This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column It isn’t so simple. Nowadays, we suffer plenty of gun massacres and rampages of our own. Yet back before 1920, when Britain’s gun laws were more relaxed than Arizona’s are today, the only major shooting episodes involved foreign terrorists (as at the famous siege of Sidney Street, 100 years ago). And harmonious Switzerland is full of powerful guns and ammunition, stored in almost every home, thanks to its sensible military service laws. If the USA is a more violent country than some (and in parts it still is), this has less to do with the presence of legal guns than it does with the bitter heritage of slavery which will divide and sour that country for centuries to come. But – without that excuse – we are quietly catching up with America in the violence league. As a people, we are far readier to resort to the fist and the boot – and the knife – than we were 30 years ago. Our suburbs are much less safe than America’s. And, as guns seep into the bottom edge of our society, our criminals will also be readier to use them. Hardly any crime is committed in this country with legally held weapons. Lawbreakers use illegally obtained guns, not legally bought ones. And the criminal gangs of our big cities know very well how to get such weapons. There is another aspect of this case that the smug media seem to be avoiding. Look at the strange picture of the alleged killer Jared Loughner. He has just been arrested for a crime for which he could be put to death, if convicted. And he is smiling. From this, and from many other things we already know about this man, it seems likely that he has lost his reason. Why and how? The most likely cause is Loughner’s daily cannabis-smoking habit. The link between this drug and serious mental illness grows clearer every day. Wickedly, the dope lobby still tries to deny this and seeks to legalise it. Loughner has been, for much of his short life, a habitual smoker of this so-called ‘soft’ organic drug. This is not in doubt. Police records, the testimony of U.S. army recruiters who rejected him partly on these grounds, and the accounts of several friends confirm that Loughner is a marijuana victim. Yes, I know. Not all cannabis-smokers lose their minds. And not all cigarette-smokers get cancer. But in both cases the risk is enough to cause concern. Cannabis is now effectively legal in Britain and in several parts of the USA, where this dangerous and unpredictable poison is ironically permitted for ‘medical use’. Arizona voters, fooled by years of cynical and shameful ‘cannabis is harmless’ propaganda, approved just such a stupid law in November. The town council of liberal Pima (scene of the murders) last week took the first step towards licensing ‘dispensaries’ for dope. Arizona has always had plenty of guns. America has always had heated political rhetoric. What is new is that it now has legal dope as well. This is very bad news for the country. It means that we are now settling into a new political arrangement in which we have a non-choice between Left and Lefter. Conservative voters have apparently accepted that their views on crime, immigration, education, taxation, national independence and the rest will henceforth be ignored by the party they believe is their own. They have shown they care more about having their tribal chiefs in office than they care about actual policies. On the other side of the line, decent Labour voters are also drifting back to their old loyalties in spite of the contemptuous way in which their fears, needs and aspirations are ignored by the metropolitan bohemians who long ago seized control of their party. Until her tribunal case came up, I had no idea what Miriam O’Reilly looked like, and didn’t care – but I had heard and thought highly of her radio reports. No it’s not. It’s a silly toy for immature show-offs worried about their masculinity, the dream vehicle of the tailgating cretins who make driving even more miserable than it needs to be. But what really matters about it is this: France doesn’t suck up to Washington. France often refuses to do what Washington tells it to do. As a result, France has a perfectly good relationship with Washington. We could do the same, and would be a lot better off if we did. If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.
15 January 2011 9:29 PM
The crazed smile that says: It’s the little packets of madness that we really need to fear
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10 January 2011 3:11 PM
The Real King's Story, versus 'The King's Speech'
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Wave of hate - or something else?
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Smugly and with a superior smile, liberal Britain looks down on those trigger-happy Americans and their loudmouth politicians. What happened in Tucson could never happen here in our nice, civilised, gun-free, peaceful country we assure ourselves.
When police caught him driving a car that stank of marijuana, Loughner was let off,
as he would have been here. So much (as usual) for the non-existent ‘war against drugs’.
