PETER HITCHENS: Why are these 'child refugees' fleeing France? The bad coffee?

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

I confess I was rather looking forward to the arrival of the alleged ‘children’ from the Calais migrant camp. Leftists have an oily habit of stretching the definition of this emotional word. It helps them make the exaggerated claims of suffering, by which they so often achieve their political aims.
I fully expected to see square-jawed, muscled, hairy young men of military age, and I have greatly enjoyed the embarrassment of the soppy idiots who spread and believed the propaganda about them. Of course it’s possible that they are all really 12, and have been terribly hardened by war and suffering. But if that is so, how come they are in a crime-ridden camp in France, which exists purely to besiege our borders and launch illegal attempts to cross them?
Nobody ever asks how the inhabitants of this camp got there, because the answer in almost all cases is that they were trafficked there by well-paid crooks. What responsible parent would put an actual child in the hands of such people, notorious worldwide for their ruthlessness? And why are we supposed to be so tear-stained that these people are stuck in France? France, the last time I looked, was one of the most civilised countries in the world. It is not a war zone. Nobody starves there. There are schools. Many fashionable British liberals own houses there. The quality of the coffee has gone down a bit in recent years, but that is no reason to stow away in a lorry or climb a 15ft fence so you can move to Tottenham or Slough.
So what are these enormous, prematurely aged children fleeing from? Why must they come here?
And then, while the self-righteous pro-migrant faction are failing to answer these questions (they cannot), along comes somebody to compare these events with the 1938-1940 Kindertransport trains which carried Jewish children out of the reach of Hitler. Baloney. The comparison is false and, in my view, disgraceful because it diminishes the horror of the past to make a cheap propaganda point about the present.
After the highly public Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, in which Jews under Nazi rule were lawlessly murdered, beaten, robbed and dragged off to prison camps without trial because they were Jews, nobody had any excuse for not helping Jews to leave the Third Reich. Mass murder was plainly the next step. These were real refugees from actual persecution (and it remains our shame that we allowed only the children in, leaving their parents behind to be slaughtered).
Look at the pictures from this era. The children involved have been torn from families, in many cases seen their homes defiled or torched, their parents obscenely humiliated in front of them. Yet somehow they remained children. Pity and mercy are precious things, qualities given to us to keep us human. Those who seek to exploit these emotions for political ends, to play upon real feelings for fake purposes, have much to answer for.

This is NOT justice - it's a witch hunt 

The Great Child Abuse Inquiry continues to devour itself, in a storm of rumour and whispers. There is some justice in this. 

The whole idea that this country is waist-deep in unprosecuted abuse scandals has always been based on allegations that cannot be objectively proved. Now this industry is the target of its own methods.

The whole country has become a vast kangaroo court, in which guilty and innocent alike are accused, and in many cases we can never find the truth.

For a year, I have been fighting the case of the late Bishop George Bell, whose courage and principle I have long admired, who was suddenly accused of long-ago child abuse by a solitary complainant, 57 years after his death. No other accusers have come forward.

To begin with, his own church, aided by several newspapers, the BBC and the police, acted disgracefully as if his guilt was proven. The police even said they would have arrested him if he hadn’t been dead, an absurd and meaningless statement which persuaded many he was guilty. 

Now, thanks to relentless pressure by many good people, plus me, the BBC have honourably retreated, the police have softened their line, and the Church themselves have published a booklet about Chichester Cathedral in which they admit that the charges against Bishop Bell have never been tested in any court and are just ‘plausible’, a feeble word given that the accusation, if true, would strip away his good name for ever.

It’s not enough. But it took all the running we could do just to stay in the same place, returning to the old English custom that all are presumed innocent until guilt is proven. If the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary could grasp this point, their hopeless inquiry could be shut down before it soaks up the entire national budget and we could go back to proper British justice.

The best summary of what is wrong with our selection-by-wealth comprehensive school system comes from a campaigner against Kent’s excellent if oversubscribed surviving grammar schools. 

One of her children didn’t pass the test. Her reaction? ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me. We shopped at Waitrose.’

Don't panic! They're just sad old wrecks 

How we love to frighten ourselves about those wicked Russians.

There was a sort of frenzy on Friday as portions of Moscow’s museum-piece fleet slogged past the White Cliffs of Dover, as if the Spanish Armada were at our gates.

Actually the Channel is an international waterway, and we don’t own it. Russia (whose Gross Domestic Product is smaller than Italy’s) is quite entitled to send her ships through it. And Russia is in no fit state to invade anything much larger than Rutland.

The Russian ships are handsome, but doddery. The ancient Soviet-era carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, started life in a Ukrainian shipyard and was then named after the decrepit Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

She left a shocking trail of black smoke as if she was burning coal.

Her main escort, the outwardly majestic Peter The Great (originally named after the KGB chief Yuri Andropov), recently spent two years rusting gently, tied up at Severomorsk. 

No wonder, given that  most of her class are unusable thanks to wonky nuclear reactors. 

The really sad thing is that, having madly scrapped our own carriers and sold off the Harriers that flew from them, not to mention axeing a huge number of destroyers and frigates, we have reduced our own naval power to a pathetic level. Is it perhaps envy that makes us so fretful? 

If Russia is now better at projecting power in the Middle East than we are, it is because we are weak by choice, not because Moscow is strong.

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PETER HITCHENS: Charmer Cameron put us on the slippery slope to disaster

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

So, Mr Slippery has finally slipped away, just before he was found out. I wish David Cameron lots of money in his future life, so much of it that he at last begins to wonder if that is what he really wanted.

But can we pause for a moment and ask how it was that this charming but pointless person rose to such prominence in our country?

His single most important action was to lend Western air forces and other assistance to Islamist fanatics in Libya. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee last week explained just how clueless and irresponsible this was, though it is a pity that so many of the MPs on this committee supported the Libya folly at the time. 

The same goes for much of the media, which reported the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi more or less as if it was a sporting event, and the fanatical rebels were our team. They also gullibly repeated the most ridiculous atrocity propaganda, something any knowledgeable journalist is trained to treat with suspicion.

I have checked my own writing and broadcasting at the time and find I warned clearly against it, for example this from March 2011: 'Who are the Libyan rebels? What do they want? Why do we love them so? I've no idea, and nor has Mr Cameron… Some of the longest wars in history started with small-scale intervention, for a purpose that looked good and achievable, and ended up ruining millions of lives.

'The Soviet takeover of Afghanistan in 1979 ended with countless innocents driven into refugee camps, and the collapse of the Soviet state itself. It also left Afghanistan as a worse snake pit than before.'

I did not know the half of it. David Cameron's war created the appalling, unstoppable crisis of mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa, a gigantic movement of people unknown in previous history, which will in the long run transform the economic and political fortunes of our continent.

This catastrophe was his most notable act. He ought to be remembered for it. Many of you will be able to think of others, some deliberate (such as his daft energy, education, migration, economic and aid policies), others exploding cigars, such as his incompetent and contemptuous handling of the European Union issue.

He was one of the worst prime ministers we have ever had, but have we – have you – learned from this experience? Will you continue to turn to the smooth, the well-spun, the expensively suited and rehearsed, the ones endorsed by the same media who gushed over the Blair creature?

Already the forces that put David Cameron in power are uniting in a dishonest spasm of hatred against Theresa May's grammar school policy and the referendum result.

Will you be fooled by them again? Or will you learn that there is no such thing as 'the centre' and that those who claim to stand there are driven by nothing but personal ambition and vanity? And that they do not offer safety, but danger? 

*****

 

Late last year a strange new law came into force in this country, making it a crime, punishable by prison, to use repeated ‘controlling or coercive behaviour’ in the home.

You might think there’s nothing wrong with that. 

But what if it becomes one of the many offences in family law where social workers, police and courts assume that the accused is guilty, and he or she has to prove his innocence?

The growing numbers who have fallen into this pit simply do not get fair trials. No doubt some of them are guilty. But in many cases this simply is not proved beyond reasonable doubt. They lose homes, families, children, livelihoods, reputations and – sometimes – liberty.

