Naivety Olympics to Gather in Euphoria, Utopia. Apply Now!

I begin this posting with an official communication from Mr M.T. Vessel, President-for-Life of the International Naivety Olympics Commission: ‘To the gullible and easily-bamboozled of all nations, I today issue this call, that you gather next year, in the month of Thermidor, in Euphoria, capital of Utopia, for the Naivety Olympics of 2015. Don’t worry about travel bookings or hotels.  Accept our assurances that your flights will arrive on time, and your hotels will be ready and waiting. Plans for a new stadium are likewise well-advanced, and the fact that it does not yet exist, and that no work has begun on it, should not put you off. After all, you swallow much bigger unlikelihoods every day.

 

'Not since the Cold War, when the same festival was held permanently in Moscow, and welcomed thousands of western academics and journalists convinced of the greatness of Soviet Communism (though many of them preferred to take part by not actually going there) , has there been such a  strong force for naivety in the world.’

 

 

Nowadays of course the global naivety movement focuses on Ukraine, where the Olympically Naïve heroically contend that Ukraine is subject to mischievous intervention only from one direction, that of Russia. Now, as someone who thinks that Russia has a strong case in this region, I would not for a second deny that Russian intervention is taking place there. Of course it is. Even though there has been scant hard evidence and the Moscow government has absurdly denied it, no grown-up person could fail to recognise that Russian agents and military personnel have been active in stirring up, organising and directing the separatist movement around Donyetsk , and were similarly engaged in the Crimea.

 

This does not mean that they were not blowing on genuine sparks of real feeling. But the use by the separatists of common symbols, flags and slogans, their ability to form into substantial crowds, build effective barricades, locate key buildings, acquire articulate spokesmen , all speak to me of organisation. And it takes little effort to work out where that will have come from. Also the whole thing has been skilfully amplified by sympathetic media coverage from, Russia, which has given great prominence to, and great encouragement to, the crowds.

 

In Crimea, the lawful presence of large Russian forces in and around Sevastopol made the action much simpler. In Eastern Ukraine, it is more complicated. But, as they say in Louisiana, ‘If you find a turtle on top of a fencepost, you know it didn’t get there by accident’.

 

Well and good. The normal deductive powers of any sentient human must lead him to this conclusion. I’m a defender of Russia’s reasonable concerns in this part of the world, but I don’t see why that should lead to me to deny or ignore the obvious truth, or pretend that ‘my’ side has not behaved unscrupulously and dishonestly. In the same way, I don’t make excuses for official Russian lawlessness, or pretend that Vladimir Putin is some sort of liberal democrat. He is a sinister tyrant.

 

 

Yet examine the parallel developments in Western Ukraine and on the Kiev Maidan, and you will find the supporters of the EU quite unable to make the same judgements of what has been happening there. When I was growing up, we used to laugh at the very phrase ‘spontaneous demonstration’ It’s such an obvious oxymoron. You might as well find that a Spontaneous Battleship of 60,000 tons displacement, armed with 12 16" guns had appeared off your coastline.  There is no such thing as a spontaneous demonstration. Demonstrations need a great deal of planning, they need objectives, route plans, timings, common slogans, symbols, banners, speakers, sound equipment, spokesmen and women to deal with the media. Once they become, as did the Maidan, long-term occupations of streets and buildings, they require logistics, food, sanitation, shelter, shift systems, some hierarchy of authority. All these things need money, generally ready cash. They also die without media support , to reflect their own importance back at them, to encourage those already there to stay, and urge new recruits to arrive.

 

This, we are asked to believe, grew out of thin air in Kiev. Nobody planned it, nobody helped it, its symbols and slogans appeared from nowhere, stimulated only by the touching idealism of the Ukrainian people.

 

Over the weekend, I had the chance to put this to Radoslaw (Radek) Sikorski, Foreign Minister of Poland, who started communicating with me on ‘Twaddle’ after I drew attention to his interview in the Washington Post the other day, in which he made it clear (despite the absurd flounderings of Roger Boyes on this subject at last Thursday’s meeting in London, see earlier posts)  that the EU very much desires that Ukraine should join it.

 

From what I can see,  my interlocutor really is the Polish Foreign Minister. If this is an elaborate satire, perhaps someone could tell me so. Mr Boyes having gone off to Waitrose when he began losing the argument with me, I’ve been having it out with Mr Sikorski, on and off, ever since.

 

I began by asking him (about 11.00 am Sunday , BST) ‘Do you seriously maintain that the Maidan protest was not in any way encouraged or assisted by persons from outside Ukraine’ .

 

And despite repeating the question, and teasing him for not answering it, I do not believe I have yet had a definitive reply to this question.

 

I have, of course, had the usual answers one gets in such discussions, to things I have not said, and (hilariously) the suggestion that Nigel Farage addressing a meeting of Eurosceptic Poles in Warsaw is the equivalent to Victoria Nuland (the USA’s Assistant Secretary of State), or Baroness (Catherine) Ashton (The EU High representative for Foreign Affairs) mingling happily with the Maidan demonstrators. If either of these charing ladies has souight to mingle with the demonstrators of Donyetsk or Slavyansk, let alone hand out biscuits to them, I have not heard of it. So i think it reasonable to assume that their appearance was a sign of partialityin an internal Ukrainian quarrel 

 

Ms Nuland, as we know from her leaked phone calls, has gone a good deal further than handing out comestibles.

 

Mr Farage, unlike these people, does not speak for any government, national or supranational, and is not proposing the expansion of EU power into a currently independent country. He is not the High Representative of anything. Mr Sikorski's  parallel, to the extent it exists at all, is exceedingly feeble. But if (say) the Swiss and Norwegian premiers went to Warsaw and began addressing anti-Euro rallies in Nowy Swiat (abolition of the Zloty remains a contentious issue in Poland),  I think Mr Sikorski would be speaking quite sharply to them, their ambassadors and foreign ministers. He would see it (rightly) as an improper breach of Polish national sovereignty. 

 

Mr Sikorski also appears not to have answered my question to him about what the CIA Director was recently doing in Kiev.

