...at 40 minutes into this programme, my participation in the newspaper review on BBC Radio 4's 'Broadcasting House' last Sunday, topics include Fidel Castro, Pubnk Rock, tennnis, airline saftey instructions and leather trousers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b083l8mc
On days such as Tuesday was in Oxfordshire, I find it hard to understand how anyone can prefer the sweaty, oppressive heat of summer to the exhilarating cold, crystalline clear air and brilliant light and colours of an English winter day. Most especially, summer has nothing to compare with the loveliness of late afternoon and sunset on such a day, the long red glow giving way slowly to complete darkness and stars, as mist forms over ponds and rivers and the last light reflects on the surface of the freezing water, which somehow looks as cold as it is.
Yet I am incessantly told by weather forecasters that heat is good news, and cold is bad news.
My delight in cold, clear days was particularly strong on Tuesday because I was lucky enough to be on Otmoor, the mysterious swampy lowland which lies to the North-East of Oxford. Evelyn Waugh wrote at least one of his books (‘Vile Bodies’) while living (in a caravan) in the garden of The Abingdon Arms at Beckley, a village which hangs on the hill overlooking the moor and dividing it from Oxford. John Buchan, who lived for many years at Elsfield nearby, knew these parts well. Lewis Carroll is said to have got the idea for the giant chessboard in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ in the same place, for in those days unmodernised, unmilitarised Otmoor was a chequerboard of hedges and ditches.
It was and remains one of those places which, while close to towns and large villages, feels immensely remote. Now some of these villages have busy gastro-pubs and pretty modernised houses inhabited by commuters. They are bordered on one side by an unforgiveable stretch of Motorway emitting that near-perpetual grating hiss and sigh of tyres on tarmac from which it is so hard to escape anywhere in modern England. The original plans for the M40 would have taken it right through the moor, but protests prevented this. Yet the place still seems far from the modern world. In 1829-30, troops were sent into it to quell a rather violent rebellion against enclosure and drainage. C.S. Lewis gently mocked these marsh-dwellers in ‘The Silver Chair’ with his character Puddleglum, a web-footed marsh dweller, half-frog, half human, gloomy and pessimistic as A.A. Milne’s Eeyore but ultimately the most resolute and unflinching member of the perilous pilgrimage described in that extraordinary book.
It is ringed by small stone villages with names as strange as the place – Oddington, Murcott, Noke (the old rhyme goes ‘I went to Noke and nobody spoke. I went to Beckley, and they told me directly’). Many of them have churches with fine stone towers visible from afar off across the rushes and ponds which still survive nearly 200 years after the enclosure and drainage . Much of it (being close to the secretive hummocks and military railways of Bicester) is now Ministry of Defence land, used for firing ranges. Metalled roads peter out at the edge of the squidgier part, giving way to tracks and paths. One of Britain’s oddest and most reclusive stately homes, Beckley Park, is nearby.
But from October to about now, Otmoor is also the scene of one of those genuinely inexplicable and wonderful events in nature which, if they happened in Africa, would be counted worthy of long and detailed Attenborough commentary and huge well-advertiswed TV series. But as they take place in England (in several places) they don’t quite attract the same crowds. This is a ‘Murmuration’, so-called, of starlings, small, cheeky birds which are brilliant mimics and which I was (wrongly) brought up to believe were one step above vermin. Most people have seen pictures and films of these events.
But the thing itself is far more potent. Nobody really knows what it is about, whatever they say. For who really knows what goes through the minds of birds? Of course, they seek warmth and food and places to breed, but this does not really explain many of their astonishing migrations. And it certainly doesn’t explain the Murmuration. As with so many things we think we understand, we can only describe it. We know roughly when it will happen – the late afternoon of days in late autumn and early winter. We know that birds fly from far away to join it. We know that they eventually settle on the rushes when they have finished. But the rest is guesswork.
I found myself close to an ‘expert’, hung about with binoculars and bird-watching kit, and very kind and helpful he was too. But his predictions that the cold weather would reduce the starling turnout, and make the event shorter than usual, were utterly wrong. They came from dozens of miles away in their vast thousands, and performed until the light faded and they could no longer be properly seen. At one point it looked almost like a swarm of locusts. At others it reminded me of films I have seen of shoals of tropical fish, similarly synchronised and equally incomprehensible.
I looked towards a distant church tower and the whole bright sky between me and the far-off building (perhaps four miles away) was endlessly full of fluttering black shapes, passing and re-passing for minutes on on end. The sound was also very strange. Murmuration? Much of the time I could hear nothing. But when the clouds of birds came close, I could hear first a sort f soft rustling, then a distinct rushing, a bit like the sound of a distant waterfall, at the exact moment when they turned together to form another of their curved, purposeful unreadable shapes.
Later, as they began to settle, there was a mixture of fluttering and twittering which sounded like half-heard conversation.
The day being almost completely windless, there was hardly any of the normal hideous noise from the M40 motorway.
If, as some say, the flocking is supposed to be a protection against predators, it does not work very well. Some sort of hawk, perhaps a Marsh Harrier, dived in among the starlings and made off with one for its supper. The victim’s thousands of close relatives, close by, did not stir to save it.
