ and in some ways better. Its portrayal of the assassin himself is far from straightforward hero-worship, with an (often but not always) selfish and troubled personal life , though most will still come out of the film full of admiration for his act of lonely, righteous, morally-complicated courage.
Very little dramatic tension is squeezed out of the attempted killing itself. After all, we know already that it failed and the most potent part of the story (unlike in the fictional 'Day of the Jackal’) lies in what happened to the would-be assassin after he is caught.
Elser was an accomplished and inventive craftsman, who, entirely on his own, designed an efficient and powerful time bomb, stole the detonators and explosives from various workplaces, and very cleverly and patiently concealed it in a pillar close to where he knew Hitler would make his annual speech to former party comrades in the BurgerBraukeller in Munich. It really ought to have succeeded. Had it done so, I suspect few would remember the innocents who did undoubtedly perish as a result, history being what it is. History would of course be wrong to do so, and if anyone thinks that assassination is morally simple, even when Hitler is involved, let them consider the Munich waitress, blown to pieces, and her bereaved family. If it is true (and I strongly suspect it may be ) that we cannot do evil that good may come, can the great evil of Hitler(much of it unknown and undone in November 1939) overcome that problem? You tell me. Elser, who returned strongly to his Christian faith in the weeks before he acted, plainly worried about the matter. At one point, broken down by torture and despair, he tells his interrogators (in the film, I do not know if he actually said this) that he now fears that his action was wrong, because it did not succeed, the implication being that God had not wanted it to succeed. How he coped with the rest of his life, I cannot imagine. He was never tried. Instead he was kept in special zones of Sachsenhausen (near Berlin) and Dachau (near Munich) concentration camps until he was murdered by the SS (his death falsified as the result of a bombing raid) . Thus led to (baseless) claims that the whole thing was a put-up job, designed to make it look as if Hitler was guarded by providence in which he had been a Gestapo catspaw. The inability of people to believe that he had acted alone would always be a problem.
As in the later failed attempts to kill Hitler, recounted by Alan Clark in his superb ‘Barbarossa’, there is something rather diabolical about the fact that Hitler escaped what would otherwise have been certain death by just 13 minutes, leaving the hall earlier than expected to catch a train (he had meant to fly back to Berlin, but fog was threatened, so he decided to take the train). Hence the English-language title of the film.
His arrest, thanks to an astonishingly clumsy attempt to sneak across the Swiss border at Konstanz, led swiftly to his detention and interrogation (his pockets were full of evidence pointing towards his involvement) .
The film subjects us to part of that interrogation. Grim as it is, it does not begin to replicate the savagery of the real thing, which left Elser beaten until he was almost unrecognisable, with his eyes bulging out of his appallingly swollen face (we know this because the Gestapo brought members of his family to see him during the questioning) . Heinrich Himmler is said to have taken part personally in the interrogation – mainly designed to get Elser to confess to working for the British secret service, or some other outside force. Hitler could not believe he had acted on his own, none of his close associates had the courage to contradict this belief, and so Elser had to be compelled, by hideous methods, to agree with Hitler. Except that he would not do so. This is totalitarianism in action. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
During this ghastly process (imagine making a full and truthful confession, and finding yourself then surrounded by cruel , violent all-powerful men who refuse to believe you and want you to say something else), the camera indicates all too clearly what is going to happen, and what has happened, but does not, I am glad to say, actually show it happening. Like the female Gestapo stenographer, we are spared the worst but horribly aware that it is taking place.
Intercut with this muted horror are scenes from Elser’s former rather rackety life in a Germany rapidly descending into barbarism. I have seldom seen this process better portrayed, as it takes place in a small, poor town ( I believe the handsome town of Weidenberg, in Upper Franconia, is used for most of the scenes, though much of the film seems to have been shot in the South Tyrol, that strange anomaly, a piece of Austria lost at Versailles that Hitler never demanded back, out of gratitude to Mussolini – Hitler had intended eventually to resettle its German-speaking people in … Crimea, long coveted by German expansionists).
The organised harassment of churchgoing Christians by the Hitler Youth, busily singing insulting anti-Christian songs, portrayed here, will come as a bit of a surprise to those who are convinced that National Socialism was a Christian enterprise. The pressure on all normal people to compromise with the Party and regime is also shown in a convincing way – private neutrality simply wasn’t an option in such places. Even the way you said ‘hullo’ in the pub or at work marked you out. And the idea of Germans as uniform, subservient conformists is also dealt a bit of a blow – though it’s sadly true that Elser’s family were treated as unpatriotic pariahs in postwar, liberated Germany, whose conversion into a liberal, tolerant open society wasn’t exactly instant.
There’s a startling and rather horrifying postscript, concerning one of Elser’s interrogators which I won’t say any more about here.
You’ll swiftly forget that the film is subtitled. Like ‘the Lives of Others’, ‘Good Bye Lenin’ and of course ‘Downfall’, this is an absorbing and thoughtful film which will stay with you long afterwards. Being foreign and subtitled, it will of course be difficult to see unless you live in the sort of place that has an arthouse cinema. Once that would have been that, now, there’ll be a DVD.