 

We have had a number of other exchanges, which subscribers to ‘Twaddle’ may easily access. I was interested to see that this much-lauded spokesman of the New Europe thinks that Britain held a referendum on Common Market membership *before* joining, a schoolboy mistake, especially for a fluent English speaker educated for some time at Oxford.

 

Membership was a fait accompli at the time of the referendum and those who recall it directly (as I do) know that it was shamelessly rigged, with the Wilson government sending out two pamphlets urging a ‘Yes’ vote (The ‘Yes’ campaign’s and the Government’s own, also in favour of continued membership,  though the Cabinet was in fact divided) and only one urging a ‘No’ vote. I might add that not one major newspaper supported the ‘No’ campaign (and you can imagine how the BBC behaved).  

 

If this sort of thing happened in the Russian Federation, Mr Sikorski would of course condemn it, and rightly so.

 

(Personal note: I voted ‘No’,  largely because an executive on the local paper for which I then worked killed a story I had written for the morning of the vote, in which I revealed serious dishonesty and skulduggery by the local ‘Yes’ campaign. Until then, I had been intending to vote ‘yes’, having been put off the ‘No’ campaign by the grotesque fake-Churchillian rhetoric of (of all people) Peter Shore, at a packed pubic meeting in Swindon ).

 

It really is time that those who want a serious discussion of the Ukraine issue recognised that it is what it is, a power struggle between two blocs – Russia, an unchanging historic force in central and eastern Europe, which regards Ukraine as an important part of its defences; and the EU, the modern manifestation of German economic, diplomatic and political power, which likewise sees Ukraine as the key to its continued expansion and prosperity.

 

Neither side is wholly right and neither side is wholly wrong. A compromise, involving permanent Ukrainian neutrality, a good deal of federalism especially on language issues,  and considerable economic aid to that country from both directions, would seem to me to be the best solution for the *people* of that unhappy region.

 

 It is my view that the ‘West’ is taking sides, and pretending falsely that  it is a Good versus Evil contest,  because of Russia’s stance as the defender of national sovereignty, especially since its refusal to take part in the destabilisation of Syria, which Saudi Arabia ( a nation so important it is barely ever discussed in public) wanted and which the United States (I suspect) promised Saudi Arabia it would achieve. A Russian defeat in Ukraine, the 'West' believes,  will lead to the overthrow (by 'people power') of Vladimir Putin and the installation in Moscow of a 'pro-Western' Yeltsin-style government, just as corrupt and repressive as Mr Putin's. but complaisant about the neo-conservative attack on national sovereignty in Syria and elsewhere.

 

As soon as one recognises this, that it is an old-fashioned  contest between two major powers,  the issue is transformed from some kind of ludicrous moral campaign for a ‘free Ukraine’ ( an objective many decades away by any route) into what it actually is, a power struggle in which postmodern weapons, orchestrated mobs,  biased broadcasting, etc, are used to achieve the aims which, before 1939, were sought through naked force. But these postmodern methods are not without risks, nor are they invariably peaceful. On the contrary, they can kill as surely as any tank or bomber can kill.

 

From the beginning of this controversy my main concern has been to try to avoid the horrors which are now emerging. I here reproduce what I wrote near the start of this episode, in the Mail on Sunday of

26^th January under the headline ‘Fanning the Flames of Another Nightmare’

 

 ‘NOW that we have reduced Syria to ruins and refugee camps through our noble benevolence, we want to do the same to Ukraine.

Western media and politicians, who do not even understand their own societies, repeatedly descend on foreign countries posing as liberators, encouraging and funding rebellions.

Too late, they find they have called up unstoppable, demonic violence, and lit fires they cannot put out. Ukraine is a prime candidate for a disastrous civil war.

Its people used to live together relatively harmoniously. But the Ukrainian-speaking West is very different from the Russian-speaking East, and the EU's clodhopping intervention in Kiev is encouraging divisions between the two.

The people who backed the rebels in Syria claimed to be surprised when many turned out to be Islamist fanatics of the sort we try to deport from Britain. Maybe they really were surprised, though it was quite predictable that such people would hate Damascus's secular state.

Well, let us spare these geniuses any surprises about Ukraine. Already a sinister faction called 'Pravy Sektor', violent and ugly, has elbowed aside the smiley crowds in Kiev. Nationalism in this much-invaded, blood-steeped part of the world has an especially dark past. Do we really want to revive it?’

 

I stand by every word.

 

 

 

STOP PRESS:

 

Next year’s Naivety Olympics in Utopia have been cancelled, following outbreaks of severe violence in the city of Euphoria, where armed riot police have been battling with crowds equipped with iron bars and Molotov cocktails. The riots are believed to have been sparked by the fury of freedom-loving citizens over the failure of talks about a planned accession agreement between Utopia and the EU. Cloud-Cuckoo Land, Utopia’s powerful neighbour, had offered an alternative deal, supported by many in the East of Utopia, whereas Western Utopians tend to favour the EU route.  The proposed site of the Games has now been set aside for mass graves. ‘We’re used to this sort of thing’ said a Utopian government spokesman. ‘Somehow, nobody ever actually gets here’. Meanwhile the Utopian Parliament discussed plans to adopt a new name for their country - EUtopia

You Never Know.... Oh, yes, you do

The worst possible argument for keeping Trident is the most common one. It can be summed up as  ‘You Never Know…’

We all know people who live their lives on this principle. Their houses are jammed with clutter, their attics and garages and garden shed bulge with books, manuals for obsolete devices, old mowers, sheaves of gas bills and bank statements, unwearable items of clothing. None of this stuff will ever be looked at or used again. One day, the Salvation Army, or some house clearance service, will cart it all away (mostly to the dump, though some will end up in charity shops where it should have been all along)  after the owners are dead.

I find this quite forgiveable,  even charming, though I would have an almost permanent skip outside my house, so that I could throw large things away more easily, if I could. I think it’s Davies, in ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ who takes an unreasoning, fierce joy in hurling large, unwanted objects overboard from the yacht ‘Dulcibella’ , particularly stoves. It occurs to me that I can’t remember Davies ever having a Christian name in that marvellous book, much as I didn’t have a Christian name during my prep-school years.

But while it’s charming in an individual, and understandable, it’s stupid for a government to cling to things for which there is no rational case.

