Colin Atkinson would have been fired if it hadn’t been for the might of this newspaper – and the dogged courage of a union official, Terry Cunliffe. Many unions are keen on ‘Equality and Diversity’ codes, and wouldn’t have taken the case. And as it’s Easter, I’d like to focus on the fact that the manager involved, Denis Doody, had a picture (perhaps I should say ‘icon’) of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara on his office wall. Interesting. Why? Well, what we recall at Easter is the show trial and judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth. A mob is manipulated into calling for his death. The judge, who knows he is innocent, feebly gives in. Such things are common in the real world, to this day. The resurrection, which some of us still celebrate today, symbolises the ultimate defeat of cruel and cynical human power by a far greater force. Among other things, Easter enshrines the idea that what we do here matters somewhere else, that there is an absolute standard by which our actions are judged. Down 20 centuries, this idea has restrained the powerful. They do not like it. Never have. Never will. The worship of Christ, victim of a lynch mob and a crooked judge, is dangerously radical. What about the cult of Comrade Guevara, embraced by Mr Doody? It claims to be radical too. But its devotees are the power-worshipping generation that now dominates our culture, using their slogan of ‘equality’ as a bludgeon to flatten opposition. Guevara was an evil killer, the exact opposite of Jesus. There is no excuse at all for revering him. He personally slaughtered alleged traitors to his nasty revolution. One of these was Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. Guevara himself icily recounted: ‘I fired a .32 calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain which came out through his left temple. He moaned for a few moments, then died.’ Later, when the rock-star rebel ‘Che’ was in power, he would lie on top of the wall at La Cabana prison, jauntily smoking a cigar while he watched the firing squads below punching bloody holes in the victims of his kangaroo trials. Guevara’s view of justice was typical of the smug Left, which knows it is right because it knows it is good. ‘Don’t drag out the process. This is a revolution. Don’t use bourgeois legal methods, the proof is secondary.’ There you have it, rather neatly expressed – the two rival forces that compete for supremacy in what was once a Christian country – the Gospel of Che, hot with hate and splattered with other people’s blood and brains in the pursuit of a utopia that never comes, and the Gospel of Christ, a life laid down willingly for others. His words, spoken in Bedford, were: ‘I think we know in 1997 the country needed change.’ Do we know that? Did it ‘need’ the ‘change’ it got – 13 years of political correctness, stupid wars, tax and spending? I hardly think so. Generally, the Prime Minister pretends at voting time that he didn’t like the Blair-Brown junta. But if it turned out that he’d voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Mr Cameron, in full election mode, is now banging on (as he would call it if anyone else did it) about drunkards and illegal drug abusers claiming benefits for being drunk and drugged. He doesn’t mean it. He regards types like me, who think that you can stop drinking too much if you want to, and that people take heroin because they like it, as horrible reactionary brutes. But unless you accept that people are fully responsible for their own actions – and modish liberals like Mr Cameron spend half their lives denying this – then the logic leads - inexorably to paying them ‘incapacity benefit’. Likewise his opportunist moaning about judges making privacy law. They do this because Parliament (under his beloved Blair) gave them the power to do it. He knows perfectly well that this is the case. If you think that people are unhappy because bad things have happened to them, and that giving them mood-altering pills is wrong, you find yourself viewed as a heartless monster. In last week’s episode of the occasionally enjoyable TV police series Lewis, the detective, played as an increasingly ill-tempered and crusty figure by Kevin Whately, started out being hostile to a tricky pill-dispensing doctor. So did his funky underling, James Hathaway, played by Laurence Fox. But the real message was different. Their boss told the younger man: ‘You’re supposed to be bringing Lewis out of the Stone Age, not joining him there.’ And lo, by the end, the seemingly nasty psychiatrist was revealed to be a saintly and honest character. Parliament has not been recalled – did you know that only the Government can do this? The main effect of our intervention has been to prolong a civil war, and the futile carnage in Misrata is largely our fault. Having intervened supposedly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, we may be causing one in Misrata. The only truly humanitarian course now available is to provide an evacuation fleet to get non-combatants out of that city as soon as possible. This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column The Prime Minister is an opportunist who doesn’t believe in anything. Don’t take my word for it. This is what Robin Harris, David Cameron’s first boss in the Tory Research Department, said of him back in 2007. It’s easily proved, by tracking his changing views on any subject you care to name since he first sought office. Zig, zag, and zig again where necessary. But don’t delude yourself that a man with no principles won’t do any damage. Because his only concern is to gain and hold office, he will do all he can for