For those of you who say I never have a good word for David Cameron, here’s one. He’s pretty much right about 1940, even if it was by accident. When a politician is accused of committing a ‘gaffe’, it almost always means he has told the truth. And 1940 was in fact the year that Britain became America’s very junior partner, a sad role we have followed ever since. I know, I know, the USA didn’t enter the war against Germany until 1941 (and then only when Hitler declared war on them). But Franklin Roosevelt took great advantage of our des perate position in 1940. As the Germans advanced through France in early summer that year, he offered one of the most unfair bargains in the history of diplomacy – 50 worn-out, ancient destroyers in return for nine rent-free US military bases in British colonies. He had already insisted on hard cash for war supplies, which rapidly depleted Britain’s gold and currency res erves. And Britain only finished paying for ‘lend-lease’ wartime aid – down to the uttermost farthing, plus interest charged for late payment – on December 29, 2006. Post-war loans and Marshall Aid came at the cost of pledges to relinquish what remained of the empire, not least the bits we had just fought so hard to get back from the Japanese, and to open up colonial markets to U.S. competition – plus unrelenting pressure to join the European Union, which still goes on. These weren’t the acts of besotted friends, but of a hard, wise, calculating politician who wanted the best for his own country, not for ours. It seems to me that we have sentimentalised this for far too long. I don’t blame the Americans for using our weakness and desperation to displace us as Top Nation. This is how great powers behave (and how we used to behave ourselves when we still could). And I think that, when China becomes the supreme world power, many people who now sneer at America will yearn for the happy days when the globe was run from Washington. But every time I hear the words ‘Special Relationship’, I feel faintly sick. And I yearn for a British Prime Minister with the self-confidence of Charles de Gaulle, who could tell the Americans to get lost from time to time, especially when they want us to join in their crazier military ventures. They would respect us more, and treat us better, if we weren’t constantly snuffling round their shoes with our tongues lolling out, like a pack of servile spaniels. I’ve visited many countries where Islam insists that women are covered in various ways, and I’m quite sure that many of them hate it. I’m equally sure that a significant number do it out of conviction and piety. I’ve talked to one such, in her home, in Iran. But I’m equally bothered by the memory of a woman in an English backstreet, veiled to the eyes and unaware that I was looking at her. As she arrived at her front door, she whipped the black cloth away from her face with an urgent, hungry gesture that said –more eloquently than any words – how glad she was It seems to me that the law really cannot do anything about this. In a free country, people should wear what they want unless – as in banks or at immigration desks – there’s a strong practical reason to compel them to show their faces. People who don’t like the sight of Militant Islam on our streets should worry first about changing the lax immigration policies that hamper the integration of the Muslim citizens who are already here. They should also wonder if our own Godless, drink-soaked, vomit-splashed, skirts-up-round-the-armpits culture doesn’t help persuade some of our Muslim citizens to hide behind the veil. Can those who fuss about the release of alleged Pan-Am bomber Abdelbaset Al Megrahi at least mention the fact there is no evidence that he committed this crime? Also that the U.S. government has been sucking up to Libya for years, in gratitude to Colonel Gaddafi for getting rid of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that he never in fact had. Anyone who actually knows what is going on in the world must find the current dim, sheep-like credulity of most of the Western media almost unbearable. This is that the EU’s Landfill Directive (devised to deal with problems in Holland and Belgium which we don’t share) is the real problem. We face gigantic Euro-fines if we continue to dump our garbage in landfill sites, thanks to a law we didn’t make and can’t change. Hence the pressure to recycle and the near-disappearance of proper weekly collections. I actually suspect Mr Pickles has enough sense to see that this stupid restriction (and thousands of others like it) will only end when this country leaves the EU. I dare him to say so. The difficulty I have with Mr Storke, and with Mr Hari, is that they do not actually appear to believe that human beings are responsible for their actions. They seem instead to believe that their misbehaviour is both created and excused by circumstances. I am perfectly happy to argue about this difference, one of the fundamental divisions in all arguments about policy and government. But only with people who will read my book before they start pelting me with thin stuff from the 'Independent', much of it of a kind which is actually demolished by my book. Were you, like me, one of those people who felt alarmed when the mob applauded Earl Spencer’s shameful speech at Princess Diana’s funeral? And were you, like me, one of those who felt betrayed and even more alarmed when the establishment congregation inside our great royal church crav enly joined in the clapping? If