Britannia Radio

20 February 2010 9:35 PM

Another big push, another procession of coffins... another unwinnable war

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Politicians are so vain and stupid these days that they don’t know any history, let alone learn from it. But why can’t they even learn from events in their own lifetimes?

Watching this week’s vaunted big push in Afghanistan has been infuriating beyond belief, not least because of the latest procession of soldiers’ coffins, driven in the rain through sad shires, valuable and irreplaceable lives honourably lost in a rotten cause.

Gordon Brown and many senior Tories must be old enough to remember the Vietnam War, with its talk of ‘Vietnamisation’, just like today’s ‘Afghanisation’, and its bombing raids that unintentionally slaughtered civilians in pursuit of an elusive enemy.

They might also recall its use of modern firepower to capture ground that was lost again within months to an enemy who melted away, leaving booby-traps behind, and returned when things had gone quiet again.

It even had its own fairy story about how, if we left, the communists would take over the whole of South East Asia - our equivalent is the piffle that if we pull out of Helmand - Islamist terrorists will immediately fan out across Britain.

Many of us laughed at this rubbish 40 years ago. And we were right to do so.

The war in Vietnam achieved nothing for that country or for the world. It was the cause of many terrible crimes committed by both sides.

It did lasting damage to the United States and its people.

Soldiers have to believe in what they’re doing, at least publicly, because they must stay out of politics and they are asked to do such terrifying things that they need to convince themselves they are worthwhile.

But there is no such excuse for the journalists and politicians who talk the braggart’s pseudo-masculine language of offensives and victory, in a battle that was lost before it ever started.

We will leave Afghanistan sooner or later, no better than we found it and probably worse.

Who will tell the families of those who die or are maimed between now and then that their sacrifice was made to save the face of a gutless Government and a useless Opposition?

* Since the politicians are so intent on ensuring that soldiers are injured in shockingly large numbers, mainly concealed from the public, might they not at least reopen the Haslar Hospital at Gosport in Hampshire?

I have a personal attachment to what was our last military hospital, since my father once worked there and I was christened in its chapel.

When its closure was announced I was sad but I never imagined it would be needed again as much as it is, since the Afghan war had not properly begun at the time.

A nation that claims to be a major military power, as we do, must surely have a dedicated military hospital - and will need one for years after this conflict is over.

Only a FULL time parent could have said No to F-word Lily

David Cameron obviously needs to draw attention away from his policy chaos, his feeble Shadow Chancellor, his weird donors and his dictatorial grip on candidate selection, odd in a man who claims to be all for decentralisation.

So he reveals an egalitarian taste for canned Guinness and darts (I bet the Bullingdon club were great stout drinkers, and ended every evening round a dartboard). And he invades the privacy of his daughter, Nancy.

Well, I’m against the premature, inappropriate politicisation of tots. The poor mite can’t possibly be old enough to be dragged into an Election campaign.

And it also strikes me that if this little girl has already been exposed to the F-word screeching of Lily Allen, left, thenMr Cameron isn’t in much of a position to lecture advertisers on exploiting the young.

Someone should have protected Nancy from this aural slurry. But experience shows that only a full-time parent can be relied upon to say ‘no’ to a child’s demands.

Paid strangers will always take the easy option.

The Camerons, being a fashionable modern couple, have no time for the cause of full-time mothers, though it’s an option they could easily afford if they wanted. That sort of thing is for dinosaurs.

Don’t let the BNP disguise its bigotry

As far as I am concerned the Equality and Human Rights Commission is the first step towards a National Thought Police, and should be shut down.

The ‘Equality’ it pursues is the agenda of the cultural and sexual resolutions.

The ‘Rights’ it enforces are the shopping lists of politically correct lobbies.

But it is also dangerous in other ways, as it proved this week.

Patriotic conservatives such as me, who loathe the BNP and its cynical pretence that it cares about this country, used to have a killer argument.

