14 November 2009 11:07 PM
NO! The most important word that a child will ever hear
Every so often our new Marxoid ruling class make an exciting discovery. There’s a long way to go (probably too long) before these smug, dogmatic dimwits realise that conservatives were right all along about everything. But we must always welcome even the smallest glint of intelligence among such unfortunate, delusional people.
For they are in charge of almost the whole country, including the Tory Party, and if they don’t find a way to admit that they have been wrong all along, nothing will ever change for the better. Now a Leftist think-tank, Demos, has realised that ‘tough love’ is the best way to bring up children. This revelation of the blindingly obvious is hidden in a porridge of Latin verbiage, but it is there and we should be pleased.
But it is useless without the next step, which must be the end of the 50-year war against the married family. For here is a simple point. A child’s own parents, and this means a mother and a father, have to work in concert. And they have to care so much about the children in their charge that they are ready to say ‘no’ to them, and mean it. ‘No’ is the most important word a child will ever hear, and if he doesn’t hear it often enough then he will be well on the way to a feral adulthood.
Statistically, ‘no’ is much more likely to be said in a stable, married family, the kind we are fast abolishing. Divorced parents and step-parents can be manipulated into undermining each other. Paid strangers will do anything for a quiet life.
As a result, there is a disastrous and widespread model of child-rearing that combines soppy indulgence with neglect. So many children now come into the schools who have not been civilised (or even house-trained in some cases) that it is quite unreasonable to expect teachers to fix the problem. It is too big.
The children of today are paying a horrible price for the selfishness that led to off-the-peg divorce and the dismantling of all the forces that kept the family together. But we are paying it too, because bad parenting creates bad citizens, and as the self-indulgent Sixties generation age, they will have to live surrounded by the merciless products of the bad society they made.
Lynn’s ‘moronic’ parents...the real heroes of this ingrate’s tale
Much praise is being given to the film An Education, starring Carey Mulligan and based on the teenage memories of the Left’s favourite celebrity interviewer, Lynn Barber. Miss Barber is not responsible for the screenplay, which is by Nick Hornby. She also tellingly admits in her book that she is ‘a deeply unreliable memoirist whose memory is not to be trusted’, and ‘never exactly a slave to facts’.
Well, the film is clever enough, and holds the attention, but I hate it. It seems to me to reinforce the nasty, snobbish suburbophobia of the modern liberal elite, their ungrateful contempt for the material security, the education and the love provided for them. This is combined with a scorn for parents and most teachers, and unwillingness to take responsibility for anything.
The attractive, clever heroine is shown living under the tyranny of near-moronic parents, portrayed as unworldly simpletons, and a headmistress, traduced as a Judophobic bigot (is there independent proof of this?).
In fact, Lynn Barber’s father, born in Lancashire milltown poverty, won a law degree by studying diligently at night school, while working by day, having been too poor to take up a place at Manchester University. He is, by her own account, ‘formidably intelligent’. Her mother, likewise risen from hard-scrabble beginnings, won a scholarship to grammar school and became deputy head of a sixth-form college.
These two should be the tragic hero and heroine of this film. But the glamour is given to their ingrate child, and her parents are even blamed for her long and squalid affair with a man she quickly realised was a particularly nasty type of criminal. It is they, not she, who are blamed for being beguiled by this skunk. That sums up my generation. It’s never our fault, but we always take the credit.
Quietly, we create a Stasi of our own
In the week when we rather emptily celebrated the Berlin Wall’s fall, Britain’s own Big Brother state grew slowly in strength. Plans are advanced to keep records of our private communications. Our journeys at home and abroad are monitored. We are followed home by police officers, and placed on file, for threatening our children with a smack.
And free speech has just had a very narrow squeak, thanks to the remaining independent voices in the House of Lords – voices who will disappear once this House is elected and so chosen by the party machines. Lord Dear, a cross-bencher and former chief constable, spoke powerfully on Thursday in defence of a clause guaranteeing freedom of speech on the subject of homosexuality.
