So a great frenzy about the three MPs who are alleged (I haven't seen proof) to have considered sheltering behind the Bill of Rights is a bit of a diversion from the real headline, which ought to be: "Four charged. Everyone else in Parliament let off" If the police started investigating every sniff of impropriety among politicians and their friends, there'd be no end to it, ever. Look at Israel, where being Prime Minister almost invariably seems to trigger a prosecution of the incumbent and or his family. Apart from undermining the electorate's sole right to appoint and dismiss MPs, and apart from giving power to publicity-seeking police officers, prosecutors and judges, I cannot see what this achieves. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.
11 February 2010 11:24 AM
Collected works
10 February 2010 4:03 PM
Hitler, coffee, cars, equality and other matters
08 February 2010 4:04 PM
Keep the police out of politics
Was Hitler influenced by Darwin or by Christianity? Some thoughts on posts by Mr 'Godwin'
Saturday 13 February 2010
I've assembled here in one place a number of comments I've recently posted on various threads, where they may have been missed by some readers. In some case they're slightly expanded.
But first a small response to Mr Barnes about Geert Wilders. I'm afraid I think he's a show-off with very little of significance to say, presumably seeking to take over where Pym Fortuyn left off when he was murdered. That's not to say I don't think he should be acquitted, because I do, and I think the decision to ban him from this country was disgraceful and pathetic. But I really don't think his attitude towards Islam is likely to achieve anything, except lots of publicity for Mr Wilders. I understand he says he's a libertarian, but he wants to ban the Koran. Excuse me? I've also heard nothing good about his famous film 'Fitna'. Paradoxically, I'm also criticised for warning against the real problem we face in Europe - the rise of Islam once Christianity is finally extirpated. I stick by this. I don't know what the Muslim population of Western Europe now is, but it's large, and significant, thanks to migration, and growing quite fast, thanks to Islam's belief in big families.
But that's not all. Islam will survive and prosper as Christianity dies out in the minds of the people, and is bureaucratically stifled by the elite state. Muslims take their faith seriously. They hope and intend to convert the entire world. And when, in the harsh times which I think are coming as the West declines, people begin to turn once again to religion, the Mosques will be there waiting for them with their very simple message, far easier to understand and accept than the complex and demanding formulas of Christianity. Christianity survived in the modern world because it was established, and built into culture, art, literature, music, education, architecture and family life - but almost all these influences are now gone, and I am not sure it is strong enough to survive three or four generations in which it is, for the most part, not taught to children.
Look at the churches which are successful in the modern world, the uncompromising ones which are not a vague mixture of social work and singing, but offer a confident explanation of the whole world and a guide to the whole of life. They are few and far between, and they are islands in a secular society. Let those who deride my prediction wait and see. I think it is at least a strong possibility.
Now, some other points:
On not prosecuting politicians
Three responses to Eric Johnson's attempt at a barbed comment: ‘Politicians should not be prosecuted for what they do in office? Thank you, Mr Hitler, you're free to go.’
One general one. Don't be silly. He knows perfectly well that's not the point. One particular one, can Mr Johnson perhaps recall why there was no prosecution of A. Hitler? And one legal one. Josef Stalin, Mao tse Tung, V.I. Lenin, Klement Gottwald, Matyas Rakosi, Walter Ulbricht, and many many other bloody tyrants died in their beds - and in some cases their funerals were attended by world 'statesmen' or at least by the diplomatic corps. And does Mr Johnson know what the charges actually were (and also what they weren't and couldn't be, and why they couldn't be) against the surviving members of the National Socialist leadership? Worth a look.
Mr Barnes (again) criticises my call for the police to stay out of politics by saying they're controlled by the Home Office already. Alas (as examined in my book 'A Brief History of Crime') this has become true, unofficially, thanks to the mergers of forces and the influence of Bramshill Police College on all chief officers. But Peel did not intend it to be so, and it could be reversed, which is why I am also on record as calling for the restoration of small local forces and the closure of Bramshill. I'd add the disbanding of ACPO, a very curious body which promotes national policing.
On the metric system, and the globalisation of the English language
Tom West asks: ‘Speaking as a typical 19-year-old (there probably aren't many reading this blog), I can use both the metric and imperial systems, but use metric because it's simpler and quicker to calculate with; that's all. It's not that I'm a Marxist hell-bent on eradicating British culture. Why is the metric system “awful”?’
Because it's a top-down imposition, devised by theorists and enforced by law - whereas the customary system is the product of centuries of use, and embraced voluntarily. The comparison is similar to that between common law and civil law systems.
The semi-compulsory use of the metric system, now being attempted here with some success, with a major effort by the state school system and the BBC, following a successful attempt to frighten market traders with prosecutions (now over, but the effect is detectable and seems irreversible) is a pretty much invariable sign of an unfree people.
