Au Revoir les Enfants

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Why I Can't Stand Cyclists who Overtake other Cyclists on the Inside

Wheezing slowly up a not-particularly steep hill on my far-from-lightweight bike, my backpack stuffed with books about the European Union, I heard the sound of rasping rapid breath at my left shoulder and moments later was overtaken, on the inside, by another cyclist, one of those scowling depersonalised clones in uniform Lycra and a plastic helmet, i-player buds jammed in his heedless ears,  who have multiplied in their hundreds of thousands in the past ten years. (In my view any theoretical gain from wearing the helmet is completely cancelled out by the added danger from not being able to hear what is behind you properly).

 

 Had I turned left just then, as I might well have done, there would have been a bad accident and it would have been entirely his fault.  I have to say I wish I could have caught up with him and told him a few home truths. I greatly fear him and people like him, and their irresponsible and self-righteous stupidity is a growing danger.  I have grown better at anticipating it, but I still haven’t trained myself to expect it as often as it actually happens.

 

The road was reasonably wide and not busy. He could perfectly well have overtaken me on the outside. I actually think he went on the inside deliberately, as some sort of thrill (it happens so often in irrational unjustifiable circumstances that I have been forced to this conclusion).

 

  I was a little way out in the road because, like most sensible cyclists,  I expect danger from any parked car. The most likely is that one of its doors will suddenly be flung open in my path. The other (especially in these days of near-silent electric cars, where the tell-tale plume of exhaust and mutter of engine are absent) is that the car will swing out without warning. It’s always been my rule to assume these dangers.

 

I ride, in fact,  very defensively. While riding, I adopt an attitude of total mistrust of all motor vehicles. I assume (often correctly) that their drivers may technically have seen me, but have not registered me as a significant object. Where the car has (illegal) tinted windows, I assume this twice over. When nice, kind, decent motorists offer to give way to me, I stonily ignore them, because I cannot square their (rare) behaviour with the indifferent or hostile road etiquette of the majority. I have to maintain my defensive hostility at a high pitch all the time. It's often reciprocated, and quite unprovoked. Many believe (I think they got this off a TV ‘personality’) that I am not entitled to use the road because I ‘don’t pay road tax’. Few remember anything of the Highway Code, especially about showing consideration to other road users.

 

I won’t say my ultra-defensive attitude keeps me safe. There is no safety on the road. I’d just say it has kept me safer than I would have been if I hadn’t adopted it, long ago, when I was one of the very few adult cycle commuters in London or indeed in the country, and was mocked or despised by colleagues for my eccentricity.

 

 

Since then, many aspects of cycling have got much better. Cycle lanes are a lot better than no cycle lanes, though they often turn abruptly into car parks or run out when you need them most. Brakes now work in the rain. They used not to, even the expensive leather ones which were better than nothing. Gears are simple and easy to use, quite unlike the old feeler-gauges on the frame, so placed that you had to let go of the handlebars to use them. The bikes themselves are lighter and stronger,  the tyres tougher, lights a thousand times better and more conspicuous, reflective gear far easier to obtain and inventively designed.

 

But drivers are more heedless and more hostile, and the law against driving while texting or phoning is, to all intents and purposes, dead - as it is almost never enforced. And then there are the other cyclists. They have, in recent years, made riding far, far more dangerous.

 

I am not a purist. Sometimes, at vicious junctions designed by homicidal traffic planners to force cyclists into the paths of speeding juggernauts, I will cautiously ride on the pavement, giving way to pedestrians if they appear. I’ve even been known to ride the wrong way up a brief stretch of (deserted) one-way street, rather than ride half a mile to stay legal.  At any sign of oncoming traffic, I will dismount. At some very slow-to-change traffic lights I will dismount, wheel my machine past and then remount, to show respect for the law. I might have gone through one or two as they changed from amber to red.  But I regard deliberately riding through a red light (especially on a pedestrian crossing) as a serious sin, as well as an offence.

 

There’s a simple reason for this. The law is what protects us.  Nothing else does. If you drive around in a  ton of steel and  glass, and drive through a red light, you probably won’t be badly hurt if it goes wrong. The same’s not true if you’re on a bike.  If red lights are just advisory or some sort of leftover Christmas decoration, then it won’t be the people in the cars or the lorries that have most to lose. And if the law protects you,  you should protect the law, all the time and especially when it doesn’t suit you. I simply don’t buy the claim that jumping red lights is safer. Staying ahead, where you can be clearly seen, is clearly safer than being stuck alongside a big lorry. But it’s not the only choice. If you can’t get ahead, then stay behind. There’s not that much hurry, anyway.  

 

The same is true, in a  slightly different way, about overtaking on the inside. When in motion on a two-way road, it’s almost impossible to drive or ride safely if you have to watch both sides in the mirror, or glance repeatedly over both shoulders, and keep an eye on the road ahead for crazies coming towards you in the middle of the road.  You’re not even supposed to do it on Motorways, where the head-on danger is a lot less. Any driver knows that you shouldn’t do this.

 

Cyclists do (I do) ride slowly and cautiously alongside stationary or very slow-moving cars on the inside in some circumstances, though I much prefer to pass them on the offside. This is awkward, and unlovely but there's a good reason for it. It is often essential if you are to make any progress on the jammed roads of modern Britain. It is not ideal. The fear of the suddenly opened door is even greater when you are doing this than when you are riding past parked vehicles.  In many cities there are actually cycle lanes where this is encouraged by the authorities. Urban drivers have, I think, grown accustomed to it and the risk is, in any case,  much more to the cyclist than it is to the driver.  

 

But why do cyclists (who have so much to fear from a war of all against all on the roads) repeatedly and needlessly do it to other cyclists who have left a sensible distance between themselves and parked cars? Or who are simply riding a reasonable distance out into the road to assert their freedom to be there?  I can't see what they gain. I can see it causing horrible needless accidents. I am growing used to it and am learning to expect this stupidity alongside all the others I see on the road. But it still seems to me to be irrational, verging on the spiteful. Can anyone explain?    

Let's Groan Again. An Atheist Writes Back

As I feared, my attempt to argue reasonably with the Atheist contributor ‘James’ was not a meeting of minds. I don’t expect these encounters to be, normally, for the reasons I’ve discussed. The modern militant atheists have closed their minds, contemptuously, to the possibility that they may be mistaken and have erected a caricature of religious believers as stupid, uneducated, anti-scientific morons which  leads to a certain ‘de haut en bas’ style in their approach, which they have done nothing to earn.

 

 

But the exercise wasn’t entirely useless. The response of ‘James’ and some other militant unbelievers makes their simple but unyielding misunderstanding of my position so plain that I can quite easily show it to any unprejudiced observer, and do so below with my inserted and marked comments. The difference between us is that they are trying to prove me wrong, which they can’t do, and I am trying to offer them some common ground, on to which they fear to advance.  It’s like trying to give a free gift to someone who is convinced it is a trick.

 

The argument also produced some cogent counters to the arguments of ‘James’ from contributors, so good that I have included them below in this post.

 

 

Let me begin with the second epistle of ’James’:

 

 

'James' writes: 'At the risk of boring Peter Hitchens further, here is my reply. In any other sphere of discussion when presented with unconvincing arguments and bad or no evidence, you reject the position until new or better evidence is presented. All I argue is that our normal standards of evidence and rigour should be applied to arguments about God.