And if we stop caring if they’ve been properly tried, we forge a weapon that may one day be used against us.

That’s why I really dislike the great fuss recently made about the BBC Radio 4  soap opera ‘The Archers’.

In this programme - which I have many times explained is openly intended as propaganda for ‘progressive’ ideas -  two actors pretended to be a married couple. This long drama got under way as the new law came into force.

For months, the male actor pretended to be a perfect example of the ‘coercive control’ which extreme feminists claim is so common. Again and again he bullied and belittled the female actor, as if he were a Victorian squire who had her imprisoned in a cottage miles from civilization.

She submitted to it meekly for months in a way I doubt any modern woman would do for more than about five minutes. Then, in a bizarre and incredible scene, the male actor pretended to goad the female actor into pretending to stab him.

There was then a pretend arrest, and a pretend trial. There was even a pretend jury, made up of celebrity actors. And the nation was supposed to be terribly engaged, anxiously hoping that the fictional jury would pretend to acquit the female actor, so she could pretend to go back to her fictional home.

This rubbish had two propaganda aims. The first was to make more people willing to believe that this kind of thing is common, when we have no way of knowing.

The second was to give the audience information it never normally has, in any proper courtroom drama. Listeners thought they already ‘knew’ what had ‘really happened’. They ‘knew’ the male actor was ‘guilty’. Actually, they didn’t. They just knew what the scriptwriters had decided to portray, a fictional wicked man, fictionally coercing and controlling, and fictionally trying to get away with it.

But in any real trial on this charge, without solid evidence, and where the only two witnesses disagree, I am sure that some real jurors’ minds will be influenced, by this programme, towards convicting. As a result, an innocent defendant might go to prison for years. I think the BBC has done a wrong and shameful thing. 

******

The story of the Prague assassination of the SS monster Reinhard Heydrich is a thrilling and bitter one, and has now been made into a major film, for the second time, or perhaps the fourth, if you count 'Hangmen also Die' and the Czech film 'Atentat'  The new version ‘Anthropoid’, which stars Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, gets closer than before to the savage horror of the Nazi reprisals, and made me wonder, yet again, if this sort of assassination was justified.

The evil of the Third Reich continued all too efficiently without Heydrich. But the torture and collective punishment visited on the Czechs (whose subjugation we couldn’t and didn’t prevent) were frightful. Was any good really achieved? I grow less sure year by year.

**********

Why do suckers always fall for the claims of ‘medical cannabis’? Its advocates are invariably mixed up with the lobby for general legalisation. America’s leading campaigner for legal dope, Keith Stroup, said in a candid moment in 1979 that he was using medical cannabis as ‘a red herring to give marijuana a good name.’ Cannabis may make some people feel better, but so did Thalidomide. A drug correlated with severe mental illness may just not be the ideal miracle cure.

 

 

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Some Thoughts on the New Film 'Anthropoid'

The City of Darkness

 

It must be 40 years since I first saw the film 'Operation Daybreak', about the assassination in Prague of the monster Reinhard Heydrich. I hadn’t been to Prague then (I would put that right two years later). That unique city, as imagined but never seen,  had a powerful, mythical, almost mystical hold over my mind. It still does, provided I stay away from it. Recent visits, in which I have come to see it as a modern place rather than a dark and lovely stage set on which good and evil do battle, have rather spoiled it for me. I do understand that its inhabitants much prefer it the way it is.

The Kafka associations and two films , ‘Operation Daybreak’ and Costa-Gavras’s now almost unobtainable ‘L’Aveu’ (‘The Confession’) about the Slansky show trials of 1953, helped fix it in my mind as a frightening place of violence, melancholy, gloom, betrayal, dungeons and defeat, but also a very beautiful one.  Later I would come to read Lionel Davidson’s charming and enthralling ‘Night of Wenceslas’, later very badly filmed, in which the city – lovely and captivating, but hiding terrible menace - plays a starring role.  As is the case with anyone in my generation, my mind was also full of black-and-white TV news pictures of Soviet tanks trundling through Wenceslas Square (which isn’t a square, as I now well know), bulldozing trams to one side (this sight made me realise what a potent thing a tank is. I’d seen trams and thought they were heavy, a useful obstruction if needed. But Moscow’s tanks just biffed them out of the way as if they were plastic toys). And I have some sort of memory of immense crowds at the funeral of Jan Palach, though perhaps I have made it up (having been privileged to see at first hand the equally enormous multitudes who turned up for the funeral of Czech Communism in the winter of 1989) . Then years of frozen silence.

 

An odd anomaly

 

I’m still not quite sure how ‘Operation Daybreak’, a western-made and financed film (it was called ‘The Price of Freedom’ in the USA, a title I’ll return to),  got the co-operation of the Communist Czechoslovak authorities, less than ten years after the extinction of the Prague Spring.  Remember, it is about Czechs trained in Britain, making an attack on the Germans in 1941-2. Czech co-operation with Britain in the 1939-45 war tended to be forgotten or suppressed. Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia owed its territorial restoration (apart from sub-Carpathian Ukraine, then in Soviet hands, now in Ukraine) and its form of government to the USSR’s victory over Hitler and the resulting Yalta settlement. Likewise, they owed to Stalin the reunification of the country after Hitler’s removal of Slovakia from Prague’s control. Slovakia, encouraged by Berlin to break away from post Munich Czecho-Slovakia(note the hyphen added to the country’s name at the time), was treated very differently from the Czech lands under Nazi rule.  

They also owed the ethnic cleansing of German-speaking Czechoslovak citizens (thus ‘resolving’ the pre-war Sudeten German problem) mainly to the Soviets, who helped them carry it out with British and American blessing, under the deliberately forgotten Potsdam agreement.  

 

The Wrong Allies

We in Britain were by then (the mid-1970s) very much the wrong allies. We were on the opposite side of Europe, in NATO. And it went deeper than that . Not only had Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938. It had then given a home to the exile government of Eduard Benes, the figurehead of Czech nationalism who was not really thought of as an ally by the Communists who seized power in Prague in 1948 in a ‘spontaneous’ mob-backed coup d’etat (which continued to fool some sympathisers for long afterwards, who described it as a ‘rising’ and argued that it was legitimate)..

It wasn’t as bad as it had been. The days were gone when Czech pilots, returning home to their supposedly liberated land from service in the RAF , were imprisoned as politically unreliable (see ‘Dark Blue World’, an interesting if disappointing film on this subject). But it wasn’t done to mention it, or draw attention to this awkward period in history.  I remember a British diplomat in Prague describing to me the little ceremony those Czech RAF fliers would try to hold each year at a war memorial in a Prague cemetery. Many would struggle into their old RAF uniforms. And the whole thing would be very aggressively watched, photographed and filmed by spooks and musclemen from the StB, the Communist Secret Police of the time. Their existence challenged the official orthodoxy, that liberation had come solely from Moscow.

Maybe the Prague Communists of the early 1970s just wanted the dollars, to help finance the mildly prosperous consumer society they were creating to soothe the wounds of 1968 and encourage forgetfulness.  Whatever the explanation, Prague was the star of the film , Prague as it then was, as I first saw it, black with age and neglect, falling to bits, indifferent to tourists, ancient,  sinister, seductive, shabby within and without, an inhabited cemetery of great loveliness and enormous gloom,  whispering from its many-spired sooty towers the last enchantments of an older, crueller, yet also more beautiful and more exciting age. Perhaps that is why , when the barbarities of the past came to life again the mid-20^th century, they did this so horribly in that particular city.

 

A Man So Horrible He had Two Funerals

One scene from ‘Operation Daybreak’  is probably clearer in my mind now than in the film. I find my imagination quite often embellishes and lengthens scenes in films watched long ago. When I finally track them down,  episodes which last many minutes in my recollection are over in 20 seconds. But the film-makers’ re-staging of Heydrich’s Prague funeral must have shocked the city at the time, only 35 years after the real thing. Hitler gave Heydrich  two lots of obsequies, one in Prague and one (with lots of Nordic fir trees and Wagner) in Berlin, with an armoured train-ride in between. This was not to make sure he was dead. The Prague ceremony was held to hammer home to the Czechs just who was in charge, and how much they were going to pay for the death of Hitler’s favourite. In the film it is a pagan occasion of barely-suppressed savagery and vengeance, the thudding SS drums a message of evil to come.

