America isn't our special friend. It ruined our Navy, Empire and future

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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We aren't fighting a 'war' - they're just a bunch of doped-up losers

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Here we go again, politicians and media hand in hand, doing the work of the terrorists. They are called terrorists because their aim is to scare us into doing their will. Those who help them scare us, by exaggerating their power and importance, are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is stupid, and they should stop.

Supposed ‘experts’ speak in grave tones about ‘security’, an area about which you can say anything at all because nobody ever confirms or denies anything. The ‘security services’, costly and ineffectual as they are, are pleased to be given an importance they have not earned.

And they will be along in a minute demanding more powers to snoop into the lives of the innocent while continuing to fail to spot the guilty. Like anyone who is allowed to claim expenses while not being required to give details of how he spends the money, these people live by boasting and exaggeration, plus a bit of angry pomposity if anyone questions their real worth.

I especially dislike all this lofty stuff about how bad the Belgians are at tracking terrorists. Are we so much better? How will all this look if – and in truth we have no realistic way of predicting or preventing it – it is London next?

The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, says ludicrously that this is a ‘war’ and others bloviate and splutter along the same lines, instantly winning themselves starring roles on the 24-hour news feeds.

What nonsense. How the sordid criminals of the Brussels suburbs, who are common murderers of low morals and low intelligence, must grin like dogs and rejoice to be paid such a fat compliment.

Let Monsieur Valls visit a real war zone and see what modern munitions can do to a big city, such as Baghdad, where the shockwaves from bombs falling a mile away made the hospitals tremble so violently that women gave birth prematurely.

Let him see the enormous craters, the concrete buildings with their floors collapsed like a pile of pancakes, the general chaos. Let him observe how normal life ends, schools close, money loses its value, the shops empty as supplies dry up and the economy ceases to function.

If we were at war, life as we know it would come to a stop, and we would be set back decades, living in ruins without electricity.

That is war. They know all about it in Iraq, Syria, Libya and the other places we have ‘liberated’ recently. What we face is crime – stupid, vicious, cruel, but crime, actions which don’t deserve to be dignified or pumped up beyond their real significance.

When we have eventually found all there is to be known about the culprits, I predict that they will turn out to be very like the drug-addled petty crooks and lowlifes who killed Lee Rigby, who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo and who murdered more defenceless people in Paris last November.

Read this report from the BBC’s Secunder Kermani, which brilliantly describes the reality, quite different from our fictional picture of Wahhabi puritans directed from a bunker in Arabia: ‘One friend of the [Abdeslam] brothers who used to hang out there told me he would regularly see Brahim Abdeslam “watching IS videos, with a joint in one hand, and a beer in another”. He said Brahim would spout off radical statements but that no one took him seriously.

‘Another friend showed me a video from a Brussels nightclub of the two Abdeslam brothers on a night out with girls, drinking and dancing – this was February 2015, just months before they started to plan the attacks in Paris.

‘The network that the Abdeslam brothers had around them – based as much on personal loyalty, disenchantment and petty crime as radical ideology – would be key in helping Salah [the other brother] escape after the Paris attacks.’

This is not war. It is the action of deranged nobodies, trying to give their dead-end lives meaning with a grandiose cause.

If you want to know where to find them, just follow the smell of marijuana, the supposedly harmless drug which rots the reasoning powers of its users and which, when combined with radical Islam, explodes into red ruin.

The Big Dope Lobby and its many suckers and dupes constantly attack me for pointing out the dangers of the drug they want to legalise. They claim I blame everything on it. But what can I do?

This week I ask your pardon for referring to this drug twice in one column. For it is not just associated with Islamic terror. It is also linked with the most callous and cruel non-political crime.

The dreadful death of PC David Phillips was caused by Clayton Williams, a youth who smokes the drug so much that his Facebook picture showed him with a cannabis joint in his mouth.

Williams had been smoking this supposedly ‘soft’ drug on the evening he mowed down PC Phillips, the father of a young family – a horror Williams’s doped mind still seems unable to understand.

When will the twin lies, that there is a ‘war on drugs’ and that taking cannabis is a harmless, peaceable recreation, be exposed for the dangerous falsehoods they are?

Though I dislike most of his views, I have always been rather impressed by Barack Obama, a thoughtful and interesting man. He has also been dead right about Cuba, realising that the best way to finish the Castro nightmare is to end the US blockade and make it clear that island’s misery is the fault of its communist despots. He should do something similar in North Korea. A picture of him standing alongside Kim Jong Un might cancel out the embarrassing memory of his plainly unwanted surprise grapple with tango dancer Mora Godoy in Buenos Aires (right).

 

Once again you will have woken this morning to find that the clocks have been shoved forward by an hour. For me, and for many other early risers, this means weeks of something rather like jet-lag. But what’s it for? Why do we do it? Nobody actually knows. We just do it because we have done it for years. There’s no solid objective evidence that it does any good at all.

Wait a few weeks and the evenings will get lighter all by themselves. Yet we’re told absurdly that it provides more light. It doesn’t.

A Cherokee elder, baffled by the paleface habit of messing around with clocks, once asked: ‘What sort of person thinks that by cutting a foot off one end of a blanket, and then sewing it on to the other end, he gets a longer blanket?’

You won’t be surprised to learn that I am more interested by the gloomy bit of Easter – the betrayal by the secret police spy, the show trial, the cowardice of the government in the face of the mob, executing the innocent and releasing the murderer – than in the happy part. The really great myths, so-called, are not about something which once happened. They are about something that goes on happening all the time, and is happening now.

Language, Truth and Logic - Further Thoughts on Kiev

Partly to show that my interest in Ukraine isn’t just a passing fad, I’d like to remind old readers of, and draw the attention of new readers to, this article, in which I examine the problem at length in the summer of 2010.

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/09/as-ukrainians-force-russians-to-turn-their-back-on-their-language-and-change-their-names-i-ask-is-th.html

 

 

Note that the problem of language plays quite a large part in it. Now look at one of the first actions of the new post-coup Ukrainian , er, regime . Well, it came to power by unconstitutional means, a fact I’ll discuss further later.

http://rbth.co.uk/news/2014/02/23/ukraine_abolishes_law_on_languages-_of_minorities_including_russian_34486.html

 Well, I never, it’s about language, a repeal of a law which would have given Russian (and other languages) a protected and equal status. If you had a big Russian-speaking minority, and you wanted to show them they belonged in your country, why would one of your *first* actions be this?

This is by no means the most disturbing event. The issue of an arrest warrant for Viktor Yanukovych is even worse. Yanukovych very stupidly ensured that Yulia Tymoshenko, his principal rival, was imprisoned on charges which were almost certainly spurious. Mrs Tymoshenko is , like Mr Yanukovych, well short of angelic status (though she looks much nicer than he does). People do not become fabulously rich in the former USSR by being nice.

 

As my old friend Edward Lucas (who utterly disagrees with me about Ukraine) wrote here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2566299/Dont-fooled-angelic-looks-shes-ruthless-shes-corrupt-A-withering-portrait-Ukraines-saviour-EDWARD-LUCAS-Russia-expert-knows-well.html

She isn’t a paragon, and many Ukrainians mistrust her.

 

But the prosecution and jailing of beaten political opponents is not a characteristic of a law-governed state. The pursuit of Mr Yanukovych is as mean and spiteful as was his own pursuit of Mrs Tymoshenko.