so, you may understand what I mean when I say that the twisted cult of Diana has now led to the even-more-twisted cult of Raoul Moat. And that Siobhan O’Dowd, originator of the Facebook tribute to Moat, is a direct inheritor of the wave of petulance and self-pity that sloshed stickily across this country after the Princess’s death in a car crash, leaving behind a smelly residue of resentment, candle grease and rotting bouquets that has never quite gone away since. The cultural revolution of the Sixties robbed the British poor of anything to believe in, or any reason to try to be good. Patriotism was derided and rejected. The Christian religion was mocked, marginalised and studied – if at all – as a weird curiosity. The stable two-parent families in which children learned manners and morals were more or less abolished, so that a household with two contin uously married parents is now a luxury item, as is an orderly classroom. The virtues of patience, stoicism, thrift, temperance, constancy and modesty were reclassified as ‘repression’ and ‘inhibition’ and all were encouraged to cast them off. And they did, so that on Friday and Saturday nights it often seems as if half the young people of Britain have decided to dress as hookers, and the other half as convicts newly released from 19th Century hulks. We are nearly back to the days of William Hogarth’s Gin Lane, only without the high-minded evangelists trying to rescue the poor from wickedness. Anthony Blair rode the tide of slime after Diana’s death by pronouncing her The People’s Princess (or rather, by obeying Alastair Campbell’s instruction to do so). Mr Cameron, who wants to be the heir to Blair but is too intelligent to fake sincerity in the same way, claims to be shocked and baffled by the Facebook adulation of Moat. Really? Mr Cameron, apart from being head of PR for a trashy TV station, was once the director of Urbium, a company that owned a chain of early-hours bars selling sickly cocktails. His only significant action as a backbench MP was to endorse a criminally stupid report calling for weaker anti-drug laws. He famously declared that he likes Britain as it is. Well, that is the Britain in which Raoul Moat went unpunished by the law for years, before finally brutalising a girl of nine so badly that even an English court was prepared to jail him. So why should Mr Cameron be shocked to find that such a man has admirers and absurdly seek to suppress what is at least a genuine expression of public opinion? This is the nation that progressives like him have made. If they don’t like its steroid-swollen face, they should admit that they have been wrong, not try to censor the truth about it. Britain’s massed divisions of political journalists have fallen like starving men on Lord Mandelson’s tedious memoirs. They allow them to return to the only thing they are interested in, the meaningless quarrel between the louse Blair and the flea Brown. Almost none of these people ever knew what New Labour was really doing, or why it mattered. For the same reason they cannot grasp the enormous significance of an entirely smooth and harmonious coalition between a supposedly Left-wing party and a supposedly Right-wing one. The only interesting thing in the entire book is the account of Mr Blair’s meeting with ‘Sir’ Michael Jagger: ‘Tony summoned up his courage and went up to Mick. Looking him straight in the eye, he said, “I just want to say how much you’ve always meant to me.” He looked wistful, perhaps remembering his frustrated rock-star ambitions from his student days. For a moment, I thought he might ask for an autograph.’ David Cameron claims to be ‘terrified’ by the difficulty of finding a good secondary school for his children in London. This is, to put it mildly, exaggeration (like the constant use in modern Britain of the word ‘desperate’ to mean ‘slightly anxious’ or ‘mildly concerned’). The Premier is no doubt troubled by the political difficulty he is in. He has skilfully wangled his children into an exclusive, celebrity crammed Church of England primary totally unlike normal state schools. And he has got away with it, thanks to the media softness that also spared him over his immensely greedy expenses claims for his large country house. But he now sees that his new Liberal Conservative Party will expect him to keep his children in the state sector. So no Eton or St Paul’s for them. Yet almost all the state secondary schools in London are bog-standard comprehensives, which means that even the best ones are far short of private standards. He’s not (yet) a Roman Catholic, so no London Oratory either. I can help. First, he should buy a house in the tiny and very expensive catchment area of Camden Girls (heavily favoured by several New Labour bigshots who did exactly this). Then (he can afford it, especially with no fees to pay) he can buy another house in Gospel Oak (near Alastair Campbell) in the almost equally expensive catchment area of William Ellis boys’ school. Both these schools are in effect grammar schools, which Mr Cameron is against. But officially they are comprehensives, so it’s all right. This is how egalitarian hypocrites purchase good secondary schooling in London, and get away with it. All our hopes of leaving Afghanistan are now pinned on training the Afghan army to take over from us. But member of this 'army', and the even worse 'police', murder our troops. And still no frontbench politician will call for withdrawal and the end of this ridiculous, futile, bloody deployment.