Britain built its first nuclear bomb (and it was a big struggle) largely because the 1945-51 Labour government realised that in those days it was essential to maintain any sort of standing with the USA. Ernest Bevin, who I suspect of having been a great man,  is supposed to have resolved to go ahead with the project after being treated like an office boy by Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes,  a not-very-well-informed Southerner. He is supposed to have said : ‘I do not want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at, or to, as I was. We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’

A similar sentiment was later voiced by Bevin’s near-namesake and left-wing rival, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, who said he did not want a future Foreign Secretary to go ‘naked into the conference chamber’, as he rejected his old left-wing friends’ calls for unilateral British nuclear disarmament in 1957, during the first early flourishing of anti-bomb sentiment in Britain.

There’s a very interesting story attached to this. Labour’s conference (then a real, living body which took actual votes on policy) voted to ban the  bomb in 1960, and Hugh Gaitskell made one of his two most powerful speeches (the other being when he had correctly warned that British entry into European union would be ‘the end of a thousand years of history’) . On this occasion he said that there were  ‘some of us, Mr Chairman, who will fight, and fight, and fight again to save the party we love’.

There was then a powerfully-organised campaign, throughout the Labour Party( then still an organisation with a large and active membership) run by a body called the Campaign for Democratic Socialism. This worked through Labour ward meetings to reverse the Ban the Bomb policy.

By this time Britain had the Bomb, though it was a close-run thing. One of the main reasons’ for Bevin’s annoyance with Byrnes had been the ingratitude of the USA for Britain’s original work on developing the Atomic Bomb, and the shut-down of US co-operation.

C.P. Snow, ( regular readers here will know of my soft spot for thus much-abused author) , wrote two novels on this topic. The first ‘The New Men’ concerns the struggle to develop the bomb, in many cases by men of the Left, scientists of the pre-1939 sort who were often utopians, in a place which closely resembles the Harwell laboratory . The second ‘Corridors of Power’, deals with a Tory Defence minister who tries (with much help from the civil servants and some discreet American backing) to abandon the British bomb on pragmatic grounds. This turned out to be politically impossible at that stage, as it would have been. There was still a good rational argument (in my view unanswerable) that Soviet domination of Western Europe was ultimately only prevented by MAD, and that a British and a French nuclear force made MAD that much more assured, because the Soviets could never be sure, that, even if the USA held back, their cities were safe from nuclear destruction.  Both books are still well worth reading now, as historical documents and stories.

One of Snow’s attractions to me was his willingness to deal with large issues of this kind, intelligently and with great background knowledge. Snow had been in the centre of civil service decision-making since the beginning of the 1939-45 war, and knew what he was writing about.  He was very good at describing intrigue (‘The Masters’) trials and scandals(‘The Sleep of Reason’ and ‘The Affair’), fascinated by science and scientists, and frank about his own left-wing passions. I’ve never seen quite why D.H.Lawrence and Henry James (who, as H.G.Wells once sniped, ‘chewed more than he bit off’) are supposed to be such Olympian geniuses by comparison.

Like another dedicated left-winger, Claud Cockburn, he seems to have had a respect for the type of conservative who is so secure in his position and beliefs that he doesn’t give a damn about offending his own side when necessary. But I digress.

The problem here is that at some point the argument about the Bomb got mixed up with the pro-Soviet Left’s  desire to break up NATO and make the USSR the principal military, diplomatic and economic power in Europe. Part of this resulted from the left’s revulsion (in my view justified) against Harry Truman’s use of the bomb in Hiroshima, and even more so by the second bomb on Nagasaki. A sort of case can perhaps be made for Hiroshima, though many historians, with access to the full documents of the time,  now dispute the idea that Hiroshima forced Japan to surrender (she was about to do so anyway). But none can be made for Nagasaki. 

By the way, the point about the bombs in ’The War Game’ being Soviet ones is this. Much of the CND case, and indeed the strongest part of it,  was about the immorality and wickedness of even maintaining such cruel weapons, let alone using them. But CND campaigned only against British bombs, not least because anyone who campaigned against the Soviet bomb would have been locked up if they had done so on the territory of the USSR. This fact rather made the point, to most supporters of the Bomb, of what the argument was all about. But it didn’t seem to have occurred to most CND supporters, especially in the ‘Ban Cruise’ era, where much of the anti-cruise propaganda seemed to suggest that cruise missiles wouldn’t just be based here, but used to attack Britain.
The argument that the West’s nuclear weapons were specifically meant *not* to be used, and that if they ever were used they would have failed in their purpose, didn’t always get across.

Having dwelt in that era, and under that supposed threat, I must confess to having been entirely free of fears about dying in a nuclear holocaust, as Mutual Assured Destruction made perfect sense to me, not least because the Cuba crisis had shown that it worked.

I was much more worried that Europe would disarm and become Sovietised, or even that a Soviet invasion might succeed. People should remember that the USSR was constantly trying to detach West Germany from NATO with plans for nuclear-free zones and so forth.
The Kremlin had crushed opposition by force or secret police terror in East Germany(19530 Poland (1956) , Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), and it had compelled Poland’s government to crush Solidarity after 1980 as well, meantime invading Afghanistan. The installation of the Pioneer (SS20) missiles was aimed ( as the novelist James Buchan puts it in his interesting book ‘A Heart’s Journey in Winter’) directly at the Social Democratic Party of Germany.  Left-wing Germans might have disavowed Marxism. But they had no special love for the USA, and were still sentimentally attached to socialist internationalism. Their former leader, Willi Brandt, had been much closer to the Soviets than he had ever let on, and not just because of the East German agent at his elbow, Gunther Guillaume.  And all Germans dreaded having another war on German soil.

There were millions of Germans held hostage in East Germany. Meanwhile, the then-perpetual German Foreign Secretary Hans-Dieter Genscher,  worked hard to smooth relations both with East Berlin and Moscow. It could have happened. German neutrality wasn’t impossible. And then, so much for NATO.

And after that, what? . Well, people said Finland, a Western country forced into neutrality by Soviet Power, wasn’t so bad. In fact, the Kremlin had a right to veto appointments to the Finnish government, but general Western prosperity, and the very existence of NATO, kept Finland freer than it would otherwise have been. Imagine, instead, a Europe in which all the countries were ‘Finlandised’ and there was no NATO counterbalance. There were powerful Communist Parties in Italy and France, and a big fellow-travelling movement in Britain, concentrated in the trade unions.

