Banging the Frums of War, again

Some of you may recall a previous quarrel I had about Russia and Ukraine (mostly via Twitter)  with the Canadian neo-conservative David Frum, inventor of the phrase ‘Axis of Evil’’. My own view is that Mr Frum is not a very persuasive debater, sloppy with facts, unjustifiably confident and inclined to make assertions he struggles to back up.

Well, now he has made an assertion about me in this article in the noted and respected American liberal magazine ‘The Atlantic’

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/larry-tauntons-the-faith-of-christopher-hitchens-a-betrayal-to-reader-and-subject/486164/

which I think is quite unjustified. I’ve taken a resolution (for personal reasons) to stay out of the controversy about Mr Taunton’s book, which led to this article. But I object to Mr Frum’s assertion in his ‘Atlantic’ article that I made a ‘bitter published attack’ on my late brother. I also object to his description of what happened next, which I won’t here rehearse in detail but which  certainly didn’t involve all that much restraint on my brother’s part.

In a Twitter exchange yesterday Mr Frum made it plain that he was referring to this article, which I wrote for ‘The Spectator’ of London in October 2001. I find it rather interesting to read it again nearly 15 years later. But I see nothing in it that could be called a ‘bitter attack’.

Mr Frum has attempted to justify his claim by citing my brother’s reaction to what I wrote. But my contention has always been that he over-reacted (please read the supposedly offensive article below, in the knowledge that I sent it to my brother before it was published, in time for his comments)

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/13th-october-2001/18/o-brother-where-art-thou

And then see this much later article in which it is shown beyond doubt that I had mentioned this to him before, to his face, in a perfectly civil fashion, and he had responded in an equally good-humoured way, also conceding the point I was making about his attitudes during the Cold War.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/01/the-red-army-waters-its-horses-in-hendon-new-light-on-an-old-quarrel.html

I really do think that Mr Frum should withdraw the suggestion that this was a ‘bitter’ attack, and apologise for it.

Goodbye Christianity, hello multicultural wasteland...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

If you want to wreck the country, get some grandiose people to sit on a panel. Make sure you don’t choose anyone who disagrees with your aim. Then write a pamphlet demanding the destruction of something good, and call it a ‘report’.
And most of the media, especially the BBC, will oblige by treating your propaganda as if it is some sort of impartial study.
The latest example is from the self-proclaimed ‘Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life’, whose demands were published last week, masquerading as the conclusions of a balanced study.
Would you believe they want to make state schools even less Christian than they already are – accusing our many excellent Church schools of being ‘socially divisive’ and of promoting ‘segregation’ – and to revise the Coronation and services of remembrance to make them more inclusive?
Of course, there are luminaries of the poor, bewildered Church of England among this report’s ‘patrons’ and on its ‘steering group’. Its chairwoman is a jolly nice church-going baroness. But what purpose do they serve in such things? They do not necessarily stand for the established order, even if they belong to it.
This may be a clue: among those who paid for this ‘commission’ were the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which until recently funded the rather militant Islamic rights group CAGE (about as far from a vicarage tea party as you can get) and the Open Society Foundations, backed by the ultra-liberal billionaire George Soros, a keen supporter of relaxing the drug laws.
Now, these modernisers have a point of view. I have a lot of time for atheists, humanists and members of other religions from my own. At least they’re interested in what seems to me, more and more, to be the most important question we face – what sort of universe is this? (Full disclosure: I am an old-fashioned Broad Church Anglican, 1662 Prayer Book, King James Bible and all.) But the idea that we should carry on adapting Britain and England to ideas and religions from elsewhere seems to me to be a mistake. All we have and are is based on the Christian faith, which has shaped law, government, morals, music, landscape and education here for a thousand years. Abandon it, and what holds up the trust which keeps us from chaos?
I accept that Christianity is dying fast in this country. I know that many schools teach religion badly, if at all, and that ignorance is everywhere. But there is more than one response to this. You could say, as this ‘report’ does, that we should accept that this isn’t a Christian country any more, and adapt it to become a sort of religious salad of all faiths and none.
You could give up trying to teach Christianity as a living faith, and instead get children to study it as a quaint, eccentric curiosity. Or – and the weeks around Christmas are a good time to say this – we could say that we still have a chance to rebuild and restore what has been lost.
Why do we so lack the confidence to do this, and readily abandon a heritage of such power and beauty, which has brought us so much good, for a multicultural wasteland in which a dozen competing faiths squabble in the ruins, and everyone else bows to the neon gods of consumerism?
Perhaps there is a multibillionaire out there somewhere who would fund a ‘commission’ that would be pretty much bound to come up with such a conclusion (I could pick the members). We could call the resulting propaganda a report. Then everyone would have to take it seriously.

 

******

Donald Trump is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the death of real political conservatism: a cool, intelligent reluctance to believe that all change is good, a love for the established, the particular and the well-worn.
During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism, actually a wild form of liberalism, for conservatism. They lapped up the temporary riches it provided and now find themselves yearning for leaders to take them back to a world of secure jobs and secure borders.
Mr Trump, Olympically stupid and ignorant in many ways and virtually thoughtless, has the low feral cunning to spot this need and to pretend to meet it.
Of course, he hasn’t a clue how to go about it. But it’s not impossible that such a person will gain high office before long.

*******

Tom's spy trial reveals the secret that keeps us free

My friend Jason Rezaian, my guide and interpreter during a captivating visit to Persia some years ago, has now endured more than 500 days as the prisoner of Iran’s secret state, arrested on absurd charges, subjected to a closed trial of which we can know nothing and now sentenced to a secret punishment. Pray for him if you can. Think of him, unable to see the sky, at some moment of your free day, if you will.
I thought of his case, and of our own gradual erosion of justice here, as I watched the fine new film Bridge Of Spies, in which Tom Hanks plays a real-life lawyer who took on an unpopular case in Cold War America.
His client was the British-born Soviet spy known as Rudolf Abel (real name William Fisher). At the heart of the film is the contrast between Abel’s trial, basically orderly and restrained by the rule of law, and that of the American spy pilot Gary Powers in Moscow.
In the communist courtroom, there is no presumption of innocence, no jury, no true defence, just shouting prosecutors and an orchestrated crowd yelling its support for verdict and sentence.
In the end, this was what really divided the two sides in the Cold War, not the economic system or even the democracy (which wilts and dies where there is no rule of law).
It is what divides good societies from bad ones. Its absence from Iran has put my friend Jason in a nameless dungeon. It is an incredibly precious possession. I cannot understand why we care so little about it.

****

This is all I’ll say about this because it seems to me the facts are so devastating. But in all three recent cases of dangerous public violence, yet again, mind-altering drugs are involved. Robert Dear, suspect in the killings in Colorado Springs, was a cannabis user. The flat of the culprits in the San Bernardino shooting, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, contained bottles of a benzodiazepine – whose ‘paradoxical reactions’ include rage, hostility, aggression and mania – plus amphetamines, which can produce delusions and paranoia. And the alleged culprit of the Leytonstone knife attack, Muhaydin Mire, was a normal young man until he started smoking cannabis, after which he became mentally ill. Please may we have an inquiry into this correlation?

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PETER HITCHENS: Really want to beat terror? Then calm down and THINK

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Could we please skip the empty bravado? This is a time for grief above all else, and a time to refrain from soundbites and posturing. France – our closest neighbour, oldest friend, beloved rival, what Philip Sidney called ‘that sweet enemy’ – France is stricken, and we should weep with her.