 

An SS Film Crew Makes a Horror Movie

I also recall a clever, deeply shocking shot of an SS camera crew, complete with clapperboard and very modern camera, but garbed in the armour, death’s head badges and deadly-black uniform of their hellish society, swinging their lenses towards the ruins of Lidice, one of two villages (everyone remembers Lidice, nobody remembers the other, Lezaky) destroyed and subjected to mass murder, including women and children,  as collective punishment. Unlike so many other German atrocities of the  period carried out in secret, this one was openly avowed and publicised by Berlin.  They wanted the world, and especially their subject peoples or those like us and the USSR, still insisting on fighting them,  to know they were capable of this. All of us live within a century of this event, an open, purposeful, publicised mass reprisal murder in civilised Europe. And yet we think we’re safe and that there is such a thing as progress. Lidice was only a small part of the bloodbath. Many others were murdered elsewhere.

Year later I saw the film again on a rather inadequate DVD seemingly made for the Arab market, in which the subtitles for the German-language segments were not much help. And yet it still had some of its power, after all that time. Anton Diffring, as Heydrich, was suitably hateful and arrogant – there was a legend that Heydrich had defiantly donned the ancient crown of Bohemia to underline his absolute power,  so activating an old curse and ensuring his death. He is shown doing so. In that part of the world, where violence and legend are in the bones of the landscape,  such things seem more credible.

 

From 'Daybreak' to 'Anthropoid' 

Now the story is once again the subject of a film ‘Anthropoid’. This is in fact the genuine name of the operation, which was nevr called ‘Daybreak’ , though it is a better title.  ‘Daybreak’ came from the title of the book about the event ‘Seven Men at Daybreak’ by Alan Burgess (once an RAF pilot) , a book now so rare that it is on sale for mad prices in the Internet, and so effectively unobtainable.

Much of this new film is spoiled for me by the casting of Cillian Murphy, the absurdly good-looking star of the unwatchably preposterous BBC drama ‘Peaky Blinders’, as Jozef Gabcik, one of the assassins.  You can find pictures 0f Sgt Gabcik ( a Slovak) on the Internet. His resemblance to Cillian Murphy is slight.  Perhaps as a side-effect of ‘Peaky Blinders’ (as so often in films about the past) no opportunity is lost (I put this mildly) for the lighting of a cigarette, though only the glamorous ignition tends to be shown, not the half-smoked stub jutting from the corner of the mouth or jammed between yellow fingers, nor the grinding out of it in some nasty place, let alone the revolting smelly piles of debris in ashtrays, or the jaundiced tinge the damned things left everywhere; let alone the grey lined faces of the smokers and their hacking, productive coughs with their ever-present promises of major phlegm expulsion.

I’ll be told that Anthony Andrews, as yet undiscovered by Brideshead, who played the same part in ‘Operation Daybreak, might also be a bit distractingly good looking. But somehow he wasn’t.  Andrews can efface his beauty quite a bit, when he chooses, and did so rather brilliantly in the later scenes of ‘Brideshead’ where he played a washed-up, broken old soak with great power.

What I can’t recall from ‘Daybreak’ and couldn’t get from ‘Anthropoid’ is any great consideration of the claim often made that Churchill thought the Czechs were a bit too quiescent and content under German occupation, and hoped to end that by killing Heydrich.  In short, he is said to have been counting on a severe retaliation by Hitler.  Though whether he expected what he got,  or rather what the poor Czechs got, who can say? Even Churchill, a man who knew a lot of history, may not have fathomed the National Socialist capacity for wickedness. Idealists are so much more dangerous than ordinary tyrants.

We did several rather questionable things during the long years when we had no army on the European continent, and to this day it is hard to discuss them without meeting the wall of rage which I encounter if I criticise our bombing of German civilians. NOTE: Since first writing this passage, with its reference to Churchill’s alleged attitude, I’ve made some effort to back it up with historical warrant, and can’t find anything which implicates Churchill, though another name does come up, which I’ll come to. I’ve kept it in because I am still not sure of the truth, would be glad of any contributions or references which either confirm it or explode it, and because I decided it would be dishonest to cut it out, as I have long believed it and often said it.  Certainly the Czechs were more lightly occupied than many other of Hitler’s subject peoples, their factories produced valuable armaments for the German Reich, and attempts to send in saboteurs by parachute often failed, ending in the denunciation of the agents or in the round-up and massacre of the resistance members who had helped them. 

 

They Rightly Feared Reprisals

But I will say one thing for ‘Anthropoid’ (which follows ‘Daybreak’ quite closely in many aspects but not all  - most modern film critics don’t seem to have seen ‘Daybreak’, or at least don’t mention it if they have). It makes it clear that those who helped Heydrich’s assassins did not, in many cases, find out till rather late what it was they were aiding – by which time, of course they were doomed to appalling fates by their participation. And it does not hide the fact that leading figures in the Czech resistance, on the spot, were horrified when they learned of the plan, opposed it and tried to get it stopped by appealing to London. (They were, in their defence, already gravely demoralised by the clever and efficient repression which Heydrich and his forerunners had visited on them. They had been penetrated and many of their best people had been arrested and murdered).  This is all true and very much confirmed by the authoritative book on the subject, Professor Callum Macdonald’s  1989 work ‘The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich’ .

According to Macdonald, the man who wanted to go ahead with the operation was Eduard Benes, who seems to have spoken personally to Gabcik before he set off. With the USSR now in the war, Benes need a major stroke against the Nazis to show that the non-Communist Czech resistance was capable of potent action. If Churchill opposed or encouraged this, I don’t know, and would be grateful for any reference.

I thought that the  depiction of the assassination in ‘Anthropoid’ was wrong because in it  the bomb aimed at Heydrich’s car also damages  a passing tram and wounds many of its occupants(the event took place on a hairpin bend in an untouristed part of Prague, north-west of the city centre). The earlier film shows the events taking place in a deserted street.   But Macdonald’s book confirms that ‘Anthropoid’ is  absolutely accurate. It also confirms that both assassins found girlfriends in Prague during the long months between their (botched) landing and the killing.

 

What would YOU have done? 

 

 

The treatment of the traitor Curda, who betrayed his comrades for a huge reward and to save his skin( see below), is perhaps a little inaccurate. I doubt that he was rotten from the start, and I don’t think the Gestapo had any need to beat his evidence out of him. He was just frightened out of his wits once the reprisals started, assumed the German would be in power forever, and did what many others would have done. Indeed, when he was brought back to Prague to be tried and hanged, he said in court that anyone else would have done what he did, given the huge size of the reward (and his likely fate if he was tracked down).

‘Anthropoid’ also invents an incident at the beginning of the film, in which the ordinary Czechs who discover the parachutists limping, lost, through the snow, appear to betray the two agents. This never happened. The men who found them helped them, and smuggled them to Prague. They were mistakenly dropped hundreds of miles from their intended landing point, missed their rendezvous and made contact with the resistance only by guesswork and luck, amid a great deal of entirely justified mistrust.

The end of the assassins’ story, with the two men and several other parachutists surrounded by the Waffen SS in a Prague Church, and their legendary, epic last strand against the Nazis (which really ought to be better known) is lengthily portrayed, as it must be. But it is not, alas,  the end.

 

Unbearable to watch

In both films the Moravec family who sheltered the assassins are prominently featured, especially Mrs Moravcova and her gentle, violin-playing, hero-worshipping teenage son Ata. Anyone who knows the story must tremble for those courageous, honourable people as soon as the assassins come into their lives.  And they duly encounter a fate so horrible and distressing that I will not recount it in detail here. In my view ‘Anthropoid’ gives too much detail of that fate, but you could, I suppose,  make a moral case for doing so, if only to remind people of how bottomlessly wrong torture is and how terribly human beings can behave when they think that cruelty is justified by necessity. But I thought we knew that about the Nazis. Maybe we are forgetting it. Cover your eyes if you prefer.