 

*** PH. Once again, there is a very simple reason why this cannot be so. We are here arguing about belief and faith, not testable knowledge. Both my religious opinion and the religious opinion of ‘James’ are just that – religious opinions about the unknowable.  They cannot be tested like the various claims of scientists,  historians, etc.  Does ‘James’ accept this? I am not sure he does. I think he is convinced as any Ayatollah in the courtyards of Qom or as any hillbilly preacher,  of the absolute truth of his claims.

 

‘James’:  I would be happy to discuss the arguments further but Peter Hitchens is completely closed to the idea that an atheist could be motivated out of anything other than selfish hedonism

 

****PH writes: No, I am not. I have never said that *all* atheists are so motivated, and do not think so. I specifically said in my first reply to him ‘I do not believe I have ever used the word 'all' in this case '.  I also said : ‘I am not making any individual or even universal claim, and any of my opponents are free to show that it is not their motive.’ He neither acknowledges nor attempts to rebut these points. Like all bad debaters, when he finds a difficult bit, he avoids it completely and pretends it doesn’t exist.

 

Indeed, he has the nerve to repeat the same false charge as if I had never rebutted it. ‘James' shouldn't make these things up. Let me give some more examples. Many atheists in our secular society , like many cradle Christians, believe in their faith out of conformism and fashion, and have never considered it deeply enough to have a motivation. ‘James’, by all appearances, may be one such. The recurrence in their arguments of the same tricks and stylistic habits, ‘gods’ in the plural without an initial capital, for instance, is often a sign of a faith casually and self-protectively picked up from a peer-group.

 

‘James’: (PH might do well to remember that he, along with everyone else, doesn’t actually know much about human nature, and that semi-autobiographical novels and his own former atheism are not evidence that atheists are generally selfish and hedonistic).

 

***PH replies: I am pretty confident that I know a good deal more about human nature than does ‘James’, my knowledge having been quite dearly bought in more than 60 years of far-from-saintly life.  It is very interesting that he completely ignores the congruence, evident to any campus visitor, between the angry atheist surge and the ‘libertarian’ cry of ‘nobody tells me what I can do with my own body’ which is the slogan of the drugtaker and the sexual libertine. That’s why all my brother’s fans hate me so. They liked having an educated plummy voice telling them their hedonism was fine and their small-town pastors were stupid morons.  They are doubly infuriated to hear my very similar educated plummy voice saying that actually it isn’t that simple.  How dare I profane the sacred memory?

 

He also ignores totally my point that : ‘Because this (hedonism) is the demonstrable default position of humanity anyway, because it is equally true of many nominal religious believers, whose faith can quite rightly be judged by how well they keep to the precepts they claim to espouse.’  The truth of the first is so blazingly obvious that he couldn’t possibly rebut it, and the second is probably something he would say himself under other circumstances, but it doesn’t suit him to do so now. So he ignores it completely. Again. Duck and cover.

 

He concentrates instead on Maugham’s eloquent autobiographical passage, which I doubt very much he has read ( I wonder if he even knows who Maugham was or how he lived) , but dismisses anyway, and on my own undoubted personal experience, which he dismisses as of being of no worth at all. ***

 

 

‘Paul’: So, as he so rightly says in other contexts, when arguing with someone who won’t treat their opponent seriously and treat them with due respect, the only winning move is not to play. 

 I will make a few brief points, as I don’t want to be thought to be ducking them, but I won’t bore PH with any further replies unless he is prepared to argue with me as though I were a moral and decent human being. 


 

***PH : I have never said otherwise. I know nothing about him and have said nothing about him. For the third time, my speculation on the motives of atheists has never been all-inclusive and he cannot claim that it is directed at him personally. He is making things up, to suit him - an interesting characteristic in one so resolutely rejecting the idea that we choose our beliefs to suit us. He has chosen this one to suit him - it sort of gets him out of a corner from which there is no escape by actual argument. Alas for him, it is demonstrably untrue.

 

 

‘James’: On the point about the complex universe being evidence for a theistic God. This is, at best, an argument for pantheism or deism, not for theism, and certainly not for the Abrahamic God. No claims in the Bible are supported by the complexity of our universe.


 

*** PH: We are not here arguing about the Abrahamic God or any particular religion. Poorly-equipped anti-God people always make this silly mistake. The argument about the existence of God is entirely separate from arguments about individual faiths.  Deism is a subdivision of Theism, not the other way round.

 

 

‘James’ : 'Einstein was a believer in Spinoza’s god, which has nothing to do with theism. He specifically rejected the idea of a personal God.

 

***PH writes: Quite so, which is why I specifically referred to : ‘the existence of something which might be called 'God' ' rather than to a personal God.  

 

‘James’  All this is easily verifiable. His beliefs on God and its existence are far closer to mine, than to yours, not that it matters much.

 

***PH writes: I do not agree, either that it doesn’t matter or that Einstein’s position is closer to his position, of absolute rejection of anything resembling a deity than to mine, a belief that He may exist, accompanied by a strong desire for Him to do so. 

 

 

‘James’: 
When Dawkins talks about aliens, he specifically describes them as “Godlike”, and different from the usual beliefs in God in one important way: Their complexity would only come about through a process similar to that of evolution. What this has to do with theism, I have no idea.

 

****PH writes: Then he is not thinking. Others have had no difficulty in seeing its relevance.

 

‘James’: 

On the topic of addiction. Fair enough, I concede that those who argue for addiction claim it is a fact, while you do not claim the same about God. This was a mistake.

 

 

***PH writes: I am glad to see him admit it. A rare glint of gold amid the mud.

 

‘James’:  I would like to say though, that a lot of my taxes go in support of the state belief in Anglicanism,

 

***PH writes : They do? Perhaps he would like to tell me how much taxation is spent on the Church of England? Figures, please, and references. 

 which leads to absurdities such as the Windsor Family and the Lords Spiritual, with which I profoundly disagree.

 

***PH writes: I hope all readers will note the change of subject here, and the comic-strip republicanism which is also revealed. 

 

'Paul': We both agree that a belief in addiction should not lead to state support, perhaps you would extend the logic to other beliefs like Anglicanism. 

 On the general topic of hedonism and selfishness. It is entirely possible for these things to be criticised without needing to appeal to Christian Morality.

 

 

***PH writes: Yes, I know. But there is a great difference between disliking these things in a specific instance or because they affect you badly personally, or they damage the national budget or reduce industrial production, or whatever it is - and having an absolute prohibition on them because they are wrong at all times and in all places . This difference is important because so many wrong acts are done in secret, their culprits unknown to their victims and undiscovered by the authorities. There is also the human tendency, most obvious in dismembering, crushing, burning and suffocating foreign civilians and permitting abortions, to claim that various forms of wickedness aren’t, in this case, wickedness at all.

 

 

 

Finally, I have one question. As you believe that belief in God is a choice, how is it that objective morality can come from it?