Here , readers will also see that the Warsaw Pact planned carefully for what they hoped would be the future.

But all this is one with Nineveh and Tyre. The Soviet Communist party will never come back. Russia, as a European rather than as a global power is no threat to Britain, and is in my view a potential ally if we ever escape from the EU. The principal threat to British independence and liberty is from that EU. A nuclear weapon (despite one strange comment here) will certainly not help us shake free of that. Switzerland, which has no bomb, has managed to put up a better fight against Brussels and Berlin than we have. Likewise Norway.

I cannot see any reason why any nuclear-armed power in the Middle East or further east should be interested in destroying London . But if such a threat developed, there are much lower-tech ways of delivering nuclear weapons than the wildly elaborate Trident, or its even more wildly elaborate (and costly) planned successor.  What this country needs is a navy sufficient to protect its shores and to project power in regions where we have influence, or where we need to protect our citizens from piracy.

Our air force needs to be able to defend our skies, and our army to be available to defend our shores and to be sent, rapidly and effectively, to protect our people and interests abroad. To achieve this, we need to work constantly to maintain a skilled core of professionals, and to update our equipment to the latest standards.

I might add that the main threat to our strategic independence currently comes from the approaching energy crisis, when the forced shutdown of old nuclear and coal-fired power stations will make us wholly dependent on foreign gas and electricity (and unreliable wind). A huge, French-style programme of building nuclear power stations is the only serious answer to this, and would be a much better way of spending the money than on the Thunderbirds fantasy, Trident, a weapon bigger than the country which owns it, designed to attack an enemy who ceased to exist 20 years ago and who will never return. 

Could I Push the Hangman's Lever? What about Finland? And other questions

A few brief and necessarily hurried responses. Scandinavian countries are often advanced, by left-wingers, as models of how to do things, etc. I have myself noted Norway’s successful existence outside the EU, for different reasons (Norway, like us, has oil and gas. Unlike us, it made wise use of them).

But these countries are really city states. They do not suffer many of the problems which blight us.  I believe Finland’s current population is 5.4 million. Its cities are spacious and its countryside sparsely populated ( I have visited it once, briefly). It is generally prosperous and stable, and has been since the end of the  Second World War left it as a neutral state. Its main internal problems used to be, as far as I know, connected with lingering hostility towards Swedes, seen as colonial oppressors.

What it does not have is the thing that curses this country – a powerful class system, probably originating in the Norman conquest, reinforced by a brutal 19th century industrialisation and now made worse by a 21st century de-industrialisation.

Britain’s class problems, often death to talent and hope if you are born on the wrong side of the divide, are the curse of our state education system. That is why enlightened socialists such as R.H.Tawney were very keen on the grammar school system which – first with scholarships and later through local authority free places – opened up good education to the children of the poor.

Of course, they did not totally succeed. There weren’t enough grammar schools in many areas, and the primary schools which fed them were often inadequate. Many, many things could have been done to widen the road upwards. But they did a lot of good, and now that road is completely closed.

There is also the powerful secondary point that not all bright children are *academically* bright, or want an intensive academic education of the kind grammar schools provide.  Many would benefit much more from a predominantly technical education, though this should also be coupled with the teaching of culture, history and language so as to permit the maximum enjoyment of life. I believe it is the case in several continental countries that the plumber or the electrician who comes to fix your pipes or wiring will be quite able to discuss literature and classical music, because his teachers never assumed that working with your hands meant that you could let your brain atrophy.

Each country has different problems. Ours were better solved by an admission that class barriers exist and need to be broken by schools. The comprehensive system fixed the class borders where they were, and let them there. It also (as I explained in the article) lowered the standards of all our schools, because its inventors could never admit openly that it was a huge experiment in social engineering. Nor could they, nor can they,  admit that it has failed.

I shall leave the discussion of cannabis for a bit, except to note how interesting it si that first-person accounts of the sad fates of cannabis users provoke so much rage and fury among the dope community. If they are so sure there’s no connection, why would they worry so? They are angry because deep down they fear that I am right.

 I intend to spend some time over the weekend grading Mr Wooderson’s more recent postings on the subject. 

I am once again accused of nostalgia, by someone who obviously doesn’t actually read what I write. I once again deny it. The past is gone. It is the future that concerns me, and the fact that we insist on choosing the wrong future. Nor were the 1950s any kind of paradise.

Luckett Bell asks if those who favour the death penalty should be prepared to carry it out. Not necessarily. We pay soldiers, sailors and airmen to deter (by being prepared and trained to kill) or actually to kill our external enemies. I don’t see why I should pay a hangman to deter (by being prepared to and trained to kill)  or kill our internal enemies . I think the parallel is exact. Some US states have elaborate systems under which the prison officer who throws the switch for an execution is one of several and does not know if he is the one responsible. I have no special objection to this, if it comforts those involved (like the supposed blank bullet in one of the rifles given to a firing squad) . But a hangman (whose action is essentially the physical exercise of the will of justice) is a skilled person, and has to be personally involved, and I can’t see how this could be anonymised. As I think hanging the most effective and humane method of execution, this makes such a device impossible. I’m sure Albert Pierrepoint was affected by his actions, but if I am right he did a great deal of good, by keeping this country much less violent than it was after he was retired. I do know, by the way, that he later came to view capital punishment as vengeance, and to oppose it. While this is quite understandable (many soldiers become pacifists for similar reasons),  I think he was wrong. On the other hand, this story hardly suggests that he was corrupted or turned into an unfeeling monster, by his duties. I certainly wouldn't volunteer for the job. I would find it very difficult. But I find many responsibilities hard to face, and that doesn't mean that, if it came to it, I wouldn't face them.