You can certainly make such a case for the awful scenes of torture shown in ‘The Battle of Algiers’, a film which did a lot to convince me that there can never be any excuse for the use of this method by any country which calls itself civilised, whatever the supposed gains.

Nazi torture, of course, requires no such examination. It involves the servants of evil doing evil things for evil ends. It is uncomplicatedly wrong. The issue here is quite different. Knowing what we knew of the German National Socialists, and of the sordid, cruel gangster Heydrich¸ were we right to embark on an operation which was more or less bound to bring about retaliation of a mediaeval type (as it indeed it did)?

There is something in me that says no, and I am not satisfied by being told in the closing credits that Heydrich was an architect of the Holocaust (as indeed he was). He was a foul man, a nasty bullying philanderer and pervert who ceaselessly betrayed his ‘good Nazi’ wife (most of the Nazi elite were amoral in their personal lives, to put it mildly, a fact not often dwelt upon, for some reason. Heydrich’s sordid morals did not harm him in the eyes of Hitler)  as well as a mass killer and wielder of terror.

Nor am I impressed by the other postscript in which it is stated that, after the killing of Heydrich, Britain revoked the Munich agreement and welcomed Czechoslovakia as a full participant in the alliance for freedom. This just draws attention to the fact that, before 1942, the relationship was much more ambiguous – and to the fact that ‘freedom’ for Czechoslovakia took the form, after Yalta, of subjection to Soviet Power for 40 long hard years, plus the savage expulsion of ethnic Germans mentioned above and described here in my posting on the Potsdam Agreement  and the fine book about it by R.M.Douglas ‘Orderly and Humane’  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html

 

Happily Ever After?

I also note that in the end, Czechoslovakia was dismantled altogether, once again  waving goodbye to Slovakia (Benes would have been appalled by this, I am sure)   and absorbed, in pieces,  into the EU. Does any of this justify what we see happening to poor Ata Moravec, whose pitiable fate in the film might be said to represent all the thousands of other gentle people hacked and smashed and torn to pieces in the red mist of vengeance which followed the assassination of Heydrich?  I am by no means sure that it does.

Instead of Raging at Russia, Try Fixing What's Wrong With Our Own Country

I thought I would give a slightly wider circulation to my exchanges with ‘Horace’ in the below-the-line comments on Sunday's column. I’ve edited them slightly to make the back-and-forth more understandable. ‘Horace’ has a habit of quoting me at length, and I have tried to ensure this is clear by putting my words, even when quoted by ‘Horace’, in bold type, and his words in normal type.

 

First, my original column item:

As I strolled through the frozen winter streets of Moscow a few years ago, a worrying idea came to me. Were speech and thought now more free in Russia than in what we used to call the West? I rather think that they are.
Last week, Kevin Roberts resigned as executive chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi for publicly questioning ultra-feminist beliefs. He is not the first. A similar wild frenzy of persecution burst around the head of the Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt, shamefully driven from his position as an honorary professor at University College London.

It doesn’t matter whether you agree with these men’s opinions or not. Can it be right that they have been treated in this way for expressing them?  Of course, neither of them has been marched off to a gulag for his thought-crime. But so what? Isn’t loss of employment and position a very serious punishment? 

Despite the smears of many, I have no illusions about Mr Putin’s Russia. It is a sinister tyranny where those who challenge the president’s power or expose his wrongdoing suffer very nasty fates.
But in public, in private, in offices, on public transport, you have no need to guard your tongue as you did in the communist days, when a poem could get you executed and a joke could send you to an Arctic labour camp for 20 years. 

I saw all that filth end, in person, and rejoiced to see it go. And I recall the brief few years when I thought foolishly that the world had been cleansed of a great evil for ever. 
And then I began to notice that the nasty totalitarian ideas that had once been trapped behind the Iron Curtain had now escaped into the once-free West. You couldn’t say this and you couldn’t say that. You had to be careful about writing certain things, especially if you worked in the public sector. 
There was a genuine fear behind all this. It was worst of all at universities, where boot-faced commissars patrol the minds of the young, enforcing speech codes – and the wrong ideas can get you marked down in more ways than one. 

This simply isn’t so in Mr Putin’s Russia, now astonishingly the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe. Orthodox religious icons were found among the debris after the shooting down of a Russian helicopter in Syria, and Russian airborne forces last Tuesday celebrated the feast day of their patron, the Prophet Elijah. People who think that Russia is still the Soviet Union, or that intolerant, militant Marxism died when the USSR fell, don’t understand Russia or Marxism. And they’re not paying much attention to what’s going on here, either.

 

‘Horace’; commented :

Peter, you make two rather staggering statements here: 'Were speech and thought now more free in Russia than in what we used to call the West? I rather think that they are.' And: 'Mr Putin’s Russia, now astonishingly the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe.' As always, to avoid accusations of propagandizing for its murderous government, you insert a caveat: 'Despite the smears of many, I have no illusions about Mr Putin’s Russia. It is a sinister tyranny where those who challenge the president’s power or expose his wrongdoing suffer very nasty fates.' Exactly right, so why do you keep praising this 'sinister tyranny?'

To which I replied:  I do not 'praise' it. I try to provide reasoned explanations for its actions, which are in general rational and broadly predictable, so as to counter the absurd and uninformative propaganda attacks common in both politics and the media. These attacks and attitudes form a very poor basis for a wise and self-interested policy towards Russia and eastern Europe. In fact, if we follow them we will find ourselves in serious trouble and greatly out of our depth. My main concern, as always in foreign policy, is for British interests. They are not well-served by ignorant hysteria. We have perfectly good (and in some cases much too close) relations with other countries just as tyrannical if not more so, so this is not a point of any importance. I undoubtedly feel a strong sympathy for the Russian *people* and I also have a strong dislike of war. The hysterical Western attitude towards modern Russia prevents an intelligent assessment of that country's actions or its people's concerns. In my view it makes war more likely.***

‘Horace’ commented:

Rightly you don't say anything nice about its equally sinister client states; Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, North Korea etc. 

 

I responded : They are not under discussion, any more than our unlovely 'client states' such as Turkey and Bahrain or the countries of which we are the client such as China and Saudi Arabia. I have written at length about several of the countries he mentions, in my book 'Short Breaks in Mordor' and in articles accessible here.He can see what I think about them by reading this material

‘Horace’ continued :

‘Nor do you say anything nice about the 'stans', those former S.U. 'members', that are now run on the Putin business model and have become little more than de facto Russian oblasts. Oddly you did refer recently to a possible 'reunification' (a Kremlin term if ever I heard one) of Russia and Belarus. Such a 'reunification' could only take place by brute force, albeit disguised by the usual 'hybrid' methodology used against Georgia and Ukraine; the last two former Russian occupied nations to try to struggle free from the Kremlin. Belarusians are no more Russian than Ukrainians or Georgians. Or for that matter Polish. How are speech and thought free in Russia? Citizens are told what to think by state controlled media, which is even less restrained than its external broadcaster, RT. Have you watched this troll tv channel Peter? You will need a bath afterwards; the outpourings of hate, lies and conspiracy theories directed against the usual enemies (US/EU/UK/Ukraine etc) are almost incredible.