He warned that without this clause, militant homosexuals, by complaining about expressions of opinion they did not like, could ensure that religious and other conservatives were arrested, fingerprinted and DNA-swabbed for saying what they think.
The Government is furiously determined to get rid of this safeguard, and has made repeated attempts to do so. Its arguments, that allowing freedom of speech will somehow increase violent attacks on homosexuals, are fact-free, baseless rubbish, close to a smear on everyone who dares to doubt or oppose the sexual revolution. The law rightly demands serious punishments for such attacks, and all civilised people support that law.
I do not think Mr Cameron’s rainbow Tory Party, which now grovels and apologises for Section 28, can be relied upon to hold the line against these intolerant fanatics. The Stasi is quietly being created here in Britain, now.
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The Sun newspaper is, as I have said, like the Germans in Churchill’s famous description – ‘Always either at your feet or at your throat’. If it were your pet, you’d have it put down before it tore your face off.
I’m not that sorry for Gordon Brown having to endure its attacks, because he spent years watching that newspaper slurping at his toecaps till its tongue was black and sore. But even he probably never imagined that any friend could be so absurdly fickle.
I remember the Sun saying Mr Brown was part of ‘an inner circle of some of the brightest people we have seen in government in recent years’.
Oh, a warning to Mrs Jacqui Janes. Her new pals at the Sun wanted the war in Afghanistan and now pretend, nauseatingly, to care about the deaths that result. If she ever differs with that policy, they won’t be her friends any more. David Cameron, who now thinks he has the Sun at the end of his leash, will sooner or later find out who is taking whom for a walk.
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The ghastly figure of John Major has been seen hanging round Westminster, looking for work. Business must have slipped on the lecture circuit, but those thinking of voting Tory next May should be grateful for this warning that what they will get is a rerun of the Major years. You can still avoid this. Don’t vote for them. Join the 61 per cent who aren’t going to.
12 November 2009 3:25 PM
The fake threat from Afghanistan, and do eagles really drop tortoises on people's heads?
A number of correspondents took me up on my (though I say it myself) refreshingly frank admission that I don't know what will happen in Afghanistan if (or rather when) we leave that country, and by implication that I don't think that outcome, whatever it may be, will make much difference to us anyway.
Edward Doyle made a number of statements and assertions which I would ask him to substantiate. First, he refers to something called 'Al Qaeda', on the assumption that there exists a defined, centralised organisation going under this name. Can he tell me: a) where I can find AQ's statement of aims, as opposed to baseless journalistic and political assertions of what those aims are; b)where and when it was founded, and by whom; c) how does it raise and where does it bank or store its funds, and how and to whom does it disburse them? d) what specific aims, methods, etc allow an analyst to decide whether an Islamist terror group is or is not affiliated to AQ, as in ‘such and such an action “bears all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda” ‘. What precisely are these 'hallmarks'? In what way are they different from the modus operandi of any fanatical Islamist terror group, and what reason do we have to assume that they are linked, except in the vaguest sense, with the actions of any other such group, Islamist fanatics existing in places as distant and different as Bosnia, Leeds and the Philippines, and often being from differing and even hostile types of Islam? e) what its political front organisation is, and how we can tell objectively that statements or actions attributed to AQ by journalists or intelligence organisations or governments are in fact connected with it?
Just asking.
Mr Doyle then says that AQ has 'relocated to Somalia'. From where did it do this? How does he know? Who relocated? What does he think about the people who claim it is in fact in Pakistan's tribal areas? Are they mistaken? If so, on what basis are we to judge between him and those who disagree with him, and decide that he knows better. Or does it just depend on which paper he read most recently?
I really don't know what the increased use of the burqa (or more often in this country the hijab and niqab) has to do with this. It is undoubtedly so (the burqa is also almost universal in those parts of Afghanistan we claim to have liberated from Taliban oppression, I might add). That seems to me to have more to do with a general revival of the stricter versions of Sunni Islam promoted by Saudi Arabia during the last 30 years.
And then there's this statement: ‘To be sure, Afghanistan won't turn into a Westminster look-a-like democracy. But it could function in its own way as one, bringing stability to that part of Asia and the prospect of economic development. All this might lead to far better influences being exported from the region.’