The truth is that the Murmuration of starlings is not really understood by anyone - like the disturbing, ancient pictures in the Lascaux caves in France, painted by people who (judging from their loving, brilliantly skilful portrayal of the world they lived in) were just like us, in their physical attributes, but utterly remote from us in all other ways. It is just something we see and cannot ever understand, despite the inflated claims of the naturalists and the ‘neuroscientists’ who can nowadays doubtless put the brain and nervous system of a starling under the microscope and perhaps prescribe it ‘antidepressants’.
But are we, in any case, trying to understand the wrong thing?
Let me try to describe it. At about four o’clock, when there was still plenty of light in the sky, I began to notice small flocks of starlings flying in, quite low, from far away, from all directions. But just when I was thinking this would take hours to reach its full strength, I saw a huge squadron of (I would guess) 2,000 of the tiny birds, swooping in across the marshes, darkening the sky where they were, low but in an undulating formation, one minute shaped like a boat, the next like a Zeppelin, the next curving up and down like a roller-coaster or a line of hills, then flattening out, climbing, dipping, climbing again and hurtling off to another corner of the marsh, there to combine into ever-larger groups of countless thousands, and resume the exuberant making of mysterious, ever-changing shapes in the winter air. For it was exuberant. It may well be that we often wrongly attribute human emotions to other creatures, but I am quite sure they were enjoying themselves.
They were in constant motion, yet seeming to think as one, making sudden turns in almost total unison. Seen from directly underneath they were all individuals, flying or gliding at their own will. But seen from the side, and from far away, they had an ordered, unified purpose. Even in the increasingly biting cold (I had not dressed warmly enough) I was unable to stop watching until the light had gone.
I ponder afterward on what I had seen. My own conclusions will not surprise anyone who knows how I think. I regard landscape and nature as languages, expressing things that cannot be put into words, or at least into prose. Since seeing the great frozen storm of the Himalayas from the windows of an aeroplane on the way to Bhutan, I have been sure that this overpowering sight contained some sort of meaning for humanity (mountains always lift my spirit but these just left me astonished and speechless).
I regard a great deal of painting, sculpture, poetry and music as attempts to translate this language into something a little more accessible, and to make us wonder about the mystery and beauty of things, including the human face and body, which we have stopped observing because we are too used to them. I wish Philip Larkin had written a poem about a Murmuration of starlings, for then I might be a little closer to knowing what it meant. But I will say this for certain. Such things are surely an antidote to the banal, prosaic and reductionist attempts to explain the world and dismiss its unsettling wonders, of which we now hear so much.
For the next few weeks here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b084fmwx/newsnight-28112016
you can see ( at about 30 minutes into the programme) a discussion between me and Tariq Ali on BBC Newsnight about the Castro issue
This interview resulted from a chance meeting on the London Underground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knd81qhbRiQ&feature=youtu.be&a
The discussion begins at about nine minutes into this
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b083lm3n
And contains a priceless moment where Jeremy Vine calls me 'The Mail on Sunday Communist'.
Keep listening for comments, and you'll hear an interesting account of what Cuban hospitals are really like. And another about the miserable surveillance of individual Cubans
You have to wonder why the Guardian, ever in the forefront of liberal reform, stuck the news about record prison suicides on page 14 of its print edition – here is the web version: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/28/one-prison-suicide-every-three-days-england-and-wales-say-reformers
Of course, about three square miles of the paper had to be given over to ambiguous coverage of the death of the tyrant and murderer Fidel Castro, still admired by many Guardian readers and (I suspect) staff. Even the Guardian now acknowledges Castro’s wicked actions, but it still has many readers and (I think) writers who are ready to excuse these, or at least offer mitigation.
But even so, a left-hand page (newspaper design experts put dull stuff on the even-numbered left-hand pages, and the big news on page one and on right-hand, odd-numbered pages) deep inside the paper is surely not what this extraordinary piece of information deserves.
Look especially at the graph ( scroll down) for once not distorted (as so many are, especially in the ‘Climate Change’ industry) by messing around with the scales to make things look bigger than they are.
Since 1978, there has been an undoubted and severe rise in ‘apparent self-inflicted deaths’ of people whose lives are, in theory, entirely under the control of the authorities. Plainly it varies greatly from year to year, but the figure is significantly higher now than it was 40 years ago, when the prison population was significantly lower (roughly half what it is now).
Suicide is harder in prison than out of it. Modern life offers many relatively easy ways of self-slaughter, if that is what you want to do. Prisoners don’t have access to them. Yet they still manage to end their lives.
We have discussed here the true suicide rate in the outside world, often obscured by vague ‘narrative verdicts’ and other coroners’ evasions. I have speculated on the possible effects on self-slaughter of the widespread use of poorly-understood psychiatric ‘medications’. Likewise we have to wonder if such ‘medications’, which I believe are widely prescribed in prisons, might also be associated with suicide. I doubt if anyone has kept any sort of record, as there is so little official interest in this possible correlation.
It is also of course well-known now that illegal drugs circulate widely in prison, perhaps (who can say?) because the authorities initially made no really serious effort to discourage this at the beginning, and now lack the resources to correct what has turned out to be a very major mistake,
Violence in prisons has also greatly increased in recent times. See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/27/prison-violence-staff-cuts-moj-deaths-assaults - 65 assaults a day. Some of these are truly horrible.
But my question is this : If prison suicides have not fallen below 50 a year in England and Wales (out of a population now around 80,000) in the last 20 years (and have often been higher) are we not knowingly sentencing many prisoners to death when we send them there?