I replied: This pseudonymous poster (what does he fear? The defunct KGB?) uses the expression 'told what to think' so as to give the impression that the Russians are obliged to hold certain opinions in public. But they are not. I think the West has certain TV channels which , in their own more subtle ways, likewise seek to influence the public mind in ways which are not wholly truthful. I have yet to see any of the major western news channels give fair airtime to significant voices critical of the interventionist policies of the West, for instance. The other side, however, get unfettered airtime. And coverage of these adventures is invariably approving and uncritical. Anyone seeking an intelligent and informed view of the Libya or Syria crises would search Western broadcasters in vain. This does not excuse RT, whose approach I do not approve of. But anyone who disapproves of it should likewise be critical of its western rivals, whose methods RT copies and intensifies.. He should read what I say. Of course it is shocking, because it is not the way we like to think of ourselves.In Russia, actual speech or thought are free. The kind of thought police patrolling which deadens our Universities and gets senior figures driven from their jobs for thinking aloud about major social issues and expressing 'wrong' opinions simply does not exist. To revive a distinction often used by American conservatives in the Cold War era, Russia is an *authoritarian* society, but not a *totalitarian* society. That is, it does not require its people to subscribe to (or pretend to subscribe to) an official ideology. But it does meet challenges to its actual power with violence and lawless brutality. This is an important distinction, and I raise it because it is a profound criticism of or own society, not because it is especially creditable that Russia is as it is. My aim was to make readers think. Of course some prefer not to do so, and so will crossly resort to distortions or deliberate misunderstandings of what I say, generally under impenetrable pseudonyms. I will just have to hope that others are more intelligent and open-minded.

 

Horace continued : ‘ Nigel Farage appears regularly, as he has the same list of enemies. He is a good fit and guaranteed not to criticise his no doubt generous hosts. You can add to the list of RT employees the names of Galloway, Corbyn, Assange and his fellow Russian agent Snowden. There is also a less well known, but really ghastly shill 'journalist' named Graham Phillips (sad to relate, this person is English) who specialises in hate and lies against the victim of the most shattering aggression from Russia; Ukraine, which as a result of the savagery inflicted upon it by its malevolent neighbour, is the genuine 'most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe.' How can that title be bestowed upon Putin's Russia, which weaponises its church to spread a race supremacist 'we are the true chosen people' message and undermines the Kyiv Patriarchate? So no, I don't think the matter of the Chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi is in any way comparable. Incidentally, the brothers were pressured out long ago by the foreign owners and have their own outfit, M&C Saatchi, which is very unlikely to be following the pc orthodoxy.’

 

I don’t think this segment added anything to the above, and didn’t bother to respond to it.

Then ‘Horace’ returned to post

‘Peter [Mr Hitchens to you, please. I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced and I object to unjustified matiness, especially from people whose names I don’t even know] writes : **** 'I undoubtedly feel a strong sympathy for the Russian *people* and I also have a strong dislike of war.'****

How sad that you do not seem to show the same sympathy for the Georgian people, who lost 20% of their land, thousands of their people and still have 120,000 internal refugees from the 2008 Russian invasion

**** PH chides: Mr Pseudonymous really shouldn't try it on in this way. What invasion? An impartial UN report….

 (see here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8281990.stm

for one of the very rare media accounts of this thoroughly inconvenient outcome still largely unknown to most journalists and, as a result, to most people)

 

….concluded that the conflict was started by Georgia's then leader Saakashvili. I am indeed sorry for the Georgian people, having several times visited that lovely and hospitable country, but their problems are not solely attributable to Russia.***

How sad that you are unable to show sympathy for the Ukrainian people who in their terrible past suffered systematic mass starvation from their imperial rulers and are again losing staggering numbers of their own, on their own land and have to look after 1.6m internal refugees, with almost zero external help, since 2014. When are you going to go in and bat for them, instead of Trumpishly undermining them? You have even denied persecution of the Tatars, despite overwhelming evidence.

****I have every sympathy with them and with all the victims of Stalin, a Communist despot. I do not know when or how I have ever 'denied' the undoubted persecution of the Krim Tatars by Stalin. Perhaps he would care to substantiate this charge? ****

‘Peter writes : '****This pseudonymous poster (what does he fear? The defunct KGB?) .......' The KGB is not defunct; the name itself was just an update from the Cheka. It is now the FSB, which has a very sinister and active external service, the SVR. Czarism, Bolshevism and now fascism, a nation does not change when it changes its system of government, as the family of the late great Boris Nemtsov know only too well. One of the last hopes Russia had for a peaceful and democratic future was his friend Gary Kasparov, who cannot even live there any more for mortal fear. ***

PH: On the contrary, these organisations are wholly distinct, having completely different purposes. Communism is a distinct system. Supporters of Ukrainian nationalism, as this contributor appears to be, should be careful about bandying the word 'fascism'. It has little direct application in the modern world, but those who wear the Wolfsangel badge and admire Stepan Bandera know more of fascism as a real manifestation than most of us..****

Horace: ‘Thank you for your replies Peter. ****PH chides: Mr Pseudonymous really shouldn't try it on in this way. What invasion?An impartial UN report concluded that the conflict was started by Georgia's then leader Saakashvili. I am indeed sorry for the Georgian people, having several times visited that lovely and hospitable country, but their problems are not solely attributable to Russia.*** I think quite a few people would disagree with this; the entire population of Georgia for example.’

PH: Whether they disagree with it or not,  it was the impartial conclusion of Heidi Tagliavini, a Swiss diplomat without any partiality,  assisted by 30 European military, legal and history experts, and commissioned by the EU, which is in many ways hostile to modern Russia which cannot have especially welcomed its conclusions. Even if everyone in Georgia *does* disagree with it, it doesn’t make it any less valid. If impartial UN reports can be causally dismissed in this manner, then there really isn’t any point in arguing. If he has any quarrel with its factual material or its logic, then that, by contrast, would be of some interest. The full text is here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/30_09_09_iiffmgc_report.pdf

 

Horace: What Georgia does or does not do on its own land is not the business of Russia.

PH: How sweetly naïve. In the same way what Cuba, or Haiti or Guatemala, or Iran, does on its own land is not the business of the USA (he will I hope know the reason why I have listed these particular states) , what Poland does on its own land is not the business of the EU Commission, what the Philippines or Vietnam do on their own land is not the business of China, what Cyprus does on its own land is not the business of Turkey, what Bhutan does on its own land is not the business of India, what Yugoslavia did on its own land was not the business of the EU, what Syria or Libya do on their own land is not the business of Saudi Arabia, France, Turkey, Britain or the USA. It’s a fine principle. But not much observed. Besides which under Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia very actively wooed both the EU and NATO, seeking membership in these organisation – a policy more or less designed to provoke a reaction from Moscow    (this may interest some http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/10/pussy-riot-versus-georgia-prison-rapes-why-some-things-get-reported-a-lot-and-others-dont.html ). Some may wonder if Mr Saakashvili, having found the West reluctant to get entangled in the Caucasus, hoped to jolly things along a bit.

 

Horace: There is a very professional video on YouTube, Lobotomy. The secrets of Russia's propaganda machine, which will very thoroughly put your misconception about Georgia right. It is harrowing to watch. I challenge you to still hold your terribly mistaken view after watching this video. Key contributors include genuine Russian patriots Boris Nemtsov and Olga Politkovskaya. It was made in 2010 and probably contributed towards the state assassination of Boris. Olga of course was already dead.

PH: I was not aware that the killers of Mr Nemtsov had been definitely identified. I have never been able to see how the murder of this has-been could have bene welcome news to Mr Putin, a practical man if he is anything,  but who knows?   But I am still not sure what this has to do with my point about speech and thought being freer in Moscow tan they are in London. It is part f the whole point of my paradox. Russia is a sinister tyranny, We are a law-governed democracy. Yet speech and thought are more free in the tyranny. I  say this to provoke thought, not to parse Mr Putin. In this case I seem to have provoked only a self-righteous reflex.

Horace(here he oddly omits the charge to which he then provides the response. The charge(see above) was : ‘You (that is, me) have even denied persecution of the Tatars, despite overwhelming evidence.’

 : PH****I have every sympathy with them and with all the victims of Stalin, a Communist despot. I do not know when or how I have ever 'denied' the undoubted persecution of the Krim Tatars by Stalin. Perhaps he would care to substantiate this charge? ****

I was referring to the persecution of the Tatars that is taking place right now, of which there is overwhelming evidence. Some of which I provided for you last time we debated this.’

