The most sinister car ever built

The car I'm pictured with in the first extract from my book 'The Rage Against God' is a Tatra, a machine not generally seen in Western Europe and, as far as I know, not at all in Britain. I certainly don't own one, though there would be a certain ironic pleasure in doing so. The problem is, as often, whether anyone would get the joke. In 1978, when the photograph was taken, these mechanized giant cockroaches were a reasonably common sight in Prague, where they were used by senior Communist Party officials. I have always thought this car, with its divided rear window and frog-like front aspect, was the most sinister ever made, though perhaps this is because of the Tatra's starring role in the unjustly-forgotten film L’Aveu (The Confession), Costa-Gavras's account of the nightmare Slansky trials in Prague in 1953, worth seeing in any case, but justified alone for the ghastly moment in the trial when the tortured, starved defendant's trousers fall down in open court, and the room explodes into ugly laughter, in which state murderers and victims are all complicit. It will freeze your heart, if you can locate a copy.

That's perhaps the easiest question to answer of all those raised by correspondents (who, I hope, by the way, have also been aware of my brother's rather different memoirs, which are not published till June but have been serialised coincidentally by The Sunday Times during the past three weeks).

Wesley Crosland is I think mistaken when he says that there is no rational basis for Christian faith. On the contrary, as reason and faith are wholly connected and Christian theology is wedded to reason. In fact, some would argue that it is the first and most thorough attempt to understand the universe and its nature through reason. What he may perhaps mean is that faith cannot be based upon knowledge. That is quite true. St Paul memorably and beautifully described faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ And in what is possibly the most powerful passage he ever wrote, he admitted that we now see as through a glass, darkly. If Mr Crosland would actually see what the dispute is, he would get more out of it. There is no point in damning Christians for making claims they don't make, or misrepresenting all Christians as fanatical literalists, any more than there is any point in crediting science with knowledge it does not in fact possess. Both Theistic and Atheistic positions have the power to explain the universe in ways which have major consequences for the way in which we behave towards each other. Neither has the power to prove that its explanation is correct. The argument must therefore be about why one or other explanation is preferable, not about who is right and who is wrong. My interest is in the origins of the Rage Against God, and the reason for that rage, which is what the book is about.

As for the problems which some readers have had in obtaining the book through an internet seller, I hope very much that these have now been resolved. Though it is of course also available through the Mail on Sunday's Review Bookstore, where they will not meet these difficulties. I should also add that the publication date, mistakenly given as 1st May, was in fact today (15th March), and proper bookshops should be able to obtain it with ease. If anyone has any trouble, please describe it here and I will do what I can to put it right. Readers in the USA should know that the book is to be published there on 1st May, by Zondervan.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.

The Greatest Painting in the World

This title will always be disputed. But I think Pieter Bruegel's 'Tower of Babel' must be one of the candidates for the crown. I had only ever seen reproductions until last week, when I finally managed to look at the original, which is rather surprisingly in Vienna (though I believe there is another version in Rotterdam). From the very first time I saw it, perhaps 45 years ago, I have been haunted by this picture without properly knowing why.

First of all it is an extremely beautiful composition, a vast and satisfying landscape, dominated by the tremendous, dream-like, never-to-be-finished tower and crammed with tiny detail which is actually quite hard to see when you get close to the original, for over-sensitive alarms shriek if you step too near to the canvas. The room in which it is displayed is almost never quiet, because so many visitors, overcome with the desire to look closely at it, unintentionally set off the electronic squawk. A tactful human guard would be a better idea, I think. Or free opera glasses on loan, so that you could study the detail from a safe distance.

Next it is full of imagination. Bruegel, in the 16th century, has conjured out of his own mind the size and shape and possible design of a tower about which the Bible says almost nothing. It is quite unlike what we should think of today, in the age of reinforced concrete and skyscrapers. It is also quite believable, rising out of a seaport city of Bruegel's time, (he began life with an 'h' in his name, but later dropped it, so I shall do the same) enormous but otherwise completely in tune with its architecture.

It is, finally, grimly satirical. Look in the foreground and you can see the richly-dressed King Nimrod, attended by his flatterers, courtiers and civil servants, while the stone-masons fall to the ground and grovel before him. Yet we know that at any minute the curse will fall, everyone will be gabbling gibberish at everyone else as great blocks of stone fall from the wildly-swinging cranes. The tower will fail and so begin at that instant to crumble, the lovely city at its foot will presumably become first chaotic, then bankrupt and finally a desolate ruin, where the wind shall blow over it, and the place of it shall know it no more.

Why does this story persist, and continue to enchant and perplex us? How can a few vague verses in the book of Genesis have given rise to this potent, thoughtful and instantly understandable masterpiece about human vanity?