Really? How, exactly? This is an enormous 'but if', around about the size of the Himalayas. Yet he skips lightly over it as if it were a sand-castle. Mr Doyle is arguing that men - his neighbours and mine - should be sent to fight and die for a cause. The burden's on him to show good reasons for this. This is a wishful and wholly unrealistic claim of the type I've mentioned before, which falls into the category I've previously mocked, that of ‘With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn't for the houses in between’. Indeed you could, if you had the ladder and the glasses, and it wasn't for the houses. But you haven't, and the houses are there. So you can't.
For example, if Afghanistan functions 'in its own way' which is as a village-based patriarchal clan system, then it won't be a parliamentary democracy. The two are mutually exclusive. See the recent laughable 'elections'.
He then says, quite reasonably: ’There is a real danger, in at least some parts of Britain, that they come to resemble Northern Ireland - opposed community groups with totally different values living cheek-by-jowl, presided over by a liberal elite who understand neither (and of course allowing the BNP to get a foothold all the while).’
But he follows this with a complete non sequitur: ‘Afghanistan is not a liberal war. It's about establishing or maintaining community cohesion over here.’
I am sorry. I simply and genuinely do not understand the connection. I cannot reply to Mr Doyle's reasoning, by which he presumably links his fear for the Ulsterisation of Britain and his belief that our military presence in Afghanistan will prevent this. I cannot reply to it because he appears to have left it out. Has he left it out because he forgot to put it in? Or has he left it out (as I rather suspect) because he has no idea what the connection is? If so, let me reassure him. Nor have I. But in that case, what is his point?
I am asked if anyone has ever been killed as a result of an eagle dropping a tortoise on his head. The Greek classical dramatist Aeschylus is said, by some accounts, to have died in this rather unpleasant and annoying (in that it is so unlikely and rather ridiculous) way. But I am not sure where the database is, that gives statistics on this risk in the present day. When I say that I am as likely to die by this method as I am to die by the hand of a terrorist, I am simply making a point that we are much too scared of terrorists, and that most of us are at no risk whatever of being killed or hurt by terrorist attacks, to which we over-react unreasonably and ludicrously. Compare the stoical response of the British population to the much greater risk from German bombing raids and guided missiles.
Dermot Doyle meanwhile rebukes me as follows: ’We would let so many people down, if we abandoned them to the uncertainty of a future controlled by a bunch of medieval hairy savages, with more wives than teeth, and the eventual consequences for ourselves. Islamic terrorism apart, the single issue of Taliban treatment of females of all ages is worthy of our intervention. We surely cannot sit back and allow a repeat of what we saw in Afghanistan, after the Russian propped regime collapsed.’
It is amusing to see him using the same excuse for our intervention in Afghanistan (emancipation of women) as was employed by Leonid Brezhnev's USSR in the 1970s, for their equally doomed intervention. It is also based on a misunderstanding of reality. Mr Doyle should look into the treatment of women in the non-Taliban areas of Afghanistan (including NGO-infested Kabul) run by our current 'friends', the corrupt and violent warlords who control the country under the figurehead presidency of Hamid Karzai. It does not differ much from the treatment of women under our former 'friends', the Mujahidin whom we financed and armed in their war against the 'progressive' Soviets, and whom we now call 'The Taleban' or 'Al Qaeda'. (People should get hold of the profane but clever and disturbing film Charlie Wilson's War to see the contradictory mess we have got ourselves into with our fantasies of intervention in this part of the world).
The age of imperialism is over. I might regret that, and in fact often do, but it is so. It is none of my business, even if I had the power to do anything about it, how other people wish to order their countries. Unselfishness and neighbourliness are of no worth if they are not effective. As the other Mr Doyle rightly points out, we have more urgent concerns, not being addressed, close to home (where charity begins). What's more, those aims would be achievable, if we tried, whereas cleaning up Afghanistan will be as easy as draining the Pacific with a teaspoon. Do these advocates of war ever look at a map, and see how tiny our presence is, in what is a small part of this rather large country? Do they notice how much of our time is spent in first taking, then abandoning, then retaking the same places?