PH asks: Did he? I am aware that some leaders of the Krim Tatars have opposed the Russian takeover of the Crimea, which has certainly led to some indefensible political repression by the Russian occupation authorities. But I would regard this as a political response to a direct political challenge to Russian power, not ethnic persecution. The Soviet Union reversed and regretted Stalin’s actions long before the collapse of Communism, and I know of no substantial difference between the treatment of the Tatars (as an ethnic group) under Gorbachev, who ended the persecution,  under Ukrainian rule 1991-2014, or under Russian rule since 2014.

 

Horace: ***PH: On the contrary, these organisations are wholly distinct, having completely different purposes. Communism is a distinct system. Supporters of Ukrainian nationalism, as this contributor appears to be, should be careful about bandying the word 'fascism'. It has little direct application in the modern world, but those who wear the Wolfsangel badge and admire Stepan Bandera know more of fascism as a real manifestation than most of us..**** I am not a supporter of Ukrainian nationalism, I am supporter of the notion that Russia should stop murdering its neighbours, stealing their land and spreading poisonous lies about the victims of its fascist aggression. I do not refer to any classical definition of fascism; the word is applicable to describe certain types of behaviour, all of which Putin's Russia is guilty of: extreme nationalism, race supremacism, anti-Semitism, extreme militarism, persecution of minorities, scapegoating of foreigners for own failings, creation of bizarre personality cult around the leader, emasculation of parliament, persecution (and worse) of opponents, emasculation of judiciary, state control of media, spending $1bn/year on external propaganda and a troll TV network, telling lies, thieving from state resources, leaders living like czars, imperialism, absurd sense of entitlement, constant airing of fake grievances, rigged elections, crushing genuine independence struggles within its own land whist creating fake ones on other people's land, menacing all of its neighbours making them live in fear, threatening to use nukes etc etc.

PH: There is no classical definition of fascism apart from ‘view held by supporter of Benito Mussolini or Oswald Mosley’, the only two figures(both of them former socialists and prize opportunists)  actually to call themselves ‘Fascists’. But in the part of the world whereof we speak, the word tended to be used to describe Hitler and his armies, who passed that way more than once and left an indelible impression on all whom they met. And it is a regrettable fact that those armies received some assistance in what is now Ukraine, and that this (rather shockingly) is not regarded as wholly shameful by some Ukrainian nationalists. Thus the use of the word to attack Russia in this context is a bit odd. I note he doesn’t really answer this.

 

The  above rather selective outrage, where it refers to internal matters, could mostly (extreme nationalism, race supremacism, anti-Semitism,   persecution of minorities, scapegoating of foreigners for own failings,  emasculation of parliament, persecution (and worse) of opponents, emasculation of judiciary, state control of media, to which one could add violent overthrow of legitimate authority and of course extreme corruption, telling lies, thieving from state resources, leaders living like czars, imperialism, absurd sense of entitlement, constant airing of fake grievances, rigged elections, crushing genuine independence struggles within its own land. What does he mean by ‘extreme militarism’, by the way?), be directed at Ukraine with as much justice if not more. If ‘Horace’ thinks that western media are wholly truthful and never propagandist, or that western powers never manipulate ethnic tensions in countries for selfish ends (Yugoslavia, anyone? The Kurds, at all?) , I can only chuckle. Self-righteousness is a pretty useless basis for foreign policy. Why, he could equally accuse Mrs Theresa May of ‘threatening to use nukes’.

 

I did not intend to restart the argument about Russia. I long ago answered all this stuff.  I sought to state a paradox which might make people intelligently critical of our own country, the only one we have any business criticising, and the only one whose fate we have the power or right to alter.

 

But if people will insist on getting righteous about Russia I will ask once again what sort of country we would be (if we existed at all) without the heroic English Channel (the real reason for our survival in 1588, 1805 and 1940) to protect us from our neighbours. Russia has never had such a moat, and that is why it is different. Only a jingo and a fool would forget this.

 

 

She's done the bank scandal... maybe Margot Robbie can explain the Great Happy Pills Delusion

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column

The biggest scandals go on for years because they are so huge that nobody notices them. We stand and watch outrageous things going on, thinking that everything is all right because nobody else is making a fuss.

The new film about the 2008 bank collapse, The Big Short, makes this point perfectly. Anyone who wanted to could see the great lending boom was based on garbage, worthless loans that would never be repaid.

But most people didn’t want to. And even now we shy away from the blatant truth. The film’s makers, realising how easily our attention wanders, hired the Australian actress Margot Robbie to sit in a bathtub, naked except for a few thousand symbolic bubbles, to explain sub-prime mortgages in simple (and very crude) English.

The Big Short’s makers, realising how easily our attention wanders, hired the Australian actress Margot Robbie to sit in a bathtub, naked except for a few thousand symbolic bubbles, to explain sub-prime mortgages in simple (and very crude) English

How I wish I could afford to hire her to explain the equally shocking truth about the vast ‘antidepressant’ scandal that goes on all around us.

But, just as banks and investors were willing – if blinkered – accomplices in the mad folly that ripped the West’s economy to bits eight years ago, many doctors and decent men and women are complicit in the Great Happy Pills Delusion.

Doctors can get plenty of rewards from drug companies for promoting their pills. Invitations to conferences at five-star hotels, with diving, golf and fishing laid on are not unknown. Others are paid to write apparently unbiased articles in medical journals praising a company’s drugs.

But even those who don’t accept this are often relieved to have something, anything, to prescribe to the dozens of unhappy patients who seek their help. If they and the patient believe these pills work, then, in a way, they will. So would inert pills made of chalk, as it happens.

If only Margot Robbie could be hired tp explain the equally shocking truth about the vast ‘antidepressant’ scandal that goes on all around us, in which many decent men and women are complicit

And so the patients, too, are recruited into the ‘antidepressants saved me from misery’ campaign. There’ll be some in every street and workplace, given that more than 53 million prescriptions for these drugs are dispensed in the UK to about four million people every year.

The trouble is that rigorous science, in which they are tested against sugar pills, increasingly doubts that they do work. And, worse still, there is worrying evidence that the side effects of some of these drugs may be very serious indeed.

Now, in the respected pages of the British Medical Journal, comes a stinging report, carefully analysing 70 trials of ‘antidepressants’, which found that some common drugs of this kind actually double the risk of suicide and aggressive behaviour in under-18s.

This, by the way, does not mean that adults are unaffected. The drug companies’ research repeatedly under-reported deaths and episodes of self-harm by tested patients.

A drug that does not really work is one thing. A drug whose users harm themselves (or others) is another.

The vast extent of this problem and the huge sums of NHS money spent on it may make media and politicians think it must be all right. But they thought the same about sub-prime mortgages. And it was not all right. Nor is this.

Those who voted Tory in 2010 to ‘get Gordon Brown out’ might ponder George Osborne’s relentless Brown-style raids on private pension funds

Our crazy war on savers

In Japan now they are starting to charge people for keeping healthy credit balances in the bank. It is called ‘negative interest’ and is part of a vicious war on savers under way all over the world. It’s pretty intensive here too. Those who voted Tory in 2010 to ‘get Gordon Brown out’ might ponder George Osborne’s relentless Brown-style raids on private pension funds, punishing and robbing dedicated savers with extra taxes, to subsidise Google’s tax breaks.

The same goes for ‘quantitative easing’, designed to push small investors into putting their cash into risky places to get any return at all. Those who refuse have their interest-free bank balances slowly drained by inflation (which is supposed to have disappeared, but hasn’t). How long before there’s ‘negative interest’ too? Destroying the savings and hopes of the middle classes is what, in the end, led to Germany’s gruesome descent into fanatical madness in the 1930s.

It helped put Vladimir Putin in power in Moscow. It is deeply irresponsible politics as well as deeply irresponsible economics.

I think I could just about bear it, even so, if people didn’t keep telling me what a great and righteous Chancellor George Osborne is. It is, once again, a lie so huge that they get away with it.

So now all of us must live in the knowledge that a double murderer, with severe psychiatric problems, is living secretly among us. I defy anyone to say with total assurance that it is safe to let him out. His crime is said to have been horrific. But he has been released into the ‘community’. He is in his 40s, but we cannot know his new name, or his old one, or where he is or what he does.

