They will then be routed down side roads to avoid nearby Carterton – a town almost exactly the same size as Wootton Bassett – and make their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford along A-roads and bypasses. There’ll be a small guard of honour near the hospital entrance (there already is) but somehow or other the cortege won’t go down any High Streets. I will tell you in a moment what the official excuses are for this. I should have thought the mere words ‘back gate’ would tell most people all they need to know about this decision. And despite the Prime Minister’s oily award of the title ‘Royal’ to Wootton Bassett, you can bet that he’d much rather the public scenes of grief and remembrance in that place had never happened, and that nobody noticed the frequent deaths his weakness and political cowardice are causing. In the same way, the Defence Ministry has almost completely succeeded in covering up the appalling numbers of men who have been gravely injured in Afghanistan because the Government hasn’t the guts to quit this meaningless war. We hardly ever see them. Were they all to be assembled in one photograph, the nation would demand instant withdrawal and probably get it. The official version is that the families of the dead will be using a new ‘Repatriation Centre’ at Brize Norton, and that it is near the back gate. Routing the hearses through the base might disrupt its normal operations. And here’s what was said by Andrew Robathan, whose stirring title is ‘Minister for Defence Personnel, Welfare and Veterans’. Speaking to Radio Oxford, he explained: ‘The side gate was seen by the Ministry of Defence and the police as the most appropriate way to take out future corteges.’ I love that word ‘appropriate’, the favourite adjective of those who have quietly forsaken the idea that there are such things as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. He continued: ‘I am not sure taking coffins in hearses past schools, past families, past married quarters is necessarily the thing that everybody would wish to see . . . the focus must be on the families of the dead service personnel. They are the people who care most. That is where our focus is.’ This is a curious statement. None of us exactly ‘wishes’ to see a funeral going by. But surely death should not be hidden away. And surely it is right that all of us – especially the young and service families – should be reminded of the price of courage and duty, and given the opportunity to salute these fine things. You can believe the various official excuses. Or you might recall that until (in April 2008) this newspaper highlighted the way the hearses were left to fight their way through indifferent traffic, even cut up by impatient motorists at roundabouts, they did not get a police escort for the final few miles to the hospital. Mr Cameron says that he will do the talking about war, and the commanders should do the fighting. Well, he may have a point there, or he would if he were not militarily and diplomatically clueless. But he might also mention that while he is doing the talking, real men are doing the dying, and their families are doing the weeping. You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher: ‘In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more. Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.’ The previous day, Martin had written from the scene of an air strike in Souk- al-Juma, which is a centre of opposition to Colonel Gaddafi: ‘In the rooms still standing there were beds, a freezer full of food, plastic flowers, clothes, cushions and a children’s bedroom with a cot, bunks and a yellow teddy bear. The apartments had clearly been civilian and were manifestly in a residential area... There was no sign of any military or government installation. Locals insisted that there were none.’ If I make a reasoned case against state subsidies for fatherless families, I am immediately, and falsely, accused by Tories and other Leftists of ‘demonising single mothers’. As it happens, I think single mothers make an entirely rational decision, based on the existing benefits system and the divorce laws. So we should change the system, and reform divorce. If David Cameron makes a weird, puce-faced attack on absent fathers, he is taken seriously by a largely sycophantic media. Read what the Prime Minister says. It is – and I am being mild here – actually unhinged. It is close to an incitement to violence, and if violence follows it, then I think the victims should make sure that Mr Cameron’s outburst is considered by the Crown Prosecution Service. Here goes. These are the actual words of the Queen’s First Minister, and Controller of the Nuclear Button: ‘We need to make Britain a genuinely hostile place for fathers who go AWOL. It’s high time runaway dads were stigmatised, and the full force of shame was heaped upon them. They should be looked at like drink drivers, people who are beyond the pale.’ Even his friends in the fashion world, who know more about handbags than about Hitler, can see that this is not a good look. He has sought to excuse his behaviour by pointing out that he is, or has been, ‘addicted’ to various pills. Two points here. There is no such thing as addiction, which is a fancy name for human weakness. If the pills are bad for him, then it’s his responsibility not to take them. And isn’t it rather far-fetched to suggest that a few pills can turn a decent person into an anti-Jewish bigot? Let us examine this statement. It begins with a series of repellent criminal assaults on ‘Annie’. I am, I must say, dismayed that the ‘abuse’ continued after the incestuous child was taken into care, for presumably by then the authorities knew of the abuse and the culprit should have been in prison for a long stretch. There he could not have continued the abuse. . Perhaps he, too, had lots of excuses for his behaviour and so was left at liberty by our excuse-making injustice system, to continue abusing his daughter. I hope nobody imagines that I am in favour of that. The assaults on ‘Annie’ are appalling. But Mr Charles seems to assume that these events have robbed ‘Annie’ of the power to choose. Note how in this account ‘Annie’ is always the subject of passive verbs, or a person apparently without a will of her own. She ‘lets herself fall’. She is ‘prostituted’. Mr Charles is so used to making excuses for wrongdoing that he does not write, as I would have done, that the father of this girl abused her. He writes that she was abused by him. Even someone whose actions he must hate or despise is not described in the active voice, the passive having become so habitual in his excuse-making mind. Annie now ‘lets herself fall’ into the clutches of a pimp. Lets herself fall? Did she have no choice about this? The language is obscure, and I believe deliberately so. She ‘was prostituted’. How exactly is this different from ‘she decided to become a prostitute’. Was she forced? How? Was there truly no choice in our welfare state? Did she never have any opportunity to take up any other life? The passive, will-free language, crammed with the assumption that nobody is ever to blame for anything they do, makes it impossible to tell. And then she ‘was anaesthetised’ with heroin. Anaesthetised? Against what? By whom? Was a professional anaesthetist present? Was it a measured dose? Did she consent? Or was she held down by force while the drug was administered? Bah. Humbug. Tell us what actually happened in good honest English, would you please, Mr Charles. This slippery, misleadingly medicalised , passive euphemism tells us nothing about the crucial events. I suspect that this is because it would confirm my original statement that so annoyed Mr Charles, namely that all heroin abusers take the drug because they want to, because they enjoy taking it, in spite of the fact that they are well aware it is both illegal and wrong. I do not in fact ‘claim’ that ‘addicts’ ‘submit to their “addiction” willingly’. I should have thought Mr Charles would know by now that I do not believe that there is any such thing as addiction, an excuse made up for people who are not prepared to control their appetites for harmful pleasures. Nor is what say a ‘claim’. If Mr Charles has any objective evidence for the existence of a medical condition which could be called ‘addiction’, in any way distinguishable from a weak will, I would like to hear it. One other thing The wearisome obtuseness of atheist bores would be funny if it didn’t take up so much space. Why can’t these people just accept that belief or unbelief in God is a choice? Why can’t they accept that they have chosen unbelief because they greatly dislike and fear the idea that their private actions may be judged by an absolute standard? Well, the answer to that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? That would involve admitting that their belief is a selfish scuttle away from justice, rather than a grand assertion of intellectual purity. Hence their flight from the idea of choice, and the shutdown of their logical processes anywhere near the point where this might need to be acknowledged. The daft ‘argument’ about change in someone’s pocket could only be advanced by someone who had wilfully misunderstood this point. It is possible to discover by objective enquiry how much change someone has in his pocket. It is not possible to discover if God exists. Gosh, is that clear now? Of course not. The wilful closure of a human mind is a tragic thing. For example: I’m told: ‘You have said that if I asked you how much money I had in my pocket and you did not know, you could 'choose' to believe that it was £4.20.’ No, I haven’t. The choice only exists because the truth cannot be objectively determined. The person has to invent statements I have never made, and could not have made, to support his dismal ‘argument. I will turn in a moment to comments on this week’s column. But first I’d like to take up once more a discussion we had last week about ‘anger’ in debate. This arises from my appearance on Sunday on BBC1’s ‘The Big Questions’, which is still on the iPlayer if anyone wishes to watch it. The second half of the discussion was devoted to the Israeli-Arab question. I repeated the arguments I made in my article from Gaza last autumn, which was posted here. But the Palestinian case was put mainly by a man in a chequered keffiyeh scarf and matching tie, and by a female alleged comedian from Glasgow who made several interjections along the standard propaganda lines of the current anti-Israel campaign. Were either or both of these people consumed with anger? Would those who make this claim about my public appearances (with the intention of invalidating my arguments) make the same claim about either of them? I would be interested to know. My suspicion is that they would not. Most people are perfectly happy to see their own opinions forcefully and passionately expressed, and I would imagine my critics have pretty much swallowed the current anti-Israel orthodoxy of the blathering classes. Yet in one of these cases I think the speaker actually damaged his cause by being so impassioned. Nor did he have the excuse that he needed to shout to get heard. He had been given a prominent position, his own microphone and a pretty-much-guaranteed major role in the discussion. In answer to comments, I called the author Sir Terence Pratchett because he chose to accept a knighthood. As far as I know, it was given in that form, and if it hadn’t been, it would have been absurd. The formulation ‘Sir Terry’ is ridiculous and incongruous, and if people don’t wish to be addressed by their full names they shouldn’t accept titles of honour. I have heard the position of the new atheists well summed up elsewhere as ‘God doesn’t exist – and I hate Him!’ But I wasn’t aware that Sir Terence (whose books I have not felt compelled to finish, or explore further, after sampling one or two) had said he hated God for not existing. Both positions are of course nonsensical. Sir Terence has no idea if God exists or not, and can believe in Him tonight if he chooses to do so. You cannot hate someone who is not there. My own view is that both believers and atheists fear that God exists, but believers also hope that he does. The passion which atheists devote the subject suggests (as such passion almost invariably does) a grave uncertainty underneath. So do the linguistic and debating tricks employed by some atheist bores (and there is no more expert and accomplished room-emptier than one of these) to strip them of any responsibility for their religious opinions, which they have somehow been ‘forced’ into. Mr ‘Avid Fan’ tells me I am self-righteous and asks me to assert that his grandmother is better off now than if she’d committed suicide some years ago. He interprets her stated wish to join her late husband, when she was still coherent, as a desire to do so. Or so it seems to me. I believe that the Christian religion (though not Judaism) has set its canon against self-slaughter. I am also (incidentally) haunted by a macabre Charles Williams story in which a man kills himself and finds that nothing has happened except that he is exactly where he was before, only in a perceptibly darker, more sinister version of the world he was attempting to leave, populated by others like himself, and with a rope still uncomfortably round his neck. What if suicide, far from being an escape, is a way deeper into the woe that takes us there? For me, therefore, there is no choice in the matter. It is something I must not do, and must not aid another to do. Others are in a different position, especially if it becomes legal to assist suicide. Would I be let off if (for instance) I were in some state of unutterable despair which was not of my own making – say in the midst of being tortured slowly to death in some despot’s dungeon? I like to think so. But I don’t know. One of the main reasons for this prohibition, though not the principal one, is (I think) the unending puzzled grief and guilt which suicide leaves behind it. Many old and bereaved people speak longingly of their wish to rejoin their lifelong companion. Many others just speak of their wish to be dead. Yet very few of them take their own lives, even so, though they have the power to do so. I am not sure it is self-righteous to advance the arguments I set out. Did Mr Avid Fan ever ask his grandmother if he could help her achieve this end, which would be the logical conclusion of thee view he now expresses? I have to say that I very much doubt it, and it is easy to imagine why he didn’t. Most of us, self-righteous or no, would feel there was something grotesque and ugly about such an offer, even made out of kindness. And we might also suspect that the answer would be pretty brusque (old, ill people can be surprisingly forceful when they choose). In which case is it fair to use her statement of wistful longing as a retrospective justification for sending her into the Big Sleep now? One of the problems with senility and dementia, as with many other states of being on the fringe of life, is that we have little or no idea of what the person is actually feeling and experiencing. My own suspicion is that the horrible mismatch between bodily decay and mental decay which makes so many final years so ghastly to behold is a consequence of our modern way of life and of modern medicine’s futile ability to prolong physical existence without being able to prolong health. But that does not permit us to look at the result and say we will deal with it with a lethal injection, a plastic bag or a dose of barbiturates. There should be far more hospice places, far more concentration on making death more bearable for the dying and for those who love them. But modern medicine, which strives with enormous officiousness to keep people alive up to a certain point, becomes cold and dismissive once they are old. I suspect that many old people are now effectively starved and thirsted to death, while many others are connected to the morphine pump , ostensibly to relieve their pain with no real expectation that they will ever wake up. In answer to Mr Perrin, this country will not leave the EU until a political party committed to this object is elected with a clear majority. I have explained at length how that could be brought about. It starts with the destruction of the Tory Party. I do not believe in referendums, and am uninterested in the futile Euro-elections to the Brussels Supreme Soviet. Why give this farce legitimacy by taking part in it? Juries (as described at length in my ‘Abolition of Liberty’, in the chapter ‘Twelve Angry Persons’) used to be selected on the basis of a property qualification, which was in effect an age and education barrier. When this was got rid of, nothing was done to replace it because the government were afraid to do so. Anything they suggested was bound to offend someone. At the time, the minimum voting age was 21, which is bad enough. It is now 18, and may well soon be 16, which will mean 16-year-old jurors. I was astonished at the age of the woman Fraill. But it did seem to me that a combination of age and educational qualification would be enough to rule out most such people. Though I am in principle a defender of juries, I sometimes think that the liberal elite has set out to make them look silly and ineffectual, as part of a long-term campaign (which is undoubted, see ‘the Abolition