Oh,  ‘Legal Highs’. Some people seem to think there is some sort of clincher here.  I can’t see why. Apart from the fact that, to all intents and purposes cannabis is now a ‘legal high’, since the laws against it aren’t enforced,   it is much like the conversion of alcohol (since the 1980s) from something generally drunk in moderation in company, into a mind-obliterating drug consumed by hundreds of thousands of people with the sole purpose of getting drunk. Self-stupefaction is morally wrong. Our society has abandoned that belief, in law, morals and custom, and the abandonment of the alcohol licensing laws, accompanied the hollowing out of the drug laws, have created a society of debauchery and licence in which self-stupefaction is regarded as normal and desirable.  Just look at the pitiful, tragic ‘ Freshers’ Weeks’ at our ‘universities’ where the young, liberated from the restraints of home, are inducted en masse into drunkenness, sexual licence and drugs.

This is ultimately a moral question, and a question of morals being reinforced by law. If we still had morals, and still used the law to reinforce them, there would be a lot less demand for self-stupefaction. There would also be a lot more discontent with the squalid, incompetent , corrupt nature of our society and civilisation. But, in a permanent haze of legal and illegal ‘highs’, we passively accept our third world lot, which will end in the miserable enslavement of our descendants, the fate which always waits for civilisations which commit suicide.  

 

 

 

 

 

Answers to Correspondents

I have here compiled in one place many of the several answers I gave in many different places to many different correspondents on Sunday and Monday. Some of you may have missed some or all of them. I will first of all give a new answer to recent correspondent who - absurdly - cites the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971 as evidence of a British 'war against drugs'. As he would know if he had read anything previously posted here, that Act was in fact the instrument for the unofficial decriminalisation of cannabis use, combined with official endorsement of the fiction that cannabis is a 'soft' drug,  which has continued to foster widespread cannabis use throughout the ensuing 40 years I advise him to read the archives. Other contributors may also be willing to help him.
 
CERTAINLY SMUG. NOT SPECIALLY CLEVER
 
I am asked by someone who thinks he is very clever 'has it occurred to you that vast quantities of people deranged enough to commit violent crimes are on antidepressants precisely because doctors have already realised that they are unbalanced?' Yes, it has occurred to me, though 'antidepressants' tend not to be prescribed (see below) to 'unbalanced' people, but to unhappy people, I am also aware of some perfectly sane and balanced people, known to me, who have been prescribed 'antidepressants' by lazy or venal doctors and have then become ill.
 
But it is not an adequate explanation of the correlation between rampage shootings and medication. Not least because rampage shooters include persons who were not, so far as we know, *prescribed* these pills (I have never seen any evidence that a doctor prescribed the Unabomber's 'antidepressants') but obtained them illicitly, and because the list also includes persons unhinged by anabolic steroids, not prescribed for 'depression' or 'unbalance' (for which the response would presumably be not 'antidepressants' but the equally suspect 'antipsychotics' which have not been involved) and also Jared Loughner, a heavy smoker of cannabis, again not prescribed. Further, it fails to explain the fact that such rampage shootings were more or less unknown until the advent of widescale taking of mind-altering drugs. Can this clever person explain that? Every one of these cases should be investigated for the presence of these mind-altering drugs in the body of the shooter, or his past use of them. When the facts are known I suspect the truth will become very clear. Until then why do such people wish to resist the unveiling of the truth with such smug, self-satisfied and wilfully incurious reasoning?
 
POOR ARGUMENTS AGAINST AN INQUIRY
 
It is wonderful to see the variety of excuses advanced for not wanting an inquiry into the correlation between drugtaking and rampage killings. One can only speculate on why people might be so hostile to such a transparently sensible suggestion. My speculation is that they are afraid of what the truth will show, and its implications for their own beliefs and morals. One, the killers were all crazed anyway, so the drugs are immaterial.
 
Two, I haven't enough evidence (although that is precisely what I seek). Three, apparently these rampage killings are somehow caused by 'yellow journalism'. I am at a loss to understand this claim, but it has been made. Four, 'it's the guns, stupid' only it demonstrably isn't, as a surprising number of these cases have taken place in countries or jurisdictions, Germany and Norway included, where guns are tightly controlled. And the USA, where guns have always been freely available, has only recently begun to experience killing sprees (and did I mention that the culprits of the Columbine High School killings appear to have been on 'antidepressants' too?). This is in fact crucial, and deals pretty much effectively both with the 'gun control' and the 'they were already unhinged' arguments.
 
For the USA has always contained plenty of guns, and plenty of unhinged people. But the advent of rampage killings in that country (and elsewhere) coincides with the advent of legal and illegal mind-altering drugs. What else changed? Music? TV? Computer games? Maybe, but these don't actually enter the brain and stay there in a chemical form. And then there is 'Tarquin'. 'The problem with your correlation is that in regards to antidepressants there are so many takers who do not commit these acts it'. How useful is this as an argument? One could say that when the standards of maintenance on British Railways fell after privatisation, which they did, there were only a few occasions where this actually led to fatal crashes. Much of the rest of the time it led to no more than spilt coffee on bumpy track, or minor derailments in which nobody was hurt. But that would not then be a reason for accepting a lower standard of maintenance.
 
The real question here is whether society is taking a major mistake by permitting the ready availability of drugs which alter human behaviour. If in this small (but growing) number of cases, the use of these drugs is correlated with mass murder, then that suggests that the drugs themselves are not safe to use. That is even more the case if they are not doing any real good, as I believe they are not. I strongly suspect (and again I normally find evidence of this correlation by careful reading of inquest accounts) that a large number of suicides are committed by people taking 'antidepressants'.
 
'DUH!',  CRY THE PANGLOSSES

'Duh! 'Proclaim the complacent Panglosses. 'They were, like, given the pills because they were,like *Depressed'. Like, Hello? That's why they committed suicide. Endov'. Well, this argument lacks an important factor. If 'antidepressants' combat depression, why do people who take them become, after lengthy courses of pills supposed to combat their depression, so miserable that they do away with themselves - and in several cases killing children at the same time, not a feature of suicide until quite recently, I think, and I am now tempted to wonder if the Pilkington case involved these drugs)). Duh! Like, hello? Ally this with the truths set out by Marcia Angell, notably the amazing discovery that in many tests there is no substantial difference between the performance of 'antidepressants' and of placebo pills, and you might- if you were open-minded, curious and sceptical - ask yourself if , while not being of any use against depression, the pills were actively damaging. That damage will take many forms. The transformation of normal being into serial killer is exceptional (not that this is much comfort if it's your child's school or camp that is targeted). But it suggests a general failing that requires a large rethink. Come on now, accept it. I'm right. there should be an inquiry, immediately.
 