This is thanks to our ‘Supreme Court’ (the name is itself a lie, for it is not supreme at all, but subject to Parliament and also the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg).

These exalted personages overruled four wiser judges, and common sense. If they have made a terrible mistake, how will they be made to pay for it?

Last week I finally underwent root canal dentistry, the lurking ill-defined horror that lies in wait for the middle-aged. Well, I am here to report that it was nothing like as bad as most of the things I have heard it compared to. And it was far less gruelling, protracted and demoralising than trying to extract an apology for wrongdoing from the BBC, or a Left-wing newspaper, or from a railway company – all activities I have been engaged in during the past few weeks.

Not all Gas and Gaiters

The Archbishop of Canterbury has had a nasty surprise. It follows the Church of England’s decision to publicise, in national media, an unproven claim of child abuse against the long-dead Bishop George Bell, one of the C of E’s few genuinely great men.

 

Now Justin Welby has had a stonking letter from Bishop Bell’s niece, Barbara Whitley, telling him off.  Mrs Whitley,91 and with a mind as sharp as a guillotine, wrote to the Prelate: ‘My uncle was an extremely holy, private man. A deep thinker with many engagements and a loving, helpful wife. I am convinced he would not have done any such thing’.

This must have come as something of a surprise, since the C of E’s  bureaucrats had assumed George Bell had no living relatives.  

You would have thought Mrs Whitley, herself the daughter of a Bishop, deserved a swift and personal reply. But Archbishop Welby passed the matter to a subordinate.  Mrs Whitley has written to him again, protesting that her Uncle’s name is being smeared. I do hope he writes back himself, this time.

 

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

Please Act Now to Oppose Irrational Intervention in Syria

Right. I have decided what to do about the Paris atrocities and ISIS, assuming (as everyone does, though evidence for this is so far scanty) that they are directly connected.

 

I would like to do something else, but I can’t. My influence on British foreign policy is non-existent, so that arguing for co-operation with Russia, Iran, Bashar Assad and the Kurds, and for serious action to bring about a peaceful settlement in Syria,  will make no difference.

 

So instead I have decided to concentrate on the urgent task of trying to prevent David Cameron getting a majority for British military involvement in Syria. This would undoubtedly make matters worse, has no good reasoning behind it, and may well contain long-term dangers we can barely conceive.

 

So I must ask all my readers in the United Kingdom to write or e-mail their MPs, as soon as possible, politely, concisely and cogently,  urging them to vote against any such intervention. This may conceivably affect events. I believe similar action may have done so the last time David Cameron wanted to go to war in Syria (apparently for the opposite reason for which the seeks to do the same now, but this is not wholly clear) , in September 2013.

 

I offer the arguments below, in case they wish to link to them in their e-mails, as a summary of the case against.

 

Why Change our Minds Now?

Emotion is a poor guide to strategy. Recent events in France, Sinai and elsewhere have rightly angered and distressed civilised people. But our emotions don’t excuse is from thinking. Some of the worst decisions in history have been taken on the basis of emotion. What is for certain is that there is no good reason for Parliament to change its mind on the subject.

 

Indeed, action was opposed by a recent (2^nd November 2015) report by the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the only up-to-date dispassionate examination of the matter in this country. You may read it here

 

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmfaff/457/45702.htm

 

 

The Committee argued only a few weeks ago that such an intervention would be legally questionable, militarily marginal, politically unpredictable, diplomatically complex and perhaps incoherent.

 

Some may argue that last week’s UN Security Council resolution changes this to some extent. However, the resolution was vague, not operational, and did not authorise military force.

 

As the New York Times pointed out here….

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/world/europe/un-security-council-approves-resolution-urging-countries-to-combat-islamic-state.html?_r=0

 

…..the resolution offers ‘no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes the use of force.’

 

 

Downing Street briefings have not directly contradicted this, but have somehow managed to give a rather different impression, suggesting that the new resolution changes the legal position when in fact it does not. This, er, confusion about the legality of action and the meaning of UN resolutions gives me a strange sense of déjà vu. Perhaps someone should ask Lord Goldsmith about it.

 

The full text of the resolution may be found here (scroll down to reach it) :

 http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sc12132.doc.htm

 

Those who genuinely think that British participation in the bombing of Syria would instantly change the balance are living in a world of fantasy. Our forces are small, and will make little difference ( assuming they share the same aim) to the efforts of the UIS and France already under way.

 

See paragraphs 22  and 23 of the Foreign Affairs Committee report:

 

‘In military terms, we noted that although our witnesses believed that a decision to extend airstrikes into Syria would be welcomed by Coalition allies, some said that it would not have anything other than a marginal effect. The experts told us that it would not be likely to involve extra aircraft but would simply re-focus existing assets; that the UK was already contributing valuable surveillance in Syria; and that the ability to conduct airstrikes as well would not have a decisive effect. Sir Simon Mayall concurred, adding:

 

“There are not that many of them, actually. This is not an air campaign anything remotely like the scale of 1991 or 2003. We need to be very clear about this. This is not a war-winning air campaign, by any stretch of the imagination.”

 

‘23.As a result, several witnesses concluded that there was little reason for the UK to change its policy. Julien Barnes-Dacey was strongly against the proposal and told us that the airstrikes make the threat from ISIS worse (my emphasis, PH) because they “feed a sense of radicalisation”:

 

“Sunnis say, ‘Look, the West is not helping us against Assad, but they are fighting ISIS.’ […] We become direct parties, all the while contributing nothing meaningful, in terms of military numbers or capability. I really fail to see how air strikes against ISIS will not do more harm than good.”

 

In paragraph 33, the reasoning of the select committee is quite clear: ‘…we believe that there should be no extension of British military action into Syria unless there is a coherent international strategy that has a realistic chance of defeating ISIL and of ending the civil war in Syria. In the absence of such a strategy, taking action to meet the desire to do something is still incoherent.’

 

In paragraph 35 it seeks the answer to several important questions, which I think the government will have some difficulty in answering if there is any sort of coherent questioning and debate in the Commons.

 

Enabling the House to reach a decision

 

35.The Government should explain the following points before asking the House of Commons to approve a substantive motion authorising military action:

 

a)On an international strategy:

 

i)How the proposal would improve the chances of success of the international coalition’s campaign against ISIL;

 

ii)How the proposed action would contribute to the formation and agreement of a transition plan for Syria;

 

iii)In the absence of a UN Security Council Resolution, how the Government would address the political, legal, and military risks arising from not having such a resolution;

 

iv)Whether the proposed action has the agreement of the key regional players (Turkey; Iran; Saudi Arabia; Iraq); if not, whether the Government will seek this before any intervention;

 

v)Which ground forces will take, hold, and administer territories captured from ISIL in Syria.

 

b)On the military imperative:

 

i)What the overall objective is of the military campaign; whether it expects that it will be a “war-winning” campaign; if so, who would provide war-winning capabilities for the forces; and what the Government expects will be the result of extending airstrikes to Syria.

 

ii)What extra capacity the UK would contribute to the Coalition’s actions in Syria.

 

36.We are persuaded that it is not yet possible for the Government to give a satisfactory explanation on the points listed above. Until it is possible for the Government to address these points we recommend that it does not bring to the House a motion seeking the extension of British military action to Syria.’

 

Whether your MP is Tory, Labour or SNP,. She or he really ought to be aware of these arguments, and able to explain why she or he plans to ignore them if she or intends to support the new rush to war.

 

There is no excuse, if you write to your MP, for any of these politicians to claim afterwards that they were unaware of opposition to the plan, or misunderstood the effect of the UN resolution, or were unaware of the severe political and military drawbacks listed so recently by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

 

The recent atrocities have not in fact changed the material position. So why would a responsible, informed or thoughtful MP, whose decisions can in the end lead to the dropping of bombs, the drawing of this country into yet another endless and insoluble foreign conflict in which its aims are, to put it kindly, unclear, suddenly switch to supporting intervention? Bullying by the government whips or a desire to please Mr Rupert Murdoch and his media should play no part in such matters of life and death.