of Liberty’) to get rid of them altogether so that our legal system can be fully merged with that of the EU (where proper independent juries are unknown outside the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic). A Mr ‘maccamfc’ , in a posting on the frontiers of literacy and coherence, says he ‘became’ a heroin ‘addict’ as if this was beyond his control, and he caught this affliction as one might catch flu. I do not believe this was the case. He started taking heroin, as all heroin abusers do, because he enjoyed it and wanted to, well knowing that it was both illegal and wrong. No doubt I shall be accused of being callous towards this individual. I don’t think so. It is the wilful drugtaker who is callous to his family and neighbours, not the person who condemns this selfishness and seeks to deter it with punishment. Whether I am ‘upper class’ or not ( lower upper middle class is my own self-description), I bet his working class neighbours and family have had plenty of cause to regret his choice, even if he thinks he hasn’t. Though I doubt he would admit to that, and he writes under a pseudonym so he needn’t take full responsibility for the truth of his posting. He also asks us to believe that while he enjoyed himself taking this very expensive drug, which tends, ah, to undermine the work ethic, he was able to support himself for many years (17 by my calculation) and not to rob anyone else. Why, in that case is he now taking methadone, paid for by me and many others out of taxes we would rather spend on something good and useful? Why didn’t he just stop taking heroin, far easier to give up than cigarettes? I have no idea if he is poor. He is certainly undeserving. Neil Saunders should be aware of the reason why capital punishment is different from abortion and euthanasia. To be justly executed, you have to be found guilty of a particularly heinous murder by an impartial jury, to fail in repeated appeals and to be refused a reprieve by the Home Secretary after careful individual consideration of all aspects of your case.. To be aborted or euthanised, you just have to be weak and inconvenient. It is Mr Hentoff (whom I rather admire) who is inconsistent.
26 June 2011 1:08 AM
As Dave 'does the talking', war dead are sneaked out of the back gate
23 June 2011 11:29 AM
The excuse industry at work
More angry people
Sunday, 26 June 2011
This is Peter's Mail on Sunday column
As Dave ‘does the talking’, war dead are sneaked out of the back gate The flag-wrapped coffins of dead servicemen are to be driven out of the back gate of RAF Brize Norton when it takes over from Lyneham (a few weeks from now) as the arrival point for the fallen.
Personally, I don’t think he or his Government colleagues are grown-up enough to pay the price of their own vanity and bombast. So they sneak the dead out by the back gate, and hope it doesn’t get on the TV.
Slaughtered...by our side
Our side did these things. I have left out some more gruesome details of the dead and injured. Since our only official justification for intervening in Libya is to ‘protect civilians’, why haven’t these undoubted incidents led to an emergency debate in Parliament on our involvement in this cack-handed, bird-brained adventure?
It’s fathers we’re demonising
He wouldn’t dare say any such thing about the many women who deliberately set out to bring up children without fathers, and he was careful to sugar his statement with exaggerated praise for ‘heroic’ single mothers. The deep anti-male, politically correct bias in our culture has grown markedly worse since the Tory Party was captured by Mr Cameron and his rich liberal friends.
Can pills really make you a racist bigot?
A pitiful creature called John Galliano is given to mad, insulting outbursts in Paris bars. He has been filmed speaking of his love for Hitler and his, er, dislike of Jews.
---
More proof that the BBC are willing to believe anything bad about Israel. On June 18, the Corporation’s website published a laughably unlikely story claiming that Rabbis in Jerusalem had sentenced a dog to death by stoning. It was false from nose to tail and had been retracted, with apologies, by the Israeli newspaper that first published it, days before the BBC picked it up (without checking) from a French news agency, and a website.
It’s partly because of this hopeless bias – Israel bad, Arabs good – that the BBC hardly ever mentioned the tyranny, corruption and political squalor of the Arab world before it became impossible to ignore in the spring.
Christopher Charles states: ’Annie was sexually abused by her father from the age of 11 to 16. She bore him a child which was taken into care. Unable to bear the abuse any longer, Annie let herself fell into the clutches of a man twice her age who it transpired was a pimp. She was prostituted out to five or six men a day and was anaesthetised with heroin. She became an addict. She has carried on being an addict for the next twenty years. [She is now in her late thirties and has been in and out of prison countless times.] Finally by dint of her own efforts and that of outside agencies she has finally got herself drug free. 'Annie' [I've changed her name] is one of thousands. Ask any social worker or health visitor or prison officer. And PH has the effrontery to claim that 'all' addicts submit to their addiction willingly. He needs to get out more and talk to some real people before loftily proclaiming such loathsome prejudices as though they bore the stamp of fact.’
In the world of excuses, everybody is passive, nobody has any power of will, decision or resistance, all is fore-ordained by previous abuse, maltreatment etc, back to the beginning of time. Nobody is ever responsible, and none of us has any duty to overcome evil circumstances.
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