This is a measurable, undeniable failure of our non-deterrent non-punitive liberal prison system, supposedly based not upon punishment (the loss of liberty is now officially said to be the sole punishment) but on ‘rehabilitation’, a mythical activity which is often asserted but has never, to my knowledge, ever provably taken place anywhere in the world.
Prisons which no longer seek to make the regime itself a punishment are, by their nature, less under the control of the authorities than those which do.
Can it be that such an arrangement (leaving inmates increasingly at the mercy of their fellow-prisoners, who are freer to organise in gangs, make weapons etc) actually produces more despair than a rigid rule of hard labour by day and single cells by night?
Could it also be that the unacknowledged policy of waiting until criminals are recidivist serial offenders before sending them to prison (which is what we in fact do with almost all crimes short of homicide) is also helping to make prisons harder to control and more anarchic?
In any case, I must ask can those who piously recoil from a death penalty that (in the modern era) was rarely used more than 18 times a year:
Why are you not equally outraged by the fact that so many people in prison who have *not* been sentenced to death, and some of whom may even be innocent of the charges on which they were locked up, predictably die , violently and in despair, in the prisons your ideas have created?
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While his modish Western admirers liked to call him ‘Fidel’, the despotic President Castro’s frightened subjects dared not speak his name. They feared they would be overheard by ever-present secret police spies who made East Germany’s Stasi look like amateurs.
Glancing around nervously, they would mime either a beard or a set of epaulettes, before speaking in whispers about the tyrant who dominated every aspect of their hungry, censored lives.
No wonder. The ‘Committees for the Defence of the Revolution’, present in every workplace, school and street, watched everyone, reported every word out of place and ruined the lives of those who spoke out of turn.
Though this apparatus endures to this day, it was originally the sword and shield of the Communist system which Castro first embraced when he became the USSR’s ally in 1959.
In this role, he nearly ended the world by welcoming Soviet nuclear missiles into Cuba, a few minutes flying time from Washington and New York. His part in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come to an actual nuclear war, was perhaps the worst of all his many cruel and disastrous actions.
Luckily, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was too sensible to heed Castro – who wanted Moscow to threaten a Soviet nuclear strike on the USA if Washington ever again threatened Cuba. Khrushchev pulled the missiles out. Eventually Moscow could no longer afford to subsidise and defend Castro.
And the collapse of the USSR left Cuba without its main protector and source of cash. But Soviet secret police methods stayed. They had become essential for maintaining the regime in power.
For despite his grandiose boasts and promises, Castro’s people lived mostly on black beans and rice. Their country, once one of the richest in Latin America, sank into decay and poverty around them. Everyone who could escape, left. It may well be that the Cuban state only survived because so many of its most dangerous opponents were allowed and encouraged to emigrate.
Castro, unlike the ordinary inhabitants of his alleged paradise, lived in considerable luxury, according to a former bodyguard, Juan Sanchez, who said the ‘Maximum Leader’ dwelt on a private island, Cayo Piedra, and liked to voyage aboard a large yacht with Soviet-built engines, the Aquarama II.
Many claims were made for Castro’s state by its western defenders. Propaganda about advanced health care was partly true, though there were the usual Communist shortages of vital drugs – and the elite had their own clinics.
Castro is surrounded by a crowd of scholarship students at a school in Ciudad Libertad in Havana in July 1964
Castro announces general mobilisation after the announcement of the Cuba blockade by US President John F Kennedy in Havana
But while literacy levels were certainly high (they always had been, Cuba was never Haiti), there was little to read apart from the leaden propaganda of one of the world’s last Marxist states. Gullible tourists admired the 1950s cars and the Capone-era hotels, and thought Havana’s decrepit, fly-infested streets were picturesque. They were not picturesque for those who had to live in them.
Castro’s Cuba even had two currencies. There was a smart, crisp one featuring romantic portraits of the fun-revolutionary hero Che Guevara, for holidaymakers to buy luxuries. And then there was another grubbier one for ordinary Cubans to spend on necessities, if they were available that week.
Perhaps now that what Castro’s millions of exiled opponents long called ‘the biological solution’ has finally arrived, the worship will end. The Castro myth, so powerful for so long, will begin to fade. But perhaps not. For Castro was repeatedly buoyed up and saved by his inept enemies. The CIA’s bungled and badly-planned 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was the worst of these follies. It made Castro – in reality a nasty military dictator – look like the defender of his nation against the bullying USA.
And the spy agency’s attempts to kill him with explosive and poisoned cigars, and to make his beard fall out, predictably failed amid mocking laughter. Castro himself once said: ‘If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.’
****
Then, years of futile blockade by the USA only served to strengthen his claim to be a patriotic champion. President Obama’s shrewdest move was the end of this isolation, and Castro’s state has been visibly crumbling as it has opened up to the outside world. He died as his supposed achievements were falling apart.
Who was he really? There is some mystery. Even his exact date of birth is not certain. But we know he was the illegitimate son of a rich sugar cane farmer and that he was a troublemaker at school. Despite being sent to an elite Jesuit college, he neglected his work for sport. At university, where he seems to have had no clear politics, he was mixed up with violent factions and eventually became an unsuccessful lawyer, so busy with political activism that his furniture was seized by bailiffs and his electricity cut off.