 

People will say that the charge is different, and that Mr Yanukovych is responsible for the deaths of demonstrators.

 

Well, maybe he is. But if so the deaths were the result of orders given by a legitimate head of state, while defending his lawful government against an armed and violent mob. This isn’t exactly Tiananmen Square (whose culprits remain safely in power and welcome in all freedom-loving Western chancelleries, palaces and parliaments) . On the contrary, the Chinese People’s Republic really *is * a regime, owing its existence to a violent seizure of power, lawless, despotic, aggressive and sustained by armed force, arbitrary courts, a network of prison camps, fierce censorship and secret police. And the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, gunned down in unknown numbers, were (in my recollection) entirely peaceful.

This sort of thing is, or used to be, covered by the defence of Sovereign Immunity. Frankly, without this defence, no head of state or government is safe from subsequent vindictive prosecution, since all governments authorise violence, usually lethal violence, during their time in office. That is, among other things, what they are for. It is not a question of letting people off. If it a wise device for ensuring that the defeated feel free to leave office. Where it is absent, chaos will usually follow.

 

In proper free countries, the transfer of power from outgoing to incoming government is conducted peacefully and without revenge on the defeated. This is important, because any other arrangement simply encourages embattled leaders to hang on to power at all costs. I am sure that it is the fear of being hauled before some international court which persuaded Syria’s President Assad to fight on rather than flee. I think the same is true of North Korea.

 

Imagine if Harold Wilson, coming to office in 1974, had put Ted Heath on trial for Bloody Sunday,  or if New Labour, in 1997,  had arraigned Mrs Thatcher and her ministers for their conduct of the coal strike. This is the politics of spite and intolerance. It is odd that those who purport to admire Nelson Mandela are so relaxed when his most important example is not merely not followed, but actively rejected by their new heroes in Kiev. Imagine what would have happened if the South African Nationalists had believed they faced prosecution when they left power. They would never have let go, and South Africa would have been inches deep in gore for years.

 

I’ll now take up one or two points from contributors. Neil Gardner said:

‘On the evolving events in Ukraine, your insights and analysis provide a useful antidote to the barrage of spin from the likes of the BBC. However, this seems at odds with a later statement on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. " But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism ". In what way is "our" arming of one of the most authoritarian states in the Middle East "justifiable" ? ‘

 

I am not sure in what way it is at odds with it. I am in favour of cynical and self-serving foreign policy, as the only route to national survival.  I reject idealist liberal intervention, in this case in some detail because I am aware of the detailed flaws in the mainstream account of events.  Where is the inconsistency?  

 

Mr Godfrey says : ‘The thugs are Christian Right wingers (aka Fascists)’. To the extent that the word ‘Fascist’ means anything, it describes the supporters of Benito Mussolini’s Fascisti. Its wider use to apply to German National Socialists robs it of almost all precise meaning, since these two movements were so different from each other. But I don’t think either the actual Fascisti, or the group which Mr Godfrey seeks to refer to, could be accurately described as particularly Christian.

 

Mr Henry Noel said : ‘Just as there is a point that precisely half the distance between London and Paris, but which no human instrumentality can mark, there exists a point at which the excesses of a democratically-elected government become insufferably tyrannical, to the extent that a people groaning under those excesses have both a need, and even a right, to end them. I don't pretend to know where that point exists, but that it does exist in fact ought to be borne in mind by critics of any popular uprising.’

 

Is that so? I should have thought that,  if it were so, then it ought to be possible to define certain conditions that would need to be met. I would have thought that cancellation of elections, disenfranchising of opposition voters, and similar measures which blocked the use of constitutional means of change, might well be acceptable. But the fact that you don’t like your lawful, elected head of state doesn’t give you the right to oust him or her by violent or intimidatory means.

 

What strikes me is that it was Mr Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the deal with the EU which triggered, very late in his supposedly hated and intolerable presidency, the  actions which brought about his downfall. Had he signed that agreement, does anyone believe that these events would still have taken place? Now, what exactly was it about a not-very-tempting offer of association with the EU ( far less economically generous than the counter offer from Moscow) that so powerfully drew the militant people on to the wintry streets? If the Yanukovych government was so bad, why and how had it survived so long without mass protest, before this particular event?  

 

And I must continue to ask why the open intervention of foreign politicians in the country’s internal affairs was welcomed by the demonstrators? Aren’t these people supposed to be proud patriots? Did they never wonder who was using whom, and for what?

 

‘Cary’ rightly raises this point

 

‘Peter Hitchens make much of the Ukrainian president being elected, yet he has argued that democracy is the least important aspect of the British constitution, individual liberty and the rule of law being much more important.’

 

Well, yes, but the *supporters* of this putsch believe that democracy is the principal (if not the only) way in which power can be legitimated. I am setting them against their own standards. If they really believe this, then they cannot *on principle* support this undemocratic, unconstitutional, violent overthrow. Yet they do. This is because they do not really believe what they say. In that case, what do they think legitimates power. Increasingly (and one thinks here of the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher by her own party in 1990, the complaisance of the ‘West’ when Boris Yeltsin’s tanks shelled the Russian parliament, the subsequent willingness to accept the shameless rigging of votes in 1996 to keep Mr Yeltsin in office (compare and contrast with maiden-auntish shock at Vladimir Putin’s comparable but in many ways smaller misdeeds),  the invasion of Iraq, the selective overthrow of various Arab despotisms, and the equally selective survival of others) that a general trend towards global governance  is what is really at issue.  Certain types of sovereignty just aren’t allowed any more. Russia’s attempt to get in the way of the EU and NATO, and in fact the continued survival of Russia as a regional economic and diplomatic power, are obstacles to this.

 

I’d also say that the EU pursues traditional German foreign policies, aimed towards the creation of the ‘Mitteleuropa’ concept first put forward by Friedrich Naumann in his 1915 book of that name. Alleged German plans from that period envisaged Ukraine wholly under German economic control, made Georgia (in the Caucasus) a German dependency, and the colonisation of the Crimea. The First Treaty of Brest Litovsk , dictated by Germany in February 1918, created (very briefly) the only modern state of Ukraine before the present one emerged from the 1991 collapse of the USSR. Had it survived, such a state would have been very much in the German sphere. The second treaty, in March, forced Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States (German and Austrian domination of Poland was assumed).

 

Much of this territory was regained by the Soviets in subsequent fighting, after the defeat of the Central powers in November 1918. Stalin seized still more in 1940 – the Baltic states, Eastern Poland, Sub-Carpathian Ukraine, ad a large chunk of Finland.  When Hitler attacked Stalin June 1941, his strongest armies drove into Ukraine, and some did eventually reach the very edge of the Caucasus, for which the Nazis had planned special forms of autonomous, or satellite government. This is, in short, a very longstanding struggle for land and resources, and I do find myself wondering if the people-power revolution has not now replaced old-fashioned armed forces as the most effective way of enforcing a nation’s will abroad.

 

Cary adds: ‘Yanukevich has failed in both of these areas, using his office to enrich himself and orchestrating trumped up charges against a political opponent. He bears comparison with Hugo Chavez or some democratically elected African leader who has used his office for personal power rather than the proper exercise of his constitutional function. None of this is an argument for the West intervening in Ukraine. I doubt the US and EU have had much influence on events there, though they may flatter themselves otherwise, and will not have much influence on the outcome.’