SELF-HARM GOES WIDER THAN THE SELF
 
'ThigGuy' writes: 'How can it be evil and wrong to sell drugs if it is not also evil and wrong to buy them and use them?' Perhaps because one is harming yourself, while the other is helping to hurt someone else?' Well, perhaps not. A question for Mr 'ThigGuy', Did Amy Winehouse harm only herself when she descended into the spiral that led to her death? Or were other people harmed too? This is an extreme case, but a family member or good friend who starts taking drugs is a matter of dread to many, many thousands of people. Why cannot people like Mr 'ThigGuy' see this aspect?
 
THAT MMR AGAIN
 
Mr 'Crosland' asks: 'if there was no tangible scientific evidence that showed the MMR to be harmful, why does Mr Hitchens think that the NHS still ought to have provided them? ' At the time when I first took an interest in the matter there was widespread fear, unappeased by dismissive official reactions, that there might be a link. Separate injections were available. Why should they *not* have been offered? Who is the NHS for? the authorities? Or the people? He cites Ben Goldacre. If Mr Goldacre criticised me personally, I am not aware of it. In any case, I will accept Mr Goldacre as an impartial commentator on scientific matters when he turns his skills to investigating the fantasy of 'ADHD', one of the most outstanding examples of bad science in the modern world. He cannot be unaware of it, as he has written about alleged dietary 'cures' for it. Why doesn't he write about the alleged disease itself? (NB I have since learned that Dr Goldacre did write, if tangentially, about this subject in October last year.)
 
FUNDAMENTAL ERROR
'Aron' writes: 'this murderer whose views were inspired by that opiate called religion' Can he please cite those passages in Breivik's 'manifesto' which show that he was a religious believer? I thought rather the contrary. 'Andrew' writes: 'Just because antidepressants don't necessarily "cure" depression, it doesn't mean that they are responsible for suicide. Yet another weak, lazy argument' It is indeed. Who has advanced it here?
 
WOT ABOUT ALCOHOL THEN, EH? EH? EH?
 
For perhaps the ten thousandth time, I favour strong restrictions on the sale and use of alcohol. I would go further if I thought it practicable, but don't. In what way is that inconsistent with seeking to enforce the law against cannabis? How are the evils of alcohol a justification for unleashing a new legal poison on our society? This, like 'medical marijuana' is a Red Herring to fool the gullible. I do sometimes think (in fact I think it more, the more I encounter their puerile 'arguments') that cannabis use renders many of its users quite incapable of either thought or argument. One has to say the same thing over and over and over again to them, and still they don't get it. And they respond to criticisms of their habit with kindergarten rage, as if their dummy had been snatched away. As indeed I propose to do. I wish, as I have said before, that I had a realistic chance of doing so. As it is , this institutionalised selfishness is now part of our society and growing all the time.
 
THE OPPOSITON SPEAKS
 
A post from 'Bert' even more obtuse and reflexively oppositional than most (I'm still waiting for him to discover the other reason for the widespread abandonment of weekly rubbish collections, apart from the EU Landfill Directive which, as far as I know, he still argues is not the cause. What is the other cause, Bert? He's had months to find out and there's still total silence. This was another subject where he took an oppositional position because that's what he does, rather than because he actually knew anything about the subject, or cared. I just had to be wrong, because I am me.). He rejects my suggestion of an inquiry, apparently on the grounds that he knows all the answers already (what a one-man research institute and think tank he is!).
 
He writes: 'To those who say that it’s hardly surprising that depressed people take anti-depressants you respond that antidepressants don’t work if people go on to kill themselves. But this is not an argument that the pills do, in some way, cause people to go on mass killing sprees.' How true. Nor do I advance any such argument. He has imagined it. I do not, anywhere, say that this is the case. I point out a) that 'antidepressants' are coming under increasing expert suspicion for not being what they say they *are*. b) I point out that their presence in the bloodstreams of many suicides cannot be simply explained by the fact that they are prescribed to depressed people likely to commit suicide. In that case, if the pills are effective as claimed, why do they kill themselves after taking pills supposed to cure their affliction? If people treated with antibiotics for a disease then went on to die of that disease in striking numbers, wouldn't there be suspicions about the efficacy of the antibiotic? Wouldn't the argument that 'they had the disease anyway, so it's not surprising that they died of it' be laughed out of court?' Do these people even think about what they write?
 
And then, separately, I point out the association of these (and other mind-altering) drugs with mass killings. If 'Bert' reaches the conclusion above from these facts, then that's his affair. I haven't stated any such conclusion because I cannot show it to be the case, and lack the facilities to do so. The job of the non-expert journalist is to state the apparent existence of a danger. The job of the expert scientist is to establish whether the danger is real or not. 'Bert' continues 'The best you seem to able to do is argue that ‘well, since they don’t stop you becoming depressed, what *are* they doing to your mind, eh?’ Well, it seems to me to be a very reasonable question, given that nobody disputes that these drugs do act powerfully upon the chemistry of the human brain. It is a question into which it would be worth inquiring in depth, with the full resources of the state and medical science. 'Bert' continues 'As others have pointed out, using Breivik as a hook for this particular hobby-horse doesn’t really work, as the ‘mind-bending drugs’ that he may have been on are not the same as anti-depressants' On the contrary, my argument is that many different kinds of drugs are being used, licitly or illictly, which have potent and unknown effects on the brain. I am careful to separate them, and to list the occasions on which they have been associated with rampage killings. They are not the same. But they share this characteristic, that they alter brain chemistry. I have not, for instance, mentioned 'antipsychotic' drugs because, although I have my suspicions about the real usefulness of these, I have no reason to associate them with rampage killings 'Bert' continues – and anyway his behaviour during the killings seems to have been very far from ’roid rage.' I did not use the (in my view misleading) phrase 'roid rage'.
 