Over the past 40 years or so, most of us have heard quite enough politicians and others pledging to stand firm against terror, hunt down the vile perpetrators, ensure that it never happens again, and the rest.

Then there have been the emergency meetings of grandly titled committees, the crackdowns, the increased surveillance, the billions spent on spying and snooping, not to mention the various wars on terror which have certainly killed a lot of our troops, but never seem to make us any safer. It is remarkably hard to defend yourself against an enemy whose language few of us speak, yet who speaks ours and can move freely in our world, and who is willing, even happy, to die at our hands – or his own – if he can kill us first.

Meanwhile, many of the demands of terror, from the IRA to the Palestinians, have been quietly met. And the extraordinary connections between our supposed ally Saudi Arabia and the worst terrorist incident of all – September 11, 2001 in New York – have been politely ignored.

It’s also worth remembering, as we mourn alongside the French, how many stupid things have been said about them. Remember the long period of macho chest-thumping in which they were idiotically derided as ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ and it was claimed you couldn’t find any French military victories on the internet?

This was stupid at the time, especially from Americans, whose country would never even have existed if the French (modestly aided by some Americans) hadn’t defeated us British at Yorktown, perhaps the most significant French victory in the history of the world. How does it sound now?

Yet this sort of thing, shouting, table-thumping, threat-making and boasting, is all too often the only outcome of murderous atrocities such as this.

And then there is the rapid casting aside of ancient, wise rules. Our irreplaceable liberty and justice, which took a thousand years to create, are in shreds thanks to hasty and emotive measures that did no good. And now we have the shame of lawless confinement of untried men in Guantanamo, of torture that Englishmen, far fiercer and crueller than we think we are, abandoned as barbaric hundreds of years ago. And we have the horrors of ‘extraordinary rendition’ by secret flights to secret prisons, in which dark things took place. How can we claim to stand for liberty and justice if we do such things?

And we see the dubious and dangerous use of pilotless drones to conduct summary executions of our enemies. Few can be sorry at the death of Mohammed Emwazi (the so-called ‘Jihadi John’), but what precedents are we setting? For the moment, our fanatical foes do not have drones of their own. One day, they will.

Few will be sad about the death of Mohammed Emwazi (Jihadi John) but the drone strike killing will set a dangerous precedent for our enemies, who don't have drones at the moment but will do one day

 

A lot of people exult over this event, and those who quietly suggest that it might violate our own principles of law and justice are jostled to one side by super-patriotic breast-beaters (the same sort who used to jeer at the French for being soft). And listen to the words of the mother of James Foley, one of Emwazi’s victims, who in a short and dignified interview epitomised the difference between our civilisation and those who seek to destroy it.

Diane Foley said: ‘It saddens me that here in America, we are celebrating the killing of this deranged, pathetic, young man.’ It gave her no solace. ‘No! Not at all! If the circumstances had been different, Jim probably would have befriended that man and tried to help him’.

She regretted the concentration of resources on revenge rather than on protecting our citizens and helping the vulnerable. ‘I am sorry,’ she said softly. ‘Jim would have been devastated with the whole thing. Jim was a peacemaker. He wanted to know how we could figure out why, why all this is happening.’

Asked if she got a sense of justice from the drone strike, she replied ‘Justice! No. Not at all. Just sad’.

Should we decry this measured, civilised and thoughtful response as foolish softness? It is surely hard to do so, when the person speaking has endured the public, cruel murder of her son, and yet still finds it in her heart to think and say such things. Could it be that she is wiser than the politicians and the security men?

James Foley was among Emwazi's victims but his mother Diane didn't celebrate the killer's death. She said it was just very 'sad' and that her 'peacemaker' son would have been unhappy about the quest for revenge

 

After all, let us not forget that Islamist terror has grown in strength and reach, not diminished, since we embarked on our supposedly benevolent interventions in the Muslim world. The Iraq invasion, the Afghan intervention, the wild and brainless enthusiasm with which we greeted the disastrous ‘Arab Spring’, the supposedly humanitarian interference in Libya which turned it into a failed state, the aid and comfort we gave to the rebellion in Syria. Not only have these things failed to prevent terror. They have visited a violent chaos on the whole Muslim world, in which fanatical and grisly death cults thrive and prosper.

And alongside them, there is the enormous migration of desperate young men, from Africa, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, many of them Muslim, some of them no doubt easy recruits for the fanatics.

We pretend to understand these nebulous and varied terror groups, for years placing them under the all-embracing trademark of ‘Al Qaeda’, now insisting they are part of a new and greater menace called ‘ISIS’. The truth is there is no mastermind sitting in a cave issuing orders (though of course someone is always willing to claim responsibility for these outrages after they have happened – and who can be sure if such claims are true?).

That is a James Bond fantasy. And it is also why these things would still be hard to prevent if we turned ourselves into a totalitarian state of surveillance, identity cards, perpetual searches of the innocent – like going through an airport, only all the time.

They don’t work by our rules. They can stay off, or below, our grid. They don’t mind if they die. They will get through.

All we will achieve by adopting such methods is to make ourselves miserable without making ourselves safe.

Our task is now first to mourn with our French friends and allies. And after that, to think rather than to shout. Rhetoric and militancy have not done very much for us in the past. Why should it be different this time?

 

Some Immediate Thoughts on the New Crisis in Syria

Just who is fighting whom in Syria? I should have thought this was the thing we most need to know before getting involved. Some years ago, before this war was a cause, I began receiving private letters from a worried British woman married to a Syrian Sunni Muslim, then living in Latakia.  Her main motivation was fear about the danger to the quiet, contented life which she and her family were then living and now are not. They are now, like so many others, refugees. I think she hoped that some discussion of this in the media might avoid such an outcome. I only wish it had been so.

 

After some checks, I believe them to have been authentic. She described the worrying appearance in that country of armed, heavily-bearded militiamen speaking Arabic in a way quite different from that in Syria.

 

I was an unlikely choice for Syrian state propaganda. I had for some years been writing rude and disobliging articles, when the opportunity arose, about Syria’s habit of massacring rebels, its discrimination against Jews, its harbouring of the Nazi refugee Alois Brunner, a  mass-murder of children,  its undoubted involvement in the attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard an El Al jet at Heathrow and its probable (in my view ) involvement in the Lockerbie bomb, strangely attributed to Libya. I thought the cosying up to Syria which followed its support for the anti-Saddam coalition in 1991 was absurd. I thought the West’s use of Syrian torturers to interrogate suspects, taken there on rendition flights after September 11^th 2001, was disgraceful. My main motive for these articles had been Zionist. I am a strong supporter of Israel’s continued existence, and had long regarded Syria as one of the main threats to that.

 

So when a certain Tory MP (whose career has since exploded amid farcical revelations about his private life) accused me of being some sort of Syrian patsy, I was actually astonished, and sought (but did not get) a retraction.

 

My interest in this issue was motivated by puzzlement  - and also by a pained sympathy for the lady who wrote to me from Latakia. I have also found it all too easy to imagine myself becoming a refugee, driven from my home by war. It has happened in my lifetime to far too many people who thought themselves quite safe, as we do, and as you probably do. You are not. Some fool may even now be devising the plan that will eventually force you out on to the road with a few belongings, leaving your house in ruins or in the hands of strangers. It makes me angry that people behave in such a way that this sort of thing happens.