24 July 2010 10:48 PM
Junior partner? Actually we’ve been America’s servile spaniel since 1940
Try it Ms Spelman, and see just how empowered you feel
If you'd asked me which Liberal Conservative Minister was the most likely to say that the burka was ‘empowering’, I’d have guessed Theresa May, the Lib-Tories’ answer to Harriet Harman. But given the deep, increasingly undeniable uselessness of the whole party, it’s no surprise that it was in fact Caroline Spelman. I suggest they both take to wearing them, anyway, for a year or two and then tell us how ‘empowered’ they feel.
to be rid of it.
‘Outraged’ U.S. has been wooing Libya for years
Drop Brussels in the black bin, Eric
Eric Pickles, the enjoyable and traditionally built Minister who once complained to me that a harsh diet had only succeeded in making his feet less fat, should likewise own up to the truth about weekly
bin collections.
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We seem to have rather suspiciously fierce laws on ‘religiously aggravated’ crime these days. In which case, how was it that a Muslim man who sprayed ‘Islam will dominate the world’ on a war memorial in Burton-upon-Trent was not charged under those laws? I’ve no idea. But an interesting new pamphlet from the Civitas think tank – A New Inquisition – reveals that there is a body called the National Black Crown Prosecution Association. This (of course) has general official backing.
How wide is its influence? Should it have any?
******************************************
On Tuesday, the BBC’s John Humphrys utterly destroyed William Hague with a new technique. As the Foreign Secretary sought to defend our futile military presence in Afghanistan, Humphrys coolly fusilladed him with the facts – which argue for immediate withdrawal. Mr Hague at least had the wit to remain calm as he sank slowly beneath the waves of truth and logic. But men are still dying almost daily because he won’t face reality.
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Since it stopped having a leader, the Labour Party has risen sharply in the polls. The people now competing for the job are dreary and uninteresting. And the media (which once sucked up to Labour) has now decided to suck up to the Coalition until about 2023, so whoever gets the job can expect to have slime ladled over his head till he gives up in despair. So may I suggest that Labour saves time, money, trouble and human grief by not having a leader at all until 2020 or thereabouts?21 July 2010 1:25 PM
Mr Storke goes to town
19 July 2010 4:34 PM
Catching Up
8 July 2010 12:06 AM
Our shameful journey from Diana to the sick cult of Raoul Moat
Sunday, 25 July 2010
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Mr Storke continues to dispute my simple point, mainly by missing it, but also by mistaking opinion and supposition for fact, and that old fallacy that 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' ('b' happened after 'a' so 'b' was caused by 'a') is proof that 'b' follows a.
Mr Storke: ’You argue that “rehabilitation is a fantasy”. However, the evidence Johann Hari provides proves this is categorically untrue.
‘On the contrary, the evidence shows rehabilitation is not taking place in Britain's prisons, because they are too overcrowded to allow any genuine education or treatment to happen.’
That is not much of a case. I'd agree that our prisons make no effort to rehabilitate. They never did, even when they weren't crowded. Since that is not their lawful purpose, and since there is no clear theory as to what rehabilitation is, or how it can be achieved, that is not surprising. But to argue that because they don't try, and it doesn't happen, that it would happen if they did try is speculation. It is not a rebuttal.
Mr Storke persists: ‘But they are not overcrowded because of a failure of deterrence,’
How does Mr Storke know this? How then does he explain the vast increase in the British prison population, which happens to have coincided with the abandonment of the concepts of retribution and 'due punishment of responsible persons' by the courts and the prisons? I agree that this, too, could be post hoc, but it is something that has actually happened, and I have yet to see a better explanation than mine. Or indeed a coherent rival explanation.
Mr Stork: ‘But because too many mentally-ill people, and illiterate minor offenders are being locked up alongside the hardcore of real criminals.’