Those who are seriously interested in public safety should worry less about guns and radio shock jocks, and more about the little packets of madness on sale in every school.
A Tory tribe without principles
The New Liberal Conservative Party has fought – and nearly won – its first by-election. The amazing willingness of Tory voters to turn out and support a Liberal candidate is one of the most significant moments of our times.
Westminster can now happily settle back into misgoverning the country, safe from any real danger of punishment or dismissal.
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We're all missing the point of the case of Miriam O’Reilly, dumped from TV for developing wrinkles. The problem is that TV concentrates entirely on the superficial, which is why we shouldn’t watch it and should all listen to the radio instead.
I remember many years ago urging a rather beautiful and very intelligent radio reporter not to go into TV, as it was obsessed with looks. She ignored my advice (people usually do), did superbly to begin with, and was then cruelly dumped because she was no longer young.
It may, alas, have been worth it.
The wretched truth is that you don’t exist in public life unless you are on TV. But that is only because so many of us have lazy imaginations, and won’t make the effort to read or listen.
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How unforgivably foolish of the police to accept the loan of a 168mph Lotus to ‘patrol’ the motorways of the Midlands. A spokesmoron commented: ‘The Lotus is a visually stunning machine which offers us the opportunity to engage with the public and reinforce the life-saving messages of road safety.’
The police shouldn’t be giving it free advertising, or endorsing the daft idea that they’re employed to mount dangerous and futile high-speed chases. Everyone involved should be given a pair of boots and put on foot patrol.
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The USA wouldn’t exist if the French (assisted by a few rebels) hadn’t beaten us and our German mercenaries at Yorktown. So it’s perfectly reasonable for Barack Obama to nuzzle up to President Sarkozy and say that America has ‘no greater friend’ than France.
I have now at last actually seen 'The King's Speech', the powerfully-hyped film whose advance publicity has been an absolute model of the propagandist's art. I would love to know exactly how it was done.
It is certainly working. The Oxford cinema where I watched it on Sunday evening was sold out, and the audience was composed of left-wing and conservative types, mostly the middle-aged market that so many modern movies foolishly ignore or despise, each group with their own entirely different reasons for wanting to see it, entertainment being only one of them.
The swearing, as I had thought it would be, was unnecessary and false, put in because it pleased the makers rather than because it was central to the story. Utterly unbelievably, it is shown as taking place within the hearing of the speech therapist's two schoolboy sons. And Colin Firth is badly miscast, as his robust and confident physique and manner were seriously unconvincing in the role of the desperately shy, frail, hollow-cheeked Duke of York. No, I can't offhand suggest the right person, but Mr Firth was the wrong one for sure.
The profanity did most certainly amuse a woman sitting several feet to my left, who had a laugh like a wombat being electrocuted, and who took special joy in every bit of bad language (and in every scene where Royal status was coarsely punctured or belittled).Though it was notable that the auditorium was divided on this. Some laughed uncontrollably. Several others remained silent or laughed in a more subdued way. Maybe it was the screeching wombat, whose grating mirth might have made others, less abandoned, wonder if they were right to find such things funny.
Laughter is a very strange thing, which we prefer not to think about very much, and is often just the collective cackle of a gang, reassuring each other that they're all in the same pack. The idea that laughter is necessarily about pleasure or happiness is simply false. Though laughter can be pleasing, or a release from tension and fear, or a bonding device, it can also often be rather nasty.
But it wasn't by any means the worst scene in the film, or the greatest offence against historical truth. I'll come to the offence against truth later. The worst scene may I suppose possibly be true, but I've never previously heard of it and I'd be grateful if anyone can tell me (I've so far not read the book on which the film is loosely based).
But it features the King and his speech therapist in the midst of a deserted Westminster Abbey, with the Coronation Chair (King Edward's Chair) already installed on its dais. At one point the therapist slumps in the sacred Chair itself, smirking to provoke the King into anger - and so, we are led to believe, into conquering his stammer. As he coaches the King through the Oath, the speech therapist (Lionel Logue) skips large parts of the wording using the words: 'Rubbish. Rubbish, rubbish.’