 

It seemed clear to me that there was a strong lobby for ‘democracy’ in Syria, with powerful supporters in Washington DC. This had been pressing for worsened relations between the USA and Damascus for some time before the protests began. I have learned to be suspicious of such lobbies for two reasons. One, they are generally selective about their desire for democracy (the lovers of democracy in Syria seem pretty unmoved by its total absence from Saudi Arabia, its suppression in Bahrain and its defeat and erasure in Egypt), and therefore must have other real motives. I have since heard that French diplomacy underwent a similar convulsion, with Paris demanding a strong anti-Assad line against the doubts of some of its experienced diplomats. I strongly suspect that something similar has happened in London. It is possible to guess that the reason for this is the strong alliance, based upon oil and arms sales, between some Gulf states and those three countries.  Those states are Sunni Muslim, whereas Syria was broadly secular and on good terms with Shia Iran.

 

 

Two, their allies are unconvincing.  I have no doubt that the various factions which formed the Free Syrian Army and other Syrian opposition groups have genuine grievances against the Assad state. Almost everyone in Syria does, It is a cruel, and presumably corrupt, despotism with little to be said for it save that it had until recently been internally peaceful, and that it maintained unusual levels of mutual tolerance among its varied peoples.

 

But I have huge doubts as to what sort of state they would create, were they to overthrow Assad. We are repeatedly assured that they are quite distinct from Islamic State, a body to which we attribute almost supernatural powers of horror and intolerance. They need to do this, or people might notice its very strong similarity to the current government of Saudi Arabia, also given to ferocious religious intolerance, beheadings and so forth (and currently engaged in a pretty appalling aggression against Yemen) , though less inclined to publicise them on YouTube.

 

But I am not wholly convinced by these assurances that these people are our friends and allies. I do not think that Christian and Shia people in Syria are convinced by them either. They back Assad not because they love him but because the alternative is a Sunni theocracy in which their lives would be enormously worse. Quite a few Sunni Muslims, the famous moderate Muslims of whom we hear so much, seem to have taken the same view, since they continue to play such a large part in Assad’s Army. He would have fallen long ago, were this not so.

 

To me it seems absurd to imagine that defeat for Assad would not pretty much immediately mean that the Islamic State extended its power to Damascus and Aleppo. The supposedly non-extremist fighters against Assad are certainly not pro-Western, and the divisions between them and ISIS seem to me to be slight.

 

Of course, a compromise peace would be good. Like all conservatives I believe very much in such arrangements. But the main obstacle to such a peace has been the absolute refusal of the rebels to contemplate any deal that left Assad in power. Every conference which has attempted to bring about a deal has foundered on this point. As I have many times pointed out our righteous modern insistence on trying and imprisoning (and sometimes hanging) overthrown tyrants, has made them  understandably reluctant to step down, so losing the sovereign immunity that keeps them safe from being hustled into a cell. The shocking and barbaric murder of Colonel Gadaffi in a Libyan drainpipe (an event which launched new horrors in that country) might also encourage any embattled head of state to battle on rather than show any weakness. Those who genuinely wanted peaceful amelioration of Syria would see this, make a deal and get all the concessions they could pocket while allowing Assad to stay.

 

But his foes, and the supposedly wise and responsible great powers of the West, have pursued a policy of all or nothing. They have got nothing, except unending and terrible war.

 

And now Russia has joined it, attacking Assad’s enemies, not necessarily ISIS. My heart sank when I heard this news, as I cannot see it ending well. I had hoped an agreement was still possible. Now I fear a limitless conflict, with ghastly implications for our peace and prosperity.  Russian exasperation is understandable. But unilateral action of this kind is just wrong, and destroys any prestige Vladimir Putin had gained from his behaviour at the UN.

 

It sank even further when I heard the American response, full of machismo and entirely lacking in caution or subtlety. I immediately contrasted the American reaction to Turkey’s supposed decision, some months ago to join the war against ISIS. This was naively welcomed by western politicians and media. In fact Turkey has barely attacked ISIS at all, but has instead launched repeated attacks on the Kurdish forces who have been inflicting serious reverses on ISIS in Kobane and elsewhere. This is all to do with Turkey’s dismal internal politics, often discussed on this blog, and nothing to do with the safety of the Middle East from murderous fanaticism. Yet the hostility and scepticism which greeted Russia’s attacks on people whose victory would help ISIS were quite absent when Turkey launched attacks on people whose defeat would help ISIS. Why?

 

Here’s a question to ponder. If (and I think this is the actual choice) you had to choose between Syria being run by Assad or by the opposition to Assad; and if the victory of the opposition was highly likely to benefit ISIS; who would you then want to win? And if the answer is ‘the opposition’, how can those who seek that end claim in reality to be opposed to ISIS, which will benefit so much if their wish comes true.

 

Russia may have thought this through more carefully than the USA. But the Kremlin has still made a terrible mistake. The USA is no longer run (as Russia still is) by disillusioned cynics seeking the least worst outcome. It is in the hands of Utopian idealists and there is no limit to the horrors they can unleash upon the earth in the names of freedom and democracy. Ask anyone in Baghdad. Meanwhile the British government is in the hands of political teenagers whose combat experience –if they have any at all – was gained at the dinners of the Bullingdon Club.

Usefully Idiotic

A recent rather silly article in ‘The Times’ (of London), which I cannot reproduce because of a paywall, irritated me so much that I sent a letter to that newspaper to express my disagreement. I don’t think it will be published, but, as debate so often does, the argument gave me a new insight into something I had previously known only vaguely.

 

The author was angry with those who though Russia was the wronged party in the current EU/NATO/US attempt to de-neutralise Ukraine and place it firmly into a NATO and EU alignment (not membership, that’s currently impossible, but the Association Agreement is clearly and explicitly politico-military as well as economic).

 

Well, we’re all familiar with this. But he chose to suggest that there was a continuity between those who took this position and those who had been the mental servants of the old USSR. He used the expression ‘Useful Idiots’, said to have been employed by Lenin to describe the willing regurgitators of Soviet Communist propaganda in the West , whose support was welcome but who were secretly scorned by the cynics in the Kremlin for being gullible dupes.

 

It’s actually rather a good phrase, and immediately conveys its message - though at the last count there was no evidence that Lenin himself had ever used it.

 

I would myself be tempted to apply it to quite a lot of leftist intellectuals taken in by Soviet lies, from Beatrice and Sidney Webb to George Bernard Shaw,  and indeed many of the stalwarts of various disarmament and 'peace' campaigns in the Cold War period. These people, in person herbivorous and gentle, unknowingly did the work of the violent and homicidal Bolshevik state, in many cases almost up the moment of its dissolution.

 

Having very much not been one of these people (at least not since I was about 15 years old)  I found the suggestion ridiculous. Indeed, if there is anything that the defenders of Mr Putin’s foreign policy have in common, it is a certain amount of social conservatism, and/or opposition to the European Union. Personally I think this is tangential, and if genuine, the result of a misunderstanding.

 

I have no affection for any aspect of the modern Russian state, though I have noted the paradox that thought and speech on matters of political correctness are probably freer in that dingy polity than they are here or in the USA. This is despite the great lack of freedom in real political choice, and the almost total suppression of real dissent.  