We intervene in these countries not to do good, but to make ourselves feel good about ourselves. This is why I recommend idealists, who think they can liberate the womenfolk of Afghanistan, to form a volunteer international brigade and go and do it themselves. Actually, only two political figures have ever succeeded in de-Islamising any society. One was Kemal Ataturk, whose work in Turkey is now being busily undone by the AK party, with Western support. The other was Josef Stalin, who banned the veil and brought female equality across Central Asia and the Caucasus. Both men were utterly ruthless. Both, in the long term, failed in their objective. Do we wish to follow their examples? Do we think we shall succeed where they ultimately failed?
In a charming and civilised post, Tom Bumstead says that a linking organisation can be identified which connects terrorist actions in Britain with Afghanistan. Well, I'd subject such claims to the questions I ask above about 'Al Qaeda'. Those in the intelligence business both love constructing these spider's webs (usually post facto) and often need them to get the US government to finance and support their work (this is the fundamental reason behind the adoption of the name 'Al Qaeda' by American intelligence organisations). But let us assume that Mr Bumstead's connections are correct. He goes on: ‘Every real attack on the UK has a link with this group and the UK will not be safe from this particular threat until Al Mujahiroun has been shut down in the UK and in Afghanistan/Pakistan. You ask why a British presence in Helmand is required - the answer is that now that Pakistan is no longer so safe a haven for terrorism as it once was - Afghanistan could take its place unless protected. The forces of civilization need to be on both sides of the border to make this area safe. There is no other area in the world which could breed this kind of terrorism - this is not an idealistic swing in the dark against evil - it is surgically precise.’
Did you spot the sleight of hand? Yes, Mr Bumstead has rather cleverly invented a country . It is called ‘Afghanistan/Pakistan’. It is necessary for his argument because, if there are such 'training camps' and if they are important, and if they do play a role in terrorist actions in this country (an argument for another time) then the trouble is that they are in Pakistan, a member (I think, currently, though this comes and goes) of the Commonwealth with which we have diplomatic relations, and with which we are not at war, and to which we gave independence in 1947. We're not sending British troops there, I think. Pakistan is also incidentally a nuclear power, and would not take kindly to our invading it. Further, Pakistan was also until recently under the control of a military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who we appear to have helped to destabilise (again in the name of 'democracy') in favour of a government which seems far less capable of controlling such things than he was. But that's by the way.
By pretending that Afghanistan and Pakistan are the same country, Mr Bumstead hopes to avoid my question, which he knows perfectly well is coming: ’How does the presence of our troops in Helmand province in Afghanistan in any way influence the existence or operation of Islamist training camps a long way away in Pakistan, a different country? Helmand, according to my map, is a good deal closer to Iran than it is to South Waziristan, the scene of Pakistan's battles with the Taleban (alias the Pashtuns). And that battle is all about the (British Imperial) misplacing of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, leaving large numbers of Pashtuns in a country they don't want to be in, a problem worsened in recent years by the many Pashtun refugees from the Russo-Afghan war, who have settled in Pakistan and so wield political influence there. I need from him simple, easy-to-follow factual explanations as to how this process - of British troops in Helmand preventing terror attacks on Britain - works. I can't make it out myself. And, once again, the burden of proof must rest on those who propose and defend this very bloody and costly military action. I don't have to prove it's futile (though 95 percent of military operations are) .They have to prove it's rational and effective.
One small non-Afghan point. A person styling himself 'Geraint' writes: ’Mr Hitchens's logic is rather faulty. He says the Tories should be destroyed but then says that the obvious successors like UKIP or the English Democrats are Cravat and Blazer brigade or too small. Yet a party starting from scratch would suffer the exact same problems. Besides which he lambasts UKIP yet at the same time praised Norman Tebbit for telling people to go vote for them at the Euro elections. Which is it Mr Hitchens you cannot have it both ways!’