That episode helped to end his first marriage, to Mirta Diaz-Balart. Castro, who is thought to have fathered nine or ten children, may or may not have married a second time and is reputed to have had two long-term mistresses and a number of brief dalliances. But as his private life and career fell apart amid various expeditions and political adventures in the early 1950s, Castro finally found a cause – the revolutionary overthrow of the then Cuban despot Fulgencio Batista.
His failed putsch, at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago in 1953, would have been farcical if so many people had not died in it. But Castro’s privileged background saved him from execution. Instead, he was held in relative comfort in a clean modern prison, and allowed to read what he wanted and stay in touch with his sympathisers. He served only two years of a 15-year sentence.
Front pages of the New York Post and the Daily News call the former leader the 'Scourge of Cuba' and 'Cuba's longtime tyrant'
Castro never forgot this generosity, and resolved not to show it to anyone who challenged him. His own prisoners suffered terribly.
Finally, luck came his way. Gathering a new team of conspirators in Mexico, he voyaged back to Cuba aboard the motor yacht Granma, which a previous American owner had named after his beloved grandmother. Perhaps Castro did not realise the homely origin of his ship’s name. For Granma would one day become the title of Cuba’s far-from-cosy or loveable Communist daily newspaper.
Once again, as at Moncada, there was farce. The yacht ran aground in a mangrove swamp. Its revolutionary human cargo, seasick and lost, arrived too late for the rising they were supposed to join.
But the incompetence, sloth and over-reaction of President Batista’s army was such that Castro’s small band survived and prospered in its mountain hideouts. Batista’s government, given to torture and corruption, lost the support of Washington, which at that time viewed Castro as just another rebel, rather than as a Communist menace.
Batista fell – and fled with his loot – above all because the USA cut off arms supplies, withdrew its support and told him he must go at the end of 1958.
A period of political confusion followed. During these months Castro held secret meetings with the Cuban Communist Party, which led to his eventual friendship with Moscow.
It was then that Castro and his comrade Guevara staged the lawless show trials of opponents, held in sports stadiums while bloodthirsty pro-Castro audiences stuffed themselves with ice-cream and peanuts.
Cuban students hold up government-supplied pictures of Fidel Castro which say 'Fidel 90'
Next came mass executions in Havana’s La Cabana fortress (the bullet holes can still be seen) while Guevara looked on. Some of these executions were filmed and shown in cinemas.
Over several months, it became clear to the outside world that Castro was the real successor to Batista and that he had embraced Soviet Communism.
Who can now say if he did this because he really believed in it, or because he saw Moscow as his protector and would pay almost any price for that? Castro’s government fiercely persecuted homosexuals, denouncing them and sending them to do forced labour in the cane fields, and later imprisoning them. His image in the West as romantic cheerful rebel was simply false. Castro, for instance, loathed rock music (he later claimed to have changed his mind about this and homosexuality, but too late to help the many who had suffered gravely at his hands on this score).
He and his fellow rulers were embarrassingly loyal to their sponsor in Red Square. Castro backed the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And he was merciless to those who dared to dissent.
One of his most savage acts was the treatment of his former revolutionary comrade Huber Matos. Matos, a long-time democratic enemy of the dictator Batista, protested against Castro’s closeness to Moscow. After a hysterical show-trial, including a seven-hour speech of denunciation from his former friend, Matos was flung into prison for 20 years (16 of them in solitary confinement), during which he was horribly tortured.
Another victim of Castro’s merciless intolerance was the poet Armando Valladares, originally a supporter of the revolution, who refused to put a ‘I’m with Fidel’ sign on his office desk. He was charged with ‘terrorism’ and sentenced to 30 years. He served 8,000 days (22 years) during which he was forced to eat other prisoners’ excrement and confined in tiny cells so small that he could not lie down.
It is astonishing that such a man, and such a state, have attracted so much sympathy and admiration from so many in the West. These people quite rightly despise and shun the various ‘Right-wing’ dictatorships of Latin America, and angrily pursued the Chilean military putschist Augusto Pinochet, who at least had the grace to retire, and hand the country back to democrats.
Yet they admire the Cuban despot. Why is this? Fidel Castro, one of the cruellest tyrants of modern times, came to prominence in the strange years of cultural revolution which convulsed the Western world in the 1960s. Why was he not reviled and denounced by the sort of people who normally like to posture as the lovers of liberty? Why did they make excuses for him, why did authors and artists pay court to him and why did so many refer to him by his first name as if they knew him?
Perhaps it was because his tyranny took place on a beautiful tropical island rather than in a grim black city on some snowy steppe.
Perhaps it was because his labour camps lay under the sun among fields of sugar cane and coffee, rather than on a windswept European plain.
Perhaps it was because it was for so long fashionable to be anti-American, and who was more anti-American than Fidel Castro? Perhaps it was because he was bearded and dressed in fatigues instead of a Soviet-made suit. Perhaps because of his machismo, youth and swagger, a generation of intellectuals treated him as a star rather than as the cruel failure he really was.
Well, now that we have the ‘biological solution’, the time may at last come for the truth.
But when it does, will those who were so wrong for so long admit their error, or will they prefer the romantic legend to that truth?
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This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
I think the man who murdered Jo Cox MP should be hanged. I think it a great pity that we no longer have this powerful deterrent against cruel violence.