that end. And to win and keep office these days, you need to be either politically correct or courageous. Mr Cameron is not courageous. That is why one of his two big outbursts this week means something, and the other means nothing. Outburst number one was worthy of Gordon Brown, and apparently modelled on his brainless intervention in the case of Laura Spence. Mr Cameron attacked Oxford University for rightly refusing to choose its students on the grounds of skin colour. Can you think of any other country where a Prime Minister would seek to enhance his reputation by an inaccurate and frankly thuggish attack on one of the few great institutions left standing? This is how debased we are. Outburst number two was a patronising Alf Garnett impersonation, in which he gave the impression he plans to curb mass immigration, without actually doing anything about it. Mr Cameron’s travelling chorus of tame political reporters duly plugged this transparent vote-grab as if it were a real initiative. I often think these people should get their salaries direct from Downing Street rather than from the news organisations that officially employ them. Now, a couple of years hence, if this Coalition manages to stay together, which of these two policies will have borne fruit? It’s not difficult to work out that Oxford University will be doing its utmost to find black-skinned students, rather than judging people by their ability. If this is wrong in one direction, why isn’t it wrong in the other? Meanwhile, mass immigration, and the official PC dogma that prevents integration, will continue as before. Sinister truth about Brixton ‘uprising’ I have this terrible habit of actually reading official documents. So I know that the much praised Scarman report into the 1981 Brixton riots was a disgraceful document that repeatedly excused lawless violence and played down the organised and criminal character of the outbreak. Even Lord Scarman mentioned that two men (one white, one black) appeared to be directing one attack on the police (paragraph 3.53). Even Scarman noted that the rioters ‘offered terms’ to the police, clear evidence of a directing leadership (though he said elsewhere, in paragraph 3.77, that it was a ‘spontaneous combustion’). And even Scarman recorded the ‘sinister contribution’ made by ‘strangers’ in ‘making and distributing petrol bombs’ (paragraph 3.104). There was ‘clear and credible’ evidence of such organised bomb-making given to him in private session by two witnesses. It is my belief that a less soppy judge could have written an entirely different report with utterly different conclusions. Yet now this nasty, sinister incident is being dignified as an ‘uprising’. I hope historians won’t be fooled by this. As for the unhinged Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, don’t get me started. Why not outlaw muffin-tops too? Gosh, it’s fashionable to be tough on Muslims these days. We invade their countries. We tell them what not to wear. And we lecture them on how our ‘way of life’ is superior to theirs. Is it, by the way? We have lots of drunken, tattooed slags with lardy muffin-tops protruding out of their waistbands. They have lots of women dressed as bats. I’m not entirely sure this proves that we’re better. As for the bat outfits, is it really such a great idea to ban them, as the French have done? As anyone could have foreseen, the law gave a number of attention-seekers the chance to get arrested on TV – but it did nothing to make France less Islamic than it was before. And it set a dangerous precedent. The Muslim vote is getting more important every year in many European countries. One day, there may be a law telling women they must cover their faces. And those who protest will be reminded of what they did when the boot was on the other foot. Most of the anti-Islamic blowhards are neo-conservatives who also favour what they call ‘free movement of people’, known to you and me as unrestricted mass immigration. And it is that policy which has turned Islam into an increasingly powerful minority in our societies, one whose growing demands for a more Muslim Europe cannot be challenged or resisted by unenforceable laws or secular liberalism. ***************** There’s yet more whimpering from the government about the spread of fortnightly bin collections. They just can’t admit that the reason for this unwanted change is the European Union’s Landfill Directive, which forces British councils – which rely more heavily on landfill than those elsewhere – to recycle more or pay huge fines. Oh, to live in an independent country again. ***************** Tristan van der Vlis, the Dutch rampage killer who murdered six people last week, is said to have spent time in a psychiatric institution. Was he prescribed antidepressants? ***************** Why do dictators refuse to quit? Simple. They see what happens to those who give up. Nicolae Ceausescu was killed after a kangaroo trial. Erich Honecker was hounded from country to country until he died of cancer. Slobodan Milosevic was locked up until he died. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is now under arrest and his sons in jail. Are they wishing that – like the rulers of Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria – they had killed more of their own people and stuck it out? I wouldn’t be surprised. If the ‘West’ really wants Colonel Gaddafi to go, it would be wise to give him an easy exit. ***************** I cannot think of any one fact which more clearly shows the speed and depth of our national decline than the news that when our Navy catches pirates, we give them nicotine patches and let them go. 