 

I’d be inclined to agree with that, though it is interesting how little effort has been put by the ‘West’ into ousting the Chavez and now the Maduro governments in Venezuela, close though that country is to the USA. I know from direct personal experience that strong legitimate opposition exists to the Caracas government.

 

A contributor with a silly pseudonym wrote : ‘It's all very well bemoaning the overthrow of a 'democratically' elected government but you don't consider the fact that the Yanukovych government changed the parliamentary system such that it guaranteed its re-election. In a poll, 66% of Ukrainians considered the 2012 election rigged. Technically, Hitler was democratically elected (his was the next largest majority in the 1932 election when Hindenburg died in 1934) but would you have complained if a mob had overthrown him?’.

 

Once again, it is not I who claims to stand for and admire ‘democracy’, but the supporters of the putsch. I repeat, I am simply judging them by their own standards.  There’s no doubt that the National Socialists came to power democratically and constitutionally, and continued to rule until 1945 without ever actually violating the Weimar constitution. Had Germany used the British ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system, the national Socialists would almost certainly have commanded an overall majority in the Reichstag. These facts seem to me to be an argument against placing too much reliance ,either on democracy or on constitutions, to protect you from despots. In my view, law,  tradition, monarchy and heredity, combined with independent professions and a  strong and prosperous middle class, are more reliable guarantees. But in the end, if nations wish to commit suicide, there is not much you can do to save them.

 

Would I have supported a mob overthrow of Hitler? I can’t see why not. By 1934, he had clearly closed off, through the Brownshirt terror of 1933 and the later night of the long knives, any possibility that he might be removed by constitutional or lawful methods . Constitutional as it regrettably was the Hitler state had no freedom of speech or the press, no freedom for opposition parties. Under these circumstances, extra-constitutional action becomes, I think,  permissible (I do not think Mr Yanukovych had closed off these avenues) .  Mind you, mobs are difficult things. You can think you are leading them, and then find that you are being chased by them.

 

Gordon Carr, rather annoyingly, says that ‘of course’ it’s legitimate to call the Ukrainian government a regime. Well, now we know he thinks so. But can he please explain why?

 

 

Mr Gibson criticises Mr Yanukovych’s government for cronyism. No doubt this is accurate, but what if the opposition is also guilty of this? I made no mention of ‘paid agitators’, though it is interesting that so many people were able to stay on the square for so long, and were kept warm and fed throughout.   How was this achieved? 

Rail Travel, Monuments and Vanished Frontiers

As we get our breath back after the momentous events of last week, I thought I would touch on one or two of the things I would have written about,  had I not felt it necessary to oppose British participation in the planned attack on Syria (and rebut the claims of Ms Charlotte Vere, who seems to have gone quiet).

 

I might add at this point that I may soon need to write at length on an unexpected personal side-effect of that Syrian matter. But I am still hoping that I may be able to resolve it without mobilising.

 

I had just spent several days in Germany, which regular readers here will know is a country whose current arrangements I rather admire, and which I think one of the most interesting in the world. I’m also struck by how little most British people know about it, and how seldom they travel there.

 

I went to Berlin by train, a journey you can now do in one very long day, though I stopped in Cologne on the way out and in Aachen (or Aix-la-Chapelle if you prefer) on the way back.

 

This is not, alas the best stretch of landscape in the country, though the traveller sees the Rhine (and can glimpse the haunting, Wagnerian hills near Bonn if he climbs the spire of Cologne cathedral, as I did). He also sees  the Weser and the Elbe, the venerable monorail at Wuppertal, once the height of modernity, now a rarely-imitated curiosity, and one or two of those very Germanic hillside monuments including a vast and brooding statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I,  near Bad Oeynhausen.  I agree that there are quite a few rather large statues of Buddha, rather paradoxical given Buddhism’s general modesty. But if you leave those out of the argument, only the Russian Communists and the North Koreans have outdone this German frenzy for such things.  The Chinese aren’t keen. The allegedly biggest statue of Mao in Shenyang, gateway to North Korea,  is nothing by comparison.

 

I’ve still not seen the Stalingrad monument, but I have seen, and been impressed and rather overpowered by, the 203 foot statue of the Motherland at Kiev, and the Soviet war memorial in Treptow, Berlin (much smaller but still powerfully disturbing). It is an interesting exploration of national character to try to work out why such things have never been a feature of our culture or countryside.

 

I’ve always rather wished I could have seen the immense monument the Germans put up on the site of Tannenberg, the site of which is now deep in Poland. This is partly because this forgotten battle probably decided the fate of the world, by diverting German forces from the West and so ensuring their failure at the Marne in 1914; it is partly because that strange part of the world is full of disturbing contradictions and unsettling transformations – I have still never got over a brief visit I once made to Soviet Kaliningrad, now a sort of Russian Gibraltar cut off from Russia by Lithuanian territory.

 

Almost every trace of its German past as Koenigsberg had been deliberately erased, during a long period when it had been utterly closed to westerners. The German inhabitants themselves had been expelled long ago. You could still see a few pleasing pre-1914 houses, the tomb of Immanuel Kant by the redbrick cathedral (then locked)  and an obviously Germanic railway station, but I found little else.The old citadel had been flattened in an act of Soviet vandalism, and replaced by an incredibly hideous brutalist modern block.  Old maps of the former city could be obtained, and it was amusing to discover that Goeringstrasse had become Ulitsa Gagarina (Yuri Gagarin Street). There was also a rather haunting seaside resort on the Baltic coast, utterly unmodernised and redolent of the Weimar republic. I wonder if that seaside resort has survived among its pines, or become a tatty modern dump?   

 

Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander had signed the Treaty of Tilsit near here in 1807, in a pavilion in the middle of a river. The place was crammed with awkward history, but war and ideology had wiped out most of the traces of it.  Even Tilsit is now called Sovyetsk.

 

A trip to Tannenberg topday would find even less. Between them, the retreating Germans, the advancing Red Army and the re-established state of Poland completely destroyed this once-enormous structure, a sort of hilltop castle, later adapted by Hitler into a tomb for Field Marshal von Hindenburg, whose remains then had to be moved in a hurry to stop them being captured by the Red Army.

 

What, by the way, happened to the huge wooden statue of the Field Marshal in Great War Berlin,  into which loyal Germans paid to hammer nails, to raise funds for the war?  This odd practice was endlessly mocked in the British newspapers of the time, but I can find almost no references to it now.

 

There’s no doubt that architectural memorials to dead regimes can be very instructive, first in an Ozymandias way, as one see how what is now fallen and derided was once mighty; and secondly because architecture gives a better key to the past than any other art. The remains of the National Socialist parade ground at  Nuremberg, now a sort of lorry park, are very instructive, especially in light rain on a grey winter’s day. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. So is the Olympc Stadium in Berlin, tactfully stripped of any overt National Socialist markings, but obviously the work of a Utopian mind.

 

Nothing gives a better idea of what Stalinism was actually like than the great Gothic towers which he caused to be erected all over Moscow, strikingly like American mid-century buildings in some ways, but also deeply different because of their overt Communist symbolism. They’ve mostly been rather well-restored in recent years, and act as an enduring monument to an era of dark and secretive power that beguiled almost as many people as it murdered.   