I've lived in countries where the metric system is fully imposed, and it's notable that it's invariably subverted in practice. French schoolchildren do not use metre-long rulers in class. It would be silly. So what do they use? 50cm? 25cm? 10cm? No. They use thirty-centimetre rulers, almost identical to the foot.
Russian shoppers at peasant markets do not buy meat fruit or vegetables by the kilogram, but by the 'polkilo' (half-kilo) as close as they can get to the pound, more or less what can be held in the hand. Likewise Norman farmers will sell you butter by the 'livre' and eggs by the 'douzaine', after 200 years of compulsory metrication. When you buy a 'demi' of beer in a Paris cafe, what is it half of? (Clue: not a litre.) Why is no decent wine sold in litre bottles? In Canada, long metricated, you can buy steaks by the ounce in Montreal or Toronto, and bridge heights in Quebec are given in 'pieds' and 'pouces'. The inch or 'Zoll' is still in widespread use in common speech in German-speaking countries, etc etc.
By the way, before someone mentions this canard, it's not true that Burma hasn't metricated. It has, as I can recount from my own visit there.
Decimal calculation is easy, perhaps too easy. What if you then have to calculate outside its range? Most of us learned good mental arithmetic when we had to know (as I still do) that 12 pennies make a shilling and 20 shillings made a pound (sterling), that 16 ounces make a pound (avoirdupois), 14 pounds make a stone, eight stone make a hundredweight and 20 hundredweight make a ton - and that 12 inches make a foot, three feet make a yard, 22 yards make a chain, ten chains make a furlong and eight furlongs make a mile (five furlongs, by the way, make a kilometre). Distances between railway bridges, I'm cheered to see, are still generally measured in miles and chains. You didn't get short measure in those days, or short change. Now you do, all the time. We've made life easier, and ourselves less mentally agile and more easily conned.
The other thing, of course, is that metric measures, having no relation to human experience or use, are much more easily fiddled, so that you can increase prices by stealth. A one-pound jar of jam has to stay the same. It's a pound. But once you start dealing in (say) 454 grams, it's easy to slip downwards to 450, then 415, or 400 (likewise millilitres).
He goes on: ‘Of all the speaking habits you've described, I only use three: I say “commit to” because it's quicker; that's all. I say “train station” because it's quicker; that's all. I say “hopefully” OR “I hope”, since they're both accurate, clear and grammatical. What's wrong with any of these usages?’
I might equally ask what's right with them? Is he in such a hurry that he hasn't time for a few extra syllables? The old usages were specifically English. The new ones are part of a sort of 'World English', much less rich, musical and allusive than the one spoken here, because those who use it generally use it as a second language, and think, dream, and speak in other tongues.
The difference, I should say, is between what I think is called 'international cuisine' or 'fast food', and a genuine local dish. Why make the world less varied, and language more bland? Why should we speak like someone off the TV, instead of like our own forebears?
He says: ‘I can understand your other described annoyances, but not these ones.’
I hope I've helped him understand 'these ones' too.
Time for a general review of comment, controversy and correspondence. I may repeat here some of the comments I have posted on individual threads, as sometimes these things get lost when attention shifts.
First, I'm struck by an exchange on the 'Response to 'Mev'' thread, in which 'HM' and Tony Wayt disagree about the left and egalitarianism. Tony Wayt rightly says that the Left discriminate all the time. 'HM' says they're egalitarian. He's also right.
Egalitarianism is much more interesting, and much more nasty, than it looks. It isn't really about making people equal. All sensible people know that, except in the eyes of God, humans are profoundly unequal in every significant way. Even a legal system of amazing fairness would end up favouring certain people over others. It's an attempt to give a moral backing to the pulling down of distinctions, honours, customs and traditions in the old society, which is being overthrown. The oppressed or poor, hearing the trumpet call of 'Equality' think this means that they will be raised up, or at least if that’s not possible that the oppressor, or the wealthy, will be pulled down.
As we all know, people and institutions are often pulled down by campaigns for 'equality'. Revolutions destroy monarchy, nobility, church hierarchy and monasticism. In modern times they also destroy respectability, individual self-advancement, the professions, marriage, the primacy of Christianity, the hierarchy of knowledge, traditional education, the married family etc.
But as with the comprehensive school system in Britain, or with the Chinese cultural revolution in general, the formerly 'oppressed' and 'excluded' gain nothing from the destruction of the old citadels of alleged privilege, and are worse off than they were before. I will leave readers to work out who does gain. What is amazing is that revolutions keep happening, and nobody seems to learn anything from them. Perhaps that's why modern revolutionaries devote such a disproportionate effort to trashing formal education and pumping liquid manure into popular culture.
Currently, the main target of 'equality' is Christianity.