Some of my correspondents will no doubt write in to tell me that the Genesis story is literal truth. That is their view and they are entitled to it. We were not there, and nor were they, and my experience is that people believe what it suits them to believe. My own view is that it is much more powerful as a parable of human arrogance, and that this is why it lasts, and why it makes such a powerful painting, drawing people to see it from all over the civilised world. It is, in short, that rare thing, a faithful rendering of an absolute and eternal truth.

The more we seek to be as gods, the more we end up failing and instead becoming the lowest savages. In some ways, the higher our aims, the lower we sink - language, of course, being the thing which most clearly separates us from the beasts. The Soviet experiment, with its limitless slaughter, was conceived by men who believed they could begin the world over again and make it better. No doubt Einstein and his friends had noble intentions when they urged Franklin Roosevelt to exploit nuclear fission for warlike purposes. Yet it ended with the mass-killing by heat, blast and radiation of thousands of civilians. And let us hope that really is the end of it.

The same goes for most of the great projects to remake the world in a Godlike fashion - empires, civilising missions, the Iraq war, and now the indefensible Afghan war as well.

What has all this to do with the Labour conference, or Gordon Brown? Very little, directly, I suppose, except that the whole time I was in Brighton I would have preferred to sit and talk about this overpowering picture, and the others that I saw, than to do what I actually did and discuss politics, an increasingly narrow and self-obsessed subject composed of nine parts gossip to one part philosophy, and that on good days.

This is partly because I am now close to completing the book about the Rage Against God which has been eating my every spare moment for months, and such thrilling affirmations of faith and understanding are encouraging as I rip up or eviscerate early drafts, or falter at the last chapter. Flemish painting, whether it is the stillness and serenity of Van Eyck or the direct, ferocious realism of Bruegel, speaks more directly to me than the lovely but often rather distant and stiff religious art of the Italians. Who but a Flemish artist could have painted the scourging of Christ as a 16th century scene, with one of the jailers actually aiming his foot at Jesus's groin, while his comrades mock and punch Our Lord and another, smirking, prepares the crown of thorns? Perhaps the violent and cruel history of this part of the world made suffering easier to understand.

Indirectly, the person who is interested in such things seems to me to be better qualified to have ideas about the future of the country than the person who is not interested in painting, or music, or architecture. Politicians of the recent past, such as Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Enoch Powell and no doubt several others in all parties whose interest existed though we never learned about it, read great books, knew history, cared about painting and architecture, travelled in their own country and in others. You may say that this didn't do us much good. I'd say that they'd have been much worse without the hinterland. Many had also experienced war, though as Nevil Shute argued in his recently-reissued, rather touching and (as always) enjoyable novel 'Requiem for a Wren', it may be that the wartime generation often enjoyed wartime too much, and in some cases even secretly hoped for another war in the hope of recapturing the exhilaration of comradeship and shared adversity which are extraordinarily pleasurable.

The war also comes to mind as you travel (as I did) by train down from Berlin to Vienna, passing through rebuilt Dresden, now sparkling with renewal, and stopping on the way in Prague. Just as was the case 150 years ago, you never really cease to be in German-dominated territory. But you must still use a different currency in Prague, though change left over from Berlin is once again useful in Vienna.

I am taken to task for allegedly falling back into default position over Neville Chamberlain's betrayal of the Czechs. Not really. There isn't any question that Chamberlain did betray Czechoslovakia. The revisionist view of the war doesn't dispute that. It questions whether Chamberlain, or Britain, should have been involved in this episode in the first place. Chamberlain's loss of reputation came from two things - his pretence of being Prague's friend and ally, when he had no power to help that country, and his childlike belief in Hitler's word. Sitting by and doing nothing (except quietly building up our defences) would have been both more honest and more effective, and wouldn't have made a ha'porth of difference to the fate of the Czechs.

In Berlin I also revisited the Soviet war memorial at Treptow, in a large and enjoyably melancholy park in the far East of the city. It is a powerful work of art in its own right, not least because it lies on top of a mass grave of Soviet soldiers who died in the taking of the city, and I suspect that people don't like being moved by it and so dismiss it as 'kitsch'. Well, I am always moved by sacrifice and loss in war, however awful the leaders were who caused it. Real men, advancing into real bullets, seem to me to deserve a moment of remembrance whoever they were, though I wouldn't myself lay a wreath (as Ronald Reagan did) at a Nazi war cemetery. There's a choking moment in Gore Vidal's fictional 'Lincoln' where the President, by then very tired and burdened by the deaths for which he is responsible, visits some Confederate prisoners of war and acknowledges their courage in their own, wrong but romantic cause. I am sure this is true. I have never had any doubt that the Gettysburg Address honours the valour of both sides in that battle, as anyone must who knows what happened (and Michael Shaara's historical novel 'The Killer Angels' is a fine description). The Treptow monument, unusually, shows atrocities against civilians in some of its relief sculptures, and also displays several long quotes from Stalin himself, which must have caused the Soviet and East German authorities problems in the years after he was denounced.