When BNP members insisted it wasn’t racially bigoted, we could point to its constitution, which was openly racialist.

Now, thanks to the EHRC, which has forced the BNP to change its rules, we can’t.

What on earth was the point of using public money to do that?

With the exception of one or two deluded twits, such as the Sikh Rajinder Singh, non-white people do not wish to join the BNP, and if they do they will quickly realise that the party’s conversion is not a genuine one.

If Mr Griffin’s louts and their dupes (whose violence was on display again last week) wish to have a racial clause in their constitution, they should be free to do so.

And we should be free to despise them for it.

Truth is, Europe doesn’t want juries

Why do you think the official report on juries was commissioned, with its damaging claim that they don’t understand what judges tell them? I will tell you.

The British Establishment knows that, if we stay in the EU, we will sooner or later have to abolish jury trial because it does not fit in with European law and we will be forced to give it up in some sordid deal.

So it is softening us up for this moment, a potentially disastrous loss of liberty.

That is also why they have been holding the first non-jury trial in England for 400 years, on the grounds that they supposedly couldn’t prevent the jury from being nobbled.

Couldn’t be bothered to prevent this, more likely. One of the allegedly dangerous defendants in this trial was given bail and so lightly watched that he has apparently vanished during the lunch hour.

Yet he is now said to be so dangerous that we mustn’t approach him if we see him - but he was let out for lunch? Excuse me?

I wouldn’t trust the people responsible for this to do a night’s babysitting, let alone protect a jury from tampering.

* As a man, and a conservative too, I’ve learned from experience that I am not allowed to have any views on rape.

My enemies will distort what I say, and pretend I have said things I haven’t. So I hereby declare that I have no thoughts on this subject any more.

But I notice that an opinion poll last week showed that quite a lot of women felt that there were circumstances in which rape victims had to accept some responsibility for what happened to them.

Getting into bed with someone was seen as one such circumstance. I couldn’t possibly comment.

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

February 20, 2010 |

17 February 2010 4:23 PM

Some reasonably accurate daylight bombing

A pause here for some responses to comments so far. Mr Mulholland wants me to engage in a 'controversy' about the alleged Mossad killing in Dubai. I am not sure exactly what is exercising him. Does he want my view on whether terrorist godfathers, who themselves cheerfully admit to murder, should be assassinated by agents of the country they attack? This is an interesting general question about the conduct of warfare by law-governed states, touched upon by the Dresden debate to which I return below. Then there's the not-very-competent undertaking of this event, in conditions of total publicity, for which there are several precedents in the history of the Mossad (if it was the Mossad). But is that his interest? Or does he want me to be shocked that assassins sometimes appear to be other than they are, and use false passports? (I am not, in fact, shocked by this. I believe Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service have - or used to have - a bit of a penchant for Swiss passports which aren't entirely genuine). Or is he perhaps concerned chiefly that these actions are supposed to have been taken by Israel, the country everyone likes to criticise, while they pass over the equivalent failings of others? My guess is that it's the last one that really bothers him, and many of those giving this prominence on TV and elsewhere, but my apologies in advance if I'm wrong.

Well, as I so often say, Israel is run and populated by fallen human beings, is anything but Paradise upon earth, and does many bad and wrong things, and I have condemned them (notably the foolish, disproportionate attack on Gaza a year ago), and will no doubt condemn them again, while clinging grimly to my view that Israel ought to continue to exist as a specifically Jewish state within secure borders, negotiated if possible, but secure above all. It does many other things that are morally questionable (I suspect the Dubai incident falls more into this category) but can perhaps be defended, on Just War grounds, because of Israel's embattled position. But it often seems to me that Israel's critics are tirelessly selective, highlighting Israeli wrongdoing while generally ignoring the same actions done by other states.