But once it's been dethroned, do people really imagine that we will live in some paradise of unfettered thought where a thousand schools of thought will contend on equal terms? Don't you believe it. Marxoid materialism will prevail, or perhaps Islam (or perhaps a cynical combination of the two, as already synthesised by some of the more unscrupulous Marxist grouplets).
People often quote Orwell's bitter jibe from ‘Animal Farm’ about ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’. Many will remember how the qualifying clause mysteriously appeared one night on the slogan painted on the wall. But I doubt if one in a hundred actually understands it, or has thought about what it means. When, for instance, I have written that the elite in egalitarian societies are *less* equal than the masses (which in my personal, direct experience of living in elite conditions in a Nomenklatura block of flats in Soviet Moscow is very much so), people often ask me: ‘Surely, you mean “more equal”?’ No, I absolutely don't.
'Equality' is the miserable, oppressed condition in which the dupes and victims of revolution live in places such as Cuba (as recently visited by the 'Conservative' W. Hague without any effort to meet dissenters) or North Korea. The elite and their families are exempt, in housing, medical treatment, education, liberty of speech, thought and travel, comfort, wealth and employment. They are also generally above the law, in many respects. They are far *less* equal than the masses to whom they preach equality.
The trouble is, since egalitarianism replaced Christianity as the basis of ethics, people all think, or like to think, they're in favour of it. The formula of 'equality of opportunity' is an interesting example of this. It is presented as if it is a moderate variation of the real thing, a belief in Equality of *Outcome*. A belief in 'Equality of *Opportunity*' clearly implies that in all significant ways, people will live wholly unequal lives. It is a confession of unbelief in the gospel of 'equality', disguised as belief in it. In fact, in reality, they're against it. But they would be embarrassed and troubled to admit it. Hence the widespread misreading of Orwell.
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I make no apology for liking coffee. I agree the 'Flat White' is an improvement on the 'Caffe Latte', but it's still quite hard to find. If the caffe latte is properly made (ie strong) it is a good morning drink. So is strong French-style cafe-au-lait of the kind you have to pay a fortune for now in France, in chichi places such as the Deux Magots or the Flore on the Boulevard St Germain, or can make yourself at home with a bit of effort and some chicory. Most French cafes nowadays serve a washy substance, simultaneously bitter and weak, which can spoil your whole day. The Italians and the Spanish make a better job of it. Also exceptionally good is the coffee served at Lou Mitchell's, the wondrous breakfast joint round the corner from Union Station in Chicago, rivalled only by the Tabard Inn in Washington DC as places where proper American coffee can be got, or should I say gotten. In my case (I can't drink black coffee without an instant headache. Coffee, for me, has to have fat in it) it's best accompanied by a splosh of 'half and half'. Most American filter coffee is foul, which is why I'm personally grateful to Starbucks for existing.
As for tea, George Orwell (there he is again) wrote the definitive essay on it (‘A nice cup of tea’), easily reached on the web. I agree with most of it, though I like tea in a mug, in a garden shed, drunk with hands still dirty from work, and I suspect that Britain's 1939 war effort would have collapsed without great quantities of heavily sugared tea (in mugs) accompanied by thick bully-beef sandwiches. If most of the tea-fanciers who've written here were faced with the sort of tea my beloved late aunt Ena made (so non-translucent that an anti-aircraft searchlight couldn't have shone through it, and a deep rich brown even after great quantities of milk were added) I think they'd simply sit there in awed silence. She kept alive an English tradition dating back to Edwardian times, and much further (and once made me a seed-cake to satisfy my curiosity about what this substance, so often encountered in Victorian and Edwardian novels, actually was. Once was enough, though it was a perfectly good seed-cake). She never had a teabag in her house.
A moment here to divert to a subject I should have mentioned earlier - the sad death of Ian Carmichael who, with Dennis Price, showed how Bertie Wooster and Jeeves could actually be portrayed on TV. How anyone could ever have imagined that Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie could measure up to this matchless duo, I don't know. Carmichael was also a fine Peter Wimsey. I hadn't read Dorothy Sayers' marvellous books until I saw Carmichael as 'Death Bredon' in 'Murder Must Advertise'. (Sayers readers will understand the importance of the name.) I always hear his voice when I read them now - I read three at one go sitting in the back of a GMC truck between Amman and Baghdad and then between Baghdad and Amman, just before Christmas 2003, on a road you can't use any more. A strange choice, you might think, but 'The Nine Tailors' were (was?) a particularly good escape from the reality of the desert.
Hitler's non-Christianity seems to be confirmed by the recollections of both Goebbels and Albert Speer, who record his contempt for the softness and 'Jewishness' of Christianity. I really do think attempts to make out he was a practising Roman Catholic in his adult life are so absurd that they are close to being disreputable.