In Prague, by comparison, a huge empty plinth stands over the city where once there was a giant statue of Stalin. This was actually blown up by the Communist authorities (it took several goes, spread over several days, and photographs exist of the explosions gradually reducing the thing to dust) after Khrushchev's secret speech ended the Stalin cult.

Prague also boasts what is as far as I know the only Museum of Communism, a small but rather good and witty collection of mementoes of that ghastly era, including sagging shelves of unattractive consumer goods and a school classroom crammed with class-war propaganda. There is also film, some of it heartbreaking, of Czechs standing up to authority in the streets of Prague. Anyone who thinks the Czechs are somehow soft and pliable, or who has forgotten that Communism deployed brutal muscle to guard itself from the people, would benefit by seeing this. Anyone who goes to Prague and doesn't see the Museum (which cheekily advertises itself as being between the Casino and the McDonalds) will not even begin to understand why this city is worth visiting in the first place.

Next week I hope to send a rather more political despatch from within Fortress Cameron in Manchester, where I plan to harangue a meeting hosted by the Bruges Group on Monday afternoon. This is within the security cordon, so those without passes will not be able to attend.

Anniversary Waltz with Michael White

Once again I'm criticised in another, left-wing, blog. Michael White of the Guardian (Google Michael White, Guardian and 'honourable road to ruin'). And, oddly, Mr White makes the same mistaken criticism of my alternative history as did several people who posted comments on the article or here. He seems to think I am advocating a peace with Hitler *after* Dunkirk. Anything but. By then we had to fight, as any terms would have been intolerable. I am saying we should not have entered the war in the first place.

He says what fun it used to be having a good row with the Tory MP and mischief-maker Alan Clark, adding :’It is less fun having one with Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, whose version of this thesis (“If we hadn't fought, would we still have a British Empire?”) was published at the weekend. It is as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered. No Blitz, no US takeover of the western world and the debauch of our culture by what Clark once called “Chesterfields and chewing gum” (ie the Yanks), no Europe to boss us around, no partition of India, no invasion of Suez...The list goes on, and it is foolish. If we had done a deal with Hitler from a position of weakness he would have come back for more. Had he gone east to finish the Russians first, who knows what might have happened, but he could not have held on to his conquests for long. Empires rarely do and, Hitler or no, the curtain was already falling on ours.’

Well, I've no idea what would have happened if we'd let Hitler fight Stalin, though I find it hard to believe it would have been any worse than the hell that actually did take place. But what I principally remember about Alan Clark was taking him to lunch, and being told by his secretary that he was a vegetarian. After scouring London in vain for a suitably grand vegetarian venue, I rang her up and explained the problem. ‘Oh’, she said, naming a stately Covent Garden eatery famous for its game, ‘Rules will be fine. When he says “vegetarian” he means he won't eat anything that's been killed in a slaughterhouse. He doesn't mind if it's been shot in the open air’. When I teased him about this over his well-shot pheasant (I think), he muttered something about how Hitler, too, couldn't abide slaughterhouse meat. He loved to do this sort of thing. He told someone else I know that he was a bit of a 'national socialist', just to shock. Of course, he was nothing of the kind. Silly stuff, in the end. He was a reasonably entertaining diarist, but not much of a politician.

But back to Mr White, whose glum and increasingly policemanly demeanour has obviously prevented me from realising that he is, in fact, in search of fun. Mr White, whom I meet from time to time in radio and TV studios for adversarial conflict, always looks as if he wants to arrest me for showing insufficient respect for David Cameron, the Guardian's new best mate. Nor is he terrifically forthcoming with the jokes.

I was not in any way suggesting that we 'did a deal' with Hitler. In fact, I was suggesting that we avoided putting ourselves into a position where we very nearly had to. Declaring war, inadequately armed and prepared, in 1939 meant that we had either to win the war, or do a deal. Few could then have guessed the third possibility, of handing over conduct of the war to Roosevelt and Stalin, while going slowly bankrupt.

Had Hitler wanted to force us into a deal after Dunkirk (which I don't believe he did), he could have massed his forces in France rather than on the Soviet border in the spring of 1941, and launched an invasion of this country. I think, given our state at the time, that we would have been at least in serious danger of being overwhelmed. Nothing in Hitler's behaviour in June 1940, after we had been driven off the continent, suggests that he was particularly interested in doing any such thing. We were left in a sort of belligerent limbo in 1940, from which we were eventually rescued by the USSR and the USA, who then conducted the war according to their goals.