 

I hadn’t visited Cologne Cathedral for about 30 years, and , while impressed by its grandeur, its glass and its scale, and by the living bridge it provides to the middle ages,(the story of the completion of the cathedral from original designs, in the 19^th century, after centuries of neglect, is astonishing) I felt it was a much more secular building than the first time I’d seen it on a winter’s morning, far darker, patrolled by stern beadles in unreformed 18^th century garb.   Christianity has shrivelled in Germany as elsewhere in Europe.

 

The Cathedral at Aachen, a much smaller and odder building, suffers from the same problem of secularisation. It is amazing how much more of a religious feeling is retained in most of the English cathedrals, especially given the retiring, self-effacing nature of the Church of England. But two great wars have utterly wrecked the spirit of Christian Europe. I saw photographs of dense, impassioned crowds attending an exposure of relics at Aachen in about 1900.  It was (just) in modern times but could not conceivably have happened after 1914, let alone after 1945. It was like looking at a photo album of the lost City of Atlantis.

 

Aachen is a border city and you can walk, in about an hour, from the heart of it into the Netherlands or into Belgium. I chose the Dutch option, and was - as I always am – utterly amazed to be able to walk into another country without any passport formalities, or change of currency. I know I’m supposed to be pleased by this, but I’m alarmed by how such a huge thing has happened without anybody seeming to care.

 

If the Second World War was fought to preserve the borders of the Versailles settlement (which as far as I know, it was) how come most of the borders of 1919, or indeed 1939, are now no more significant than the boundary between East and West Sussex?

 

My journey also took me through Liege (which now has an astonishing new railway station, whose giant concrete ribs resemble the skeleton of some immense alien monster). I pondered that, 99 years before, the great battle to destroy and capture the Liege fortresses had just finished, and that many of the objectives of the German armies which had then marched on towards Brussels have in fact been achieved. Air travel tends to befuddle us. But stay at ground or sea level, and you will learn much, much more.      

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Stuck Inside of London with the Pyongyang Blues Again

I must confess I’ve never taken much to John Sweeney, the BBC reporter in trouble for going to North Korea as part of a student trip. I remember a quarrel with him in a bar in Prague (in, what? 1988?  It’s possible) in which I very nearly lost my temper. I can’t recall exactly what it was about, but I assume it was politics.

 

But I sort of sympathise with him, up to a point, in his row with the London School of Economics about whether he should have entered the country in this way. It is very difficult for a journalist to get into North Korea, because the tour companies which go there won’t take you. They are, quite reasonably,  afraid they will lose business if they do.

This doesn’t matter if you are relatively anonymous, and I think quite a few journalists do sneak in on tours. I tried, but was quite quickly asked to drop out by the tour operators. So I had to find another way.  But it was not easy or quick. I spent 20 years trying, including hammering on the door of the North Korean embassy in Moscow (they wouldn’t come out to talk to me) and taking coffee with the charming staff of the new North Korean Mission in London, just down the road from Sid James’s old house.

 

I can’t, even now, reveal the full details of my eventual arrangements, which were circuitous and quite funny.  Nor am I sure how official my entry was. I’m sure that someone in the Pyongyang government knew who I was and what I was doing, but I’m not sure how high the knowledge had gone. I think, for instance that if the Pyongyang airport border guards had spotted anything in my passport revealing me to be a reporter, I would not have got in.

 

There were several journalists on the trip, from Australia and the USA, one with a TV camera,  plus some interesting and enterprising people who were not journalists, including two witty young women from California who – by the end of the trip – could do a jaw-droppingly accurate and very funny imitation of the curious marionette-like gestures used by Pyongyang’s beautiful female traffic police, while on point duty. These gestures are (or were, I believe things have changed as the traffic has increased) made still more haunting by their pertly tailored uniforms and by the fact that there was no traffic. It is widely believed that these officers are personally selected by the Leader himself.

 

I’ve never quite fathomed how we all ended up on that particular visit. They all owed quite a bit to me, though – as the final hurdle of our visa procedure was an evening in the Chinese city of Shenyang (formerly Mukden) in which we entertained the staff of the North Korean consulate there. Several of them were very lovely women, and it was made clear to me quite late in the evening that it would be wise, for the purposes of getting visas, if some of the men in the party would dance with them. Nobody volunteered.

 

I cannot dance. But being British, and of a certain age, I did my duty even so, and embarrassed myself for Britain and for everyone else. As I twirled, an official headed out of the back entrance of the restaurant. Half an hour later, he returned with our passports, each adorned with the chocolate-brown oblongs which entitled us to enter the Democratic People’s Republic.

 

I’ll wait for tonight to see whether Mr Sweeney actually discovered anything of huge urgent interest or novelty on his trip. Almost everyone who goes sees more or less the same things – a controlled tour of Pyongyang, a trip to a mausoleum (I was refused this joy, which involved being personally vacuum-cleaned on the way in) , or to the museum housing gifts from abroad to the Great Leader, a trip to the frontier with South Korea, the National Library (which doesn’t have the works of George Orwell or Milton Friedman. We've all had fun asking). I was refused access to the Pyongyang Bowling Alley, though it exists. Then there are a few theatrical displays or parades, a very short journey on the Metro, the captured USS Pueblo (great fun this) and of course the crumbling Juche Tower, apt symbol of the Kim State.  My great good fortune was to see North Koreans spontaneously celebrating the rather picturesque and ancient festival of Chuseok, and also (quite separately)  to see enough incidents of drunkenness and enough evidence of a ready supply and a plentiful consumption of strong alcohol to form my own theory,  which is that the place survives only thanks to a perpetual fog of rice-wine.  

 

If you want a really good account of the country and its history, I cannot recommend too highly the book ‘Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty’ by Bradley K. Martin. Just don’t take it with you when you go.    

 

New readers might also like to read my own articles on my visit, now some six years back,

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486079/PETER-HITCHENS-North-Korea-great-Marxist-bastion-real-life-Truman-show.html

 

and

 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/prisoners-in-camp-kim/

 

 

 

 

The Enigma of North Korea

Some readers have asked me to give my opinions on the current strange events in North Korea.  Very cautiously, I will respond. I am cautious because my only qualification to speak is a visit to that country nearly six years ago, the research and preparation I did at the time, and the interest I have maintained ever since. 

 

Here is what I wrote at the time on this blog, in the Mail on Sunday...

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486079/PETER-HITCHENS-North-Korea-great-Marxist-bastion-real-life-Truman-show.html

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/memories-of-pyo.html

 

...and in the American Conservative

 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/prisoners-in-camp-kim/

 

 

You will see that I concluded that North Korea is pitiable, hopelessly poor, not very sober and almost derelict, trying to find its way out of a dead end.

 

That dead end, at present, leads only to Chinese domination, a fate which might well suit the rest of the world, but which North Koreans themselves greatly dread. As the Tibetans and the Uighurs know (in Tibet and Chinese Turkestan), Chinese domination means the end of national culture, probably the population of the national territory with Han Chinese until the Koreans become a minority in their own country. This is the form which modern Chinese imperialism takes, and I am always amazed that people who get hoity-toity about the wicked past of British imperialism are so uninterested in this development.