'Bert' opines (in one posting): ' There’s nothing wrong with being squeamish'. That depends what one is being squeamish about. Being squeamish about the careful use of force and violence against guilty persons convicted in fair trials to defend peace, order and safety is quite different from being repelled (as so few are, but I am ) about blowing innocent German civilians to bits in their homes, or baking them to death in firestorms, because you can't make contact with the enemy's army. Funny, in fact, that so many who are squeamish about the swift and humane execution of justly convicted killers are so relaxed about the mass murder, often by tearing them to pieces with metal instruments, of unborn babies, the bombing of Belgrade, Baghdad and Afghanistan (and now of Libya). 'Bert' continues: ' and just because you don’t think it’s right for the state to kill doesn’t mean that you don’t want to defend what is right.' Well, yes it does, if you think it's fine for the state to kill, or license killing, for other purposes that suit you. Which is why people who support such policies always claim(though without explaining why) that the predictably lethal wars or predictably lethal transport policies they like are not in any way comparable to the existence of a death penalty. Not to mention the predictably lethal arming of the police, a direct consequence of the abolition of lawful execution in Britain. And it also does if by disarming yourself you unleash much greater violence on those you are supposed to be protecting. And I have established here that greater violence has followed the abolition of the death penalty, something my emotional spasm opponents don't like discussing. He then asks: ' As for your peroration, do you really think, in the cold light of day, that scrapping the death penalty is a “betrayal of civilisation”?' Absolutely. The colder the light, the more I think it. A civilisation that won't defend itself will soon cease to exist. QED. 'Curtis' submits :'What about John's gospel, 7.53-8.11? A crowd asks Jesus if a woman, just caught in adultery, should be executed, by stoning. This was the law in Jerusalem then Jesus stops the execution by saying ‘That one of you who is faultless shall throw the first stone.’ This passage makes me think that if Jesus were around today, he would oppose the death penalty, on the grounds that no one is good enough to execute anyone'. (A note in brackets: This provides an illustration of how much we have lost thanks to the discarding of the Authorised Version of the Bible, in which the words are rendered so much more memorably as : 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her'. (How is this hard to understand as it is? Or archaic? It only contains two words of more than one syllable, and they are 'without' and 'among') ) The incident seems to me to be too specific, to the sin of adultery, to allow of this interpretation. Also, taken in company with Christ's behaviour before, during (and, as it happens, after) his own trial and execution, it cannot be used to make such a point. Without the latter, it might serve. With it, it does not. He intervenes to prevent an act of gross hypocrisy and (as so often in his life and ministry) to take the side of a woman against male hypocrisy or dislike. Not to object to the penalty as such ( had there been a sinless person there, that is to say anyone who had not committed adultery himself, Christ presumably could not have objected if he had cast the first stone). Mr Walker runs away from the argument thus :'You yourself were the person who started the emotional side of this debate. All that nonsense about 'wielding the sword of civil society' etc. Sounds good but is not an argument'. I didn't offer it as an argument. I have set out my argument in detail in articles findable through the index, and in the relevant chapter in my book, which Mr Walker ( despite my urgings) has chosen not to read , preferring to get het up and then flounce off. Like so many abolitionists, he prefers self-righteous emotionalism to a cool analysis of the practicalities. He is, perhaps, afraid of losing in such a contest. The phrase 'The Civil Sword' is just an expression, used by persons as various as John Milton and Andrew Jackson to refer to the state's monopoly of violence. If it upsets or otherwise unsettles Mr Walker, I cannot help it. The person hiding behind the name 'Scaramanga' thinks he is being satirical when he is in fact just being boring. Mr Charles writes: ' "Strict pacifists can use the risk of innocent death as an absolute reason for opposing execution (provided they also wish to ban private motor cars)." This utilitarian nonsense could've been written by Jeremy Bentham.' Really? If I were to advance the perfectly good Christian arguments for a death penalty, namely the greatly heightened chance of genuine repentance and remorse on the part of the killer, not to mention the large number of murderers who commit suicide, which is gravely distressing to a believer, Mr Charles and others would jeer at me for superstition and mumbo-jumbo. So I stick to the things they can understand, which are measurable on a materialist calculating machine (however desiccated) and are equally true. But people who would jeer at a transcendental argument cannot really, in all consistency, also jeer at a utilitarian one. He continues: 'PH exhibits a massive failure of imagination in regard to what capital punishment does to society as a whole.' He should be more specific. I am not sure what imagination I need to deploy here. I have myself witnessed two executions in a foreign jurisdiction. I grew up in a society with a death penalty, and it was chiefly