 

**** PH replies: I don’t see that this is an inconsistency. I believe in the existence of objective morality and absolute truth.  I do not state that they definitely exist because I cannot (any more than he can state that they don’t) .  It is, of course, a claim but its point is that it requires absolute standards of goodness from those who make it. That is why I choose to believe in it.  Large objective consequences can be shown to flow from the general belief in its non-existence, and likewise from the general belief in its existence.  I can offer no other test this side of the grave.

 

 

Mr ‘Bunker’ then joined the argument, perhaps feeling left out, as ‘James’ has pretty much completely restated the case  which Mr ‘Bunker’ first made here about 2,000 years ago. ****

 

 

Mr ‘Bunker’ wrote: ‘If (as I assume) Mr Hitchens is telling the truth when he says he is a believer, then let him prove that he is able to choose to believe the opposite - just for, say, one week as from tomorrow, in which we could argue with him about it. Then he could return to the belief 'of his choice'!’

 

Of course he could 'pretend' to believe God doesn't exist, if only for one week, but that's not the test. The test is whether he could 'truly' believe (just for one week) that God does not exist. And argue, genuinely and credibly, with believers on this blog that there is no God, that God is a figment  of human imagination and that only deluded people can believe such rubbish.

 

I don't think Mr Hitchens can do that. I don't think that choice is open to him. He cannot choose arbitrarily to believe the opposite of what he does in fact believe - and neither can I!!! (There is some mysterious force preventing him!!!!!)’

 

****PH writes ‘There is nothing mysterious about it. The 'force' that is preventing me from choosing the atheist creed again just now is my strong desire, which I have developed rationally over many decades, to live in a designed, created and purposeful universe, to which justice, love and liberty are essential. I cannot unlearn the experiences or forget the knowledge which brought me to this desire, though I can, alas,  imagine appalling circumstances which might make we wish once more for another kind of universe. As I say, the key is the desire.  That is why the desire of the atheists is so interesting, and why they are so reluctant to admit this or discuss it. When you desire, you can and will choose what suits your desire. What does Mr Bunker desire, which enables him to choose the cruel,  meaningless and purposeless chaos in which he seeks to live? He won't even accept that his choice is motivated by a desire, so he won’t talk about it. Note that, one again,  I can easily answer his question. He won't even consider mine.

 

‘Paul Small’ also joined in to say:

PH's attempts to rationalise his beliefs just cause him further problems as his logical inconsistencies are exposed. He concludes this piece saying: "Knowledge of God's existence or non-existence is not available to us. Fact, reason and logic cannot take anyone any further than agnosticism, as he well knows." Yet earlier in the same post, PH wrote: "Belief in God, once it is accepted, requires the individual to reform and govern himself according to eternal laws which he cannot change - often to his own severe disadvantage." This is self-contradictory. If knowledge of God and His existence is unavailable to us, then so is any knowledge of His supposed eternal laws. Instead, PH's principle that we choose our beliefs must apply equally to our beliefs about these 'eternal laws': Does God exist? You can choose Yes or No. If you choose Yes, then is (for example) homosexuality a sin? Is it wrong, acceptable or a duty to kill non-believers? You must choose yourself because fact, reason and logic cannot tell us. The same is true for every belief about God, if it is true for the belief that He exists in the first place. How can you reform and govern yourself according to laws if you do not know what those laws are? On the other hand, if you do know what these eternal laws are, you must necessarily also know that God exists. In which case, it is not a choice.

 

****PH replies : Mr ‘Small’ is (this is so common) confusing two different processes. One, the choice of belief in a God or a comparable force (see discussions elsewhere about Einstein, Spinoza, etc) and two, the actual religion which the believer then adopts, or perhaps doesn’t. They are distinct. Once one has decided to believe that there *is*an absolute, one then has to try to discover what it is and what this fact means to us. This is the cause of philosophy and of theology, and of the huge energy devoted by so many very clever people over so many centuries to trying to establish this from the various instructions we appear to be have been given. You have to accept first of all that there are rules. You must then spend the rest of your life trying to discover what they are, and how to obey them. But Christ’s summary of the law, combined with the Sermon on the Mount and the parables, all in His own words, seem to me to me to offer a fairly straightforward guide to anyone seriously interested. But of course you have to approach them in that way, not as a teenage scoffer.

 

 

My thanks to

‘John Baker’, who wrote:

 

‘This concept of 'choosing' to believe something is really causing people problems. It shouldn't. It should be uncontroversial. Choosing to believe something is not restricted to the philosophical or the spiritual. People choose to believe all kinds of things, including and particularly of a temporal nature, every day of their lives. Most of the 'facts' people think they 'know', they have chosen to believe. It is impossible, for an individual to 'know' that a particular event or discovery occurred, if they were not themselves present, and it wasn't recorded on some reliable medium. They have to take the word of others. Or not take the word of others. Most of the 'facts' about events in the world are derived by individuals from media of some kind, or from word of mouth, not from personal experience. An individual may sit down to watch a BBC news report about some event that the BBC claims happened. Most individuals do not start phoning around to check if the news report is true. They believe the report is true, they believe the report is untrue, or they don't form an opinion. If they believe the report is true, they are choosing to do so. They base their choice on something they already believe. Such as, the BBC is a source of authority, and is trustworthy. If they believe the report is untrue, they are choosing to do. They base their choice on something they already believe. Such as the BBC is purveyor of propaganda, and is untrustworthy. It will often not be possible for an individual to verify the report, even if they wanted to, and had the time, and money to do so. A event could be between two other individuals who attest that something specific was said, but that was not recorded on any medium. Whether the first individual believes the other two individuals is a matter of choice. They can't 'know' what happened, if they weren't there. This extends to any event at which an individual wasn't present, or experiment they did not carry out themselves. People do not start carrying out an investigation, an experiment, or calculate probabilities, for every potential 'fact' that comes to their attention. It is as impossible for individuals to 'know' about most of the things they think know about, as it is for them to peer beyond the universe and 'know' if there is a God or no God. Everyone chooses to believe things, every day.’

 

Likewise to Peter Charnley, who wrote:

 

 

‘@James | 28 July 2015 at 02:27 PM ‘James’ is firing wide of the original mark with many of his replies. James:-“On the point about the complex universe being evidence for a theistic God. This is, at best, an argument for pantheism or deism, not for theism, and certainly not for the Abrahamic God. No claims in the Bible are supported by the complexity of our universe.” This has got nothing to do with the straightforward question of whether there is or is not a God - which is the original primary question as to whether extraordinary structured complexity arose naturally or as a consequence of a conscious act.
 James:-“Einstein was a believer in Spinoza’s god, which has nothing to do with theism. He specifically rejected the idea of a personal God. All this is easily verifiable. His beliefs on God and its existence are far closer to mine, than to yours, not that it matters much.” Again this is a dilution of the point under consideration. There are many people who believe in a Spinozistic or Deistic 'God of Nature' who or which leaves Nature and its creatures (including its human creatures) entirely to their own devices. I believe that Anthony Flew, famous for being ‘the world’s most notorious atheist who changed his mind’, moved through this stage. And he famously argued against Richard Dawkins that ‘natural selection’ does not explain the existence of life, affirming that there is today no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the first emergence of life from non-living matter, or for the capacity of life to reproduce itself genetically, and observing that there isn't even any sign of such an explanation on the horizon 'if indeed’ as Flew suggested ‘there ever could be.' In short, James, the fact that a Spinozistic God has nothing to do with theism is irrelevant to the question of whether the universe came into being as a deliberate act of a conscious mind - i.e. a God. James:-“When Dawkins talks about aliens, he specifically describes them as “Godlike”, and different from the usual beliefs in God in one important way: Their complexity would only come about through a process similar to that of evolution. What this has to do with theism, I have no idea.” Again you are functioning wide of the debating mark, James – for largely the same reasons as above. James (now entering into the realm of a theistic personal God) :- “On the general topic of hedonism and selfishness. It is entirely possible for these things to be criticised without needing to appeal to Christian Morality.” You may very well abhor hedonism and selfishness as a self-proclaimed atheist. However, simply dismissing the origin of absolute morality does not discount that origin – whether you believe in it or not. James:-“Finally, I have one question. As you believe that belief in God is a choice, how is it that objective morality can come from it?” For the same reason as above. You can choose to acknowledge that origin or to deny it. However people who deny a definitive source of absolute objective morality are more likely to stray from it than those who don’t. The history of the human race, particularly the 20th century, makes that self-evident.’