Scott Ross wants me to 'rethink' my views about transport and presumably join the Petrolheads and the bulldozer drivers, chewing up what's left of our towns and country for the great god Car. I ask Mr Ross to appreciate that this view of mine is not some eccentric quirk, but integral to my particularist conservative view. Nobody could love this country and like what the car has done, and is doing to it. I urge him to read the relevant parts of 'The Abolition of Britain' and 'The Broken Compass' soon to be republished in paperback as 'The Cameron Delusion'.
I said it during the 'cash for honours' investigation and I say it again now. The police should stay out of politics. Prosecuting politicians for what they do in office is filled with dangers. I'd obviously exclude prosecutions dealing with actions taken in the normal course of life. An MP caught shoplifting, or driving like a homicidal maniac, should be prosecuted and, if convicted, punished like a normal subject. The MPs who are accused of false accounting in their expenses should, if convicted, be sent off into obscurity, not sent to prison. I feel the need to stress that they haven't actually been convicted, since I believe so strongly in the presumption of innocence as one of our basic freedoms.
Partly my revulsion at these events is instinctive. The sight of police officers rifling through MPs' affairs gives me the creeps, very deep inside, just as I very strongly disapprove of the presence of armed officers in the Palace of Westminster, as we have sometimes seen at moments of official panic over terrorist outrages. Parliament, not the police, is sovereign. Who are the police serving here? The law, or the state or the media elite? Or the mob, which has currently turned on MPs in a vague, directionless 'to blazes with the lot of them' way - which cannot actually be dealt with by a general election which will elect another almost-identical parliament - after months of increasingly shallow and thoughtless coverage of the expenses affair.
But there are rational grounds for my disquiet, as well as instinctive ones. The first is this simple point. All police investigations and all prosecutions in modern Britain are selective. The volume of wrongdoing means they have to be. The police simply don't bother with many offences, and with many offenders, and I am mildly surprised that a force which is so reluctant to investigate a burglary, and has virtually given up investigating car thefts, is so keen to throw allegedly scarce resources into probing an allegation of fiddled expenses, an offence which is committed (if it has been) whether the money involved is public or private, and which, er, never happens in the police, the media or business. Does it?
So how do the police and the CPS or the DPP decide which cases to pursue and which not to pursue? What public good is promoted by pursuing these particular broken, finished old has-beens through the courts? Where was the bar set, and by whom, that meant three obscure Labour MPs and one even more obscure Tory peer were the only ones who deserved to be prosecuted after months of revelations of greed and fiddling? That presumably means that the prosecuting authorities have decided that all the hundreds of others were acting within the law.
This concentrated rage against people who have already tumbled from grace, and are the designated sacrificial victims at the end of a national frenzy about 'sleaze', is a bit reminiscent of the unhinged police pursuit (a squadron of cars coming up the drive, filmed by TV cameras, all lights flashing, how did the TV station know they were coming?) of the former Tory MP Neil Hamilton when some dingbat ludicrously and falsely accused him of rape. And it also reminds me of the nonsensically vindictive (*by the standards of the system*) prison sentence imposed on Jeffrey Archer and served in unjustifiably harsh conditions (*by the standards of the system*) for perjury in a civil case (where nobody's liberty was at stake). This was demonstrably out of line with normal practice *by the standards of the system* in such cases. For example: Archer got four years for lying in a libel case where nobody was at risk of imprisonment. Neil Hamilton's accuser - whose allegations could have sent him to jail for many years - got three.
I'm not excusing his perjury (as I know I will be accused of doing), or saying Archer shouldn't have been imprisoned for it (as I likewise know I'll be accused of doing). He should have been. I'm merely pointing out that the punishment was excessive *by the standards of the system which imposed it*, that he was held in excessively confined conditions *by the standards of the system which inflicted them * for someone in his position, and that these things appeared to have been driven by a desire in the criminal justice system to show off to whoever happens to be political top dog at the moment. In that case, it was a triumphalist New Labour. Those who applauded this sort of thing then may yet live to regret it, if the Cameroons ever do end up on top. This tacky, rackety, personally vengeful continental-style or American-style politics does not belong here, and lowers respect for Parliament.
It isn't actually the false accounting that has infuriated the public, as it happens. As always (and as was famously said by the excellent American journalist Michael Kinsley) the surprise is not about what's illegal. The surprise is about what is legal. That is to say, that things most people would regard as wrong, greedy and despicable are officially permitted, and still remain so despite months of scandal.
And, as I have often pointed out, it is quite legal for the rather rich leader of a major political party to charge the taxpayers - most of whom struggle to pay for one home - many thousands of pounds a year for the interest on the mortgage of his second home. This is a substantial family house in easy reach of London, which in my view he does not actually need for his parliamentary duties. The place is in reasonable commuting distance of London, and if he really can't face the journey (many of his constituents do it daily) what's wrong with a small flat or a room in a B&B? Or if he wants a nice big house up there, why not just pay for it himself?