I dealt with this only last week (Google the November 5 posting ‘Please stop trying to get me to endorse UKIP’. Or find it in the archives). UKIP is not 'the “obvious successor” ' to the Tories. As long as the Tories remain unsplit, no serious rival can develop. Any new party will be built out of the ruins of the Tories, and will have to win a large part of the vote which the Tories have hitherto counted upon. It will not be 'starting from scratch'. It will be reordering the conservative forces in this country which exist, but are currently trapped in impotence, or reduced to abstention. They are either too disillusioned to vote, or they are chained by habit and misplaced loyalty to the Useless Tories. That loyalty can only be shaken by a further Tory failure at the election, a real possibility (The last Tory score in the polls was 39 percent, of 67 percent of the electorate, which in reality means the support of about 25 percent of voters as a whole).
11 November 2009 1:38 PM
Two minutes without silence
This morning I walked across the street to the Kensington War Memorial for the Two Minute Silence, the proper one, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was all very seemly. A row of tiny children from the Church primary school, a small crowd of perhaps 200 people, an Anglican parson, a brave little girl sounding the last post on her bugle, to signal the start of the ceremony. I'll come back to this in a moment.
I am lucky to be free to do this sort of thing, and glad that amidst my office business I remembered in time (I have in the past forgotten to observe this small commemoration, and quite understand how easy it is to do). There's no doubt that such events have grown more intense than they were ten or 15 years ago, and are better-attended.
I also went to a Remembrance ceremony in a small Berkshire village on Sunday. These things are done best either in the capital, with massed bands, sonorous Bishops and the crash of great guns, or in the countryside where memory lasts longest, and there will still be descendants of those whose names are on the memorial, looking on, and where kindly neighbourliness, the blessing of the clean, cold country air and the noise of rooks in ancient trees, more than make up for the lack of the gilded splendour of Whitehall.
And on Tuesday evening I stood on a dreary suburban road in Oxford, in the drizzle and the dark, as six coffins were driven by, the latest casualties from Afghanistan. As I live in Oxford, I tend to think it's an obligation to be there if I am in the city on the chosen day. This is not Wootton Bassett. The crowds are substantial but not huge (in my view they are too small for a place the size of Oxford, which contains far too many middle-aged graduates like me, and a rather lower proportion of proper people doing real work in the real world).
Here there is no ceremony save the lowering of standards by men and women from the British Legion, and the brief closure of the road to normal traffic by the police. As a result it is very raw, not softened by the sweetness of hymns or the reassurance of prayers, music and poetry, but going direct to the heart. In these cars, beneath those flags are dead men who a few days ago were more alive than most of us will ever be, now returning home for good in a way nobody would wish to come home, but home all the same, back in this small, chilly, damp country, away from Afghanistan's scorching days, frozen starlit nights, where gunfire is almost as normal as traffic noise. Quite a lot of people, heads bowed at the roadside, unexpectedly find themselves weeping.
It's important that we care and show we care. I'll touch on the subject of Gordon Brown's famous letter of condolence in my column on Sunday, not here. But the act of mourning and remembering the dead is one we otherwise rather neglect in modern Britain. The old ceremony of All Souls, itself a festival Christianised when pagan times ended, used to be a major festival. All civilisations have such a thing. The Mexicans famously have their day of the dead. When I visited North Korea I was lucky enough to be there for the festival of Chuseok, probably the only occasion when North Koreans follow their own ancient traditions rather than taking part in Kim-worship. Everyone in Pyongyang, by foot, bicycle or cart, headed out into the autumn countryside for a commemorative picnic at the graves of their ancestors.
We, who used to have elaborate customs for mourning the dead, including strict rules as to how much black to wear, and when it could be laid aside, now do not know how to behave (or what to sing or say) at funerals, or have any agreed response if funerals pass by. The significance of much of Wilfred Owen's poem. 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' is probably lost by many of those who read it. They have never heard a 'passing bell' rung. They have never seen the blinds in a whole street drawn down in respect for the dead. Many of these customs, paradoxically, faded away during the First World War precisely because there were so many deaths, all of them eventually enfolded in the Two Minute Silence, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Cenotaph.