How Long Before We See Troops on Our Streets, Just Like Rangoon?

Yesterday my colleague Martin Beckford had a tremendous scoop in the Mail on Sunday . As usual, we had several such scoops, so his was not on the front but prominently displayed on page 5, a right-hand page (these catch the eye rather more than left-hand pages) .

 

Martin wrote : ‘A TOP-SECRET plan for the mass deployment of armed troops on the streets of Britain in the wake of a major terrorist attack can be revealed for the first time today.

More than 5,000 heavily armed soldiers would be sent to inner cities if Islamic State or other fanatics launched multiple attacks on British soil - an unprecedented military response to terrorism.

The plan, codenamed Operation Temperer, would see troops guard key targets alongside armed police officers, providing 'protective security' against further attacks while counter-terror experts and MI5 officers hunted down the plotters.

The shocking plans for 'large-scale military support' to the police are contained in documents uncovered by The Mail on Sunday. They have been drawn up by police chiefs and are being discussed at the highest levels of Government, but have never been revealed in public or mentioned in Parliament.

The mass deployment of Army personnel on the streets of mainland Britain would be hugely controversial, even if it helped keep the population safe, because it could give the impression that the Government had lost control or that martial law was being imposed.

Baroness Jones, who sits on London's Police and Crime Committee, said she was 'shocked' at the plans, saying: 'This would be unprecedented on mainland Britain.' And she expressed concern that the troops would not be sufficiently trained to protect civil liberties.

Some police leaders fear that the soldiers would be needed if there were a wave of attacks by extremists inspired by Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, as police forces no longer have enough manpower to cope.

It can also be disclosed today that, one week after this year's Paris massacres, senior police officers discussed raising the terror threat level in Britain from 'severe' to the highest level of 'critical', meaning a terror attack is 'imminent' rather than 'highly likely'. But in the end the level was kept at 'severe'.

The military contingency plan is revealed in the minutes of a National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) meeting held on April 22 at a hotel in Leicester. Documents accidentally uploaded to the NPCC website give details of what was discussed in a closed session.

Under the heading 'COUNTER TERRORISM POST PARIS LARGE SCALE MILITARY SUPPORT TO THE POLICE', the minutes reveal that deputy chief constable Simon Chesterman, the 'national lead' for armed policing, briefed the other chief officers. The paper says up to 5,100 troops could be deployed 'based upon force assessments of how many military officers could augment armed police officers engaged in protective security duties'.

'Discussions were ongoing with Government', the minutes added, saying: 'Chiefs recognised that the Army played an important part in national resilience and supported the work going forward.'

After being spotted by this newspaper, this section was removed from the NPCC website on Friday.

Sources confirmed the detailed plan had been discussed at the highest level and would only be triggered by the Cobra committee chaired by the Prime Minister if there were two or three terror attacks at the same time in Britain, leaving police struggling to respond. Will Riches, vice-chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said: 'The bottom line is you can't reduce 17,000 police officers and expect nothing to change.’

 

The story was followed on Monday in some other papers,  but not as widely as it should have been and not as prominently as it should have been.

 

I have written before about the strange and disturbing response to the terror attacks in London on 7^th July 2005, here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/07/scandal-panic-and-anomalies.html

 

…in which I said ‘London went into severe state-sponsored panic (later misreported as phlegmatic calm) over the bombings. My mobile phone stopped working (as did most others) . It seemed to me to have nothing to do with the alleged network congestion which was later given as the official reason for this. There were no unobtainable tones or ‘network busy’ messages. The phone just did not work at all.

 

But *before* mobiles stopped working,  the BBC crew with which I was spending the morning received a call. (As I remember, we were filming my BBC4 documentary about Britain and the Common Market, ‘This Sceptic Isle’, and interviewing the refreshingly intelligent Lord (Nigel) Lawson,  just off Piccadilly). The call ,as far as I could make out from various muttered conversations,  instructed them to cease whatever they were doing and to return to TV centre immediately because of a ‘national emergency’.

  

I am sure I read reports in early editions of the London Evening Standard of troops (not ceremonial , but in battledress and with modern weapons)  being deployed in various central London locations. But they were not carried in later editions and I can now find no trace of them. Official accounts do say that important buildings, such as the Houses of Parliament were ‘sealed off’, but do not say who did the sealing, or how. I had the odd feeling that I had glimpsed the outlines of a much more severe response, half-unveiled and then withdrawn when the atrocities turned out to be less extensive than at first feared.

 

A few weeks later, all-party support was obtained for what would become the Terrorism Act, a measure which originally was intended to introduce 90-day detention, and which also created the unEnglish offence of ‘Glorifying Terrorism’ , which has always sounded to me like something out of the Soviet penal code of 1936. In the hands of a tyrant (and of course we will never have a tyrant here, so no need to worry) , the Act’s vague provisions are a severe blunt instrument. Take a look at them, and also at the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act of 2004, under which Parliamentary government and almost all the ancient constitutional protections in our law could be suspended in seconds.’

 

Now, it’s my view that troops can do little to help after a terror attack, unless in some way the normal emergency services have been disabled and cannot do their jobs, in which case soldiers , thanks to their discipline,  flexibility, familiarity with shocking things  and general competence, might be expected to step in – but not as troops.

 

It’s the nature of terror that it avoids direct clashes with trained armed forces, which would overpower terrorists in any such clash.

 

It cleverly manoeuvres us into making these attacks more damaging and significant than they are.

 

Terrorism is like judo. It uses our strength against us. A highly-developed urban civilisation is easily disrupted by relatively small acts of violence. The terrorists are only too happy when we react with emotional hyperbole to these comparatively small attacks, which seldom if ever threaten our political, social or economic stability (the only exception being the IRA’s successful targeting of the City of London, which played a major part in their victory over the British state). I am not here saying that terrorist atrocities are not horrible, evil and worthy of condemnation. I am just saying that our politicians and media make too much of them, and so they do the terrorists’ work. Terror ,as its own proponents say, is 'propaganda of the deed'. They rejoice at the fuss we make. 

 

By comparison with German bombing attacks on London, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Liverpool (for example) terror attacks in modern times have been comparatively small.