So let no Leftist propagandist try to smear me as an apologist for her killer, whose dishonoured name I shan’t even repeat here in case he relishes his notoriety.
But I am repelled and disturbed by the attempt to pretend that this deranged, muttering creep was in any way encouraged or licensed to kill a defenceless, brave young mother, by the campaign to leave the European Union.
Of all the low, dishonest tricks used by Remainers in this continuing contest, this slimy innuendo is the worst. Of course cheap Left-wing propagandists always like to insinuate that anyone more conservative than John Major is a secret Nazi, longing to massacre people in death camps.
Two could play at that, and it wouldn’t work out well for the Leftist smear-merchants, if two did play at it.
A lot of very prominent people on the mainstream British Left, in politics and the media, have never properly apologised for their many years of sympathy with the Soviet cause. Even fewer have regretted their slurping admiration for the homicidal, torture-prone Castro regime in Cuba.
Sick Leftist monster-worship of this kind is, amazingly, quite respectable. Listen to them still talking about ‘Fidel’ today as if they were old mates.
Admiration for Nazi killers and torturers is, quite rightly, restricted to such people as the Moors murderer Ian Brady and Jo Cox’s attacker.
I do not know why Jo Cox’s killer did what he did. I am told that, despite his supposed ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder’ (he washed his hands until they bled), he was not prescribed any of the potent mind-altering pills that doctors like to dish out for these things. Likewise, there is no evidence that he took illegal drugs.
But the same is true of Brady. Some people just do step outside the normal limits of humanity. It cannot always be explained. But this was not a person with any serious political interest. Had he been, he would have known that the cruel murder of a young mother would help the very cause he wanted to damage.
But one Blairite commentator wrote last week: ‘Deep down they [opponents of the EU] feared that aspects of the language or direction of the Brexit campaign they legitimately supported had emboldened extremism. While they themselves were in no way permissive of the act, might they in some way have been permissive of the motive? Or even of the mood?’
The politest word for this is ‘cobblers’, but ‘tripe’ will do as well. More or less deranged people turn violent all the time, whatever the ‘mood’. Jo Cox’s attacker was not officially classed as mentally ill, but (and here I am absolutely not trying to excuse his act) I am not sure where the boundaries of mental illness run.
Officially mentally ill people (those actually classified as such by the NHS) attack – and often kill – dozens of innocents every year, alas.
Sometimes they give their acts grandeur by saying or yelling political things. But it doesn’t mean their motive is political. The Leytonstone knifeman shouted ‘This is for Syria!’ but not long before, he had told doctors (seriously) that Tony Blair was his guardian angel.
When I heard of Jo Cox’s death I simply felt grief at such a loss, as any normal person did. Only later did I realise that some people would take this opportunity to smear the ‘Leave’ campaign. And so they have.
What is much worse, the authorities entered into the same spirit. The killer was tried, absurdly, as a ‘terrorist’. Terrorists, like the IRA who actually did murder another MP, Ian Gow, are horribly rational. They saw Mr Gow as a fierce and influential opponent of the ‘peace process’, by which they would eventually defeat the British state and obtain its surrender.
They didn’t shout anything. They just put a bomb under his car and stole away, later collecting their reward – victory – from the Blair government. I don’t recall anyone, at the time, blaming Left-wingers who openly sympathised with Irish republicanism for creating a ‘mood’ in which this sort of thing was more likely.
Jo Cox, a shiningly good person, was foully murdered. Her killer has been justly tried and convicted but alas cannot be justly punished. Let her family mourn, and let her rest in peace. Do not turn her memory into cheap propaganda.
A fantasy full of REAL danger
I have been puzzled for years about the extraordinary appeal of the Harry Potter industry. The books aren’t that good, and the films aren’t either.
Can it possibly be because they confirm the soppy self-satisfied groupthink of the post-Blair generation?
In search of an answer, I went to see the new J. K. Rowling film Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them. I still have no idea what it was about. An angry pudding terrorises New York City, but it can’t be all bad because it occasionally kills ‘Right-wing’ politicians and puritanical religious leaders. These are portrayed as killjoys, witch-hunters and child-beaters, with terrible hair and clothes.
Meanwhile, the Magical Community is full of funky, Multiculti, understanding, liberal types, sparkling with equality and diversity. Eventually, they manage to understand the pudding, which only wants to be loved. But then they kill it.
Have I got this right? I am not sure, and do not care. But too much of this must certainly soften the brains of those exposed to it.
****
A major military power on the edge of Europe, which illegally occupies a neighbouring state’s territory, is sinking into tyranny.
Its increasingly megalomaniac leader has built himself a huge new palace and is systematically eliminating all opposition as he prepares to become an unchallengeable supreme ruler.
Journalists at the only remaining major opposition newspaper have been arrested on ridiculous charges. They are among thousands of others scooped up in an enormous purge, flung into prison or removed from their jobs.
No, it’s not Russia, the economic cripple with a navy even more decrepit than ours, which you’re constantly being told to fear.
It is Turkey, still an unchallenged member of the supposedly pro-freedom alliance Nato. Turkey, in actions very similar to the Russian seizure of Crimea, grabbed North Cyprus by force in 1974 and has been there ever since, still our welcome ally.
Turkey’s President Erdogan, a passionate Islamist who regards democracy as a means to an end, is at least as repressive as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and has certainly locked up many more journalists.