It is foolish and/or naughty of Mr Storke to persist (after I have taken him up on it twice already) with this deliberate confusion between the minority of genuinely mentally ill people in prison (incoherent, minds overthrown, raving and violent in prison because nobody can work out what else to do with them in the absence of mental hospitals), and those who, having been convicted of offences consciously and deliberately committed, repeatedly over many years, have loosely been categorised as 'mentally ill' by themselves or by others seeking to make excuses for them (if such vague and variable things as 'depression' can be classified as 'mental illness', in the same way that a man incapable of coherent speech and given to bouts of irrational violence can be described as 'mentally ill'). The two categories are wholly different, and if Mr Storke persists any further in pretending that they are the same, I will reluctantly conclude that he is incapable of honest, responsive debate, and abandon this exchange.
I'd also suspect that Mr Storke would be pretty unwilling to live in the same road as these allegedly 'minor offenders' he speaks of, whose effect on the lives of their neighbours is hellish and disastrous. The criminal law decides who is a 'real criminal' - that is to say, someone who breaks the criminal law. Its main failing at the moment is that, when it first encounters them, it fails to arrest them; when at length it does arrest them, it lets them go, and then having finally charged them, it fails to prosecute them competently and lets them go again. When and if it eventually successfully prosecutes them, it fails to punish them. Those who have arrived in a British prison do so at the end of long years of crime, misbehaviour and successfully taunting authority. They are already habitual criminals. In the absence of a major punitive shock, they will remain as such until they get too old to follow their chosen trades, or the testosterone runs down.
As to their illiteracy, what of it? What does this prove, except that our school system (see Miriam Gross's interesting report this week) refuses to teach children to read by methods which work? What is the logic which says that if you cannot read, you go out and make your fellow-creatures' lives a misery through theft and violence? This is just standard excuse-making.
I don't know what objective tests are used to arrive at someone's reading age. But judging by modern newspapers, including the unpopular ones, and by much anecdotal evidence from schools, severely limited literacy is common even in trades and professions where good reading and writing might be thought to be an essential qualification. I note Mr Storke does not say what the national average is for having a reading age 'lower than a six-year-old'.
So when Mr Storke says: ’This is one of Hari's central, and most persuasive points. The evidence shows 60% of Britain’s prisoners have a reading age lower than a six-year-old. This is well below the national average. Similarly, 70% have at least two diagnosable mental illnesses, and Prison Director Michael Spurr says at least 10% are severely mentally-ill. Do you not get the point that this contradicts your argument that the reason for prison overcrowding is that we have failed to deter crime?’
No, I do not 'get this point' because neither the facts nor the logic do any such thing, any more than the document which he urgently pressed upon me last week (and which turned out not to contain the facts it was alleged to contain, a fact which I mentioned in my last post but which Mr Storke wisely chooses to bypass) did what he said it would. All he does is posit his pet theory of crime being caused by social circumstances, against mine, that it is caused by human wickedness, and insisting that his opinion is a fact and mine is not. He's right about my opinion. It's not a fact, though all the facts of human history tend to support it. But he's wrong about his opinion. It is not a fact either, and none of the facts of human history tend to support it.
Now he refers me to an allegedly ‘brilliant’ article by Johann Hari, ‘It's Time To Get Liberal Or Get Mugged’ (available on the web). He says that this tirade ‘goes in-depth on this, and provides more of these sources, in detail.’ No, it doesn't. It makes a number of assertions, fails to consider the possibility that the participants in 'successful' 'rehabilitation' schemes are self-selecting, or carefully pre-selected, from among those already seeking to end careers of crime for whatever reason. It confuses different forms and gradations and definitions of mental illness (as Mr Storke repeatedly does) and provides no sources for a number of sweeping claims, with which it is fairly stuffed. We are told, for instance that ‘The Cheshire Drug Squad found in the 1980s that the presence of a heroin-prescribing clinic on their patch caused a 94% drop in property crimes.’ Did it so? Where are the details of the impartial research on this claim to be found? It also accepts the tendentious argument that the users of illegal drugs are victims, in need of help, whereas they are in fact deliberate criminals in need of deterrence and punishment.
Here's Mr Storke: ‘Here are the facts Hari provides in this article which disprove Peter Hitchens arguments.
‘False Argument One by Peter Hitchens: “Rehabilitation is a fantasy”. The Cheshire Drug Squad found in the 1980s that the presence of a heroin-prescribing clinic on their patch caused a 94 percent drop in property crimes.’