I'd also like to make a brief diversion here into two stories which seem to me to be quite interesting.
The Tory party treasurer, Michael Spencer was said to have sold shares worth £45 million, only weeks before the company involved (his own) issued a profit warning that sent their value tumbling to £30 million. I here reproduce the account from the Daily Mail of 6th February:
‘THE Tory party treasurer was accused of lacking integrity last night for selling a stake in his own broking firm before warning shareholders profits would plunge.
Michael Spencer, who is a close friend of David Cameron, is likely to face questions from the City watchdog over the timing of the sale which gained him at least an extra £15million.
One financial analyst described the deal as incredibly well-timed but lacking in credibility. The Liberal Democrats called for the billionaire to be sacked from his role in the Tory party.
The allegations concern ICAP, the broking firm that Mr Spencer founded in 1986.
On January 8 he sold 10.3million shares at 440p a share, netting him £45million.
Yesterday, however, ICAP shares crumbled to 297p following an unexpectedly downbeat report on trading. Had he sold after the warning he would have realised £30million.
The trading update saw £406million wiped off ICAP’s market value yesterday. Vivek Raja, an analyst at investment bank Panmure Gordon, said: “Selling at the top of the market like he did is probably within the letter of the law: as they say it’s all about timing. But there is an issue here over a lack of credibility and integrity. Sentiment has turned against the company today in a big way, many shareholders are angry, to put it politely.” Last year Mr Spencer quit as chairman of stock-broking firm Numis a few weeks after admitting he used his stake in the company as collateral against a loan.
He is understood to have lost hundreds of millions of pounds in the credit crunch and stands to lose many more if he and estranged wife Lorraine divorce after 25 years of marriage.
A spokesman for the Financial Services Authority said officials were aware of the furore around the timing of the ICAP sale but refused to comment on reports that they were launching an investigation.
However, he said Mr Spencer’s sale did not break any regulations governing the sale of directors’ shares as there is no so-called ‘closed’ period around trading updates.
He would have been forbidden from offloading the shares before half-year and annual results.
Mr Spencer insisted last night that there was nothing untoward about the sale. The shares sold amounted to 8 per cent of his total holding and his remaining shares fell in value by £70 million yesterday.
A spokesman for Mr Spencer said: “He wouldn’t have known what trading was going to be like in December and January and the wording of the new guidance was only agreed at a board meeting on Thursday.
“The shares were sold in an open period. ICAP has strict procedures on share sales which were followed. Charles Gregson [ICAP’s chairman] was approached, his permission for a sale was sought and granted.” He said the motive for a sale was to raise money to pay down debts owed by his private investment company, IPGL.Analysts said the detail of the profit warning should have pushed ICAP shares no more than 7 per cent lower. But on the day, shares fell 17 per cent." ‘
Mr Spencer also defended the action to The Times in person. ‘By definition, as you very well know, I wouldn’t have sold those shares at that time had I been aware that we were facing a profit warning,’ he said. ‘That’s a statement of fact and a supportable fact.’
I don't doubt his defence. But I'd like to know more about it, especially if I'd bought any shares in Icap recently. And if I were Mr Cameron I'd like to know more. Where's the clamour?
Then there's Andrew Feldman, now 'Chief Executive' of the Tory Party, an old friend of the Tory leader, who helped him to win the leadership. Mr Feldman is also a successful businessman, and has just won a valuable government contract in Macedonia, a Balkan state that the Conservative leader has said should be invited to join the European Union.
Here's the account from the Daily Mail of 8th February:
‘THE Tory leader is facing allegations of cronyism after it emerged that a key aide won a valuable contract in a Balkan state which Mr Cameron has said should be allowed to join the European Union.
Andrew Feldman, the chief executive of the Conservative Party, who has been friends with Mr Cameron since university, was in a consortium which in 2007 won a government contract to build a five-star hotel in Macedonia.
Mr Cameron called for the U.S. to back Macedonia four months after the deal was signed.
Mr Feldman, who had no previous experience of building or running a hotel, now stands to profit from the deal.
A spokesman for Mr Cameron said: “It is a long-standing Conservative Party policy that we support the enlargement of the EU to all of the countries of the western Balkans.
“Any suggestion that this position is somehow linked to Andrew Feldman's business is as offensive as it is ridiculous.” ‘
I'm sure this is all entirely above board, and that Mr Cameron's spokesman is right. But once again I'd like to know more, and once again suspect Mr Cameron would too. So would the electorate.