 

China also does not want Korean unification. Mind you, nor does South Korea. They saw what happened in Germany, and they know it would mean ruin. So both of Kim Jong Un’s obvious exits are closed. He doesn’t want to become a Chinese province. And he cannot throw himself on the mercy of Seoul. Japan is also in no state to become North Korea’s saviour, though it is very interested in what happens there in the end. My guess is that Kim hopes, somehow, to drag the USA into a rescue.  What he longs for is a high-level US mission to Pyongyang, perhaps headed by an ex-president, followed by aid and investment and a gradual opening to the outside world.

 

The USA, which insists on seeing this decrepit state as a threat, either does not want to do this or cannot grasp that this is what Kim wants, or both. That’s all very well, but I do hope that American diplomacy is based on not wanting to help, rather than on a genuine belief that this alcohol-sodden, bankrupt, half-starved dump with its midget soldiers and its ancient worn-out weaponry, is a new Third Reich or USSR. It just isn’t.

 

I’ve no doubt that even North Korea’s decrepit military could do quite a lot of damage if it tried,  particularly to Seoul which is alarmingly close to the frontier line.  But it would lose any war it started.

 

And that, of course, raises the other ticklish question. If such a war happened, what would happen to Kim Jong Un (assuming he wasn’t killed in it)?

 

What will happen to him anyway, if he admits the whole thing is hopeless and gives up? As I wrote many years ago, all such despots fear two things. 1. They fear the fate of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, more or less murdered as soon as their own elite realised that their power had slipped away, which happened as soon as they showed any sign of  fear or weakness. 2. They fear the fate of Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, filmed as they’re swabbed in some prison for DNA, as if it mattered, and then either publicly hanged or crammed into a prison cell in the Hague.

 

Who would choose either of those fates? Nobody who could avoid them. It may well be that, thanks to the large-scale illegal emigration of many North Koreans into China, across the frayed northern border, the truth about the outside world is seeping into North Korea,  and the magical hold of the Kim cult is weakening. For all I know it will crumble in a matter of days, next week or next month. My experience of Eastern Europe and the USSR tells me that such events can happen with extraordinary suddenness, and are often triggered by turmoil such as North Korea is now undergoing.  From what I can gather Pyongyang has been changing quite rapidly since I was there, with major currency reforms and a limited amount of market capitalism. Who knows what this betokens? Given that no foreign visitor sees much more than he is meant to see, and cannot travel freely, many other things could be happening, outside the relatively prosperous zone of Pyongyang, of which we know nothing.

 

I have often said that the world’s various despots would be much more easily removable if we would drop all this International Court rigmarole and let them climb on to a plane with their money, and vanish into quiet exile somewhere. I still think this. On the other hand, I don’t blame the USA for being reluctant to become a Sugar Daddy to Kim, with no certainty that American aid will lead to his departure, and the grave risk that the collapse of the old order will bring such chaos in the whole of North Korea that nobody will be able to cope, and millions of half-starved refugees clamber across the rusted defences of the DMZ to get to the South.  

 

It’s not easy. But I don’t think we make it any easier by accepting the idea that North Korea is a new USSR, or even an Asian Iran (not that Iran is a Middle Eastern north Korea, either) . As far as I can see, the thing Kim really cares about is the special hard-currency bank accounts, some now said to be located in Shanghai, which presumably enable him to purchase his lobsters , cognac and DVDs, pay off the rest of the power-elite with their share of luxury,  and keep his various palaces warm, and comfortable.  The last major North Korean nuclear crisis came after an earlier version of these bank accounts (then in Macau) was discovered and frozen by a US Treasury Department operation.

 

Would a high-level US mission to Pyongyang, armed with the power to give Kim safe exile,  succeed in ending this ludicrous, doomed regime and bringing North Korea back into the world? I don’t know. But it might work better than the current arrangements, which could accidentally result in an actual war, or at least deaths. I feel most of all for the actual people of North Korea,  who do not in any way deserve what is happening to them.

 

 

 

 

 

'Cushty, easily done!' A criminal's mocking words that sum up our injustice system

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The pro-crime lobby who run our injustice system have two fixed beliefs.

One is that criminals are victims.

Their misdeeds are not their fault but the inevitable result of non-existent poverty.

They have no personal ability to overcome their backgrounds, and so it would be cruel to punish them.

The other is that prisons are a waste of money, an ‘expensive way of making bad people worse’ as the supposedly Right-wing Tory Home Secretary David Waddington said in 1990.

They would rather not have any prisons at all.

They keep the jails we have only because of tiresome public opinion, and because of newspapers like this one that hold fast to traditional ideas of right and wrong, justice and punishment.

That is why they deliberately run those prisons very badly – they are pointless, apologetic warehouses, largely under the control of the inmates and full of illegal drugs. 

Almost nobody is sent to these places until he or she is already a habitual, confirmed criminal.

They are then almost always swiftly released, after learning for certain what they have long suspected, that they have nothing to fear from the police or the courts.

Then the pro-crime liberals write reports pointing out how awful the prisons are (while ignoring the fact that their own ideas have caused this) and urging that even fewer people are sent to them.

As a result, crime increases so much that – despite ultra-liberal guidelines on sentencing – the prisons still fill and overflow.

Last summer’s mass disorders (wrongly called riots) were a direct result of this moronic policy.

Last week we saw two court cases which showed exactly what is going on.

Both are dismal and dispiriting.

Our existing political class, their heads crammed with the mental cotton wool of Sixties Leftism, will learn nothing from them.

But will you learn the crucial lesson, that the Tory Party is just as soppy, just as liberal and just as much your enemy as Labour?

Case One concerns Caroline Pattinson (pictured above), an abuser of heroin, which is supposed to be illegal but isn’t in practice.

Pattinson, 34, has committed 207 crimes in 20 years.

These include 108 convictions for theft, many for cruel frauds on pensioners. But until last Tuesday she had never been sent to prison, except on remand.

Now that she has, she’s not worried. Why should she be?

On being sentenced to 30 months (of which she will serve at most 15 months), she mockingly called out: ‘Cushty! Easily done!’

Case Two concerns Gordon Thompson, also 34, another child of post-Sixties Britain.

Thompson collected an 11½-year sentence for burning down a large shop in Croydon during the mass disorder.

This sounds tough, but once again I doubt if Thompson has much to fear from a modern British prison. The nastier you are, the easier it is to do time in these places.

In any case, I’ll be amazed if he serves more than six years, if that, before they find an excuse to tag him and send him home.

The sentences passed on those involved in the summer outbreak of mass greed and destructiveness have been heavier than usual, but purely for public relations reasons.

Normal lawbreakers continue to get the standard soft treatment.

Thompson already had 20 convictions (fare-dodging, beating up his wife, cocaine possession, carrying knives), and had been so exceptionally callous to his neighbours that the courts did occasionally manage to imprison him, though, as usual, too late and too feebly to do any good.

No, prison doesn’t work – unless it’s an austere place of punishment. But it is absurd to claim that it makes criminals out of harmless innocents.

It is the Permissive Society and our lavish Welfare State which are an expensive way of making bad people worse.

Gove’s schools fail the crucial test

Every Easter sees the same sterile battle between the teachers’ unions, whose conferences give platforms to unrepresentative, strike-happy loudmouths, and the Education Secretary, currently Michael Gove.