So, if all those media who attack Mr Putin the whole time are really so worried about Russian repression, why do they say so much less about the ruthless extinction of freedom in our Nato ally? Could it be their anti-Russian outrage is phoney?
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The following despatch from Havana was published in the Mail on Sunday on 30th July 2006. I think it holds up pretty well.
In Cuba the last Communist God is Dying after decades of Tyranny. But if you thought Fidel Castro was bad, wait till you meet his brother Raul.
By: PETER HITCHENS
Sinister black flags fly this week on the windy seafront of Havana, their mourning colour seeming to foretell an approaching death. In fact the dark banners are part of an obscure propaganda war between Cuba's communist state and the reviled American diplomatic mission which sits sulkily in the heart of the capital.
But the unintended effect is to make passers-by wonder if they are being prepared for the end of the longestlived dictatorship in the world. Old age has at last stolen up on FidelCastro, who will officially be 80 on August 13.
Well, probably – such is the night and fog of his censored police state, nobody really knows when he was born.
The man who was once the rock-star revolutionary who made communism seem cool now looks in official posters like a slightly gaga grandfather.
'Vamos Bien,' they say ('We're doing well'). But the vague eyes, grey hair and beard and the shrunken, lined features send another message: 'I'm getting old.' As if to try to cheer everyone up, these unsettling portraits are being replaced by chirpy flags squawking: '80 more years. Long live Fidel.' Eighty more years of this? The world's most efficient secret police, verminous prison cells full of peaceful dissidents, rationing, a diet of rice and black beans, a servile Press, the slow collapse of civilised life, power cuts? Heaven preserve us.
For all those Sixties rebels who fantasised-about fighting in the jungle with Fidel and Che Guevara, their hero's decline is a reminder of their own mortality. For Cuba, it is far more serious. And, given the astonishing impact this island has had upon the world in Castro'stime, we ought to worry too.
Coming within inches of nuclear war
Castro's 1959 revolution convulsed the world, creating a communist base 90 miles from US territory. In 1962, Russia and America came within inches of nuclear war over the missiles the USSR had placed in Cuba.
The migration of two million anti-Castro Cubans to Florida has turned Miami into a Latin American city and shifted the balance in several US presidential elections. It is almost certainly responsible for the narrow election of George W. Bush six years ago.
Since January 1, 1959, all power has rested in the hands of Fidel Castro, the 'Maximum Leader' and the one free man in Cuba. All others, even his family, have had the choice between being his loyal serfs or facing exile, prison or death. Yet somehow he has managed to escape the loathing that normally comes the way of Latin American tyrants.
Castro's rebel chic gave revolution a smart new image which to this day infects the educated elites of almost every advanced country.
Until Castro, communism was about tanks crushing romantic revolts in the streets, and dreary, potato-shaped, middle-aged men in hats and overcoats saluting rockets on Red Square.
After Castro it was about romantic revolts and guerrilla bands, featuring young bearded heroes and smouldering, beautiful revolutionary women, overthrowing corrupt dictatorships in a festival of the oppressed. And it began in Havana, Ernest Hemingway's 'great white city on the bay',perhaps the most perfect backdrop on the world with its happy music,its picturesque,easygoing people, its enjoyably grotesque mobster hotels, its cigars and rum.
Marx and Lenin, dressed up in fatigues, were suddenly fun and sexy, freed from the Kremlin puritans.
Castro was to revolution what Mick Jagger was to rock, and his image (and Guevara's) had a lot to do with the strange student revolt that destroyed Charles de Gaulle's conservative France in 1968, and with the wave of cultural revolution that changed the morals and attitudes of the Western world and has now subsided into the weary swamps of political correctness.
Castro didn't actually like rock music
Interestingly, the student revolutionaries who loved Castro and Guevara got Fidel wholly wrong. He loathed rock music as degenerate and only in recent years has he recognised it as an ally, permitting a John Lennon memorial park in Havana. They got a lot of other things about him wrong, too.
Castro matters so much to the fashionable liberal Left that they have tried to deny – to themselves – the true nature of his very nasty regime. A recent example of this was a March 2005 letter to The Guardian signed by, among others, Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, Nadine Gordimer,Harry Belafonte and Danielle Mitterrand, which claimed that in Cuba 'there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised'.
This is almost total garbage and just shows what the Left will put up with when it likes someone. Castro personally reversed the verdict of an important trial when he disagreed with it. He used to round up homosexuals and put them in labour camps to 'make men of them'.
One of his old comrades, Huber Matos, confided after 20 years of brutality and starvation inCastro's jails that he was 'subjected to all kinds of horrors, including the puncturing of my genitals'.
Just three years ago, after a brief period of liberalisation, Castro threw 75 peaceful dissidents into dungeons.
Most are still there. Their wives demonstrate bravely every Sunday for their release and are attacked and abused by 'spontaneous' mobs of loyalist women.
Others who defy the leader face similar misery short of jail. They lose their jobs. Their houses are trashed by government supporters. One incredibly brave dissenter, Oswaldo Paya, remains at liberty but he is constantly watched and the state has placed an insulting poster near his house which says: 'In a country under siege, all dissent is treason.' Imagine the response of Pinter and his friends if a Rightwing Latin American dictator had done half these things. No wonder one of the alsatian guard dogs that patrol Castro's villa near Havana is called Guardian.