Source of independent research confirming this statement? And in any case what has it to do with 'rehabilitation'?
‘In Switzerland, the introduction of drug rehabilitation caused crime rates to fall.’
Source of independent research confirming this statement?
Mr Storke says: ’Mr Hitchens says teaching prisoners literacy will not cause crime rates to drop.’
Mr Hitchens doesn't say this and hasn't said it. Mr Hitchens is all in favour of teaching prisoners to read and write, just as he's in favour of teaching children to read and write. It is possible (though by no means certain) that it could lead to circumstances in which a prisoner is less likely to commit more crimes, and can certainly do no harm. Though Mr Hitchens remembers with a thin smile the letters written to the 'Times' in the 1980s in perfect sociologese by a noted gangster seeking his release, and does wonder if convicted criminals really ought to be taught the 'social sciences' which excuse their behaviour when they could, for instance, be learning the skills of sewerage maintenance or similar, in which they might find useful employment in later life. Mr Hitchens just doesn't think that prisoners are in prison because they can't read. They're in prison because they committed a lot of deliberate crimes, which they knew to be wrong when they committed them.
Mr Storke once again quotes his beloved Johann Hari: ‘ “There are some brilliant rehabilitation programmes, but they are underfunded and sparse.
‘Joe Baden has founded one of the best, The Open Book Project. When he was imprisoned in the seventies facing armed robbery charges, Baden was taught creative writing – and it inspired him to go straight. Today he goes back into prisons to help inmates get academic qualifications, supporting them at every step. He has taken prisoners from illiteracy to gaining degrees – and only 2 percent of the people he works with reoffend.”
‘Is that not strong evidence, that it is not punishment, but education, which many criminals need?’
No, it isn't evidence of any kind. It repeatedly presupposes cause and effect. I would need to know a good deal more about an armed robber before I concluded that it was creative writing, rather than imprisonment, and the fear of more imprisonment in future, that persuaded him to abandon armed robbery as a trade. After all, once you've done time for armed robbery, it's a lot easier for the police to find you if you do it again, isn't it? Even these days. And, as I point out elsewhere, the recruits to such schemes are self-selecting, or selected from among those already least likely to reoffend. I'd also like to see the independent research confirming the two per cent figure.
As usual, it's impossible to answer absolutely everything posted, especially since I've been away. I hope to get round to some more recent topics later in the week. For the moment, I've selected a couple of contributions for fuller answers, hoping as I do so to deal at least partly with the queries of others.
Let me first of all try to deal with the persistent postings of Mr Storke, who has referred me to a paper by Professor David James on the treatment of mentally ill people in prison. Let us remember that Mr Storke's original disagreement with me was about my view that rehabilitation is a fantasy, that crime is an act of choice and that more people will avoid it if they fear severe and deterrent punishment.
Mr Storke has been relying quite heavily on the professor's paper in his argument. I am at a loss to see why, since it's a report on mental health in prisons, an issue on which I haven't specially pronounced (except to agree with the oft-made point that the prisons nowadays house many people who would once have been in mental hospitals, when we still had them. This is beyond dispute. I favour the rebuilding of our lost mental hospitals to deal with it, as I have said).
He appears to believe that in some way it 'disproves' my contention that the threat of punishment is an effective deterrent of criminal behaviour.
I cannot see how. It seems to me to have almost nothing to do with the subject under discussion, and if it contains the claims he appears to attribute to it (about miracle crime cures in Switzerland and Denmark) I confess that I am unable to locate them here. Perhaps these references are in another document, which he meant to refer me to. Or perhaps I have just missed them, in which case a page reference would be appreciated.
Professor James's report appears to have nothing whatever to do with my point, which is that if prisons were properly and systematically punitive, instead of chaotic warehouses run largely by their inmates, responsible persons would make much greater efforts to avoid being sent to them. I suspect that Mr Storke has little idea of what my opinions actually are, having assumed that I defend the current state of the prisons when I deplore it, that I am some sort of Michael Howard 'prison works' person, or that my views are identical to those of (say) Richard Littlejohn. They are not, as regular readers here well know. To retain this view he has therefore ignored anything I have written which might suggest that this is not so.