 

This is mainly because Russia simply missed the great PC re-education programmes that swept North America and most of Europe from about 1985 onwards, and its current isolation keeps it that way. It is also because patriotism and religion were persecuted or perverted by the Soviet regime, and so have strongly revived in the years since it fell. Both therefore exist in a much more potent high-octane form than is to be found in most of the ‘West’. Their strength prevents any current moves in the politically correct direction, though one cannot really be sure that this suits the Russian government. And I am sure that the Russian state would leap at the chance to join the EU, with all the compulsory political correctness that would require,  in the highly unlikely event that it was offered.  It is precisely because such an offer is more or less impossible that things are as they are.

 

So there isn’t really any idealistic or dogmatic element in the position that Russia is (in this case) on the receiving end of diplomatic aggression by the EU/NATO/US . It's just a matter of observable, measurable fact.  

 

Some sentimental old leftists, who still yearn for the old red flag,  and have always found Eurocommunism too weak a brew, may enjoy the apparent revival of the old conflict. But they are as ill-informed as those in the West who kid themselves that Vladimir Putin is the product of a KGB plot to win back the world for Marxist-Leninism, and revive the USSR, and is poised to invade the Baltic states and Poland.

 

The point of all this is follows. Those in this argument who are moved by a utopian ideology , and are its 'useful idiots', are not the cynical realpolitik-loving critics of the Euromaidan. Anything but.

 

The ones whose shining, joy-filled (and naïve) faces  belong on a propaganda poster are the young idealists of the Euromaidan, with their flags and their songs and their ludicrous hopes that they can begin the world over again with mass demonstrations and the storming of palaces.

 

It is they who, like the Bolsheviks of a century ago, dream of a new world order, a borderless planet of pace, love and honesty, in which corruption is swept away by nobility, and we all live happily ever after. Such utopianism always attracts its share of foreign admirers, who long for something similar in their own slow-moving, non-idealist and conservative nations. From such dreamers are useful idiots created.

 

Such people no longer look to the dead and buried USSR, nor to the Kremlin. They are inspired instead by the USA as the new liberator. These are the people who thought they could install freedom in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia etc.  Why, they even thought they had installed it in Russia via Boris Yeltsin(big mistake). 

 

And, oddly enough, such ideas have the same Utopian roots as Bolshevism. American neo-conservatism, which allied itself with George W.Bush and Donald Rumsfeld (in the form of the Project for the New American Century) is neatly embodied in the figure of William Kristol, himself the worthy son of that powerful thinker Irving Kristol, who had begun his intellectual life as a Trotskyist. It’s a fundamentally idealist view of the world, not necessarily much to do with the basic interests of the USA, much more to do with a conception of a re-ordered planet, ruled by democratism.

 

Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State prominent in the encouragement of the Euromaidan, is married to Robert Kagan, who prefers to be called a liberal interventionist but whom many regard as a prominent neo-conservative in the Kristol tradition.  Another rather good example of this continuity was of course my late brother, Christopher who never abandoned his admiration for Leon Trotsky and yet managed to combine this with militant support for George W.Bush's invasion of Iraq . He became an enthusiastic US citizen partly to demonstrate his sympathy for the USA’s new role as the headquarters of world revolution. Once people have puzzled out this equation, they are a lot closer to understanding what is actually going on.  Those who still think in pre-1989 categories have no idea what is happening. Anyway, the utopian idealists are all on the other side now. The conservative cynics are around here somewhere.

The Arithmetic of Alleged Aggression

Phoney outrage over Russia rumbles on. So I thought I would set out some facts on the issue:

 

Bear in mind that before it lost huge portions of its contiguous land empire, Moscow was not defeated in war, and in fact (with some small exceptions probably inspired from within the KGB) barely lifted a finger to retain its control.

 

Compare this with the Chinese People’s Republic, which engaged in a severe massacre in its own capital, followed by widespread repression,  rather than relax its rule, in the same period, and which despite this still enjoys warm diplomatic relations with the NATO powers. China could also be accused of severe aggression in Tibet.

 

Such an enormous transfer of territory from one power to another as took place between Russia and the EU after 1989 is, as far as I know, unknown in history, except as the result of humiliating defeat in actual war.  I simply cannot think of another example of such an event having taken place without such a defeat. 

 

I might add that both Manfred Woerner, then in charge of NATO, and James Baker, then US Secretary of State and spokesman for the entire Western alliance, gave undoubted assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time that NATO would *not* extend its jurisdiction eastwards. I think it fair to say that it was on that understanding that Mr Gorbachev peacefully dismantled the Soviet empire. Without those guarantees, it would not have been so peaceful. Yet they have been utterly broken.

 

There can be no doubt that this understanding has been breached. There can be no doubt that Russia has complained clearly about this for years, while refraining from any action. President Putin said in Munich , at a major security conference, in February 2007, seven whole years before the February 2014 revolution in Kiev : ‘It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfil the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all.

 

‘I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Manfred Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?’

  

NATO forces now exercise close to the Russian border in the Baltic states

 

http://www.stripes.com/news/nato-wraps-up-major-exercise-in-poland-baltics-1.252512

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10802516/British-troops-fly-to-Estonia-as-tensions-with-Russia-rise.html

 

 

Aggression generally means advancing your force and power into the territory of others, or (and this is important in this case) into non-aligned and neutral territory bordering rival countries.  Ukraine, since 1991, had been non-aligned, retaining economic and political links both with both Russia and the EU bloc.

 

 

Aggression is not always achieved by direct military intervention. It can be done by economic pressure, by sheer menace, by stirring up ethnic or other discontents in the territory of the targeted country (examples, Germany’s overthrow of the Russian provisional Government by employing the Bolsheviks in 1917, the Anglo-American overthrow of Iran’s leader, Mohammad Mossadeq, by a stage-managed putsch in 1953).

 

I fail to see how it was anything but an act of aggression to encourage Ukraine ( a bankrupt, corrupt, ill-governed and poorly-defended state which in normal circumstances would not be considered for membership of these bodies for an instant) to dream of EU and NATO membership.

 

This was done, as can be demonstrated easily by recourse to published figures and reliably reported facts, by scattering EU largesse in hundreds of millions of Euros across Ukraine

 

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/08/04/EU-millions-paid-for-Ukrainian-groups-behind-Yanukovych-overthrow

 

plus the active intervention on foreign soil of prominent NATO and EU politicians, an activity not in any way concealed from public view:

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-victoria-nuland-wades-into-ukraine-turmoil-over-yanukovich/

 

 

http://eastbook.eu/en/2013/12/uncategorized-en/two-days-in-the-hottest-scene-catherine-ashton-visits-ukraine/

 

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10518859/John-McCain-in-Kiev-Ukraine-will-make-Europe-better.html

 

 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/12/04/uk-ukraine-idUKBRE9B20BV20131204

 

Ukraine was thus encouraged to seek EU association. In the lught of these preliminaries, the West's acceptance of the resulting unconstitutional regime change as valid, and its acceptance of the resulting government as a legitimate negotiating partner, could possibly be described as ‘defensive’, or ‘passive’.  

 

In any allegation of assault, self-defence is generally regarded either as a mitigation or as an actual full defence against the charge.  In this case, the expanding power, aggressively pushing its desires, ignores protests made over a long period, and overrides a peaceful attempt by Russia to resolve the quarrel.