Mr Gove (like his many forerunners) knows that being attacked by such people is good for his image.

But it is not good for the country.

The real issue is what it has been since 1965.

Are schools places for pupils to learn, under authority, the things they need to know to be good and useful men and women?

Or are they to be laboratories of social engineering, designed to force equality and Left-wing ideas on all those who can’t afford private fees?

Mr Gove, who is no fool and so has no excuses, knows this perfectly well.

But he will not take the one step that would put it right – the return of academic selection.

Instead, he is trying to nationalise all the State schools in England (this is what the academy programme actually means), a bureaucratic non-solution that will give terrifying centralised power to a future Labour Education Secretary.

How is this conservative?

You can’t fool me with that spoonful of sugar

I shall keep on saying this till everyone notices.

The ‘health-and-safety’ frenzy that has reduced us all to quivering cowards in the face of the slightest risk is nothing to do with human rights or even political correctness. 

 

It is the direct fault of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s Tory Governments, which introduced ambulance-chasing, no-win, no-fee lawyers into this country.

They did so with Section 58 of the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, and the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations, passed as a Statutory Instrument in 1995. Repeal them.

Tory laws made us all cowards

I shall keep on saying this till everyone notices.

The ‘health-and-safety’ frenzy that has reduced us all to quivering cowards in the face of the slightest risk is nothing to do with human rights or even political correctness. 

It is the direct fault of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s Tory Governments, which introduced ambulance-chasing, no-win, no-fee lawyers into this country.

They did so with Section 58 of the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, and the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations, passed as a Statutory Instrument in 1995. Repeal them.

 

The one thing I learned when I visited North Korea is that it is not a serious threat, except to itself. It is a pathetic remnant of the Cold War, frantically hoping that the rich West will save it from Chinese domination.

Drunkenness (on cheap rice wine) is rife, there’s almost no electricity or petrol, the underfed soldiers’ weapons are obsolete and decayed. No wonder the much-trumpeted rocket fell into the sea.

Pity for the North Korean people, not fear of their ridiculous leader, should be our main response.

Pyongyang Revisited – or, still no chance of a Flat White in North Korea

It does not feel as if four years have passed since I finally managed to visit North Korea. The experience feels as if it were yesterday.  Those who have not read my account of that visit, or who would like to read it again, may find it here.

I am glad that it took me so long to make the journey. Long years before, in May 1986,  I was one of the reporters accompanying Margaret Thatcher on a visit to Seoul. Don’t be too impressed. We were crammed in the back of a very old VC-10, a long way from her unless she decided to stun us with a monologue, which from time to time she did.  So I had been taken, tagging on the tail of her party,  to the strange and perplexing border between the two Koreas at Panmunjom.  Just yards away, with no physical barrier in the way, was the entrance to the Looking-Glass World of Communism which in those days stretched all the way to Germany.

Around the small enclave in the Demilitarised Zone were dense woods full of wildlife. Strange music played from a ‘village’ of concrete blocks, plainly uninhabited, which the North Koreans had built  for propaganda purposes. Tantalising mystery lay beyond the weird pavilion from which North Korean soldiers and their visitors gazed at us.  How simple it all seemed then – evil over there, good on our side. I really, really wanted to see the evil half of the world, perhaps so that I might be better at recognising good when I saw it later, and used many methods to try to go there. But as a journalist I was forbidden. Tour firms refused to take me. The North Korean embassy in Moscow, which I pestered with requests, coldly ignored me.

I suppose I more or less accepted that the North-South division was an oriental version of the German problem, and then went on to accept the idea that Pyongyang was some sort of heart of darkness, headquarters of evil, etc etc, until the lies of the Kosovo War, and then the Iraq war, corroded my credulity and compelled me to examine these things for myself.

When at last, via a Russian academic in Australia and another link in China that I will not mention here in case I need to use it again, I found a way in, I was determined not to write the standard account that I had seen so many times.  Nor did it seem likely to me that this small, isolated, desperately poor place could be a threat to the world, as so many people were writing.

As I say, you can tread here what I wrote then.  When we left, I and the others in our very mixed party made a half-serious promise to try to meet again for an event which still seems highly possible in my lifetime – the opening of the first Pyongyang Starbucks. This (though also probable as an actual fact) is a sort of metaphor for the transformation I have seen in so many other ex-Communist countries. It is one I hope for, and expect.

But only if we can control our rather childish readiness to believe in the North Korean bogeyman. North Korea is not a giant, but a dwarf. Those soldiers marching in those enormous parades are ill-fed and on average many inches shorter than men and women of the same age in the South. Their uniforms are made of cheap poor-quality cloth. Their weapons ( I have seen them up close) are obsolete and decrepit. I wonder how much real ammunition they have for them? Or how much fuel they needed to hoard and gather to keep the vehicles moving during the funeral of Kim Jong Il ?

I wonder ( and this is my own individual theory based upon observation) how many North Koreans , at all levels of society are either too hungry (if the rural poor) or too drunk (if the urban poor) to do their jobs properly. I have no doubt they could still do quite a lot of damage to South Korea if they wanted to. But I doubt if they could win any kind of war against a modern well-trained, well-equipped army made up of strong, well-fed young men.

I saw little of the countryside and what I did see was carefully pre-arranged, but even so failed to hide the absence of modern farm machinery or modern agricultural techniques, plus the fact that a supposedly electrified rail system was being operated, where it worked at all, by diesel locomotives. It was quite clear that even in the privileged elite city of Pyongyang, which is closed to most citizens, electric power was in very short supply (our hotel’s power was switched off as soon as we left each morning, and probably not switched on again until soon before we returned in the evening)  .  But I do know that the surveillance and stage-management broke down on two important occasions during my visit. Once was when we arrived at our designated restaurant to fund a man, dead drunk, prone upon the grass in front of the entrance. When members of our party tried to take pictures of this, our furious and embarrassed escorts  summoned loyal citizens to form a human wall around the drunkard until he could be removed.

On another occasion, I managed to get left alone with one of our escorts, the less confident or the two, and to persuade him to let me to roam a little along the bizarre street in which we found ourselves. It contained several absurd shops, with no staff and no customers, supposedly selling such nonsensical combinations of goods as motorbikes and cornflakes. The only busy spot was a small shop front with opaque doors, outside which a few men squatted.  When I asked my escort what it was, he said it was a bar. I suggested we visit it. In a state close to panic, he emphatically refused and steered me as far away from it as possible. Readers must understand that these escorts are human beings, who must be presumed to have wives and children, and that I for one thought it wrong to push them too hard into awkward positions.

Put these two experiences together with a third, when I opened my hotel room window,  high up over central Pyongyang, quite late one evening. the city was almost wholly silent (there was very little traffic, mechanical or human). But from far, far away I could clearly hear a voice singing. My guess is that Pyongyang is fuelled by rice wine, much as Hogarth’s London was fuelled by gin, and that the regime, within limits, is happy to numb its population in this way.

I describe elsewhere the boundless privation and misery which I am sure exist in the parts of the country that foreigners never see.  I am, not in any way trying to defend, justify or understate the sheer nastiness of such a state.