The report, to the extent that it is relevant, indulges in the usual confusion and vagueness about what 'mental illness' may be - unsurprising in an area of subjective pseudo-science in which there is a great deal of opinion, and very little measurable fact. Then it piles vagueness upon vagueness. It speaks of an 'estimate' (p iii) that 70% of prisoners have two or more diagnosed mental illnesses. Whose is this estimate? It doesn't say, at least not anywhere near where it makes this claim. Why not? And then, why, if these alleged illnesses are 'diagnosed', does this have to be an estimate anyway? Surely there would be an actual figure. Later it suggests (p.7) that 90% of prisoners have ‘common mental health problems’ which it then lists as ‘anxiety, depression or neuroses’. Once again, we are dealing in subjectivity. I have no doubt that many people in prison, or awaiting sentence after conviction, might find it useful to assert that they were 'suffering' from such indefinable complaints, as this might lessen their sentences and would also indulge their sense of self-pitying grievance, and aid them in avoiding the ever-unwelcome conclusion that they are answerable for their own actions.
The authorities might equally find it useful to agree with them as it would help them to reduce the pressure on prison places by giving them lesser sentences, and allow them to dose them with tranquillising or pacifying drugs, while they are detained.
Also, one thing pretty certain to lead to genuine, objective mental disorder, through interference with or damage to the physical brain which (while not being the same thing as the mind) is the physical seat of the mind, is the taking of illegal drugs. (I'd say that many legal drugs now in existence might have this effect too.) And since illegal drug-taking and criminality are practically synonymous in modern Britain, it would be likely that some sort of disturbance or malfunction would be likely.
So these declarations are pretty much tautologies.
And, I repeat again, they have nothing to with the point. I entirely agree with those who say that there are too many people in prison who are actually insane. I have seen them there, in Wormwood Scrubs, incoherent and raving in their cells, their minds overthrown. Nobody is keener than I on the restoration of proper mental hospitals in which such people could be better and more kindly kept. But to confuse these sad persons with self-indulgent users of illegal drugs, or with excuse-making thieves and brutes, is to do truth a disservice. I urge Mr Storke to read my 'Brief History of Crime', especially the chapter in which I discuss my visit to Wormwood Scrubs Prison.
Now to Mr 'Un', and what I regard as his category error.
I shall take one of his recent postings and reply to it point by point.
He writes: ’I have read your book. I've said this repeatedly to you. I know exactly what you say in it, and nothing in it gets to the bottom line of *what is the truth*.’
My reply: He may have said it repeatedly, but he does not furnish any evidence that, while reading the book, he paid any attention to what it said. If he really has read my book, rather than just flipped rapidly through it whilst making scornful snorting noises at the passages he most dislikes, then he will know that one of its most fundamental points is that we simply cannot know (in the sense in which we use the word 'know' on any other matter) if there is or is not a God. We are obliged - if we are interested at all - to choose belief or unbelief, or to admit that we cannot make up our minds. My interest is in why people choose what they do. Since they cannot do this through factual proof, they have to do it because they prefer the implications - either of a created, orderly universe or of a random, chaotic and purposeless one. I suggest that, if he reads the book again with more care, he will be spared much of the confusion he appears to suffer about this topic.
Mr 'Un' again: ’That's what is important, right? That's why I raised it again to you, as you were claiming to be someone who cares about truth - in this case over WW2.’
I reply: This is the category error. We most certainly can know what happened in the years before the Second World War. The records are full, and readily available. And those who study those records can see that the events which led to the alleged 'Finest Hour' were in fact not an inevitable and fateful series of pre-ordained steps towards Britain's heroic and costly last stand - but the result of conscious choice by politicians, avoidable and so far from fateful or pre-ordained. It is simply not possible to do this with the accounts of Christ's birth, preaching, miracles, death or resurrection. Once again, as with the origin of the universe, we are free to choose between two different worlds - one in which the miracles are true and the resurrection is true, the other in which these things are a fake.
It is, by the way, quite possible for someone to conclude that there is a God, and to reject the Christian story. I happen to believe that there is a God, and that Jesus Christ was his son and rose from the dead. There are many shades of opinion between and among these beliefs, from Theism to Deism to Unitarianism to orthodox Roman Catholicism. I prefer the reasonable modesty of the Church of England.