Secondly a peaceful civilisation is inclined to panic at any manifestation of the abnormal, especially when such panic is officially encouraged by incessant wailing sirens, often needless,  and grim-faced politicians on the TV acting as if we have been invaded.  

There are obvious cheap reasons for such behaviour. Any examination of post-terrorism rhetoric from politicians will show that it is usually composed of entirely empty promises to apprehend the culprits, bring them to justice etc, which are usually not fulfilled. When they are, the said culprits are often released soon afterwards in political amnesties and even end up drawing taxpayer-funded salaries.

 

The terrorists are also called various names, which may or may not be true, and are described as ‘mindless’. This is a curious thing to say, given the high success rate of terror campaigns in achieving their aims, and the large number of former terrorists who have ended up as national leaders or at least as free, prosperous and well-regarded politicians.

 

Well, all this is by way of business, I suppose. But for me it is the use of terrorism as a pretext for surveillance and increased state power which is the worst of all. And that is why I was so struck, and so dispirited,  by this plan for troops to take to the streets.

 

I felt very sure, in 2005, that elements in the government might have found it convenient( I won’t say they ‘wanted’ this, because I shrink in horror from the thought and do not think it true. These people simply are not that wicked) had the 2005 attacks in London been larger than they were.

 

Had they been, then some sort of British version of the ‘Patriot Act’ and ‘Homeland Security’, might have been feasible, with lengthy detention without trial, compulsory identity cards ,  and all the other sick dreams of those who think like this, rushed through an unprotesting and unanimous Parliament, uncriticised by a similarly unprotesting and unanimous press. .

 

Such people have always existed and emerge like Japanese knotweed when the occasion allows. Give a nobody power, and he will use it (I recall , as a teenage steward at a Trotskyist conference, becoming in an an instant monstrously officious as I wielded my tiny piece of authority, officiously demanding credentials from people I’d known for years. I still blush with shame over it.) The not-famous-enough Zimbardo experiment

http://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html

 

seems to me to establish beyond doubt that the desire to feel superior or others, and push them around, is part of the original sin innate in us, and as a result, innate in all state institutions unless restrained by powerful forces. The British state (being as it is the direct inheritor of Henry VII’s despotic government, Star Chamber, High Commission and all), has hereditary tendencies in that direction. I believe that newly-appointed Home Secretaries have for many decades been presented by smirking, oily officials with plans for identity cards, detention without trial, jury abolition,  and warrantless searches. Until recently, these politicians had the character and historical knowledge to tell the officials what they could do with these ghastly proposals. Not any more.

 

In fact, two world wars have allowed much of the securocrat fantasy to become reality. On the pretext of a much greater national danger than any we face now (though it was still a pretext) the state has gained powers which our pre-1914 forebears would never have allowed it.

 

Read, some time, the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/36/contents, and see what astonishing powers the British state could take if it decided they were justified.  The legal procedures exist to turn this country into a dictatorship, should anyone with sufficient nerve and determination care to use them. The setting up of the National Crime Agency (originally SOCA), essentially the Home Office’s private police force, is particularly worrying in connection with the CCA. For the first time in modern history civil servants under direct orders from Ministers are empowered to make arrests . Before the NCA was created, this power was normally only enjoyed by police officers sworn to uphold the law and empowered, nay, obliged to resist unlawful orders.

 

This means its existence is far more of a departure than that of the three semi-national police forces that have quietly come into operation , the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police (known in the trade as Modplod) and the (armed) Civil Nuclear Constabulary. All these are composed of sworn officers under a Chief Constable.

 

The deployment of thousands of armed soldiers on the streets of British cities, not in ceremonial parades but on active duty, would be a huge departure from the practice of nearly two centuries and in my view a long step towards the end of liberty as we know it.

 

Once deployed, they might well become permanent, like the gates on Downing Street and the armed police who infest central London and major airports. Who would have the courage to withdraw them? And so, just as the presumption of innocence is dying, the presumption of freedom under the law would fade as well, replaced, as if we were in Rangoon, by open displays of state power.  

 

The 1689 Bill of Rights was designed to prevent a standing army on British soil capable of being used against the populace, and for most of the time since then the British Army has been mainly overseas.  Since the Peterloo massacre in 1819, there has been a  special horror of the use of soldiers to maintain public order, and this was one of the reasons Parliament eventually gave in to calls for a police force.

 

But Parliament, knowing well what continental police were like, insisted that the police would be unarmed, not under direct government control, definitely not a national force. Their uniforms were to be non-military and understated. They were to act as citizens in uniform, and would have few powers beyond those of normal citizens (all this is detailed in my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’). Bit by bit, especially since around 1965, Parliament’s wishes have been quietly but relentlessly circumvented, so we now have the militarised, armed, glowering state militia that still calls itself the police, but is in fact increasingly what the MPs of the 1820s feared.

 

And now, it seems, we are to have actual troops on the streets…not yet, but I fear the time will come. Once they start planning for it, you may be sure it will happen. I suspect it will begin with an ‘exercise’ , like the strange performance we saw in London a few weeks ago near the Aldwych. Then another exercise. Then another, until we and they are used to it. And anyone who criticises it will be told he is complacent about, or soft on terror. It is all very sad, and not what my parents’ generation went through the 1939-45 war to bring about.

Groan. An Atheist writes....

Some interest has been shown in a posting by someone calling himself 'James'. For any who think that this contains original or interesting challenges to my view that religious belief of any kind is a self-interested choice, I have wearily inserted my responses in his posting below, marked***. It doesn't. As usual, he is free to reply at length if he wishes.

 

'James' writes: You've changed my mind on many things, drugs and addiction, grammar schools, the crisis in Ukraine, the goodness or otherwise of the European Union and better affirmed things I already believed regarding liberty and free speech. You (and your brother) have done a great deal to get met to think independently and to not be concerned with the consensus or with fashion.

So I comment here not as a closed minded, unthinking, dogmatic atheist, but as someone genuinely interested in having my mind changed. But some of the things you say on the topic of God and his existence seem to me to be wrong.

Belief in what is true and what is not true is not a choice, this is the case for every single idea with which we are faced, including God. I do not chose not to believe in God, it is simply that there exists no evidence for such a being, nor any good argument.

****PH writes: This is simply silly. As I said in the podcast, the question is not whether there is evidence, but whether his prejudice will allow him to admit that evidence. The existence of a vast and intricate universe engineered to very fine tolerances is strong evidence, though not proof, of the existence of something which might be called 'God'. History is full of eloquent arguments, logical, philosophical and moral, for the existence of God. There is a persuasive case for saying that Einstein was a theist in this matter, though not a follower of any religion. And Richard Dawkins's speculation on the possible intervention of aliens (whose existence remains unproven) seems to me to be essentially Theist in nature. It is not necessary to accept the many arguments for the existence of God to grasp that they are powerful even if they are not conclusive. Likewise, I accept that there is evidence, but not proof, for the non-existence of God, and arguments against his existence which are powerful but not conclusive. ***

'James ' : And when faced with no evidence and no good argument

(***PH writes: Which he isn't, see above)

what is one to do other than reject the claim? 

You don’t believe in addiction because no objective proof can be presented. I don’t believe in God because no objective proof can be presented.