And I ceaselessly tax these selective critics, in a Mrs Merton sort of way, by asking them: ‘Why is it that you pick out the world's only Jewish state for your selective criticisms?’ I don't expect a truthful answer. One effect of the Holocaust is that people in civilised countries are at least a little embarrassed that they have a thing about Jews, and will always bluster away about how they aren't Nazis, how ridiculous to suggest any such thing, ooh no, not me, I'm nice, not Nazi - when that is not what is actually being suggested. There are plenty of ways of being Judophobic, which do not involve donning a silver-grey uniform, subscribing to 'Der Stuermer', pulling on the jackboots and doing the old goose-step. Many of these ways are increasingly respectable.

But back to the controversies already in process. I never cease to marvel at the way in which my critics attack me for what I haven't said, and are often wholly ignorant of what I actually do say or write, however hard I try to place these things in front of them. But I specially treasure really blatant examples of this.

One such appeared on Wednesday morning on the 'Whimper Olympics' thread. Phil Sheffield, unsurprisingly one of those people who thinks he needs to remind me of my own name, wrote (using some puzzling non-punctuation which made me wonder for a moment who 'Peter Brown' might be): ‘You jumped the gun Peter Brown did not cry, he just welled up.’

But that's more or less exactly what I said. I didn't say he had cried. I said he had 'choked up', which is more or less the same as Mr Sheffield's 'welled up'. And then I referred to his ‘emotional discussion of his child's death.’ Even if I had said he had cried, that wouldn't have been 'jumping the gun', or 'sour grapes' or any of the many abused expressions increasingly employed by people who don't think about what they say.

The rest of the posting is nonsensical and incoherent, bizarrely accusing me of 'using a dead child as a shield for you[r] own narrow-mindedness'. In what way have I done such a thing? What, precisely, am I 'narrow-minded' about? Why do people behave in this way on the net? Why can they not at least try to read what is written before posting embarrassing half-literate drivel of this kind? I did little more than to note the behaviour of Messrs Brown, Campbell and Cameron, and to make some mild remarks on the public's appetite for this sort of stuff, and politicians' willingness to satisfy it.

On the 'How to Punish New Labour' thread, I'm asked to explain my dislike of John Major. I think it's the contrast between the 'decent guy' appearance and the rather different reality that has most influence on my judgement.

I asked those who had railed at me when I criticised Mr Cameron's use of emotion in politics (and who were now railing against Mr Brown's use of it) to recognise that their objection had been partisan. This was the entire point of the piece, as far as I was concerned. I don't think I had a single response to this challenge. I do know that people come here to write about what they want to write about, and I can hardly complain, but it is gratifying when anyone actually sticks to the subject.

Yes. I have noticed the increasing dominance of BBC news bulletins by manufactured 'survey' stories. Of course, they never ask who has commissioned these surveys and why.

I am asked why I haven't written about some sex scandal. Well, there are a lot of things, perhaps 98 per cent, perhaps 99.6 per cent of the daily output of the nation's news sources, that I don't write about. This is not necessarily because of a positive decision to remain silent on these questions. No conclusions should be drawn from it. Perhaps rather than berating me in this finger-wagging way, the writer might explain why we should be interested in it, paying attention as he does so to the defamation laws of this country, and to the rules about sub judice matters and contempt of court which rightly accompany the Presumption of Innocence?

Mr Barnes speaks of his 'main site', a place I have as much desire to visit as a Motorway rest stop. Does he then regard this weblog as his property, and as a subsidiary of his 'main site'? I feel curiously slighted by this. Perhaps if Mr Barnes has such a 'main site', he should spend much more time with it and on it, where those who agree with him could enjoy his contributions, and much less time boring me (and some others) half to tears with his discredited, repetitive and unresponsive defences of the BNP.

This outfit, by the way, has recently distinguished itself by moronically roughing up a journalist whom it had invited to a press conference. What better evidence of its inherent, inescapable loutish stupidity, and its unacceptability to civilised persons, could I provide? Actively courting bad publicity by behaving exactly as your detractors claim you do seems to me to be just about what I might have expected from them. The idea that they represent any hope for this country is too dispiriting to require much of an answer.