It’ll tell you much, much more about Hitler, Germany , morality, terror, history and truth than any number of films of little girls doing mock Hitler salutes in long-ago London gardens.
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
I recently visited a ‘head shop’, one of many totally legal establishments now flourishing on British high streets, where users of officially illegal drugs may buy the equipment they need to enjoy their criminal habit.
I didn’t buy anything. But one of the items on sale was a wall-clock, especially designed to be used to store drugs. ‘Hide your stash in plain sight!’ said the little poster next to it.
It is good advice. If you really want to conceal something, leave it lying about where everyone can see it.
This is what the Prime Minister has done with his supposed promise to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union.
The dishonest trick at the heart of the offer is so blazingly obvious that nobody notices it.
Let me explain. If Mr Cameron really believed that he would win a parliamentary majority on May 7, he would not make this promise.
He loves the EU so much that he has said that he wants to extend it to the Ural mountains. He absolutely does not want this country to leave it.
But because Mr Cameron knows perfectly well that he will not win such a majority, and that no possible coalition partner or ally would support such a referendum, he feels safe to make a pledge that will never be redeemed.
The purpose of the pledge is to win back some of those voters he and his Blairite friends have long derided as fruitcakes and closet racists. He despises them, but he wants their support to ensure that the Tories are the largest party, and that he stays in office.
It would be disastrous for him if they all took him too literally. He needs some of them, but not all of them.
This is perhaps why the Tory Party’s campaign is so crude, narrow and awful, almost designed to repel thinking and decent people.
The interesting thing about all this is that it is so blatant, yet nobody seems to notice it, just as they don’t notice the perilous state of our economy (another disastrous balance of payments deficit was announced last week). And just as it is obvious that, while we are supposed to have ‘tough’ and ‘draconian’ laws on drugs, shops which help people take drugs thrive all over the country. I sometimes wonder if, one dark and tear-stained morning, all these many lies will be brutally exposed in one dreadful awakening.
Winning at any cost? It's the only Game in town
When I rather guiltily read the books on which the TV series Game Of Thrones is based, I was struck by one thing. The whole point of this saga is that ruthlessness pays, that evil generally wins, that justice is non-existent, and utter cynicism the only wisdom. It is the Middle Ages without the saving grace of Christianity.
The whole idea is symbolised by the ghastly Iron Throne for which the various factions and clans compete, and which, once gained, eats into the souls of all who sit on it.
I won’t watch the TV version because I very much do not want to see a slick and well-acted portrayal of such foul behaviour. But the success of this drama suggests that this sort of merciless immorality now has a wide and receptive audience. Gleeful, unembarrassed ruthlessness, once rightly kept in check, has become normal among us, and Game Of Thrones is a success because this change is now more or less complete.
Political campaigning has played its part in this. I first noticed really dirty tricks in the 1997 campaign, when New Labour screened a particularly vile anti-Tory broadcast personally mocking Tory politicians and conference representatives, and falsely alleging a plan to ‘abolish the old age pension’.
Once, this sort of thing was left to underlings and backstairs-crawlers who could be disowned. But now it seems to have become central. The Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, is a senior Cabinet Minister and an experienced grey head in the Tory Party. I rather like him. But his outburst against Ed Miliband, accusing him of stabbing his brother in the back, and planning to do the same to the country, was a departure from the old rules of gentlemanly combat.
It was also inaccurate, as Mr Miliband stabbed his brother in the front, openly campaigning against him in an election – more than can be said for the Tories, who deviously overthrew Iain Duncan Smith in a cruel and personalised putsch.
But perhaps the most tricky and ruthless political act of the week came from the Blair creature, who ‘supported’ Mr Miliband on the European issue. How can this ghastly, discredited man not know that his kiss is the kiss of death? Of course he does.
Compared with Blair’s embrace, a stab in the back would be an act of kindness.
You shouldn't make it up
The story of how the young Princess Elizabeth and her sister Margaret mingled incognito with VE Night revellers is a moving and very British episode.
So why must the makers of a new film, claiming to be about the event, fabricate falsehoods about the King’s daughters going to brothels and gambling dens, and Princess Margaret getting drunk?
I suppose that having got away with the multiple untruths in The King’s Speech, the movie industry felt that invention was better box office than truth.
And yes, I know Shakespeare made things up, too. But this stuff isn’t Shakespeare.
The devastating attack no one heard
In a grown-up campaign, last week’s attack on David Cameron by a former British ambassador to Syria would have been devastating. As it is, it seems to have passed almost without notice.
Here’s a flavour of the indictment levelled by Peter Ford, Our Man in Damascus from 2003 to 2006. ‘If Cameron had his way, the jihadists could have been in control of Damascus by now,’ and, ‘To call for the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, to demonise it out of all proportion… to predict its imminent fall… and then to wail as though it was nothing to do with them when British Muslims set off to help hasten said overthrow is inconsistent and nonsensical.’
I couldn’t agree more, and still can’t understand how he gets away with it.
Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Cameron go around the country eating bacon sandwiches and hot dogs with knives and forks to avoid embarrassing photos.
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