***This is a rather boring multiple category error, which could only be made by someone who is not thinking as he writes. Belief in God, once it is accepted, requires the individual to reform and govern himself according to eternal laws which he cannot change - often to his own severe disadvantage. 'Addiction' is a concept (not a *belief*, as it happens, but a thing claimed by its adherents to be known and true, without evidence) which releases the individual from obligations and rules, and permits gross self-indulgence by excusing it and denying responsibility for it. Also, equally importantly, religious belief *is* a belief,which those who hold it recognise as a belief, as distinct from knowledge.

Now, if anyone ever said merely that they *believed* that addiction existed, that wouldn't especially trouble me. By doing so, they would be giving me permission to disagree with them, and making it a matter of choice - as is belief in God. But supporters of the idea claim (baselessly) that it is a matter of proven *knowledge*, and invariably respond to my informing them that it is not, by demanding that I disprove it. This reverses the normal process of scientific enquiry and discovery, which requires that the advocate of the proposition collects and rigorously tests the evidence for it. . In the case of 'addiction', we have an official state creed of personal irresponsibility, which demands belief in it, and alters law and medical practice to behave as if it did exist . A lot of my taxes, for instance, taken from me under threat of imprisonment, are used to pay for methadone programmes based on a fantasy, with which I profoundly disagree. They also pay for police forces and courts which absolve proven criminals of repeated crimes, much against my desire. ****

'James' :There isn’t any other motive. And this is where I must pick you up on something, the idea that those of us who don’t believe are all selfish hedonists who want to behave in ghastly and immoral ways without fear of punishment.

***PH writes: I do not believe I have ever used the word 'all' in this case . I have praised Thomas Nagel for his generous and thoughtful approach to the subject. And no doubt there are some atheists who live ascetic, selfless lives, though I have to admit I can't think why they bother. In the lives of the non-ascetic, and the non-selfless, I should have thought that, in this fallen world, unrestrained hedonism must play some part. What else is the loud, petulant (and severely mistaken) whine 'Nobody has the right to tell me what I can with my own body' , which we hear so often nowadays, but a demand for unfettered selfishness? Those who utter this whine invariably turn out to be atheists as well as advocates of unrestricted drug abuse and sexual liberation. They often combine in gnat-like clouds to berate me on Twitter for not being my brother ****

Is the characterisation of atheists in this way treating your opponents with due respect and decency that you always ask (and seldom find) in your opponents?

****PH: Why wouldn't it be? I am not making any individual or even universal claim, and any of my opponents are free to show that it is not their motive. But they never do. They encourage me in my belief by ludicrous verbal manoeuvres aimed at avoiding the idea that their belief is a choice, or that they have made such a choice. I long to find atheists who are prepared, like the great Thomas Nagel, to concede that they have reasons for their belief, and that it is a belief, rather than a passively imposed mental vacuum. Our old friend Mr Bunker cited some mysterious nameless force which somehow prevented him from believing in God. Others equally ludicrously maintain that they 'have no belief' in their NoGod, that they have never felt the need to consider the matter and that the theist concept has never even briefly entered their heads at any time in the lives. I simply don't believe them, and am, encouraged in my incredulity by their frantic desire not to discuss this question. A lump of soap may have no belief, or a puddle or (possibly) a toad. Toads, for all I know, may have perfect knowledge of God. But a reasoning being makes a choice. It would be as ludicrous for me to claim that I had never doubted the truth of the Resurrection. Of course I have. I doubt it many times a day, and even more at night. But I conquer my doubts through my desire to believe in it. . ***

'James':It doesn’t seem to me that it is. If I were to say that your reasons for conservatism were not actually your reasons, but because you secretly hated women and homosexuals and the poor, you would quite rightly criticise me as being hostile and foolish.

***PH writes: No, I'd invite you to provide evidence of it, if you made the individual claim. If you made such a *general* claim against conservatives, then you'd have some evidence to support it, for there are such people on my side of the argument and I'd be a fool to deny it. There are also many who do not fut this description. Social, moral and political conservatism is a far broader and less specific position than absolute atheism. In my case, I rather think you wouldn't be be able to come up with such evidence against me personally, so you'd be wrong to claim it against me personally. Frankly, I'd be glad to argue with any atheist who admitted that he *did* have motives at all. It;s their own ridiculous position, that they didn't choose their beliefs, which prevents them from defending themselves against my accusation. That's a problem for them to solve, not for me to solve.

'James' So why is it acceptable to characterise atheists as hedonists who deny the existence of God because they want to behave anyway they can?



***PH writes : Because it was certainly one of my motives during my long atheist years, which is how I know in grim detail where this path actually leads . Because this is the demonstrable default position of humanity anyway, because it is equally true of many nominal religious believers, whose faith can quite rightly be judged by how well they keep to the precepts they claim to espouse. Because of Somerset Maugham's eloquent and honest description of his own motives in his autobiographical novel 'Of Human Bondage', which chime with my own experience and seem to me to truthfully and persuasively expressed, And because very few atheists are willing to discuss it, at all, preferring the wearisome and comical pretence that they didn't choose their creed. ****

'James:I would be happy to know what you think is evidence of God,

PH writes :No he wouldn't, and I won't oblige. This is just clever-silly stuff. he knows perfectly well what believers think is evidence for God's existence. By claiming he doesn't, he's making a (chosen) declaration of the closure of his mind to the theist case.***

James: and explain to you why I do not find it persuasive.

***PH writes. I know already why he doesn't find it persuasive. He doesn't want to find it persuasive. Next question : 'Why not?'. But we cannot ask him that, because he refuses to admit that his belief is a choice. Snore.

James : But please do not imagine that my atheism is held for any other reason then one of fact, reason and logic.

***PH writes: No need to imagine. It's a demonstrable fact that it's not held through fact, reason and logic. He cannot hold it on those grounds. Knowledge of God's existence or non-existence is not available to us. Fact, reason and logic cannot take anyone any further than agnosticism, as he well knows. Why doesn't he content himself with that? Because he has a reason to be discontented with it. Even acknowledging the *possibility* of God disturbs him deeply. Until he gives me another explanation, I'll assume this is for the normal reason, as it has been among unbelievers for many thousands of years.

Eric Metaxas interviews PH

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/

 

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

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

A touching Tango on the road to Nazi disaster 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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The Man (You've Never Heard of) Who Tried To Kill Hitler

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.

Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth

I know by heart the first two verses of Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’, the warning that ‘if hopes were dupes, fears may be liars’, and that apparent defeat may conceal real victory.  I used to say them softly to myself quite a lot, when it seemed as if the various battles I have fought for the last 15 years were lost.

 

I don’t bother these days, since the total failure of my main project, namely the destruction of the Conservative Party. Hopes were dupes. Fears weren’t liars. It really is that bad.  Through the most dishonest manifesto in modern history, and the use of huge piles of hedge-fund money in immensely clever and brilliantly-targeted direct marketing schemes, the Tory Party achieved what I had thought and hoped would be impossible, its first national parliamentary majority for 18 years.

 

Even so, I sense that some of my micro-battles, tiny guerrilla struggles and coastal raids behind enemy lines, are not as doomed as the main project. I think the obvious truth and force of the grammar school argument has genuinely penetrated the public mind, and even the elite mind, and the terrible error of 1965 may at least partly be undone before I die.