Lorraine Thurlow writes: ‘I understand what you are saying about another term of Labour being what's needed for the Tories to pull themselves into a decent party, Mr Hitchens, but what scares me is yet MORE mass immigration, with more countries joining the EU and the subsequent millions pouring onto our island and becoming Labour voters!’

Well, alas, she does not understand, since I most certainly do not have the slightest hope that the Tories will pull themselves into a decent party. I wish to see them humiliatingly defeated, so that they collapse like the rotten, worm-eaten structure they are, and so to be replaced by something better. I have been trying to make this point, here and elsewhere now, for several years. I do hope it gets through, soon. They are beyond reform. As for mass immigration, the Tories have no serious plans to limit migration from non-EU countries, and by their continued enthusiasm for British EU membership they ensure that they have no powers to influence the movement of EU citizens into Britain. Nor do they have any hope of limiting the expansion of the EU. Indeed, they support it.

I still don't understand why people think one more term of Labour, weakened, exhausted and demoralised, will be so much more irreversibly damaging than the three terms we have had of them already, when they were in their prime and strong. Nobody among the Tory loyalists ever, ever, ever answers this point. They just brainlessly repeat the CCHQ mantra that: 'We can't cope with five more years of Labour' as if saying it a lot will make it true. If I can respond to their arguments, why can't they respond to mine? Well, I can't bear the idea with five years of the Heir to Blair, David Cameron, in Downing Street, or five minutes of George Osborne, whose knowledge of the economy seems to me to be dangerously limited, squeaking his way into an even worse crisis at the Treasury. Nor could my Tory loyalist critics. But they don't know it yet.

I have dealt with the point raised by 'Mr Rob' many times. Human beings are, quite rightly, not governed by pure logic. Also, far too many of us regard voting as some sort of sacrament or act of conscience. Not everyone has lived in the USSR, as I have, and had the scales fall from his eyes about the importance of the right not to vote, and the necessity to exercise it. The pure, cold logical conclusion of my argument may be as he says. But I would defeat my own object if I tried to get people to follow my argument to such a conclusion. They would be justifiably upset and demoralised. And that is why I restrict myself to 'Don't Vote Tory', even though it invariably spawns a whole load of letters asking (and I quote, hence the block capitals) ‘Well who SHOULD I vote for, then?' or 'Where IS this “new party” of which you speak? (I don't, as it happens, except in the future)' and, bringing up the rear, the people in blazers and cravats, smoking pipes, who haven't been listening and want to know - yet again - why I won't endorse UKIP. Sigh. Look it up. I have actually thought about this.

Now to the bombing of Dresden. I am accused of hindsight. Well, I personally can have no other sort of sight in this case, since I was born more than six years after the Dresden events. I hope I should have had the courage to object at the time. Others certainly did. There were notable voices raised against the indiscriminate bombing of German civilians at the time, particularly by the most impressive and courageous George Bell, then Bishop of Chichester and (until he raised his voice) likely to have become a very distinguished Archbishop of Canterbury. Bell was a powerful intellect, not a naive sentimentalist, and had maintained good contacts with the anti-Hitler resistance in Germany since before the war.

As A.C. Grayling says in his book (p.181) ‘George Bell's attitude to the conduct of the war was not a function of other-wordly innocence. He knew rather better than most what was at stake in Nazi Germany. Before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, he was active in helping people of Jewish origin gain asylum in Britain, and he had maintained contact with people engaged in opposition to Hitler.’