Mr Un: ’Once again though, you fall back on your “I choose to believe it to be true”, which really is an extraordinary statement. Does this imply that you don't actually think it is true, but you pretend that it is? Isn't that exactly the same as you said that you did in your Trotskyist past? ‘
The category error persists. First of all, I do not at all think ‘I choose to believe it to be true’ is a particularly extraordinary statement. It is a rational, honest and accurate statement of my position. I can say neither more nor less. I make this choice because I prefer to live in a world where Christianity is true, because of the many implications, for justice, the survival of the human spirit, our direct knowledge of God and His of us (just to begin with) are the case.
In my Trotskyist past, I pretended (against the clear, demonstrable, overwhelming evidence of historical fact) that totalitarian horror was not the inevitable consequence of revolutionary utopianism. So no, it is not only not 'exactly the same'. It is utterly different.
Mr 'Un' again: ’But, of course, it wouldn't really matter what you personally “choose” to believe, if you didn't wish for the particular superstitious belief that you “choose” to believe, to be taught to all children as *truth*.’
Me: The first part of this statement is quite true, just as it would be true that it didn't matter what Mr 'Un' believed provided he didn't think it his duty to order society along the lines he preferred. Which I believe he does, and with what I believe to very bad consequences for us all. But as we both feel that society should be ordered along the lines we prefer, this is what the argument is about. Which seems to me to be a good honest starting point for this discussion. It is really about politics, as it always was.
His references to 'superstition' are just rhetoric. I should have thought a belief based upon the imperfectibility of man, and his consequent need for Divine Grace, was a good deal less superstitious and far less fanciful than a belief in 'human progress' or whatever it is Mr 'Un' terms his political and social theory.
Mr Un asks: ’Firstly, what exactly do we teach children when they ask about hell? What do we say when a child is taught in the classroom that Christianity is true, and they ask “but Sir, will ____ be going to an eternity of torture, because he isn't Christian?” ‘
Me: I am not sure where in the Gospels it says specifically that eternal damnation is the necessary consequence of not being Christian (though I do know some people who think this, and I disagree with them, being what C.S. Lewis termed an 'inclusivist'. I should rather have thought it was the possible destination of the unrepentantly wicked, cruel and callous (the most powerful and disturbing evocations known to me in scripture are in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, where Dives suffers torment for ignoring the beggar Lazarus at his gate, and in Matthew 25, vv 31-46, which everyone should read quite often.
Mr 'Un': ‘Eternal damnation is a perverse and horrendous belief,’
Is it, though? Why is that? Because Mr 'Un' thinks so. But others might disagree. Most of us have noticed that justice is often absent from this world, and that the strong, rich and powerful frequently die in their beds after long lives of profound evil. If there is justice in the universe (and it is our quest for this universally desirable thing which leads to the setting up the courts at The Hague and elsewhere which try to judge tyrants, and which I suspect Mr 'Un' supports) then - since it doesn't exist in this life - it is to be found beyond it. The concept of eternal reward and punishment (about whose details and duration we are told little) arises from the good desire for justice, and allows for the existence of a location in which it can take place.
Mr Un: ’and Mr Hitchens should be clear about what he thinks about this.’
I am quite free to be vague about it if I wish, thanks all the same, since the scriptural material on the matter is vague. But my view is summed up above, for anyone who cares what it is. There's no reason why they should. As I repeatedly say, I am neither a Bible scholar not a theologian, nor am I a Christian apologist, nor is my book a work of apologetics, and I make no claims to any special expertise in this matter.
My book is about politics, culture and morality (which I do claim to understand), and the role of the Rage Against God in politics, morality and culture. As I keep saying. And as Mr 'Un' prefers not to acknowledge, so that he can worry at his bone, and try to pick a fight with me on a subject in which I am profoundly uninterested and on which I make no claim to be informed.
Mr Un: ’Oh, but of course, I shouldn't be asking questions like this! Mr Hitchens doesn't want to discuss the actual details of the ideology he wishes for children to be taught as *truth*. The details of Christianity aren't important.’
No, I didn't say that. They are important. I am just not that well-versed in them. Better men than I know those details better than I, and who I am to set myself up in rivalry to Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker or, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
Mr Un: ‘What's important is that Mr Hitchens thinks it is right for the people of the country.’
Me: Spot on.
Mr Un: ‘So then, what exactly makes you different from any hardline Communists, or the “Warmists” you so love to denigrate?