 

So perhaps I had better learn the second half of the poem, which runs:

 

‘For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes, silent, flooding in, the main.

 

‘And not by eastern windows only,

     When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

     But westward, look, the land is bright.’

 

 

Now two of my other campaigns, on ‘antidepressants’ and marijuana, are also beginning to get a hearing, through the white noise of conventional wisdom.

 

Today’s blatant announcement by a ‘Police and Crime Commissioner’ that he wants his local police force to ignore Parliament and refuse to enforce the law against cannabis cultivation, (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3169435/Police-s-latest-potty-idea-no-longer-prosecute-smoke-grow-cannabis-small-scale-reduce-costs.html )

has alerted many people to a fact I’ve known for years and which I tried to make better-known through my book ’The War We Never Fought’. I failed because the book was destroyed by a canny mixture of abuse and silence, and the people at whom it was aimed don’t know I’ve written it , what it says or even that it exists.

 

Our laws against cannabis are vestigial and wilfully unenforced. They are maintained on the books only to fool  conservative-minded voters and gullible politicians (and journalists) into thinking that there is still a serious effort to combat drugs which have, in effect long been decriminalised.

 

There are several reasons for this, one being the continued existence of international treaties which oblige us to maintain these laws on the books, but don’t tell us how we should enforce them.

 

But the main one is that much of our elite is already corrupted by drug-abuse, its own and that of its children. And the next one is that powerful forces, which are working night and day for total legalisation, open commercial sale and heavy taxation, need to maintain the pretence that the current laws are oppressive.

 

This falsehood, widely believed, enables them to recruit to their cause gullible simpletons who can be made to think that the law against cannabis is an affront to the liberty of the individual. These dim dupes can then imagine that they are fighting for a noble cause as they act as unconscious advocates for one of the most cynical billionaire lobbies in the world, one that hopes to make still more billions out of human misery, and is on the moral level of Big Tobacco.

 

Crucially, it also enables them to claim that the many problems caused in our society by drugs are the result of a non-existent ‘prohibition’, when the truth is the almost exact opposite.  The widespread and tragic abuse of drugs in our society is the *consequence* of 40 years of unofficial decriminalisation. It will be far worse if we are fool enough to take the next step – to full legalisation .

 

This plan is falsely described as ‘regulation’ by its slippery advocates, falsely because this so-called ‘regulation’ will actually be deregulation by comparison with the current state of affairs, unleashing a hideous free-for-all in the dangerous drug market.   

 

Anyway, apart from the Durham incident, we also have more evidence of my suggestion that there is a correlation between drugtaking and the violence in our midst which we often seek to explain purely as terrorism, when in fact its perpetrators have been driven out of their minds by legal or illegal drugs.

 

I have studied these cases so often that I now know that it will usually be just a matter of time between the report of the outrage and a (much less prominent) story about the perpetrator’s drug problem.

 

A few evenings ago, reports came in of a supposed terrorist atrocity in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Apart from the unlikelihood of the So-called Islamic State targeting military facilities in such a place, I immediately thought that there were features of this (especially the lone killer) which made it likely that it was an act of madness. Very quickly it emerged that the killer, Mohammod Abdulazeez, had previously been pulled in by police for driving under the influence,  while stinking of marijuana and with a crust of white powder round his nostrils.

 

Now it turns out that he was a ‘deeply troubled young man who struggled with mental illness and drug abuse at the same time’ and who had also been ‘medicated’ by doctors in his school years then ‘turned to drugs and alcohol’, then lost a job for failing a drug test. His diaries, written shortly before his crime,  are described by those who have read them as ‘gibberish’ .

 

In this he is similar to almost all of the drifters and drug-abusers who have been involved in two recent murders of soldiers in Canada, the Lee Rigby outrage, The Charlie Hebdo murders and the linked killings in and around Paris, the Tucson, Arizona attack in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others were badly wounded, and six people died . Not to mention the entirely non-political killings of Palmira Silva by Nicholas Salvador, and of Jennifer Mills-Westley by Deyan Deyanov (both these, horribly, involved the beheading of the victim, an act commonly associated with Islamist fanatics).

 

Then there was the utterly irrational and purposeless (but dreadfully violent) killing of Alan Greaves, a Church organist, by two known cannabis users in Sheffield. The thread which runs through these incidents and which, I suspect, runs through many more less-reported ones, is that the killers were drug-abusers and that they behaved in a wholly unhinged and irrational fashion.  

 

My first interest in this was stimulated by what still seems to me to an extraordinary correlation between the use of legal ‘antidepressant’ medication and rampage killings.  Many of these killings are scantily reported in the British press, because the numbers of dead and wounded are – comparatively – small. So I sometimes contact local journalists in the USA to ask for details. I found that, in some cases, there was genuinely no trace at all of the use of ‘antidepressants’, but there were suggestions of marijuana use. Over some years of examining such cases,  I came to the conclusion that this is still a correlation which badly needs investigating, a correlation between mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal, and irrational acts of severe violence. Such an investigation would need a lot of money and a lot of power, especially to demand the opening of sealed medical records which are a surprisingly common feature in such cases. I believe this is also still a problem in finding out exactly what ‘medication’ the German wings pilot who deliberately crashed his plane , Andreas Lubitz, may have been taking. I have to ask who benefits from this secrecy.

 

I’d add at this point that the linked problem of ‘antidepressants’, drugs whose efficacy seems to me to be unproven and whose side-effects are beyond doubt, also seems at last to be getting some attention . Though again, people seem unable to see what is in front of their noses.

 

I watched the start of a BBC News Channel programme on Monday. I think the first three individuals who spoke said how ‘antidepressants’ had a) done them no good and b) been very hard to relinquish. Rather than pursuing this, the presenter then went off into a general discussion about how mental illness was still not treated as the same as physical illness, which is undoubtedly true and also not wholly irrational, given the absence of objective diagnoses in this field.  

 

This followed a powerful article in the ‘The Times Magazine’ last Saturday, which is behind a paywall, but which I urge you to read. In it, Luke Montagu, the future Earl of Sandwich, recounts his experiences with ‘antidepressants’ .

Here’s a small sample:

 

‘For the past 20 years, Montagu had been taking antidepressants - first Prozac, still new back then, now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs of all time, subsequently other common antidepressants such as Seroxat.

‘Yet when he was first prescribed these drugs at 19, Montagu was not depressed and had never been diagnosed with depression. He was a student at New York University, and had recently undergone a general anaesthetic for a sinus operation that left him with headaches and feeling, as he puts it, "not myself".

‘Without carrying out any tests, a British GP announced that he had a "chemical imbalance of the limbic system" and prescribed Prozac. Montagu, "impressionable and in awe of doctors", swallowed them unquestioningly.’

 

You’ll have to read the whole thing to find out all the dreadful things which followed.

 

But the bit which rang the strongest bell with me was this  ‘One of the worst things the family has had to endure has been the scepticism of others. Antidepressants and sleeping pills are everywhere - one in three British women will take antidepressants in her lifetime and one in ten men. People don't like to hear that something supposed to make them feel better might actually be harmful.’