 

Please act now. For all the government’s claims that it is still pondering the matter, I believe there is a strong chance that it will ambush the Commons with a vote soon before it rises for Christmas on 17^th December. That gives those who oppose this hasty and ill-considered action only a very little time to mobilise the forces of truth and reason against those of emotionalism, bombast and irrational panic.

 

I note that Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill are already being invoked, a clear sign that Munich Syndrome is raging in Whitehall, and especially fiercely in Downing Street itself. This is the delusional and historically illiterate belief that all crises are identical to the Czech crisis of 1938,  that all this country’s enemies are identical to Hitler,  that the sufferer is Winston Churchill reincarnated (he tends to growl in the later stages of the complaint) and that anyone who criticises him is Neville Chamberlain resurrected.

 

There is no known cure, but lying down in a darkened room with a cold compress on the brow and an umbrella to hand can relieve the symptoms.  

An article in the Spectator about the Chilcot Inquiry

Some of you might like to see this article in this week's London 'Spectator', in which I suggest that Sir John Chilcot's inquiry will solve nothing because it  is looking in the wrong place.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9622092/forget-chilcot-heres-the-inquiry-we-really-need/

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.

Dresden and After. Has the Holocaust Eclipsed all Other Horrors?

On the 75^th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden (an account of which can be found here, and I beg you to read to the end

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/dresden-bombing-70-years-on-a-survivor-recalls-the-horror-he-witnessed-in-the-german-city-10042770.html )

 

 I thought it worth asking :

 

Are all other horrors of war so eclipsed by the Holocaust that we no longer have any usable scale by which we can condemn them? Can we condemn them as much as they ought (in my view) to be condemned without being falsely accused of equating them with the Holocaust?

 

Here is one answer.  In his fine and necessary book ‘Orderly and Humane’ (about the disorderly and inhumane, but forgotten and ignored expulsions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after 1945) Professor R.M. Douglas wrote (referring to these expulsions) : ‘…the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime. With the exception of the war years themselves, Europe West of the USSR had never seen, nor would it again see, so vast a complex of arbitrary detention - one in which tens of thousands, including many children, would lose their lives. That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see.’

 

Does the fact that Hitler’s Germany was responsible for the Holocaust mean that any measures taken against Germany during the 1939-45 war, or afterwards,  are beyond effective condemnation? Does this fact mean that anyone who does condemn such measures is in effect excusing or minimising the Holocaust? Some have, repellently, tried to do so, attempting to equate them.

 

Does that mean that those (such as I)  who emphatically do not equate them but who still regard the bombing of civilians as terrible and wrong, must fall silent for fear of being falsely lumped with such grisly propagandists?

 

My answer is ‘no’. It is perfectly possible to make a consistent and sincere condemnation of both the Holocaust and the British bombing of German civilians.  It is perfectly possible to say that the bombing was wrong, while continuing to believe that the Holocaust was even more wrong, and rejecting any equivalence of the two.

 

The problem really lies in the ear of the hearer of such condemnations. A lot of British people do not want to know what we did in our bombing of Germany, and as a result  remain in a deep and self-imposed ignorance. That ignorance allows them to remain ignorant of the he extent of the bombing (thinking that Dresden was the only serious incident for instance) .they are also uninformed about its true character, continuing to think that our main targets were military and industrial, rather than domestic. Knowing so little of its true character, they can then pretend to themselves that nothing truly bad was done, and even it was, that the mass murder of the Jews somehow excused it. If these barriers fail, they can claim that critics of the bombing are German propagandists trying to excuse the Holocaust. Or they can say that people such as I are attacking the RAF bomber crews, which I specifically refuse to do.  

 

As I know to my cost, from various futile exchanges I have had with people who refuse to listen to facts and logic about the British bombing, many even to this day simply do not want to know what happened in the Dead Cities of Germany, many have a deluded belief that the civilian casualties were an unintended side effect of striking at military targets, many believe (wrongly) that the bombing of German cities in some way ‘saved’ Britain from invasion ( a danger which, if it ever existed, was in no way reduced by bombing) or contributed importantly to winning the war (which they did not, in reality do, as Hitler had already lost the war in the USSR before the major bombing started) .

 

It is arguable that they may have shortened the war by diverting aircraft and artillery from the Russian front, but it is equally arguable that they may have lengthened it, by depriving our anti-submarine forces of aircraft, and by diverting men and manpower to the destruction of cities and people, who could have been better used in attacking military and industrial targets.  

Had they done so, of course, they would have achieved a similar diversion of artillery and aircraft from the eastern front. This rapidly becomes counterfactual and speculative, as it involves such things as the earlier development of long-range fighter escorts, consideration. But in truth it is a diversion from the moral argument – could it ever possibly be right to deliberately bomb civilians from the air?

 

One solution to this is to apply a presumption of mass guilt to the German people. They must have known, we are told, what was being done by Hitler. I cannot tell if this is so. The industrial mass-murder of Jews took place outside Germany, and it was never publicly stated as an aim. Yet rumours must have reached civilians from the combat zones and the districts in conquered territory where the murders were taking place. I think many knew, and many did not, and many suspected. The outrage of Kristallnacht in 1938 must have warned anyone in any doubt that the National Socialists were ready and willing to murder Jews for being Jews. Whether you could deduce the existence of Auschwitz from that , I am not so sure.  The human mind would be inclined to think it impossible, unless presented with actual evidence.

 

As we know, certain people, either pitiable or disgusting, refuse to this day to believe the extermination camps existed, in spite of incontrovertible evidence and eyewitness testimony.

 

But I think we must exclude babies and children from this calculation.  Yet they were not excluded from the bombing.

 

Then there is the question of whether they could have done anything about it. Once again, they could have done so. But how many of those who say ‘They should have protested’ would have done so themselves in that society? The threat of losing a job is usually enough to silence most forms of dissent in modern Britain. How much more effective would be the threat of torture, imprisonment and death, made against you and your family?

 

As I repeatedly point out, many Germans continued to resist, and to vote against Hitler long after most of us would have gone quiet, when the Brownshirt terror was already unleashed.. The English channel , which saved us form these dilemmas, is not a moral quality allowing us to claim superiority. It is just a physical fact, which saved us from being tested.

 

Maybe you think that failing to protest, even in such danger, is a sin of omission so serious that those who committed it, and their children, deserved to die in firestorms.

 

Well, that is a point of view, But those who believe it must be careful to apply the same stringency to themselves, and to their own acts of cowardice, probably known only to themselves.

 

We know for certain from the dispassionate official post-war bombing surveys that the effects on the German economy were far smaller than those imagined and claimed by the advocates of ‘dehousing’.

 

AS for ‘giving them some of their own medicine’, we also know that the British raids on Germany were far larger than those by Germany on Britain (Germany never had any equivalent of the Lancaster bomber) , and that wartime surveys showed that people who had experienced German bombing were *less* keen on bombing Germany in return than those who had not experienced it. The question of ‘who started it’ is also a good deal more complicated than we like to think.  AS for the argument that ‘you weren’t there, you couldn’t know’, Bishop George Bell of Chichester (an unimpeachable patriot, by no means a pacifist and an early and principled opponent of the Nazis well-informed about events inside Germany)  was ‘there’, experienced bombing himself and still opposed it. Indeed, he and those like him were in a minority, but the fact that he did and said what he did and said, shows that it was possible be ‘there’ and oppose it.

 

I often think that the expression ‘War Crime’ gets in the way of our understanding. If you don’t want to lose a war you must fight with ruthless violence. Almost every effective act of war ( I say ‘almost’, in case there are exceptions I can’t think of)  would be a crime in civilian life. The only excuse is self-defence or justice, and – if we knew how terrible war was going to be – most of us would set the bar of justice a good deal higher than we do. I’m still not a pacifist – I tried that in my teens and found it impossible to sustain. But I am harder and harder to persuade of the need for war except in direct self-defence . Well-prepared and thoughtful deterrence, on the other hand, is a moral act of great value.