Bell called what the RAF was doing 'obliteration bombing'. He had supporters in both the Lords and the Commons, including Richard Stokes MP and the then Marquess of Salisbury. Others opposed the decision to engage in this sort of bombing on the grounds that it would do little to end the war, would draw valuable resources away from the decisive battle against the U-boats, and would cost horrendous numbers of lives (an interesting insight is given into this in C.P. Snow's novel 'The Light and the Dark' in which (spoiler warning) a brilliant academic who was at one time sympathetic to the Nazis eventually joins the RAF as a bomber pilot and (knowing full well that this fate is virtually certain) is killed while bombing Berlin. Snow wrote from personal knowledge of the debate, as a senior scientific civil servant. He was horrified at the losses, comparable to those on the Somme in 1916, and it is plain from his account that many experts argued against the Harris campaign, on the grounds of the casualties, which by their nature destroyed the lives of some of the country's best young men, and the military futility of the action.

In answer to 'Roy,' and Michael Williamson, Grayling also notes a surprising (to some) lack of enthusiasm for the bombing of German civilians by British civilians who had themselves been subjected to this uniquely horrible form of attack. When a British pacifist , Vera Brittain, wrote a book attacking the bombing, it was most savagely denounced in the USA, a country which had at that time never experienced aerial attack on civilians. I should stress here that I have little time for Miss Brittain, whose silly attitude between the wars contributed to calls for British military weakness in the 1930s and so helped lead to a war in which we felt the need to resort to bombing.

George Orwell, who justified bombing during the war, wrote after touring the scenes of destruction in Germany when the war was over: ‘To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.’

And I should say here that the destruction visited on Germany by British bombs was immeasurably greater than that suffered by British cities. Even the famous raid on Coventry was small by the standards of Harris's thousand bomber raids (600 people died in the Coventry raid. This would be equalled or exceeded in many British raids which nobody has heard of - Stuttgart, April 1943, Dortmund, twice in May 1943, Wuppertal, 3,400 dead in May 1943, 1,800 dead in a second raid soon afterwards, Dusseldorf, 1,292 dead, June 1943, Krefeld, 1056 dead, June 1943, Hamburg, 1,500 dead, July 1943, then two days later, 35,000 dead in the firestorm of 'Operation Gomorrah' - these are a mere selection from the catalogue of carnage). Nothing Germany ever did compared with 'Operation Gomorrah', which destroyed the houses and people of much of Hamburg, or the Dresden raid, in which the numbers of dead are not known but were probably around 25,000. As many as 20,000 may have died in Pforzheim a few days later. There was no German equivalent of the Lancaster bomber.

And 'Roy' should note that most Germans, while they still remained free from secret-police terror (under which even he might have found himself voting for someone he didn't like. Can he be sure he wouldn't have?) did not vote for Hitler, and that the principal opposition to him (and the last brave voice raised in the Reichstag against him before the darkness fell, that of Otto Wels) came from the Social Democratic Party, whose support was concentrated in the close-packed working-class housing which Harris destroyed. What were these poor people supposed to do to avoid the supposed 'justice' of Arthur Harris's incendiaries and high explosives? Emigrate in protest?

'Brian T' says: ‘As far as I know, the people who prevented the demonstration in Dresden were not peaceful residents of the city, but violent left-wing extremists.’ He does not know very far in that case. Such extremists were present, mainly in the area round the Neustadt Station (used for the deportation of Jews to the death camps) which is some way from, and on the other side of the Elbe from, the historic centre. One might expect such people to be present. But, in a report which can be found with ease on the English site of 'Der Spiegel', and also from the account in the International Herald Tribune, it is clear that the human chain was composed of ordinary citizens. Their action was applauded by the city's Christian Democrat Mayor, and by civilised people all over Germany. Why, I wonder, would anyone want to give a different impression?

Mr Barnes's curious remarks on the Holocaust (15th February, 6.52 pm) are worth serious study, despite being partly incoherent. I shall certainly read his future contributions more closely, in the light of this one.

James Shaw (among others) dismisses as 'nonsense' my argument that: 'It is my suspicion that the moral shrivelling of Britain since 1945, the increased violence and delinquency, the readiness to accept the abortion massacre, the general coarsening of culture and the growth of callousness have at least something to do with our willingness to shrug off - or even defend - Arthur Harris's deliberate 'de-housing' of German civilians.'