But I am trying to point out that it is a dead end. Without the Soviet subsidies, and the Chinese ones, which kept it going in Cold War days, North Korea is simply bankrupt. A small elite live in the strange, curtained luxury enjoyed by the privileged classes of officially egalitarian states , though much of it is exaggerated by myth and rumour, and their lives would probably seem cramped and limited to a well-off western family. The larger privileged class who are allowed to dwell in the capital live reasonably well by their own standards, but may by now be aware of how poor they are by comparison with their cousins in Seoul.

It is genuinely unclear just how much most North Koreans know of life outside, and if I eventually return this will be one of the questions I will be most anxious to answer.  Far more than they used to, I think, thanks to the many who have slipped across the surprisingly ill-patrolled border with China, some of whom have returned  or got messages about their lives to their relatives still stuck in Kim’s dark, decaying paradise.

The real problem for the country’s rulers (who of course know perfectly well how backward their country is, and how poor) is how to get out alive. They cannot risk a sudden collapse, as happened to East Germany. They would probably be torn to pieces, if the populace ever thought that the security apparatus had lost its will to kill. South Korea does not want this either. It greatly fears millions of refugees sweeping south, uncontrollable in their hunger and disillusionment, and then the enormous economic burden of reconstructing the blighted North from scratch. It was bad enough in Germany. It would be far, far worse in Korea.

There are far too many Western politicians who enjoy having North Korea to use as a bogeyman, for their various reasons. There are also that nasty new breed of foreign policy moralists, whose aim is to feel good about themselves rather than do actual good unto others, and who like to lecture the rest of the world about evil dictators, and long to put all such dictators on trial. It seems to have escaped them that this is why modern despots are so reluctant to stand down and increasingly fight to the death. If young Kim, the ‘Great Successor’ could be guaranteed a nice quiet exit and a chance to spend more time with his foreign bank accounts,  my guess is that he and his entourage would be only too happy to go.

But we won’t let them. We mistake their noisy self-aggrandisement for genuine aggression when I suspect they are just trying to say that they want Western Europe and the USA to come to their rescue  (how they long for a high-level American visit). They greatly fear that they will simply become a colony of China,  which will probably happen sooner or later if the ‘West’ doesn’t take advantage of the few months of opportunity that I think will follow the change of leadership.  These people need help, and above all a way out. They are , as I have written elsewhere, a stagnant remnant of the great flood which global communism caused. If we are genuinely concerned, we should realise that. I suspect there are people starving in North Korea now, who might well be saved from starvation if only we were to adopt a more imaginative and thoughtful policy, instead of pretending that this tiny, impoverished statelet is a menace to the planet.

Judas, the First Socialist, and other issues

I’ll get on to Judas Iscariot in a moment. I am asked how I define poverty. I would define physical poverty as severe want – not enough food to eat, no access to clean water, absence of proper shelter either from great heat or from cold, inadequate clothing, untreated sickness and no possibility of medical help, conditions so squalid that cleanliness is impossible, severe overcrowding. These are the features of poverty that I have seen in various forms on my many travels into remote parts of the world.

 

I had an interesting discussion about this on Nicky Campbell’s Radio Five Live programme a few weeks ago, and was encouraged by a contributor from Africa who agreed with me that poverty of this kind does not really exist in this country. But he added that hardship undoubtedly does exist. Of course much of that hardship stems from not having things that others do have, and from a feeling of injustice and rejection. But this is not poverty, which in my view is an absolute condition of severe material want, not a comparative condition of being worse off than your neighbour. I would add, as I often do, that I suspect that there may be something very close to absolute poverty among the lonely old people of this country, trying to make ends meet on no more than their pensions, regarding any further appeal to the welfare state as a shameful (and therefore unthinkable) form of charity which they are too proud to accept.

Many of these live very pinched and deprived lives, though even they are materially rich beside the rural dwellers of North Korea or millions of the less fortunate in Africa and parts of India. But the measure of poverty as an arbitrary proportion of average income is just a device by which socialists justify their unending raid on the possessions of the wealthy and productive, to finance the unproductive and penniless state in its vote-buying projects. Some of these projects may incidentally do good. But their aim is not to do good, but to make their authors feel good about themselves, while increasing their power. It also incidentally shrinks the power of the productive middle-class to be charitable in their own right, as they have handed over a large part of their charitable duty to the state.

That is why I am so fond of Christ’s rebuke to Judas, and the account as a whole. The passage is as follows: The Gospel according to John, 12th Chapter, beginning at verse iv; Mary (not Mary Magdalene, but Mary, sister of Lazarus), has just taken a pound – or 454 grams in the Rocky Horror Bible - of very costly Spikenard ointment and wiped Jesus’s feet with her hair, ‘and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment’. ‘Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, which should betray him : ‘Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?’ This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus :’Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always’.

 

As so often, there’s a lot packed into this, notably the realistic recognition that there will always be poor people in the world , and those who wish to help them will always have the opportunity to do so. But it is the biting observation that Judas, like so many since, is pretending a concern for the poor to cover up other, less noble motives, that really goes home with a satisfying thud. There is no new thing under the sun. I’m accused by some of saying that Christianity has no part to play in politics. I’ve no doubt, as it happens, that it does have a part. But that it is an individual part, in that the man or woman who embraces Christian principle may be involved in politics, in any party which is not actually wicked, and use his or her individual influence to good and Christian ends. But I do not think there is such a thing as a ‘Christian policy’ or a Christian party’, or that any grouping should arrogate Christianity to itself as its own possession. This is because Christianity is not about earthly power, but about love. And if you think about it, power is the opposite of love – and the less love there is, the more power you will generally find.

That’s enough religion for this posting (though I plan another contribution on a recent visit to Lincoln Cathedral which may be of interest to the atheist fancy). On other comments, Mr McDonald (or ‘McDonald’ as he perhaps prefers to be addressed) is wrong in particular in saying that the MPs’ expenses story was offered first to our sister paper ‘The Daily Mail’ (it wasn’t, though I should point out here yet again that I do not write for the ‘Daily Mail’, but for the ‘Mail on Sunday’ , a separate paper with its own editor and staff) and wrong in general, that the anti-EU rebels were specially spendthrift on the expenses gravy train ( I believe one of them had the lowest claims of any MP, whereas Mr Cameron himself, as I so often point out, was among the highest claimers – quite legally –for his nice country house, despite being personally rich. There’s a book to be written on the selective nature of the coverage of MPs’ expenses, and the selective nature of the way in which some were chosen for the public pillory and others exempted). Many of the rebels are, I believe, newly elected since the rules were changed). So the comment is both incorrect and irrelevant.

 

If people come here to plug the BNP, they must learn that they will earn themselves my utter contempt. I had thought we had got rid of them, but perhaps now the BNP – which is now tiny and very short of money - has emerged from its latest furious inner faction fight, it now has time to start spreading slime again. This revolting grouplet has been thoroughly dealt with here, and the index is full of clear explanations as to why no civilised person should dirty himself by association with such a spectacularly disreputable organisation. Reminder: It was founded by a Judophobe Hitler-worshipper, so pitifully obsessed with Jews that he once launched an investigation into Nicholas Griffin’s ancestry because he thought his (Griffin’s) father had rather a large nose, and still peopled with Holocaust-deniers and similar. The BNP’s noisy flag-wagging patriotism is wholly opportunist. So is its, er, critique of Islam. Mr Griffin, it might be recalled, once travelled to Tripoli to seek aid from the late Colonel Gadaffi. Not long afterwards he was consorting with the Ku Klux Klan. Is there nobody Mr Griffin can’t bring himself to meet? There is nothing to hope for from this squalid and pathetic faction, whose existence does grave damage to every cause it claims to espouse.