 

It may then be reasonably assumed to have taken more serious, perhaps covert steps to reinforce its earlier encouragement

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/14/john-brennan-kiev_n_5147799.html

 

 

Arithmetic again: Just before the Kiev putsch Ukraine had asked for €20 billion (US$27 billion) in loans and aid. The EU was willing to offer €610 million in loans, one 16th of what Kiev wanted.  Russia offered $15 billion in loans plus cheaper gas prices, far closer to what Kiev was asking for.  In addition to the money, the EU required major changes to the regulations and laws in Ukraine. Russia did not. Thus the EU sought power over Ukraine which it had previously possessed, in return for wholly inadequate financial promises.  Russia offered a large bribe to maintain the status quo, under which Ukraine remained non-aligned.  It was hardly unreasonable or irresponsible of President Yanukovych to decide that the Russian offer was preferable.

 

 

The Arithmetic of Alleged Aggression:

 

 

Territories and populations in Europe which have ceased to be ruled from Moscow since 1989 (NB, these figures are approximate, and do not include Central Asia or the Caucasus, in which case they would be much larger):

 

Former Warsaw Pact

 

GDR 16 Million people 41,800  sq m

Poland 38 million 128,000 sq m

Czechoslovakia 15.6 million 49,300 sq mi

Hungary 9.9 million 36,000 sq mi

Romania 20 million 92,000 sq mi

Bulgaria 7 million 43,000 sq mi

 

Former USSR now in EU and NATO

 

Lithuania 3 million, 25,000 sq mi

Latvia 2 million, 25,000 sq mi

Estonia 1.3 million, 17,000 sq mi

 

Former USSR now non-aligned

 

Belarus 9.5 million 80,000 sq mi

Ukraine 48 million 238,000 sq mi

 

Thus, Moscow has lost direct control over roughly 180 million people, and roughly 700,000 square miles.

 

The EU (and its military wing, NATO) have in the same period *gained * control over more than 120 million of those people, and almost 400,000 of those square miles.

 

How many times is a sovereign power, clearly the defensive and losing force in this change, expected to watch its protests being ignored, and former agreements being broken, before it is entitled to respond?

 

I thought we were all supposed to believe that appeasement in the face of threats and force was a bad policy, to be despised and mocked? Yet, not merely do we condemn President Putin when he refuses to appease the ‘West’ any further and says, after many clear and patient warnings ‘thus far and no further’.  We actually accuse him of aggression.

 

I am accused, in this debate, of being an apologist for Mr Putin, or of ‘siding’ with Russia. I have even been slandered by people claiming I take money from Russia in some form. This is not so.  I regard Mr Putin as a sinister tyrant, and am happy to repeat this ad infinitum, because it is true. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the Ukraine dispute. The blindness of so many commentators to the extremely nasty side of the Ukrainian elite and its allies is a symptom of their infantile view that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ countries and that we should pick our side on this basis. Such babyish views always lead to exaggerating the ills of the one, and concealing from yourself the wrongs of the other.

 

I think the same (sinister tyranny) is true (as I shall explain in a later post) of our NATO ally Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and of the Chinese Politburo. My response to tyranny abroad is to defend liberty and law at home where and when I can, not to imagine that I am some sort of caped crusader who can go round the world biffing despots.

 

My engagement in this conflict is simply an attempt to set the record straight. This seems to me to be justified when I read unhinged calls for *us* to threaten Russia with sanctions or military action, to halt Moscow’s wicked aggression.

 

As we have learned several times in recent years the recruitment of the ignorant populace into such crusading fantasies is the first step towards actual war. Much later, the duped and deluded shouters of ‘tough’ slogans  realise that they have been humbugged by politicians, and pretend they never supported the wild adventures for which they once cheered.

 

But by that time, the bereaved, here and there,  have been forgotten, the mounds of rotting human corpses have been bulldozed into the mass graves by men in  gasmasks, the ruined towns clumsily rebuilt,  and the limbless, blinded  children have graduated to adult begging.

 

It is the truth I support in this conflict, and it tells me that this country and its people have no reason to support a historically-tainted and dangerous interference by outsiders in a part of the world where it is very likely to do serious harm. At the very least, Britain has no reason to support this adventure. And if we stand aside, we make it less likely that it will turn into a full-scale war. Otherwise….

Mourn the victims... but don't turn one tragedy into a global catastrophe

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

One thing we should have learned in the past 100 years is that war is hell. We might also have noticed that, once begun, war is hard to stop and often takes shocking turns.

So those who began the current war in Ukraine – the direct cause of the frightful murder of so many innocents on Flight MH17 on Thursday – really have no excuse.

There is no doubt about who they were. In any war, the aggressor is the one who makes the first move into neutral or disputed territory.

And that aggressor was the European Union, which rivals China as the world’s most expansionist power, swallowing countries the way performing seals swallow fish (16 gulped down since 1995).

Ignoring repeated and increasingly urgent warnings from Moscow, the EU – backed by the USA – sought to bring Ukraine into its orbit. It did so through violence and illegality, an armed mob and the overthrow of an elected president.

I warned then that this would lead to terrible conflict. I wrote in March: ‘Having raised hopes that we cannot fulfil, we have awakened the ancient passions of this cruel part of the world – and who knows where our vainglorious folly will now lead?’

Now we see. Largely unreported over the past few months, a filthy little war has been under way in Eastern Ukraine. Many innocents have died, unnoticed in the West. Neither side has anything to boast of – last Tuesday 11 innocent civilians died in an airstrike on a block of flats in the town of Snizhne, which Ukraine is unconvincingly trying to blame on Russia.

So PLEASE do not be propagandised by Thursday’s horrible slaughter into forgetting what is really going on. Powerful weapons make it all too easy for people to do stupid, frightful things. Wars make such things hugely more likely to happen.

In September 1983, the Soviet air force, inflamed by Cold War passions and fears, inexcusably massacred 269 people aboard a Korean Airlines 747.

In July 1988, highly trained US Navy experts aboard the cruiser Vincennes, using ultra-modern equipment, moronically mistook an Iranian Airbus, Iran Air Flight 655, for an F-14 Tomcat warplane. They shot the airliner out of the sky, killing 290 innocent people, including 66 children. All kinds of official untruths were told at the time to excuse this. In October 2001, bungling Ukrainian servicemen on exercise were the main suspects for the destruction of Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 over the Black Sea. Whoever did it, they killed 78 passengers and crew en route from Israel to Novosibirsk – though Ukraine has never officially admitted guilt.

Complex quarrels about blame for such horrors are often never resolved. I am among many who do not believe that Libya had anything to do with the mass murder of those aboard Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988, very likely an Iranian-backed retaliation for the Airbus tragedy. All the evidence points to a terror group operating from Syrian-controlled territory, and none points to Libya.

But at the time of the prosecution, we were trying to make friends with Syria, which has since gone back near the top of our enemies list but may soon be our ally again, against the fanatics of Isis. Confused? You should be.

So, let us just mourn the dead and comfort the bereaved, and regret human folly and the wickedness of war. Let us not allow this miserable event to be fanned into a new war. That is what we did almost 100 years ago, and it is about time we learned something from that.

Dave, the high-five federalist
See how quickly the Government’s fake hostility towards the EU has vanished?

This picture of David Cameron performing a high-five with new European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker shows the truth about the relationship.