I think he has missed my point. He can explain whether this was accidental or deliberate. I am obviously not offering a direct line between Arthur Harris and the 1967 Abortion Act, nor (as he fails to note) is abortion my only example of the effects of the wartime demoralisation of Britain. If I were, his instances would be of some value. But I am not. I am saying that such actions helped to coarsen and brutalise a nation which was formerly notable for its gentleness, kindness and Christian charity.

Other countries started from different places and came under different influences. Sweden, which enthusiastically sterilised some of its citizens before 1939, may have other reasons for its demoralisation, rooted in its enthusiastic worldly utopianism. Few would question that the Spanish Civil War, with its legacy of horror and unrestrained brutality, has poisoned that country for generations, and also associated the Catholic Church with the discredited Franco tyranny.

He also makes two other remarks which I find irritating and rather low: ‘Presumably you would have rather that the RAF had allowed German industry production to peak even higher, and take a terrible toll on the Russian front.’

Well, if he had made any attempt to study my argument, let alone to read Professor Grayling's book, or even studied the subject marginally, he would know that the effect of bombing German civilians on German industry was startlingly small, especially in comparison to the awful losses of our young men, and the hecatombs of German dead.

People were angry and defiant, rather than demoralised. Germany remained able to restore basic services in its bombed cities until a very late stage in the war. Its air defences by night were frighteningly effective, as any Lancaster veteran can recount - not all that much less effective than by day. And the factories were untouched except by accident. The main damage to German industry was done by the accurate daylight bombing of the USAAF, especially its attacks on oil installations rather late in the war. The Americans sacrificed bomb load for protection, and developed, as we could have done, long-range escort fighters which made such bombing practicable. Harris didn't like being asked to do this, and resisted his Army colleagues' demands for help in attacking transport targets in the run-up to D-Day. When he did assent, the attack was highly effective. A policy of bombing industrial targets by day under fighter escort would also have absorbed just as much, if not more, of the German war effort as did the indefensible alternative of killing women and children in their homes, by indiscriminate carpet-bombing.

Mr Shaw adds: ‘It's also worth remembering that the British government only came to the conclusion that the bombing of German cities would work after examining the effect of German bombing on British cities.’

Did it? What is his evidence for this claim? He seems very assured, verging on the smug. Has he any reason to feel so? British civilian morale did not break during the London Blitz or after the Coventry massacre. So why should the Germans behave differently? (They didn't either, as it turned out). The main reason for the de-housing policy was that we couldn't hit proper targets by night. The devastating Butt Report (look it up) demonstrated that Bomber Command's night attacks were mostly dropping bombs on German cows, if they were lucky. The reason for attacking big cities, rather than industrial or military targets, was because they could reliably hit them by night.

The bombing of civilians from the air may have appeased Stalin a little and given the British people the (wrong) impression that they were doing serious damage to Hitler's war effort. But it squandered valuable young lives, and was a poor substitute for direct engagement with the enemy on the ground, the only way in which wars are won.

This we were unable to do because our army in 1940 had been so small and weak that it had been abruptly ejected from continental Europe at Dunkirk (which was, by the way, a defeat, not a victory). It could not get back there for many years and then at horrendous cost in lives, invasion from the sea being a terribly bloody form of fighting. No wonder Churchill (who could not forget the disaster of his attempted landings at Gallipoli) hesitated so long. The bombing's only good effects, the diversion of strength from the Eastern front, could have been achieved by American-style accurate daylight attacks, with well-armed bombers under fighter escort, which would have been morally defensible while simultaneously doing real damage to the Nazi war effort. I doubt if the casualties on our side would have been much worse, either. Admit it. Bombing civilians deliberately was both wrong and ineffectual, and robbed us of much moral authority. Its roots lie in British weakness, brainless pacifism and dumb diplomacy during the 1920s and 1930s. It is time we recognised it.