 

As for UKIP, I only attack it when I am foolishly urged to support it. I have explained why( again see the index) and only those who want me to attack it should sing its praises here or pointlessly seek my endorsement of it, which is never going to come. I cannot think of a more certain way of ensuring that opposition to EU membership returned to the braying margins of political, life, for the rebel Tories to have anything to do with this hopeless Dad’s Army, a group of people so politically naïve that they thought they could make use of Robert Kilroy-Silk. He tied them up, hand and foot, with their own cravats. The Gang of Four came closer to succeeding than most people realise. Their failure was not predetermined, though Margaret Thatcher bears some responsibility for it, as I shall one day be free to reveal. Oh, and to Howard Medwell ‘Why *not* “Pestilent”?’ It’s a good 18th-century pejorative term, much in need of revival.

Our nice, furry Archbishop... lost in a barbarous world

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column 

Do we have to wait until the hate-filled mobs storm into Canterbury Cathedral and drag him from the pulpit before the Archbishop of Canterbury grasps that Christianity is in danger in this country? Nice, furry, mild and useless, Dr Rowan Williams chose this Easter week not to protect his Church, but to rebuke several bishops who had rightly warned of the swelling rage against the Church.

No doubt he is right to point out that Christians elsewhere suffer more. I would like to hear more protests from 'human rights' campaigners against the nasty treatment of Christians in the Muslim world, not least under the rule of the Palestinian Authority which many leftist Christians idiotically admire.

But so what? In those rough neighbourhoods, under the grudging scowl of Muslim so-called 'tolerance', this has been the case for centuries. Here, things are and ought to be different. Dr Williams is the head of the Established Church in England. The laws of this country, the shape of its cities and countryside, its language, morals, literature, architecture, family structure and politics are all based upon Christianity.

Take it away and it will be like removing the mortar from a great building, leaving its bricks and stones loose and trembling in the storm to come. And yet there are many people who want to do this. In this Century of Selfishness, Christianity is an annoying obstacle, with its infuriating insistence on active unselfishness and its unalterable rules which say that there are some things you just cannot do, like for instance murder unborn babies and walk out on your marriage.

Last week, there was yet another case of someone being in trouble for being a Christian, in an officially Christian country. I collect these incidents: preachers arrested and fined; nurses disciplined for offering to pray for patients; registrars disciplined for declining to officiate at homosexual civil partnerships; adoption societies forced to close because they will not place children with same-sex couples. Just 30 years ago, they would have been unthinkable. Another few decades and Christianity will be against the law.

I expect that before long there will be cases of teachers being fired for resisting compulsory sex education in primary schools. Last week's example was that of a nurse, Shirley Chaplin, badgered by superiors for wearing a crucifix on a chain.

Does anyone really believe that she would have been pestered by authority if she had worn a Muslim symbol on a chain round her neck? Does anyone believe that a Muslim preacher would have been put in the cells, and fined £1,000 - as happened to Shawn Holes in Glasgow - for callinghomosexuality a sin in a public place? Each of these cases lets others know that they had better be careful, and makes many faithful Christians fear that they may have to choose between their faith and their livelihood.

Does Dr Williams even know about the oppressive new codes of practice in the professions and the public sector, which compel employees to adopt the new secular faith of 'Equality and Diversity'? Now the Archbishop has strangely chosen this weekend to attack his fellow Christians in the Roman Catholic church. They must be beginning to wonder how long they have got before they are arrested. Yet nobody seems to ask, in all the justified fury against Roman Catholic priests who have disgraced themselves and wounded others, an interesting question. Here it is. This Easter weekend, a film was released into British cinemas called 'Kick-Ass', which features an 11-year-old girl, Chloe Moretz, who speaks in filthy language and wears outfits obviously designed to sexualise her.

I find this repellent, disgusting and immoral. Yet this film, which members of Britain's exciting post-Christian elite helped to make, is receiving generous praise in the liberal media. Why? If this isn't the corruption of the young, then what is? Yet I have no doubt that those who defend this sewage are in the ranks of those howling at the Pope for supposedly condoning priestly child abuse (which he doesn't).

Phooey. What they hate is not the abuse, which happens in liberal state institutions just as it does in the Roman church. What they hate is the Christian church. And at the moment they are winning the argument partly because the Church won't fight back with any spirit. Dr Williams seems actually to be on the side of the anti-God battalions.

Cam Jong II, a not-so-very-dear leader

David Cameron's strange appearance in 'casual' gear made him look as if he had been dressed by a committee, perhaps of his enemies, perhaps of people who are not very bright.

What were they hoping for? That these clothes would further infuriate the remaining conservatives daft enough to support this liberal in biker's clothing? That he would get the votes of ageing women who still hanker after the young Marlon Brando?

As it happens, he ended up looking faintly like North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, who also seems to have consulted the wrong style advisers in a bid to appear to be something other than he is.

Given that one of Mr Cameron's key media supporters this week issued a stern condemnation of conservative journalists such as me for failing to show 'discipline' by continuing to criticise Mr Cameron, I think I may start calling him Cam Jong Il, the notvery-dear leader of the Democratic People's Blue Labour Party.

Discipline, indeed. Who do these people think they are?

Time to put the clock back, not further forward

I've never seen the point of British Summer Time as it is. It's like jetlag without the travel. But what if the clocks never went back, but went forward even further? Bar-haunting trendies living in London may not see anything wrong with pushing time as far forward as they can. The disadvantages are only clear to early risers, who dislike being forced to go to work in the dark for half the year.

I also rather like the lamplit dusks of late autumn, a very English time of day designed for tea and hot buttered toast, which would vanish if we had our clocks permanently on Berlin time, as these zealots want.

I read last week that this plan now has the support of all the major political parties, plus a lot of metropolitan journalists who plainly seldom come out from under the duvet before 11am. Once again, it's time to put the clock back.

• The police have sabotaged the attempt to ban mephedrone, before it has even begun. A spokesmoron for the Association of Chief Police Officers has announced that the police will not actually be enforcing the law, by arresting and charging people for possessing this stupid poison. Oh no, that would be 'criminalising' them. It will be only the 'evil dealers' who are targeted

What this uniformed cretin should realise is that young people criminalise themselves by buying an illegal drug. It is completely illogical to say that something is so dangerous that you should go to jail for selling it, yet when you buy it, nothing should happen to you.

Drug-takers are criminals, not victims, and if we took this view there would be many fewer of them.

A fitting symbol for a nation dominated byphonies

Only a nation on the way down, whose culture was dominated by phonies and jokers, could allow the building of the stupid and ugly tower planned to adorn London's Olympic Park.

I suppose that, since it looks like part of a collapsed steelworks, it might symbolise our lost industrial greatness. Compare this, and the vast, tatty zero of the London Eye (which ruins many fine prospects of Central London) with the things we used to build  -  St Paul's Cathedral, now hemmed in by brutalist concrete, Big Ben, a soaring stone hymn to Victorian selfconfidence, and even the lost twin towers of Wembley.

Now all we propose is a futile tangle of metal that will look as if it has fallen down when it is up.

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