 

Once people have themselves been prescribed these things (last year there were 57 million ‘antidepressant’ prescriptions in England) they become advocates of them. They want to believe they are being helped. So they refuse even to consider that they might  possibly have been prescribed a useless or even harmful drug.

 

Like so much of modern life, the whole thing reminds me of that great and terrible film ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’. People cease to be who they were, and those who notice and complain are vilified and isolated.

 

And yet, and yet, if such an article can appear in such a place, perhaps a painful inch has in fact been gained.

'Go Set a Mockingbird', or 'Don't Kill the Watchman'

I suspect I wasn’t the only person who *thought* he had read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ . When the squabble erupted about Harper Lee’s other book ‘Go Set a Watchman’ , I decided that I had better read ‘Mockingbird’ again, the better to judge the new work. I searched the house. It wasn’t there. It dawned on me, slowly but shamefully, that I had never owned or read it in the first place, so couldn't re-read it. I had seen the film, several times, and persuaded myself that I had read the book on which it was based. Check your own memory. If you sort-of think that Gregory Peck is the same person as Atticus Finch, and are quite surprised to see a picture of the real Atticus Finch, then you’re probably a victim of the same false memory.

 

 

Well, I’ve read it now, and have to say that the film is an astonishingly accurate depiction of the book, closer than almost any film I can think of apart from David Lean’s heartbreakingly good version of ‘Great Expectations’ . Both films, of course, have to leave a lot out. But neither leaves out anything essential. 

 

And I’m a little baffled by all the fuss about the revelation that Atticus Finch was not in fact a politically-correct 21^st-century American liberal. The book is not in fact about political opinions. It is about courage and goodness.

 

For those who don’t know, let me summarize. Atticus Finch, a respected but fairly poor lawyer from an old family, in a hot and humid, wholly segregated Alabama town in the 1930s, is landed with the awkward and unwelcome job of defending a black man against a plainly false charge of raping a white woman.  He decides to defend him properly, rather than (as expected by most of his neighbours) feebly going through the motions.

 

I won’t tell you the outcome, as it would spoil book or film for you to know. But I will tell you that Finch’s actions and attitude put him and others close to him in peril of their lives and earn him the spite and hate of many of his neighbours, most especially of the chief prosecution witness who he cross-examines devastatingly but wholly courteously (this is typical of Atticus Finch, a large and passionate soul, concealed by exquisite good manners). I will also mention that his own decision to do the right thing influences several others (who the reader might at first have expected to be on the other side) to do the same. He does not act alone.

 

It’s that courtesy you have to understand. Atticus Finch has not, back in 1935, realised which opinions and attitudes will be beloved and popular 50 or 60 years later among fashionable liberals. He fears, as the more intelligent white Southerners of the time rightly did, that they will one day be paid back for their treatment of their black neighbours, though he has no grand theory of how the wrong should be put right. But he is, in the most profound sense of the word, a gentleman.  He is guided by the principles of chivalry. He reminds me a bit of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great creation, the mediaeval knight (Sir) Nigel Loring, whose elaborate, courtly good manners deceive a number of foes into underestimating him.

 

As a gentleman, Finch defends the weak as a matter of duty, and desires justice for its own sake. He loathes violence and coarse language. You would regret swearing or using the n-word in his company, for you would know that you had sunk permanently in his estimation. He is (for example) a superb shot but will not, except in cases of great need, so much as handle a firearm, and hates it when his children shoot birds.

 

It is when he’s explaining this that he says he knows they will shoot birds with the airguns he has given them, but tells them that even so they must never kill a mockingbird. For the mockingbird does no harm.  All it does is sing beautifully, so to kill one is an undoubted sin . This exchange gives the book its title.

 

He is polite and forgiving to those who are horrible to him, or just horrible, and tries to educate his children to do likewise. When he goes to church, he sits alone, so as to be able to think. He reads a great deal, and laughs softly at a lot of things.   Such people do actually exist (generally I think they are the most courageous among us) and Gregory Peck did a wonderful job of portraying one such, and of helping the rest of us to imagine how we might be if we became better people, which is why both book and film are morally important.  

 

The key to the book is of course in the trial, as it has to be. Here all the strands knit together into a thick cord of moral power and truth. We have already experienced the pitiable misery of the poor whites, the grim, subject lives of the poor blacks, the plump, thickly-powdered smugness of the southern ladies, the dense cloud of humidity, gossip, unspoken secrets and inbreeding in which the little town sits and stews in the insufferable damp heat of Dixie.  It’s all very picturesque in its way, observed through the pages of a book or the flickering pictures of a film. Now we see how very nasty it can get. 

 

In the midst of it, Atticus Finch gives away the fact that he is no sort of radical.  In his speech to the jury, he explains what he thinks Thomas Jefferson meant when he said that all men were created equal

 

‘…a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the executive branch of Washington [Eleanor Roosevelt in case you hadn’t guessed, the Hillary Clinton of her day] are fond of hurling at us’ .

 

Note that ‘us’ a, defiant identification by Atticus Finch with Dixieland.Whatever he may think of some of his neighbours, he still abhors a Yankee. .

 

I found the next bit particularly striking, for it is a marginally relevant attack on crude egalitarianism in education.  In an earlier scene, in Scout Finch’s classroom, we see a bitterly satirical attack on the egalitarian education experiments of the kind, already well under way in that era, which end by Scout going home and asking her father to stop encouraging her to read, because it is getting her into trouble . These nonsenses are blamed in the book on the theories of the American radical educationalist John Dewey (who, by the way, is not connected to Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System of library classification, though Scout thinks he was).

 

 

It seems to me that British left-wingers who have hero-worshipped Atticus Finch, and have now dropped him because in ‘Go Set a Watchman’ he is outed as a racialist,  might now have *two* reasons for not liking him. But if they’d read the book, they’d have known about his views on egalitarian education anyway, which just goes to show they haven’t read it.

 

Here’s the key bit:

 

 

‘There is a tendency in this year of grace 1935 for certain people to use this phrase [all men are created equal] out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious – because all men are created equal , educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority.’ 

 

‘ We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe – some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it. Some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others - some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men’.

 

Which is of course a simple statement of the facts.

 

But it is followed by a great, pealing plea ( alas, not actually true most of the time)  for real equality in the conduct of justice: ‘But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal – there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.’

 

Well maybe. But in any case these are conservative pleas. This is not an early Martin Luther King come to demand equality. It is a decent man, limited by his time,  seeking to do right according to his lights.

Personally I think it absurd that, in ‘Go Set a Watchman’, Atticus Finch is said to have joined the Ku Klux Klan or to have taken a passive uncritical part in meetings in which racially bigoted sentiments are expressed. It doesn't fit with the one we see here. 

 

For example: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/review-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-gives-atticus-finch-a-dark-side.html?_r=0 (Multiple spoiler alerts)

 

These don’t seem to me to be the acts or thoughts of the sort of chivalrous gentleman we see portrayed in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.  Maybe after a few years in New York City  a liberal-minded émigré Southerner might pretty much lump all 1950s Dixieland conservatives together. Perhaps it’s just and fair to do so. I wasn’t there. I don’t know. It just seems strange to me. Atticus Finch wasn’t that advanced in 1935, and he wasn’t that backward in 1955. But when tested once in his life (which is more than happens to most of us), he sought to do what was right.