But back to Kensington. While a substantial group of people paused and prayed and held silence, the great busy city did not stop. The buses and cars growled on by, the horns honked, the shoppers hurried along the pavements. It was not a general act of mourning, but a minority action. I wasn't angry with those who didn't take part, just sorry that they had missed an important experience, and full of regret that they somehow hadn't ever had it explained to them.
Could it be otherwise? I think so, if we tried. The modern world can stop as easily as Britain did in the 1920s. I remember being in Jerusalem for the funeral of the murdered Yitzhak Rabin. At an agreed moment, the air-raid sirens sounded briefly and the city (or at least the Jewish western half of it, where I was) completely halted. Cars pulled into the roadside and the people in them got out and stood still. Buses likewise stopped and emptied. Everyone stopped what they were doing and kept still and silent. Perhaps it is easier for Israelis, used as they are (especially in Jerusalem) to a serious Sabbath observance. But not that much easier.
I assume throughout this that such commemoration is a good thing. And so it is, though - as I argue in my forthcoming book - the cult of war has to some extent become the national religion in this country, or was for many years its official religion. Now that is fading, I wonder what we shall live by in the future.
A couple of comments
I am asked what I think might happen if the NATO nations pulled out of Afghanistan. The answer is that I do not know, but that this is really a matter for the Afghan peoples. In general, given full responsibility for their own fates, people reach sensible settlements eventually because they need to. Even Somalia was on the point of regaining some sort of order until the West's most recent crass intervention against the Islamic Courts movement. I am hard put to see how Afghanistan could be much worse than the mess of corruption, rule by warlord and ethnic hatred which we are propping up. At the moment we are both responsible for the mess and unable to influence it. At least if we pulled out we would not be responsible for it, nor would we be taking heavy casualties for a purpose nobody can define. I am utterly unconvinced by the idea that Afghanistan seethes with people who long to attack us, but are somehow prevented from doing so by the presence of our soldiers in Helmand province.
And until someone can explain to me, in detail and with concrete examples given how our Helmand deployment prevents terrorism in Britain, I shall remain unconvinced.
Similarly, I am taken to task yet again for not being able to promise a detailed salvation of Britain in the event of a Tory failure to win the next election. This is not idle speculation. I think Mr Cameron's shameless u-turn on Lisbon has revealed his true nature to quite a lot of formerly loyal Tories, despite most of the media's pathetic and shameful downplaying of the event. The latest Populus poll, not very prominently featured in The Times, showed a fresh Tory drop in the polls, to 39 percent, and a growing belief among voters (and analysts) that a hung parliament was quite a likely outcome. Let me say it again, Labour are unpopular, but that has not made the Tories popular.
I reply to such critics, as I have so many times, that I cannot know what will happen next, exactly when it will happen or the detailed course it will follow. I am not a prophet or an astrologer.
I only say that such a defeat is a *necessary*, but not a *sufficient* condition for changes that will have to be achieved by men and women concerned for the future of the country. To put this still more simply: Unless the Tories lose, nothing can be done. If they lose, something can be done, but to a great extent it will be up to us to ensure that it is done. Here's the paradox. I am accused of pessimism and negativity all the time. But when I actually propose a positive course of action, I am told I am being silly. Such is life.
This always reminds me of the story of the Liverpool docker, told to me by (of all people) the late Jack Jones.
The docker, working late and almost alone on a tricky cargo on a dark afternoon, slips on the dockside and falls into the dock, but with his hook manages to stop his fall about halfway down to the deep, cold water. He cannot climb up. He cannot hold on for long. If he falls, he is sure he will die. He calls out in anxious hope: ‘Is there anybody there?’ A booming, rather celestial voice replies from above ‘Yes, my son, I am here’. The docker yells: ‘What shall I do?!’. The celestial voice calmly responds: ’My son, you must let go.’
The docker thinks for a moment, and then yells: ‘Is there anyone else up there?’