Both men understand Mr Cameron has to do a bit of play-acting now and then, to try to whittle away the Ukip vote. Next, they’ll be sharing a bottle of something agreeably federalist.

Finally, Fry gets it right
I CAN’T stand Stephen Fry – smug, vain, tedious Leftist that he is. When we met, at my late brother’s memorial service, he forced his company on me then went away and insulted me on Twitter.

So it gives me no pleasure to praise him for saying at a New Labour gathering that accused persons are innocent until proven guilty. This is never more so than when the accusation is child sex abuse, a charge so horrible it makes people forget their duty to be just.

Shame on those who have since attacked him. The presumption of innocence is never more vital than when only a few people will stand up for it. On this, we’re shoulder to shoulder.

Police fiddling of crime figures is exposed. A few months later, crime figures go up.But what does it matter? We then discover that police probes into 52 per cent of crimes don’t even manage to identify a suspect.

Female politicians won't help real women
Why do people think that women in politics will help ordinary women lead better lives?

Political females are almost all ambitious careerists who have decided, of their own free will, to work outside the home and spurn the task of raising children.

Such people have no time for those who think it better to stay at home and raise the next generation. And they think all women are like them, actively preferring the office to the home. But, in fact, millions of women go out to work because they have to, not because they want to.

The great paradox is that, in many cases, male MPs will be more sympathetic to the real problems of most women.

Personally, I think the public relations-driven cynicism of Mr Cameron’s reshuffle is so blatant that it will disgust rather than inspire. Not merely has he opted for cheap, superficial cosmetic change but, by firing Michael Gove, the Prime Minister has shown himself a disloyal weakling in the face of polls and focus groups. I think Mr Gove’s reforms were greatly over-rated, but he got himself disliked by the right people.

David Cameron pretended to be Mr Gove’s friend and ally. Mr Gove has now found out just how much that was worth. I doubt they’ll be sharing the school run much longer.

Text cop's clear message

Stronger penalties for texting while driving will never work because nobody enforces them.

Worse than that, I clearly observed a police officer texting while driving a van emblazoned with ‘community policing’ in large letters.

If even the police won’t obey it, the law is dead.

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The Word "Extremism" Does not Mean Anything

The word ’extremism’ does not mean anything. I confess, abjectly, to having used it in the past. But for some years now I have been trying very hard not to do so.

 

To the extent that it can be said to have any meaning at all, it is ‘opinion not fashionable, not approved of by mainstream at time under discussion’.

 

Anyone who has been paying attention to the status of various opinions, about morality and politics, over the past 40 years, will easily be able to see that opinions which were ‘extremist’ half a century ago are now in many cases mainstream and almost obligatory, and vice versa. The issue of whether they are correct or not, or just or not, cannot be decided by how modish or unfashionable they happen to be.

 

 

So , as you study the fuss about supposedly extremist-dominated schools in Birmingham and elsewhere, please bear that in mind.

 

The facts about these schools are disputed and hard to pin down.  The original ‘Trojan Horse’ letter on which the whole row is founded does seem, by general agreement, to have been a hoax.

 

Not everyone involved may be telling the whole truth. I am quite prepared to believe some of the more worrying things we have heard about what some children have been taught or told in some of the schools involved. But I am also ready to believe some of  the quite impressive declarations of innocence we have also heard.

 

The real problem we face is that we are still, officially a country which believes in freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, and specifically in freedom of religion. Indeed, I believe these were among the Four Freedoms, so charmingly depicted by Norman Rockwell,  which Franklin Roosevelt recognized as the war aims of the allies in the Second World War.

 

More than that, we are a society which has an established Church, the Christian Church of England, and a country in which the churches, especially the C of E and the Roman Catholics, did much to set up schools for the children of the poor. They did this when the state was more or less uninterested in doing so. Thanks to various treaties between church and state, in which the Churches were in a strong position because of the work they had done, the state conceded large freedoms to the churches, especially the freedom to continue to maintain schools in the state system, which had a religious character and which are allowed to choose many of their pupils on a religious test.

 

In my view the Church of England were diddled, because the promise they extracted in return for ceding control of many schools, that all state schools would have a ‘broadly Christian’ daily act of worship, and that the national faith would be taught as such in schools, has been comprehensively broken. I use the word ‘comprehensive'deliberately,. The creation of vast new American-style high schools has made  it far easier for these obligations to be shelved, forgotten or bureaucratically obstructed .'We just don’t have a hall big enough. We can’t fit it in to the timetable. We don’t have the qualified teachers', etc.

 

I’d be very interested in a survey of how many non-RC state schools actually deal with the Christianity question. I think it would show that most pupils could get through their school careers without ever encountering anything resembling organized Christianity ,as a living faith.

 

Now, one of the things I really like about Muslims is that they are not having any of that. They value their faith, they believe in it, and they see it is one of their main duties in life to pass it on, undiluted, to their sons and daughters.

 

And, since we allow Christians to have state schools, and since we have freedom of conscience, how exactly are we to deny them the freedom to do so, now that there are so many Muslim parents and children living in our country?

I simply cannot see how, without conscious, gross and blatant injustice, this could be done.

 

Now, the neo-conservatives who get into the most frenzied state of mind about alleged ‘extremism’ in schools are also keen supporters of the ‘open border’ and ‘free movement of labour’ policies which have led to the establishment in this and many other European countries of large and thriving Muslim communities.

 

Such policies are an essential part of their belief in global free trade and the downgrading of national sovereignty to a vestige, which all their policies and actions support.  

 

This is an odd contradiction, far too seldom challenged.

 

The fact is that most religious views, examined coldly by those who don’t believe in them, can be portrayed as ‘extreme’. (There's a fine illustration of this in George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman at the Charge’, in which Flashman, posing as a Sepoy, listens to a Sepoy sergeant’s incredulous, scornful  translation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, one of the most beautiful stories in Christian scripture but here portrayed as a description of a more or less mad person).

 

I wonder how many of the firm beliefs of many of my more Calvinist or Romish friends, described in cold and unsympathetic prose, or even some of the sentiments in some quite popular hymns,  could be made to seem like sinister and cultish absurdities, from which the young should be protected, with a little propaganda skill. Western atheists who bother to read Christian scripture are quite good at this sort of thing.

 

What also makes me pause before condemning too vigorously is that many of the Islamic opinions about or drunkenness and general sexual abandon, about which we purse our lips in horror, are more or less exactly what the average Anglican parson, Methodist minister or Roman Catholic priest would have felt (and said openly) in this country before 1914, and in some cases a good deal more recently than that.

 

Women in Europe and the Americas, who since the 1920s have dressed in ways that would have profoundly shocked all previous generations are amazingly unaware (as they trip merrily around the Muslim world)  of how viscerally shocking their appearance and behaviour is to both men and women.

 

It is hard to think of any way of illustrating this, though perhaps if we started getting high-value tourism from alien planets (so high-value that we preferred not to turn it away) , whose female inhabitants wore nothing at all, or dressed as if for pornographic films, and engaged in adventurously unconventional sex in the streets and squares, we might be as shocked as much of  the Arab and Muslim world is by our behaviour. We would, as they do, put up with it and pretend not to notice, but I suspect there might be moments of deep misunderstanding, even so. There would also be resentment.