A slightly unexpected side-effect of last week's morsel on evolution (which interestingly produced, as this subject always does, more responses than many more immediate topics) were some stern postings by a Mr 'Godwin' about the origin of Hitler's exterminationist beliefs. I suggested that Hitler's keenness for compulsory sterilization, then his programme of 'euthanasia' (aka murder) for the mentally handicapped and finally his racial mass murder were at least partly the result of ideas founded on Charles Darwin's proposition. I might point out here that my idea is not original or rare. In Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, Professor Kershaw (who has no axe to grind on this topic, so far as I know) repeatedly attributes a belief or world view which he terms 'Social Darwinism' to the National Socialist leader.
Mr 'Godwin' disputed my position and also suggested that Hitler remained a Christian (he was certainly baptised and raised as one) during his active life. I try to tackle this below. Can it be that Mr 'Godwin' is one of those who argues with what he wants me to have said, rather than what I have actually said? Does his approach have any other faults? Let us see.
Mr 'Godwin' initially said: ‘The Nazi party specifically banned works on “primitiven Darwinismus”, calling it “falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung”.’
I asked for references.
Mr Godwin responded promptly: ’The quotes I provided yesterday came from Die Bücherei 2:6, an official Nazi library journal from 1935 which detailed what should and should not be stocked. It named Häckel as a seditious author.
‘The related list is available via the University of Arizona's website (you must make your own way there from this island), which cites the 1968 publication Strothmann, Dietrich - Nationalsozialistische Literaturpolitik: ein Beitrag zur Publizistik im Dritten Reich as its source.’
A pro-Darwin website gives the full title :’Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel). (Guidelines from Die Bücherei 2:6 (1935), p. 279)6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel). Hmmm. Not 'Darwinism'. Much more specific. ‘False scientific enlightenment’, then ‘primitive' Darwinism *and* 'Monism'. What's that? Could this be about something else, not about Darwinism at all? Let's see.
I believe that this ban (mention of which, I now gather, is a stock-in-trade Darwinist response to the allegation that the Nazis were influenced and inspired by evolutionary theory) was not caused by any NSDAP objection to the theory of evolution, but may have more to do with Hitler's specific disagreement with Haeckel's supporters and disciples, the Monists, who were very far from being Nazis.
So far as I know, the Monist League, which was made up of Haeckel's disciples, was shut down in 1933 by the Nazis, so publications linked with it would have been banned at the same time. Richard Weikart, in his book exploring the links between Darwinism and National Socialist ideology ('From Darwin to Hitler' p.70) notes: ’The Nazi suppression of the Monist League was not a function of a fundamental change in the Monist League's orientation during the Weimar period, as [Daniel] Gasman has argued, but rather reflected significant differences between Haeckel and Hitler. Haeckel and the Monist League promoted many social reforms that were anathema to Hitler, such as homosexual rights, feminism, and pacifism.’
The Daniel Gasman referred to is the author of 'The Scientific Origins of National Socialism', in which he wrote (Chapter 7): ’If one surveys the origins of the Volkish movement in Germany during the three or four decades prior to the First World War it is apparent that Haeckel played an influential, significant, indeed a decisive role in its genesis and subsequent development. An impressive number of the most influential Volkish writers, propagandists, and spokesmen were influenced by or involved in some way with either Haeckel or his Monist followers. In the development of racism, racial eugenics, Germanic Christianity, nature worship, and anti-Semitism, Haeckel and the Monists were an important source and a major inspiration for many of the diverse streams of thought which came together later on under the banner of National Socialism.’
But plainly (see above) not all of them. And here you could see why Hitler or his followers might have wanted to ban Haeckel, for political reasons, rather than because Haeckel was a sort of Darwinist.
Haeckel himself was very far from being an orthodox Darwinist. I submit that it was his Monism, and the politics of it, not his evolutionary beliefs, that Hitler didn't like.
Now, here's a question for Mr 'Godwin'. If the Darwinists could find, in this 'Die Bucherei' volume, an instruction to ban 'The Origin of Species' or 'The Descent of Man' wouldn't they mention it in preference to the Haeckel ban? Perhaps they can't find evidence of such a ban because Darwin wasn't in fact banned by the Nazis. The banning of an obscure Monist work by Haeckel doesn't amount to a Nazi hostility to Darwin.
I have so far been able to find no record of mainstream evolutionist works, by Darwin or Huxley, being included in the Nazi book-burnings of 1933, or in subsequent library or bookshop bans. Yet we know from contemporary accounts that the works of Sigmund Freud and many other notables were chucked on Dr Goebbels's bonfire. If Darwin had been among them, wouldn't the Darwinists proudly trumpet this fact?
Actually, you can see why Hitler might quite have liked this famous extract (easily located in the Project Gutenberg e-text) from Darwin's 'Descent of Man' (Chapter 6, in the section entitled 'On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man'):
‘The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies, between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae, between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.’
We might all pause for a moment here, and ponder a bit. These are, so far as I know, the words of that nice old man on the ten pound note.
Back, however, to Mr 'Godwin'.