09 November 2009 3:32 PM
Piety about the Berlin Wall
Actually I am tired of all this fake joy. When the Berlin Wall went up, the 'Free West' did precisely nothing, just as it had done precisely nothing when the Red Army put down the East Berlin workers' revolt of June 1953, precisely nothing when the Red Army crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and just as it would do nothing when the Warsaw Pact invaded what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968. It would later do precious little when the Polish state moved against Solidarity in the early 1980s. In fact, apart from some brave freelance activity by a few committed conservatives, notably Roger Scruton (of whom more later), nobody really did very much at all to give practical aid to the forces of liberty in the Soviet sphere of influence. Speeches about ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ and ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall’, were just rhetoric for home consumption.
Why was the piety a fake? Why is our joy at reunification largely synthetic (while that in Germany is real, but accompanied by severe mixed feelings)? Because the Cold War was largely about our accepting Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, in return for peace, stability and prosperity on our side of the fence. Who, of those millions who benefited from this deal, can say he would personally have opted instead for frequent war and everlasting tension, given the choice? We supported change over there only when the Kremlin gave us permission to do so. West Germany was actually rather annoyed by the Polish wave of revolt because at one stage it threatened their curious tango with East Germany, a forgotten era when East German leaders were welcomed in Bonn with all the panoply accorded to normal heads of government, huge subsidies flowed quietly eastwards into the puppet state, and political dissidents were bought for hard cash, straight out of East German prisons.
This was the same era when Western leftists often made excuses for East Germany. Jonathan Steele's book Socialism with a German Face is worth obtaining for an insight into this era. Mr Steele is, in my view, a fine and courageous foreign correspondent, whose professionalism and bravery I witnessed and admired when we were both working in the old USSR. And I think he was expressing the honest feelings of many western leftists when he wrote that book. I'd even agree with them, that there were admirable aspects of East German society, as many former East Germans will now tell you. The trouble is that the price paid for them was much too high, and that the East German system, which is well described in the book Stasiland and the film The Lives of Others, was cruel, often to the point of being actively murderous, intrusive, corrupt, wholly dishonest and power-worshipping.
Well, there are lots of governments like that, and ours is slowly but alarmingly turning in that direction. Would that have happened if the Cold War had continued to keep the domestic left out of political office, and if the warning of the real existing Big Brother state over there had continued to exist? I wonder. I have often thought that the best solution for East Germany would have been for it to be taken over by Disney, and run as a vast theme park in which people could see the otherwise unbelievable operation of socialism in action. I saw East Germany at first hand, and even I find it difficult to believe what I know to be true. How will the next generation learn from this awful mistake? They won't credit that it actually happened.
What's more, the new liberated territories in the old Warsaw Pact zone are in many cases a severe disappointment to those who hoped and worked hardest for change. As Roger Scruton wrote recently, and very movingly, in The Times (in an article entitled ‘The Flame that was snuffed out by Freedom’), many of the East European dissidents were highly moral and courageous beings wedded to truth, principle and high culture. And they suffered in many unpleasant ways.
As Scruton notes, ‘There was a heavy price for opposing communism, and only a few were brave enough to pay it...
...The people that I met were imbued with a more than ordinary gentleness and concern for one another. It was hard to earn their trust but, once offered, trust was complete. Moreover, because learning, culture and the European spiritual heritage were, for them, symbols of their own inner freedom, and of the national independence they sought to remember, if not to regain, they looked on those things with an unusual veneration. As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips I was amazed to discover students for whom words devoted to such things were wasted words, and who sat in those little pockets of underground air studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.’
When the oppressor left, Scruton hoped that such people would be in power. Alas. ‘For a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State. It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and real-politik — without which it is impossible to stay in government.
‘They sat in their offices for a while, pityingly observed by their staff of former secret policemen, while affable and much travelled rivals, of the kind with whom German Social Democrats and French Gaullists could both “do business”, carefully groomed themselves for the next elections.’
Read the article to see his explanation of the extraordinarily rapid triumph of the European Union, which has become the new power in this region. I have a great deal of admiration for Roger Scruton and some others known to me who, unrecognised here, took considerable risks in those sinister places to try to bring freedom. All I did was observe, at no risk to myself. But I share his sadness at the lost opportunity. The hopes that flared like fireworks in the autumn of 1989 fell all too swiftly back to earth
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