 

These are the problems of multiculturalism, which encourages the creation of large solitudes next door to each other, of people who don’t necessarily want to integrate with each other, see no good reason to do so and often see several good reasons not to. It’s a tribute to the basic tolerance,  patience and good nature of so many of those involved that we have got into such a mess, in our crowded cities,  with so few open clashes.

 

Now, there is a special difficulty between Islam and Christianity. Islam believes that it is the final revelation, and that it has rendered previous Abrahamic religions obsolete. Christianity it is true, takes the same view of Judaism, or did so, but has now reined itself in. The old C of E Collect for Good Friday, which prayed for the conversion of ‘Jews, Turks, infidels and hereticks ’ has been quietly retired , and Pope John Paul II put a stop to similar trends in the RC Church, both by his personal diplomacy, transparently friendly to Jews and Judaism,  and by movingly referring to the Jews as ‘the elder brothers of our faith’.

 

Islam, it seems to me, hasn’t made this adaptation and shows little sign of doing so. Suggestions that children were urged to join in chants against Christmas are perhaps the most disturbing of the claims (and I stress these are claims)  about Muslim schools which have been made. It is hard to think of any Christian school, however fervent, asking it children to take part in chants dismissing Eid or Ramadan.

 

On the other hand, it’s no rumour that my late brother (though he allowed a plastic Christmas tree in his home) had a strong dislike of the feast,  liked to sing Tom Lehrer’s mordant song about Christmas ( ‘… Drag out the Dickens, Kill the turkeys,  ducks and chickens, deck the halls with hunks of holly, disapproval would be folly, Brother! Here we go again! Etc etc) to anyone who would listen, and this is recorded and available on Youtube, as far as I know.

 

Of course the real worry is that ’extremist’ Islamist teaching will produce graduates of these schools who put into severe practice the idea that they are taught.

 

I know of no way of predicting this. What we know of many who have taken to real terror is that they have been initially poor adherents of the Muslim faith, often hanging around in delinquent groups, before having some sort of late revelation and suddenly turning into zealots; or that they have been disarmingly normal schoolboys, regarded as such by all who knew them, who have later rather inexplicably turned to plots and bombs. And also in some cases that they have overthrown their reason with cannabis, as I believe may well have been the case with the killers of Lee Rigby.  

 

Anyway, English law’s quite simple, or was, and ought to be again.  You’re punished for what you do, not for what you might do, or for what you think about doing, or even for what you talk about.  I think that’s reasonable,  because the gap between idle chatter and action is a very large one, and if people talk openly then we will have much more warning that things are brewing than if they don’t. You can’t prevent all terror, by any amount of laws, however stringent. I suspect that if you do want to detect its gestation, then freedom of speech and a willingness to tolerate ‘extremist’ political groups will make it easier to do so.

 

Incitement to violence is a crime, as it ought to be. But on the bogeyman pretext of terrorism, terrorism which is far more effective than it otherwise would be because both politicians and journalists so readily react and over-react to it, we have begun to whittle away such sensible rules.

 

The Blair creature, back in 2006, insisted on shoving a provision against ‘glorifying’ terrorism (which sounds like something out of the old USSR penal code) in to his Terrorism Act, though wise heads in the House of Lords, seeing the possible difficulties of such a law in a free country, had thrown it out by a large majority. A pity, in my view.

 

But in general, it seems to me that you can’t, in a free country, welcome large numbers of adherents of a certain religion, and then get alarmed and panicky because members of that religion preach doctrines which,  they genuinely believe flow from their faith.  Actions are one thing. Expressions of opinion are quite another. Islam's view of the world is not new to us. We encountered it in the Crusades, in our own empire, especially in India and the Middle East, in our dealings with the Ottomans.  Now it is here, and in some strength.  We are going to have to get used to it.

 

For me, as a Christian who prefers Christianity to Islam, though I necessarily find much to admire in Islam's adherents (especially an undoubted love for God, and a great deal of serious devotion, a good deal of personal and moral courage,  not to mention charity) I am concerned that our approach is so secular, that we seem to think that our expensive weapons, our consumer goods and our technology make it unnecessary for us to offer any other arguments on our own behalf.

 

If only we would be more Christian ourselves, I think we would get on better, and we would also have more persuasive power, not perhaps to convert, but to bring about a coexistence in which Muslims more often recognized the virtues in our faith, and we recognized virtues in theirs, and both sought to emulate the best in the other.  

We're being dragged into a new Cold War by a puffed-up bullfrog (and I don't mean President Putin)

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Stupidity and ignorance rule the world. The trouble is that the stupid and the ignorant think that they are clever and well-informed.

Take Mrs Hillary Clinton, next President of the United States and former chief of American foreign policy. She has directly compared Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hitler. And she has compared events in Crimea to the Czech crisis of 1938.

Dozens of other politicians and grandiose journalists are currently doing the same.

It’s the one thing they think they know about history – that Britain’s pathetic Neville Chamberlain didn’t stand up to evil Adolf Hitler in 1938 at Munich over Czechoslovakia, so making Hitler believe that he could take over the world. And that the brave Winston Churchill then saved the world.

Almost no part of this legend is true. Even those bits that  are true are misleading, with one exception. Hitler was certainly evil. But so was Stalin, the communist mass-murderer who ended up as our main ally in the fight against Hitler.

If we had gone to war to save Czechoslovakia in 1938, we would have been beaten. We had no proper army. Nor did the USA, whose army at that time was about the same size  as Portugal’s.

 When we later went to war to ‘save’ Poland,  we didn’t in fact save it at all, leaving it to be bombed, starved and massacred by Hitler, carved up between Germany and the USSR and later swallowed whole by Stalin. And we were beaten – just not actually invaded.

Churchill was indeed a great man, but his achievement was to secure our bare survival, which came at the desperate cost of our national wealth and our empire. Later in the war, Churchill appeased Stalin by giving him the whole of Poland and Eastern Europe. Just like Chamberlain at Munich seven years before, he had no choice. The Yalta conference, which finalised these arrangements, was as disgracefully self-interested as Munich.

Yet the silly, half-educated politicians of today still like  to pose as tough guys with the following formula, addressed to anyone who suggests that Russia might have a case over Ukraine and Crimea.

It goes: ‘Putin is Hitler. You are Neville Chamberlain. I  am Winston Churchill – hear me roar.’

Apart from knowing nothing about European history, and apart from their bone-headed inability to distinguish Christian Russia from the communist USSR, these people also don’t understand what is going on in Ukraine.

It never occurs to them that Russia has good historical reasons to fear its neighbours. It never crosses their mind that the borders drawn by the victorious West in 1992, like  those drawn at Versailles in 1919, are an unsustainable, unjust mistake.

They never ask why Britain (or the USA) should be hostile to Russia, or what the quarrel between us actually is. What  is it to us whose flag flies over Sevastopol? Yet it matters greatly to those who live there.

They cast every Russian action as evil, and every Ukrainian action as saintly. The world is not like that.

I hated the old USSR as an evil empire. But, having lived in Moscow, I feel a strong affection for post-communist Russia and count Russians as good friends. That does not make me an apologist for Mr Putin. I have repeatedly condemned him for his suppression of opposition and the many evil things done by his state. I can see his faults and do not pretend they do not exist.

 But the warmongers are selectively blind. Hardly any British news media have mentioned an event in Kiev last week. A group of five louts, one of them an MP from the thuggish, racialist ‘Svoboda’ party, forced their way into  the office of Oleksandr Panteleymonov, chief of the main Ukrainian TV station. There they physically attacked him and shouted anti-Russian racial abuse at him.