Or so I am told. Like all tyrants, Castro conducts his real life behind thick screens. After a long absence he has twice appeared in public recently.
During a rambling speech in Cordoba, Argentina, he continually plucked at his collar as if in some sort of discomfort.
The cameras swung away. Back in Cuba a few days later, he jokingly promised not to stay in power until he was 100.
A recent rumour that he had died was spread, as always, by Cuban exiles who yearn for him to go so that they can come back. The story was denied not by Castro but by his new friend and admirer, the Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chavez.
The Miami Cubans long ago despaired of overthrowing Castro and now mutter about what they call 'the biological solution', when he is removed at last by the Grim Reaper and the tongue that gave so many endless harangues is finally silenced.
There have been hints of mortality. In June 2001 Castro seemed to faint during a seven-hour speech in the merciless Cuban sun, but came back later to finish it. In October 2004 he fell off the stage at a rally, breaking his arm and his kneecap – but five days later he was on TV making jokes about staircases.
The CIA spreads stories that he has Parkinson's disease – but then the CIA would, having failed to finish him off in various ludicrous assassination attempts in the Sixties. Castrodenies it and says he doesn't care if he does get Parkinson's, since it did not seem to hamper Pope John Paul II all that much.
The little we know about his current life is this: Castro lives a little way out of Havana in a villa that most Cubans would regard as luxurious, but which a rich Westerner would view as modest.
He is a grandfather several times over. He now seems to have a settled personal life,after some years of roaming when he claimed to be 'married to the revolution'. His second wife, Dalia Soto de Valle, could pass unnoticed anywhere in Cuba since pictures of her and her five sons (Angel, Alex, Antonio, Alejandro and Alexis) are never published there. Another son, Jorge, the supposed result of one of Castro's affairs, is believed to be living in Cuba, but nobody knows where.
A Disloyal Daughter
Castro's illegitimate daughter Alina Fernandez, offspring of a romance with the beautiful Natalia Revuelta,broadcasts uncomplimentary programmes about her papa from an exile radio station in Miami.
The leader's first wife, Mirta, lives in obscurity somewhere in America and never speaks about her onetime spouse. This may have something to do with staying in contact with the couple's only son, Fidelito, who looks astonishingly like his father and sometimes appears at Havana receptions for visiting businessmen, who are suitably impressed at this close brush with superstardom.
But Castro's most important relative by far is his younger brother and designated heir, Raul, who is 75. Left-wingers who sneer at the hereditary principle seem only too willing to keep things in the family themselves. No doubt, Raul Castro has his talents, but he isCastro's appointed successor because he is his brother.
And Comrade Raul is, well, not very nice. He is thought to have been recruited by the KGB back in 1955 and so to have been one of the main early links between Castro and the Kremlin. In the early days of the revolution, during which 550 men were shot, according to official figures, he was a great signer of death warrants.
He is said to have presided personally over the mass execution of 70 government soldiers, machinegunned in front of an open trench.
Around about this time, the Cuban journalist Carlos Franqui called Raul 'an operetta-class Hitler'.
But he is way out of the operetta class now. As well as commanding the powerful and competent armed forces, Raul is in charge of much of Cuba's new tourist industry, which brings in so much badly needed hard currency.
Together with the horrible and bloodthirsty Guevara, he is also said to have been keen on the obscene show trials, where jeering audiences in stadiums demanded the death sentence while gorging on ice cream and peanuts, and firing-squad executions which were filmed and shown in cinemas to enthusiastic audiences.
If you look carefully at the walls of the former prison (now a tourist destination) of La Cabana in Havana, you can still see the pockmarks from the bullets of these executions and find traces in the grass of the posts to which the victims were tied.
Fidel Castro has sometimes rather enjoyed threatening his enemies with Raul. He once warned opponents that it would be no good assassinating him. They would only get Raul instead.
He said: 'The destiny of peoples cannot depend on one man. Behind me come others more radical than I. Assassinating me would only fortify the revolution.' In other words, don't kill me or you'll get someone even worse – a charming fraternal recommendation.
Castro is plainly both flattered and unsettled by the growing debate about his coming death.
'Raul's not getting any younger,' he remarked in grumpy tones a few months ago.
Yet something is plainly going on.
The official media, where nothing happens by accident, has begun to show more and bigger pictures of Raul, who, strangely, looks nothing like his big brother, being small and having a faintly Japanese look to him. His tedious speeches are reported at enormous length. Some now argue that Raul, without his brother's passion or his fire, will be able to compromise with the United States and begin to open up the country.
The outlines of coming change are already there. Money from rich exiles and semi-legal business is already creating a shadow market economy. There are luxury shops in the Havana suburb of Miramar and new air-conditioned banks in the heart of the capital. There is also a Citroen showroom.
If Raul gave the word, a great gush of money – and perhaps democracy – would pour across the Florida Strait and create a capitalist revolution. Some think the new Cuba could be a huge offshore banking centre. Others suspect that its neglected port facilities would be enormously profitable.
Nobody really knows.
But perhaps it won't happen.
Having struggled in pinched poverty and misery for years after their Russian subsidies were withdrawn, Cubans now benefit from new patrons equally interested in annoying Uncle Sam.
These new helpers see that Washington, with its endless, futile blockade of Cuba, has turned Castro from a failed revolutionary into a patriotic hero. They notice that George W. Bush's despicable prison camp in Guantanamo Bay makes it far harder for Washington to criticise Cuba's human rights abuses.