different from today's in being more peaceful and less violent, and having an unarmed police force. He adds: 'I would HATE to live in a society that was ruled by retribution. I aspire to something better. I'd refer him to my earlier post on this thread if he wants clarification.' I still don't see what's wrong with retribution forming part of a criminal justice system. Indeed, I can't see how it could function or long survive without it. And I suspect Mr Charles doesn't have my experience of seeing inside several prisons. I have no doubt that long-term imprisonment is immeasurably more cruel than swift execution. But 'ruled' by retribution? Hardly. Though the anarchy towards which we are heading, as justice fails, will be ruled by vengeance and blood-feuds. I think I can be pretty sure this one will happen. Those of you who have access to the Sky Arts 1 channel can see an hour-long interview of me by Professor Laurie Taylor at 10.00 pm on Thursday 14th April, and if that is not enough for you, a further hour after 11.00 pm when Prof. Taylor interviews my brother Christopher. Having already seen both (and read transcripts of them) I may well be asleep at the time. There comes a point when all interviews of me, and of Christopher, seem to me to be more or less the same (though his recollection that he tried to persuade me that I was adopted might interest some. I mainly only ever hit him, or doused him with soapy water using old washing-up liquid bottles) . But I have been amused by one or two of the previews in the TV listings magazines contrasting my hectoring, lecturing style with my brother's greater affability. There's no arguing with the fact that I like a good hector. But the joy of this interview, recorded in Harrow-on-the-Hill late last summer (Cleo Laine was in the same Green Room, as they were recording several that day back-to-back) is that for once I am allowed to develop my points and finish my statements without the usual hostile interruptions I would get from the BBC. Christopher (whose interview was recorded much more recently) has also been known to use the edge of his tongue, and even go in for a little lecturing. But I would say that people you agree with tend to sound more affable, and people you disagree with tend to sound more hectoring, as a general rule. For some reason, I suspect my following among the writers of TV previews is small. Laurie Taylor and I are vaguely acquainted. He was the famously culturally revolutionary sociologist , and leading light of something called the 'Deviancy Symposium' when he was a professor and I was an undergraduate at York 40-odd years ago. In those days I was a dogged Bolshevik, dreaming of strikes and barricades, and of storming barracks and Winter Palaces, and regarded his interests as frivolous. I now grasp that he had understood the nature of modern revolution far better than I. He's also a pretty good interviewer, though I must admit to being more than a little bored with being asked why I stopped being left-wing. I think my interviewers are all secretly afraid the same thing will happen to them, and want to know how to avoid it. What would their friends and colleagues say, if they came out as conservatives?
23 April 2011 8:11 PM
Jesus vs Che Guevara: A man who laid down his life for us ... or a murderous ‘rock-star’ rebel? We know which the Wakefield Cross persecutors will worship this Easter
16 April 2011 8:34 PM
Leave it aht, Dave! Nobody’s buying your Alf Garnett routine (and you don't even believe it yourself )
The Civil Sword
More Hitchens than most people could possibly want - Sky Arts 1, Thursday Night, 10.00 pm
Sunday, 24 April 2011
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
We now have to be pleased that a man has not been sacked from his job for putting a small cross on the dashboard of his company van. Please forgive me if my joy is muted this Eastertide. The real meaning of the Wakefield Palm Cross Affair is not specially happy.
Care to choose?
Did Cameron vote for Labour in 1997?
David Cameron said on Friday that it was a good thing Labour won the 1997 General Election, something that a remotely awake media would have blazoned across the sky in vast headlines, but which they buried instead.
How can I begin to tell you how much this man and his party do not deserve your support? And how much they laugh at you when you give it to them?
Lewis and a drugs cover-up
The issue of psychobabble versus common sense – linked to the dangers of antidepressant drugs – is increasingly important.
I find these days that even asking questions about the huge prescription of antidepressants in modern Britain gets me into trouble. Actually, that’s why I keep doing it. The twitchiness of the pill-popping faction suggests they are hiding their own grave doubts.
Mr Parris civilised? I’ve got news for you
Some of you may have enjoyed my cameo appearance on Have I Got News For You, in which I was filmed sneering lengthily at the presentation of an award to the slippery ex-MP Matthew Parris.
What got my goat was the description of Mr Parris as ‘civilised’, after he had gravely misrepresented my views on a public platform and refused to make amends for this cheap behaviour. As civilised as a rattlesnake, I’d say.
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As the Libya policy goes wrong, the nation’s brakes have failed. Where is the high-level criticism? Where the questioning? The Prime Minister was interviewed at length on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and even managed to give some (duff) racing tips but, incredibly, was not asked about Libya.
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