The MP involved is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament’s committee on ‘Freedom of Speech’. And the louts were  so proud of what they did that they filmed it and posted it on the internet.

These people are supposed to be our allies and friends.

On their behalf, our Prime Minister is puffing himself up like a bullfrog, and busily creating a new Cold War that will benefit nobody except spies and weapons-makers, for a cause he doesn’t understand and can’t explain.

If this is the kind of statesman it produces, it strikes me that Eton can’t be such a good school after all.

Nazi-obsessed movie world has lost the plot

There’s something about a swastika that captivates film-makers and publishers. But is the effect at last wearing off?

The recent film The Book Thief has a daft plot and an even dafter voice-over, supposedly provided by the Angel of Death. It hasn’t been a wild success, and no wonder. If it weren’t set in Nazi Germany, with plenty of swastikas, would it have been made at all?

Meanwhile, really interesting moral puzzles in the modern world don’t seem to attract film-makers. On a recent visit to New York, I saw the fascinating Israeli thriller Bethlehem, about an Arab youth who collaborates with the Israelis. One of its many themes is how well Jews and Arabs get on when left to their own devices.

How I long for someone to make films out of the fine stories of Matt Rees, set in this part of the world.

******

Half a century of liberal crime policies under all parties have utterly failed. As I write, the prisons of England and Wales (I expect Scotland is  much the same) are full almost to bursting. I am not sure why this isn’t a major story.

Some figures: in 1960, the England and Wales prison population was 27,000. By 1990, it had hit almost 45,000. Last week it stood at 85,338, with room for only 568 more. It won’t take long to find them.

Remember, this has happened despite the watering down of  all penalties and the repeated slashing of sentences. Yet nobody learns from it. It will  be ‘solved’ by letting more prisoners out, and sending fewer criminals to prison.

******

‘Child care’ actually means child neglect. The Government is bribing us with our own money, to dump our children with strangers. The only thing they won’t subsidise is children being raised by their own married parents. That’s penalised, and despised.

*******

Why rejoice at the abolition of annuities? It’s just an admission that saving of all kinds is pointless when interest  is microscopic and state-sponsored inflation is debauching the currency.

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I’m so sorry... but I don’t mean it, it isn’t my fault and no, you can’t sue me

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

Why won’t anybody say sorry properly any more?

The miserable behaviour of the police officers in the Plebgate affair, questioned by the Home Affairs Committee, is just the latest example of the strange apology crisis which has this country in its grip: too few of the right sort; too many of the wrong sort.

Nobody is ever straightforwardly sorry for what he  has done.

He may be ‘sorry if’ you were upset, or inconvenienced or offended. But listen carefully. This is just a way of telling you to stop being so sensitive. It is not an admission of fault. Watch out for the treacherous little ‘if’, that gives the game away.

He doesn’t regret doing the thing that angered you. But he hasn’t the courage to say so.  He just thinks it is tiresome that you are making a fuss about it, and wants to shut you up by faking contrition he doesn’t feel.

Then there is what I call the Railway Apology. There are now millions of these worthless things in circulation, like the old Zimbabwe dollar. They trickle out of station loudspeakers in an unstoppable, computer-generated flow.

They result from some long-ago market research, which showed that passengers thought they were due a bit of penitence for the lateness and unreliability they constantly suffered.

They did, and they do, but what they really wanted was some sort of readiness to put things right in future. It’s no good saying sorry for doing something you intend to repeat almost exactly, within a few hours, and then again and again for as long as you live, or as long as your franchise lasts.

It’s also no good getting a robot to do it for you. Real apologies stick in the throat, involve some shame and humiliation, and are intensely personal.

Perhaps it’s because the Japanese take apologies so seriously that their railways are so much better than ours.

Imagine the directors of some wretched rail company lined up in their suits at a big London terminus, bowing deeply to their customers as they promised to make amends for years of profiteering, cheeseparing and neglect. You can’t? Nor can I.

Some of this is of course the result of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s too little-known legal time bomb, the delayed action decision to allow American-style ambulance-chasing no-win, no-fee lawyers to operate in this country.

The 1990 Courts and Legal Services Act (Section 58) cleared the way, followed in 1995 by the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations. These, not ‘Human Rights’ or ‘Health and Safety’, are the source of the lawyer-infested culture in which we now dwell, in which a simple, decent and sincere apology has been turned into a dangerous admission of liability.

I am truly sorry about that. But it’s not my fault.

A lovely sign that Dave's in trouble

You can always tell when the Prime Minister’s poll ratings are in trouble, for photographs of Samantha Cameron, looking lovely, will soon appear in all the papers.

And this time she looked lovely in her sari, left. But is this sort of thing really wise?

Our Indian community are a great asset. But so are many others, from whom the Camerons might seek votes.

Will we see Mrs Cameron in a hijab, attending a mosque? And why is it only the womenfolk who go all the way?

How about the premier in a shalwar kameez?

Come to that, when things get really bad, will  we discover that our head of government has quietly slipped out of the back entrance in  a burqa?

I knew we were well on our way down the plughole when, aged nine, I watched our last battleship, HMS Vanguard, being towed out of Portsmouth to the breakers on a sultry afternoon in August 1960. She ran  aground on a mudbank, just  to make it worse.

Now poor old Pompey is to lose its shipyards. This is sad for so many reasons. That battered old city has suffered quite enough in the last hundred years. But there’s also this point.

Nobody is supposed to mention it, but defence contracts have always been a quiet way of protecting our own industries and jobs from foreign competition.

Everyone’s supposed to be in favour of free trade, though you can be sure the French, the Germans and the USA look after their own all the time. But we won’t do it. We abide by rules our rivals mock. And so the dole queues lengthen, and we lose the skills to recover.

How funny that we are being accused of spying on the Germans from our hideous new embassy in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse.

It reminds me of a much more interesting unsolved case, revealed by that mysterious but authentic writer of spy thrillers Alan Judd. He says a British diplomat was once caught spying on us, on behalf of the European Union.

The wretched traitor’s reward was to have his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then president  of the European Commission.

Australia's losing its past AND its future

I HAVE been spending a  few precious days in Australia (my first visit in  20 years) and New Zealand (my first visit).

It is still very moving for a British person to experience these two civilisations, which are rooted in our ideas of justice and liberty.

Would either place be so happy and free had they been colonised instead by China, Japan, France or Germany? I don’t think so. Yet the link is weakening.

Thrilling as it is for me to  see Australian warships flying ensigns very similar  to our own, and moving as  it is to see the Queen’s head on the coins, these things  are vestiges.

The British elements are all old, from the age of the floral clock, the war memorial, the silver sixpence, the domed Guildhall and the bowling green. Now they have kilometres and dollars, symbols of globalisation and of US influence. Political correctness has swept away the old tough male Aussie  ideal, as I learned in detail when I appeared on the local version of Question Time.

And in Sydney the other day, Rupert Murdoch urged mass immigration on Australia, much as he has supported it here. If he gets his way, Australia will become ‘the world’s most diverse nation’, though Britain under the same policy must be competing  for that dubious title.

I hope he doesn’t succeed. If Australia just becomes another money-making multicultural desert of concrete and plastic, its origins in our misty islands forgotten, it will lose much more than it gains.

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