Look up Cuba and human rights on the internet and it is Guantanamo, not Castro's Gulag, that shows up.
They see that Cuban patriotism is hopelessly mixed up with hatred of the gringos to the north. And they, like Moscow before them, can see the strategic use of this well-placed island. True, the only missiles I found in Cuba were decommissioned relics of the Cold War, still pointed towards America, but there are plenty of other ways in which Cuba could be used by foes of Washington.
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela provides oceans of cheap, evil-smelling oil and petrol, and in return gets Cuban help building his increasingly nasty people's republic. And China, perhaps interested in Cuba's nickel reserves as well as its political potential, has become very friendly.
Smart new Chinese buses now join the clattering Chevrolets and sputtering Ladas on Havana's potholed streets, monuments to layer on layer of superpower interference.
If you ask Cubans what will happen when their Maximum Leader is gone, the smarter ones almost invariably speak of Raul. For an informal opinion survey I visited a crude, bare bar in a concrete Havana suburb – a place so bleak it was actually called a 'Beer Dispensary', and that is what it did, providing our table with glasses of the cloudy brew that poor Cubans can buy with the special, near-worthless money now reserved for them.
One of the customers had to be shushed by other guests as he raged about how Raul was not worthy to step into his brother's shoes. This man, politically simple, was like many poor Cubans who have soaked up decades of propaganda and cannot really imagine thatCastro is mortal. He summed up the state of affairs in Cuba thus, and quite accurately: 'The health and education are good. Everything else is s***.' He had not heard of Oswaldo Paya.
But another of the customers had and obviously admired Paya's guts and persistence, qualities that make some think he might be Cuba's Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel.
Certainly the place could do with a non-violent figure of reconciliation. Since fighting its way out of the Spanish empire, Cuba has had a tradition of savage and violent overthrows. The hotel in which I am writing this, the Nacional, was shelled by rebels in a 1933 putsch. Nearly 100 people were killed and supporters of the defeated regime were then dragged to their deaths by troops of the coup leader Batista – who was himself to be overthrown byCastro with much bloodshed in 1959.
There are other traditions but they are not so strong.
The city possesses a majestic American-style Capitol building, with debating chambers for a congress and senate, but it has not been used since 1958. Some hope that it may be about to come back into its own.
How did he survive so long? He let his enemies leave
It is very hard to tell. By allowing his enemies to leave in huge numbers and by buying off most of the rest, Castro has created a state that depends on him completely.
The people live amid desolation. There is a lot of talk about Havana as a modish tourist destination, and so it appears to be if you do not look too hard and do not mind about the political prisoners. There are plenty of picturesque museum-piece American cars from the Eisenhower era, most of them held together by paint, and imitations of the Buena Vista Social Club play with grim determination at smart new cafes in the expensively restored Old City.
But step a few yards away from the pretty parts and you find a city in ruins, literally falling to bits from poverty and neglect, people crammed into collapsing, stinking buildings with fizzing, ancient wiring and sewage leaking into the water supply. Sometimes the houses actually do collapse. The place looks as if it has been under bombardment because there is so much rubble about.
It is all very well saying Cuba has no shanty towns, unlike the countries to the south. But much of Havana, 50 years ago one of the most advanced cities in the Americas, is crumbling into the mother of all shanty towns.
Two parallel currencies operate. The 'convertible peso' is now needed to buy almost everything from petrol to clothes, and the 'national money' is the second-class cash which the poor can use in the ghostly, and mainly empty stores selling rationed rice, eggs (eight per month) beans and fatty pork.
Yet people are not as angry about this as they are entitled to be (imagine how you would feel if such a system operated in Britain). Cubans as a whole are some of the most pleasant people in the world. Perhaps because they live on an island, perhaps because they have learned the hard way not to care too much, they seem to prefer to be content. And, cut off from real information about the outside world, they are in a Garden of Eden of communist innocence.
I visited Yaney, a young schoolteacher in her pretty but crumbling house overlooking Havana's harbour. 'We are entirely in agreement with the system,' she declared, sitting on an ancient sofa in her cheap clothes beneath a rotting roof. Rightly praising her fellow citizens' kindness and generosity, she denounced 'horrible capitalism', saying: 'I fear capitalism. I fear its return.' This enthusiastic Fidelista lives with her husband and her mother on an income of 1,000 pesos a month – the equivalent of about £22. Her grandmother's pension of about £4 a month is eaten up by utility bills, including electricity charges that were raised sharply this year to try to prevent power cuts.
She could not really cope with the idea that Castro might soon be gone. And she doesn't seem to want him to be. 'I am a simple citizen. But I think it's not going to happen . . . It's going to be against Cuban society,' she said, obviously disturbed by the thought of what may be coming.
Some very different Cubans, a group of blacks sitting on their doorsteps in a typically grimy Havana street, deal with the subject more simply. 'He's not going to die,' they affirm. 'There's no reason why he can't just go on and on.' But there is. One day soon, the blackflags will fly in earnest. So Cuba waits, and the world waits, and many other ageing radicals wait, to see what will happen when this, the last communist god, finally dies. Let us hope that the truth will at last be told about this wicked tyranny and that Cuba will not have to hear the sound of the firing squads again.