Nobody is saying that Hitlerian extermination is the direct or only possible consequence of belief in Evolution by Natural Selection. But I am arguing that Hitlerism is permitted by this belief, and debarred by Christianity.
Mr 'Godwin' then engages in a tiny bit of bait and switch. He produces several quotations from Hitler which confirm (what is not in dispute) that Hitler was a Theist or Deist of some kind. Examples: ‘Mein Kampf translations are available widely online. In volume one, chapter two, Hitler wrote “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
‘In volume one, chapter eight, Hitler wrote: “What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfilment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.”
‘In volume two, chapter ten, Hitler wrote “Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow God's handiwork to be debased. For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.” ‘
But this is not the argument. Mr 'Godwin' assumes that any mention of 'God' must imply that the user is a Christian. In modern Europe this is a reasonable assumption. But is it right in this case? My argument is firstly that Hitler was not a Christian, but some sort of Pagan; next that his attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church was tactical, not attacking it directly until he was strong enough to do so. For this, see Kershaw's biography of Hitler (Vol 1, 1889-1936, 'Hubris', Penguin paperback edition, 2001, p.34) on Hitler's criticism of his forerunner in the Volkisch movement, Georg Schoenerer, for antagonising the Catholic Church from a position of weakness. Yet on page 58 we find reliable accounts that Hitler, when a dosser and layabout in Vienna, was obsessively hostile to the Jesuits. I said I believed that he was a sort of Wagnerian Pagan, a view for which I think there is much support in recorded episodes of Hitler's life, his undoubted passion for Wagnerian opera from his loafing days in Vienna till his death, and his own statements. Why, he may even have been a 'theistic evolutionist'.
It is well known that the Nazis encouraged a Church (The German Christians) from which the Jewish Christ (and the Jewish Old Testament) had been removed and in which Hitler himself was the 'completion of the Reformation'. Baptised Jews were also excluded from this grotesque 'church'. A rival body, the 'Confessing Church' was set up by orthodox Protestants to counter it. There were unconfirmed, and (undenied) rumours that Hitler had himself joined the 'Deutsche Christen' at some Witches' Sabbath in Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad) in April 1933. Against this we have the single quotation attributed to Hitler in the diary of General Gerhard Engel, in which Hitler is supposed to have said that he was and had always been a Catholic. The diary was written in 1941 but seems to refer to a pre-war conversation. Hitler, as we know, would say almost anything to anybody if he wanted something from them, and often did so. David Irving, for what that's worth, apparently thinks the Engel diary (which he says he has seen at first hand) is a fake. I don't see what motive Mr Irving would have for denying its authenticity, but I wouldn't necessarily want to rely on his opinion, either. I just mention it. If anyone has better information on this diary, I'm anxious to see it.
Mr 'Godwin' says of Hitler's Mein Kampf ravings: ’These are not the words of a man who was an exponent of (or even believed or understood) the Darwinian theory of the origin of species, nor are they atheist philosophy. These are the words of a deranged psychopath who professed to believe in a divinely created superior race of a divinely created superior species, created separately with a God-given right over all others to do what was necessary to maintain its “Rassenreinheit”.’
I'm not sure how he can be so certain of that. I'll return to that in a moment.
Finally he said: ‘Mr Hitchens has claimed that Hitler was a keen exponent of Charles Darwin’s theory of a naturalistic origin of species, but has provided no evidence to back up his claim. I cannot find one recorded mention of Darwin in all of Hitler’s work. Does Mr Hitchens have any positive evidence of Darwin’s influence on Hitler, or will this assertion remain unsupported?’
This statement - that the name of Darwin doesn't feature in Hitler's book, is often made by evolutionists. It is both entirely true and deeply misleading. Is it meant to be misleading? Mr 'Godwin' will have to tell us. Since he claims to be familiar with the ravings of Hitler, can he not have noticed the flaw in his assertion? Let me help him.
The name of 'Darwin' is, it is true, not invoked anywhere in Mein Kampf. Given the establishment of the theory (pretty much complete by Hitler's own youth) as a scientific orthodoxy, it is just as likely to be referred to by the name of the theory (if not more so) than by the name of its chief proponent. And the word 'evolution' most certainly is invoked in Mein Kampf. I believe that it was also frequently invoked in Hitler's orations and newspaper articles, and I would welcome any information about that.
Now, to the appearance of the evolution theory in Mein Kampf. Does it appear? Yes. Does the way in which it is used suggest that Hitler did or did not believe in it? It suggests to me that he accepted it, insofar as it suited him to do so, without necessarily understanding it. He may not have understood it, but then most people who believe in it don't understand it either, so that's of little significance. Take for instance this passage (to be found on p.237 of the pdf of Mein Kampf easily located on the web): ’The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all’.