Here are the words so treated (actually, the expression: 'Rubbish, rubbish rubbish' isn't used until after the first promise):
(NB, this wording is from the 1953 Oath, so the countries named are significantly different, but I believe the rest ws more or less the same as in 1937) The Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?’
The King: ‘I solemnly promise so to do.’
The Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Will you to your power cause Law and Justice, in Mercy, to be executed in all your judgments?’
The King: ‘I will.’
The Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolable the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?’
The King: ‘All this I promise to do. The things which I have here before promised, I will perform, and keep. So help me God.’
If Mr Logue thought these sentiments were 'rubbish', I wonder what the nature of his commitment was? Or why he is supposed to have been such a loyal friend and companion to a King who undoubtedly took these words very seriously indeed (as well he might).They are the keystone of authority in this country, and the ideas they embody distinguish our form of government and society (and to some extent that of Mr Logue's native Australia) from (for instance) the elected and plebiscitary dictatorship of National Socialist Germany, the Vanguard Party dictatorship of the USSR and the elective monarchy of the USA. It is also hard to believe that Logue, an actor shown as being a great lover of Shakespeare, would have treated such a matter so lightly even as an element of a performance.
Actually, I doubt very much if this actually happened. But I suspect the makers of the film do think such things are rubbish, without even realising that this is a point of view, and so thought this a good and easy way of rushing through the scene, which also contains a childish and incredible caricature of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang. Lang may not have been the greatest holder of the post, but he was more interesting and more intelligent than he is shown to be in this portrayal. His much-criticised attack on Edward VIII (once he had clearly lost the battle to stay on the throne) was a pretty melodramatic moment which would have made good cinema.
But back to the offences against history. To make George VI acceptable as a sort of hero to left-wing watchers of this film, the British Royal Family is portrayed as a sort of weapon of war against Hitler. George V, Stanley Baldwin and others are credited with amazing foresight about the future, as is Winston Churchill.
Well, as readers of this site well know, even Mr Churchill wasn't quite as prophetic as all that (in 1936 he urged talks with Hitler over the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, rather than the swift military action which everyone now claims to realise was the right thing to do, and even in that he was more militant than anyone else, as the general belief was that it was nothing much to worry about).
Churchill himself plays a particularly odd part in the film. I watched this with special care because Deborah Ross, in her review of the film in 'The Spectator', said that the actor Timothy Spall (who plays Churchill) was 'channelling Peter Hitchens' in his portrayal of the great statesman. I have never been entirely sure what 'channelling' means, or why it's different from 'mimicking', but when I watched Mr Spall struggling with the role, eyebrows knitted and jowls throbbing, I realised with hilarious clarity exactly how some of my foes view me. Oh, that Peter Hitchens (or as he is known in my household 'The Hated Peter Hitchens').
But leave that aside. And I'm prepared to accept that Stanley Baldwin really thought as early as 1937 that Churchill was right about Germany, though I didn't realise it before.
The first of two things that really jam in the gullet is the way that Churchill's (ridiculous) support for Edward VIII in the Abdication Crisis is glossed over as if it didn't exist. In fact, he was so besotted with Edward, and so unable to see that his cause was lost, that he did grave damage to the cause of rearmament by making his support public.
He did this most notably in December 1936 at the inaugural rally of a new movement for rearmament called 'Arms and the Covenant', wrecking its impact by using this platform to speak in support of Edward VIII (when it was already too late anyway, even if it had been the right thing to do, which it wasn't). This is a well-known historical fact, but Churchill hagiographers tend to whizz past it because it reminds us that the supposedly impeccable Churchill was often a political incompetent.