If 'Bert' looks at my blog posting on the subject earlier this week he will find a description of the effects of anabolic steroids (and ephedrine) on the human mind which is quite distinct from the crude and misleading term 'rage'. I repeat it here; 'I think it fair to say that the use of anabolic steroids is correlated (I know correlation doesn’t count with the cannabis crew, but you can’t please everybody) with aggression and violence. In the weird language of Psychiatry, in which I am unwilling to trade, it is correlated with ‘Hypomania’, which grandly describes a rather worrying state of mind for anyone to be in, while carrying a gun and a lot of ammunition. Ephedrine, meanwhile, is said to be associated with delusions, paranoia, hostility, panic and agitation. It is similar to amphetamine and to the SNRI type of antidepressant.' 'Bert' concludes' To me, your case for an immediate inquiry is not substantiated.' To 'Bert' nothing I ever say ever has been, or ever will be, substantiated. That is because I say it. But what is substantial about him? I wouldn't mind this boring, back-row-of-the-class prejudice if it weren't coupled with such superior sanctimony and such a grand and pretentious fake name.
 
'ROID RAGE'
 
I did not use (and do not regard as useful or properly descriptive of the problems of Anabolic Steroids) the expression 'Roid Rage'. Please refer to my description of the effects of these. I wrote: 'I think it fair to say that the use of anabolic steroids is correlated (I know correlation doesn’t count with the cannabis crew, but you can’t please everybody) with aggression and violence. In the weird language of Psychiatry, in which I am unwilling to trade, it is correlated with ‘Hypomania’, which grandly describes a rather worrying state of mind for anyone to be in while carrying a gun and a lot of ammunition. Ephedrine, meanwhile, is said to be associated with delusions, paranoia, hostility, panic and agitation. It is similar to amphetamine and to the SNRI type of antidepressant.' No mention of rage. Don't be confused by this phrase.
 
POPPER RECANTS - MY BLOOD RUNS COLD
 
In other words, Mr Platt cannot in fact elaborate on his assertion.that: 'Evolution is as fundamental to biology as the atom is to chemistry or gravitation is to physics'. Just flannel and assertion. My school biology textbooks (GCE 'O' level, Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board), in the mid-1960s, didn't even mention evolution, (nor do I see why they shoud have done), and they were pretty new and shiny. I have not heard of any discovery since that would have caused them to change. Biology as I was taught it was matter of description and understanding of the workings of organisms, based upon observation and experiment. It was not a theory of the universe. His parallel with the atom (which was constantly present in all my science classes) also seems weak to me.
 
The idea of the atom is a sound working concept to explain things as they are and as they behave. The theory of evolution is a sound working concept to explain how things might have come to be as they are. This is not the same thing. As for gravity, that great mystery, let's not even begin. Mr Crosland, to whom I intend to reply privately rather than cause any collateral damage through boredom, says that Professor Sir Karl (not Mr) Popper 'recanted' his doubts about the evolution theory. How strange that anyone seeking or claiming intellectual respectability can use the word 'recantation' without his blood running cold. Apart from the fact that a doubt once expressed cannot be recaptured (and that as far as I know Popper left the offending words unchanged in subsequent editions of the publication involved), the whole idea of 'recantation' stinks. Isn't that what Galileo was forced to do? Isn't it, in general, something people are made to do by by external forces, rather than by their own consciences? The whole point about Karl Popper is that, if one of the greatest scientific philosophers of our age is prepared to entertain doubts about the certainty of the truth of evolution by natural selection, it really is no good for Professor Sir Wesley Crosland, as he is not, or Professor Doctor Andrew Platt, as he isn't either, to throw their weights about in this self-important, blustering manner, as if no intelligent person could doubt this blazingly obvious truth for a moment. We know that one very intelligent person certainly did. They are cleverer and better-informed than he? It isn't that simple, and their angry, intolerant defence of it is very good evidence of their own nagging doubts, with which I sympathise and which I wish they'd stop trying to repress.
 
CHRISTIANS, SUICIDE AND PROSTITUTES
'Andrew' writes (first quoting me) "I strongly suspect (and again I normally find evidence of this correlation by careful reading of inquest accounts) that a large number of suicides are committed by people taking 'antidepressants' " Depressed people committing suicide? Surely not? I have already answered this facile and impoverished 'point'. See earlier postings on this thread. Mr 'Bimble' writes :' I also like the way you have brushed the more significant point that he was a Christian fundamentalist or is that too close to your own moralistic point of view' Could Mr 'Bimble' point me to the passages in Mr Breivik's manifesto where he says he is a Christian believer? I haven't seem them so far. My understanding is that he is a user of prostitutes and mass murderer who views Christianity as socially useful. I doubt if anyone that Mr 'Bimble' would view as 'Christian fundamentalists', would contemplate going to prostitutes, or murdering dozens of people in cold blood. It's kind of fundamentally prohibited.
 
MR 'K' SPEAKS
 
'Stu K', says: 'Mr H - Ignorance is bliss... "The human brain is a delicate and mysterious organ, of which we know amazingly little." By "we" I assume you refer to the Daily Mail? Luckily there are many, many others who know far more.' No, Mr ' K' (is he a member of the Khrushchev family, whose most famous member used to go by that sobriquet in my youth?), I am referring to the state of human knowledge of the human brain. If Mr 'K' knows of persons who know 'far more' perhaps he could direct us to their names and works. My experience of neurologists especially is that they are always most insistent on how limited their knowledge is.
 
THE HUNT FOR DRIVEL
 
Albert Mooney says: 'It might be an interesting exercise to play a game of distinguishing passages from Breivik's drivelling manifesto and The Abolition of Britain.' Indeed. Please let's try it out. But to do that, Mr Mooney would have to *read* 'The Abolition of Britain', which I am quite sure he hasn't.
 
FULL TIME MOTHERS

Mr Wooderson reconstructs his question thus: 'I think perhaps a better question would have been, 'Does Mr. Hitchens believe just that being a housewife is equally good an option to being in employment (a perfectly sensible view - I'd say the same of men too), or that being a housewife is a better option?' Before I answer, let us note that the BBC Producers' Guidelines (wait for it, wait for it) certainly used to say, and may still, that the word 'housewife' is derogatory and is not normally to be used. This has, absurdly, become the case, so successful has the feminist campaign to denigrate marriage and family been. So I won't use it. I prefer, in any case, the designation used by the women who have chosen to stay at home and raise their own children - 'Full-Time Mothers'.
 