This seems to me to settle that Hitler, like most people, had absorbed the conventional wisdom of evolutionary theory, and that he thought, wrote and acted as if it was a settled truth. Hitler, as we also know, left his 'Realschule' at the age of 16 with an undistinguished record in all subjects (he had been chucked out of a better school because of his poor marks). He is unlikely to have had any expert understanding of the theory, any more than most of its lay adherents do now. But that didn't stop him from believing in it, any more than it stops others from doing so today, on as flimsy a basis, and acting upon their beliefs.
On the following page we find :’If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one, because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds and thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.’
There are further mentions of evolution as assumed truth on p.245, 248, 249, 365, 471 and 530 (I have omitted one or two uses of the expression in a purely political sense, though these too would tend to suggest that Hitler accepted it as a scientific fact)
Mr ‘Godwin’ again: ’In the meantime, my most recent post, and posts by others, provided unambiguous evidence that Hitler was in fact a keen exponent of belief in a Christian God, who publicly said he was a Catholic doing the work of the Lord.’
Do they, though? Can Mr ‘Godwin’ refer me to the passages which establish these precise propositions? A god of some sort, yes. A Christian God? Not so clear.
Mr ‘Godwin’ once more: ‘Hitler told people he was on a mission for the divine creator, who had given men their physical features and mental capacity, and created a master race which should be kept pure in accordance with His will. These religious ideas are repeated throughout Mein Kampf. The idea that Hitler was an exponent of any naturalistic explanation of human origins, or any other atheistic philosophy is a clear fallacy.’
But that is not my proposition. My proposition is that Hitler was an evolutionist, a survival-of-the-fittest Spencerian, and non-Christian theist. The 'Christ' of the 'German Christians' was not, for instance, a Jew.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the original racialist theorist, and one of the prophets of Nazi racial theory, devoted some effort to trying to establish that Jesus was not a Jew. Yet it's perfectly obvious from the Gospels that Christ was a Jew. Nobody could be a Christian and accept this nonsense. I don't think most Nazis believed it either. Olivia Manning, who was in Nazi-dominated Bucharest in 1940-41, records watching newsreels of victorious German soldiers singing, in 1940, 'Wir wollen keinen Christen sein, weil Christus war ein Judenschwein' - ‘We don't want to be Christians, because Christ was a Jewish pig'. I regret having to reproduce this slime, and having to translate it, but people should be in no doubt of the sort of thing that was taught and sung in the SA, the SS and the Hitler Youth, and of the vicious hostility towards Christianity shown by National Socialists at many opportunities. How this could be so if Hitler had been a practising Roman Catholic, I really cannot say. Hitler's mystical references to the Almighty are not by any means necessarily to be taken as references to the God of Christianity, let alone the God of Judaism.
Mr 'Godwin' again: ‘Mr Hitchens states that if Hitler was an exponent of Darwinism as he claimed, it would demonstrate that the theory has repulsive consequences in human action. This is an obvious non-sequitur. If Hitler was an exponent of Christianity (which clearly he was), would Mr Hitchens accept that Christianity had these same repulsive consequences? Whatever Hitler believed, it can teach us nothing about the truth of our origins, whether they are natural or supernatural.’
Well, see above for whether Hitler was in fact 'clearly' a Christian, let alone an 'exponent' of Christianity. If this were so, where are the accounts, anywhere, of his attending religious services (apart from patriotic shows such as the famous 1933 gathering at the Garrison Church in Potsdam) and the pictures of him leaving church portals after Mass? Which church did he attend in Vienna? Or Munich? Or Berlin? Was there a chaplain at Rastenburg, or in the Hitler bunker, to serve his needs? Who was he? Why haven't we heard from his confessor? Or his pastor? Or anyone? There's no evidence of this Christianity of Hitler's except unreliable third-hand tittle-tattle, so far as I know.
Yet the eugenicists, with their belief in sterilisation of the 'inferior', and the racial theorists, such as Chamberlain, were excited by Darwinism. In the days before 1945, when such movements were still respectable all over the civilised world (see Richard Overy's recent book 'the Morbid Age' for an account of the enormous strength of the eugenicists in inter-war Britain) there can be no doubt that general acceptance of Darwin fuelled such utopian ideas. The phrase 'survival of the fittest' was Herbert Spencer's, but it wasn't an unreasonable deduction from Darwin. Could it, would it, have been formulated without Darwin? Hitler's 'euthanasia' of the mentally handicapped, and his eventual mass-murder of supposedly inferior races are not mandated by evolutionary theory. But I think honest evolutionists must be able to see how useful such a theory might be to someone who believed in racial superiority and the extermination of the 'unfit' and the 'subhuman'.
Mr 'Godwin' is of course free to reply at length to this examination of his postings, if he so wishes. I very much hope he does. I will instruct the moderators to accept a posting from him which is longer than the 500-word limit.
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