The second is the final scene, in which George VI triumphs over his stammer, making a broadcast to the nation on the outbreak of war in September 1939. This portion of the film, full of historically unlikely moments, is signalled as momentous by the playing of the second (allegretto) movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. This, perhaps the most sublime piece of music ever written, is almost guaranteed to make the heart swell with emotion, particularly when played in semi-darkness over the powerful loudspeakers of a modern cinema. I doubt if the sequence would have one tenth of its moving power without the Beethoven.
Did BBC technicians and ministers really applaud the King for making a speech without stuttering? Did they congratulate him (it was, after all, a pretty grim occasion, the beginning of an unknown period of sudden death, destruction, privation and loss, not just some prize-day oration).
Did crowds gather outside Buckingham Palace inspired by the broadcast? I have checked the files of the Daily Mail for that date, and can find no account of such an event. Nor, incidentally, do I think that the pubs would have been open that early on a Sunday evening in 1939, though the brief shot of gnarled citizens listening glumly to the King on the wireless in a shadowed public bar is a work of art. Where did they find people with such old-fashioned English faces? I thought they had all gone.
But, tenderly as I feel towards George VI (in whose reign I was born, and who seems to me to have been a basically decent if not terribly bright cove who did a lot to preserve the crown and undo the damage wrought by his selfish brother) I think I should point out that there had in fact been an occasion in his reign around that time, when crowds did gather outside Buckingham Palace. It is one we prefer to forget (though the newspaper accounts of it at the time are almost universally approving and close to ecstatic).
It took place in early October 1938, on the evening of the day Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with his piece of paper. On the King's own initiative (so far as I can discover), Mr Chamberlain was invited to the Palace to stand on the balcony and bathe (alongside the young King and Queen) in the adulation of London's delighted millions, who did not in the least want a war or object to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, but who also didn't understand the stakes being played for. The only anti-aircraft searchlight then in existence in the London area was trained on the balcony as a spotlight. Personally I regard this behaviour by the Monarch as an unconstitutional and partisan action, which Chamberlain should have prevented by refusing to take part, and would have done if his head hadn't been so swollen by praise.
Like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the Munich agreement (and the reactions of people to it) is simultaneously disreputable and far more interesting than the smiley and largely false 'Finest Hour' version of history of which this film will now form a part. Wait and see how long it is before 'everyone knows' many non-facts which this production presents as true. When next you hear Munich discussed, remember that almost everyone, including people just like you, was in favour of it at the time, even that nice shy King George. This is a fact which we should not forget the next time any political action meets with universal approval.
The left-wing media are full of attempts to blame the Arizona murders on some sort of wave of hatred engendered by 'right-wing' movements, radio stations etc. So far as I can see, there is absolutely no evidence for this. I have little liking for the raucous tone of the 'Tea Party' and the supposedly conservative talk radio hosts, who seem to me to be Reaganites without the charm or the Cold War to justify or excuse them, economic liberals, emptily belligerent abroad, uninterested in genuine conservative reform at home, and very far from conservative in any proper sense.
But this claim (as a sensible radio report from the BBC's Jonny Diamond made clear on the 'Today' programme this morning) is not necessarily the case. Evidence for it is scant, and the main reason for the connection being made is an outburst by a local sheriff. Only one of the victims could conceivably have been the target of political rage. The Judge who was killed was there by chance and the killer almost certainly didn't know who he was. More significantly the alleged killer is said to be an incoherent, cannabis-smoking ( and possibly LSD-taking) loner from a dysfunctional and far-from-conservative home background. He is said to have a police record for possession of drug paraphernalia and another unspecified charge. Those who claim that the USA conducts a 'severe war on drugs' might note that this event resulted in a 'diversion programme', not several years in the slammer.
I would, as usual in such cases, ask whether he has in the past or at the present been prescribed anti-depressants or other drugs of this nature, as the culprits of such killings very often turn out to have been ingesting these substances. But it is worth mentioning that in this case cannabis, with its well-known association with serious mental illness, especially in those of school age, may have taken the place of such things. And if he has taken LSD, then the danger of total mental overthrow is even greater.
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