- Communists believe that by teaching children as truth the ideology of Marxism and Socialism, the country will be a better place, and people happier.
- Some “Warmists” believe that by teaching children about caring for the environment in everything they do, will end up with a better society.’
Me: Well, as for the Communists, as my book demonstrates, they are inclined, when they have the power, to use force to ensure that their teachings have an undisputed monopoly (as I show in my book) and to suppress the teachings of rivals. I have no such desire or intention. I would be happy with the law as it exists (and as it is not currently enforced), that our schools should teach Christianity and hold Christian acts of worship, from which those who wished could at any time withdraw their children.
If Mr 'Un' has read my book as he claims, he will also know that the modern anti-theists are prepared to prevent, by law and censorship (their term) if necessary, the teaching of Christianity as truth to children. Indeed they classify it as child abuse. Unlike them, I have no desire to keep the teachings of atheism from the young by law or force. If atheists wish to set up atheist schools, clearly designated as such, they should be permitted to have them - though I am not sure how many parents would subscribe to them. Several atheist parents of my acquaintance send their children to explicitly Christian schools, and who could blame them?
As for the Warmists, I'm as concerned about the environment as anyone, and more than most, but I'd be hesitant about the teaching of Warmist speculation to children as if it is settled science (a completely different thing from caring about the environment, best done by individual acts of selflessness and sacrifice), which the Warmists are already doing in all schools in this country. Perhaps they could do it in special classes, from which non-Warmist parents can ask for their children to be excused?
Warmism, being non-science but taught as if it is science, is in a different category from faith, taught as faith, or Communism, ideology taught as faith. Once again, Mr 'Un'. seems to have difficulty in distinguishing among things which are different from each other.
Mr Un: ’What difference are you to them Mr Hitchens? Just like you, they may believe that their ideology is the one that should dominate society, and be taught to children as *truth*.’
Me: The difference is that Communism is a belief which can be shown by experience and undisputed history to be cruel, disastrous and murderous. Warmism is a belief which demands obeisance but is deeply intolerant of critics, ready to distort or suppress facts and which remains (to put it mildly) unproven. Christianity, by contrast, is the foundational moral system of the greatest civilisations and cultures of human history. That is the easiest sense in which Christianity is 'true' - not because it can be proven as knowledge, but true as in a blade that is true, or a compass that is true, or an angle in a piece of woodwork or masonry is true, or as a friend is true, so that those things which depend on their truth - the defeat of the armed assailant, the finding of the way in the wilderness, the arrival of help when sought, the soundness of the building and the strength of the arch beneath enormous weight - demonstrate the truth of the thing that made them.
Or as Mr 'Un' would put it: ’But ah - there's a difference here. The ideology is different, and therefore we must debate and discuss the details of Communism and Warmism. Everyone can see Mr Hitchens's record on “Warmism” - how he likes the facts to be discussed properly, saying there's not a proper debate going on, and how Warmists are trying to get their ideology taught as truth regardless of facts!’
But Mr 'Un' then spoils his case by continuing: ’But Christianity? Nah, the details of that particular ideology aren't important. Because it's Mr Hitchens's ideology.’
But I have never said this. That is because I do not think it. Of course the details are important. I am just not an authority upon them, or particularly interested in becoming an authority on them. I will happily refer Mr 'Un' and other interested parties to those who are. Not least because I know perfectly well that his only interest in this argument is to try to show off the rhetorical tricks he has learned from some anti-theist book or other, and he has no desire to learn the details and history of the Christian faith. If he did, he'd find a church, and seek out a teacher. When I have suggested others on this subject, he has simply looked for ways in which they differ from me. Well, so what? Christianity isn't some sort of Bolshevik party where the leader sets a line and all agree with it. It is a humble lifelong pilgrimage towards the truth, in which some get further than others, and there are many roads to the same goal
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Of course, it is obvious now that the unleashed passions of the new underclass are pretty nasty. How could they not be? They have been brought up to be nasty, or at least nobody in our neon-lit, raucous Babylon has ever had any opportunity to persuade them to be anything else but nasty during their formative years.
Rock star Blair: The awful truth
And for a moment, the awful truth – that for ten years we had this Olympically ignorant, tickle-minded, empty vessel pretending to be Prime Minister while others pursued a great constitutional and cultural upheaval – is revealed.
Hypocrisy will save our ‘terrified’ PM
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