So let's rephrase it again:' 'Does Mr. Hitchens believe just that being a full-time mother is equally good an option to being in employment (a perfectly sensible view - I'd say the same of men too), or that being a full-time mother is a better option?' Well, I think being a FTM is a much tougher option, because of the strong disapproval of media, schools, politics and conventional wisdom (Harriet Harman actually declared herself in favour of getting women into paid work and out of the home, and the honourable and irreplaceable task of raising the next generation is now widely sneered at as 'being chained to the kitchen sink', which is why hardly anyone is actually doing it, with the results that we see).

 

But in my Protestant worldview that of course makes it a better option almost axiomatically, difficulty generally being the route to happiness, and courage being the supreme virtue because none of the others is possible without it. As for whether it's better, better for whom? Undoubtedly better for the children, who are far more comprehensively continuously and consistently cared for, brought up, educated by example in morals, manners and work discipline, and given the chance to form a lasting relationship with a person all of whose facets are displayed to them and who gives them the irreplaceable gift of her limitless time. Undoubtedly better for society, since children raised in this manner will be better people, both as citizens and as husbands, wives, fathers and mothers. Better for her? That must remain a matter of opinion for those involved. The woman who stays at home loses many attractive features of life, if she is in the professional classes (much less so if she is not, where the work is often dull, the wages poor and only the companionship of the workplace really worth having). In a world where wageslave mothers predominate, physical isolation from other adults is an undoubted problem, sometimes very hard to overcome. Here you have to ask if the sacrifice is worthwhile judged by the result, and for that you need a measure of a whole life and its worth. If your measure is purely material, then I suspect that wageslavery will be preferable to full-time motherhood. If not, then not. As usual, it is a moral and a cultural argument about the most basic disagreements , as are most serious discussions.
 
MORALITY AND COURAGE
 
Mr Dodd asks about my statement that courage is the supreme virtue because none of the others is possible without it. This is not my thought, but that of C.S.Lewis I cannot, alas, remember where he wrote it. Perhaps another reader can). But as soon as I read it and began to consider it, it seemed to me to be unquestionably true. All virtuous acts in a sinful world are (often immediately, invariably eventually) questioned, mocked, derided and opposed. Or they are undermined by the spirit of the age (try to be thrifty in these times and see what happens). Without courage, they cannot be performed or sustained.

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

 

All the Hallmarks of What?

I think it’s in the story of ‘The Dancing Men’ that Sherlock Holmes finds a bullet hole in a window and a set of footprints outside it which the police have somehow failed to spot , and - when asked by Dr Watson how he saw them when nobody else did - replies ‘Because I was looking for them’.

So, here I am, looking at the misery, loss and grief of poor Norway, and wondering what could explain this quite astonishing and exceptional behaviour.  Want my answer? Hang on a second. First let’s see what the answer isn’t.

Part of me is sneering at the ‘experts’ who initially assumed that this was another Islamist attack. I’d be unsurprised to find that one such proclaimed that the event has ‘all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’, a phrase which invariably causes me to conclude that the user has no idea of what he or she is talking about at all.

What are these ‘hallmarks’? That a terrorist murder has been committed, and that a Muslim has committed it. Well, if it’s that easy, then that means it isn’t helpful either. If ‘Al Qaeda’ can be detected with such extraordinarily broad clues, can it really be said to be a meaningful concept? (No, actually).

Then, when the undisputed culprit turned out to be a podgy-faced  blond Scandinavian body-builder and general loser, with some half-formed ideas about Islamism, off we go into the realms of a sinister ‘right-wing’ menace, not to mention neo-Nazis and Christian fundamentalists.  Well, you worry about that if you like. Dingy attics are full of mummy’s boys and fantasists hunched over keyboards whose impact on the outside world (apart from the bad smell they usually give off) is likely to be minimal.

Others proclaim that he is ‘mad’. An unhelpful idea in such cases. Plainly it is reasonable to assume that someone who has done such cruel things is not fully human. But it is also circular, and avoids the interesting question of why this is so. It has no practical application, either. Nobody said he was mad before he did his murders. Nor can I see what objective diagnosis would have concluded that he was, until it was too late. So thanks a lot.

Now, here comes Sherlock Holmes (who I’m sorry to say is not a professor, nor even a neuropsychopharmacologist, but can still tell a hawk from a  handsaw and so may still have something to say on this subject)  He’s looking for something.  And these days he has the wonderful facility of ‘Control F’, which finds the very few important words in vast 1,500 page manifestoes of drivel.

What is he looking for? No, not our mass killer’s views on ‘Cultural Marxism’ or Antonio Gramsci. Such views do not cause any normal human being to go out and murder nearly 100 fellow-creatures with pitiless calm. Rather the contrary, if  he has actually understood what this dispute is about.

He’s looking for suggestions that the killer might have been using legal or illegal mind-altering *drugs*.  

And because he is looking for them, he finds them.

The entry for July 3rd makes it plain that this unlovely creep was taking Anabolic Steroids and a stimulant (similar in effect to amphetamine) called Ephedrine, in his case mixed with caffeine. Follow these references up and you find a great deal about a substance he calls Winstrol, also known as Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid derived from testosterone and favoured by some body-builders as it doesn’t lead to weight-gain. 

Our mass murderer has settled on this as his steroid of choice after much experimentation with others.

I think it fair to say that the use of anabolic steroids is correlated ( I know correlation doesn’t count with the cannabis crew, but you can’t please everybody) with aggression and violence. In the weird language of Psychiatry,  in which I am unwilling to trade, it is correlated with ‘Hypomania’, which grandly describes a rather worrying state of mind for anyone to be in while carrying a gun and a lot of ammunition. Ephedrine, meanwhile, is said to be associated with delusions, paranoia, hostility, panic and agitation. It is similar to amphetamine and to the SNRI type of antidepressant. 

Once again, it strikes me that if you’re taking this stuff, especially along with testosterone, it’s not a good thing to be armed.

I can do no more than point out these facts. They seem to me to be highly significant, and to warrant serious research into the effects on the human mind of various types of drug which are too readily available in our civilisation.