Let me make this point again. There is no evidence, in word or deed, that Hitler had any special interest in the British Empire, or in destroying it. Sad as it is to acknowledge it, Britain did not figure greatly in his calculations or seem to be much of an obstacle to his plans. If we had 'given' him Poland (which we actually had no power either to give or withhold) as we had 'given' him the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia (which we also had no power to give or withhold) what was the 'more' he would have come back for? Would our willingness to let him seize chunks of Central Europe, where we had no interest or possessions, have somehow fuelled a German desire for Burma, Malaya or Nyasaland? Hitler wanted a German Land Empire stretching into the east, into Ukraine for the wheat, and the Caucasus for the oil - probably something like the territory seized by the Kaiser at the 1917 Brest-Litovsk Treaty. I don't follow the logic that leaving Hitler to fight his twin, Stalin, would have fuelled in him a desire to seize Delhi or Nairobi. The threat to the British Empire came from the USA, which wanted it broken up, and from Japan, which wanted to steal large chunks of it. Though Japan was powerless as long as we and France were militarily strong in the Far East.

It is perfectly true that an Anglo-French stand against Hitler when he reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 might have brought him down. But this is much more fantastical than my essay. By 1936, we had already trashed our good relations with Italy and nobody in democratic Europe, nobody - not even Churchill - actually favoured the military action which would have thrown the then-tiny German army back over the Rhine bridges.

After that, you have to ask, what exactly would Britain have done had we 'fought' over the takeover of Austria in 1937, another genuine turning point. With what army? With what air force? Come to that, how would we have saved Czechoslovakia?

Look at a map. Central Europe is more interesting and complex than you think. Prague is not some remote Slavic outpost, but a long way west of Vienna. In September 1938, Prague was perhaps an hour's flight from the Luftwaffe airfields near Dresden. Bratislava, then the second city of Czechoslovakia, is practically in the suburbs of Vienna, where Hitler was free to station enormous forces. The territory of Hitler's Reich embraced the Czech lands from North, and Southern flanks. However gallantly the Czechs might have fought in their mini-Maginot line in the Sudetenland, what would have become of them, while we gallantly dropped propaganda leaflets on Mannheim and Stuttgart from our bi-planes, and the French polished their belt-buckles in the Maginot Line, as they did while Poland perished in September 1939? They'd have gone the way of the Poles. We didn't fight in 1937, 1938 and 1939 because we couldn't. The silly part of Munich was not our realistic failure to stand up for people we couldn't actually help except with words, but our misleading and dishonourable pretence that we could help the Czechs, the pretence that we were their 'friends' at Munich and the pretence that the inevitable climbdown was 'Peace with Honour’.

It was this deluded, idealistic piffle that was exposed when Hitler grabbed Prague in March 1939, and we then gave our inexplicable - and wholly worthless - guarantee to Poland. What good did it do? It took away from us any freedom to decide when or whether to go to war. It didn't save an ounce of Polish sovereignty, or a square inch of Polish territory, let alone a single life or building. Having been useless and idealistic over Prague, we were then to be useless and militant over Warsaw. It has been said many times how much worse it was to be a 'saved' Pole than it was to be a 'betrayed' Czech. Who can deny it?

No, the question is not what sort of a deal we'd have had to make with Hitler. My reading of 1940 tells me how very, very close we came to making such a deal after Dunkirk left us bankrupt and without an army, a state we were in entirely thanks to the beliefs that 'something must be done to stop Hitler' and 'you have to stand up to bullies', neither backed by any considered thought. Well, if you do stand up to a bully, experience suggests that you knock him down with the first blow, or he'll still be a bully. You certainly don't let him knock you down.

My reading of 1945 tells me that we ended up making a shameful deal with Stalin, under pressure from Roosevelt to do so, giving the Soviet tyrant the very 'free hand' in central Europe that we had impotently sought to deny Hitler. The difference was that by then we had sacrificed huge numbers of lives, all our wealth and our Empire. For what? If we had stayed out of power struggles in which we had no power, there'd have been no need to make a deal with Hitler, or Stalin either.

The USA, which stayed out of the conflict until December 1941, acted much as Britain used to behave in European conflicts, supplying and paying others to fight on its behalf until it had to intervene directly. This sensible policy, which made us rich and powerful in the 18th Century, did the same for the USA in the 20th.

In his jocular mockery, Mr White derides me for listing some of the things we would have escaped if we had stayed out in 1939. ‘It is as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered. No Blitz, no US takeover of the western world and the debauch of our culture by what Clark once called “Chesterfields and chewing gum” (ie the Yanks), no Europe to boss us around, no partition of India, no invasion of Suez.’ Well, let Mr White tell us, which of these avoidable developments does he think were good things?

It was the people who wanted war in 1939 who exposed us to the terrible danger of having to make a deal with Hitler as a beaten nation. Had we stayed out, why would we have had to negotiate with him at all? He simply wasn't interested in us until we declared war on him.