This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column * * * Why should we want that? Yet we continue to portray this sad survival as a major power and adopt a high moral tone in our dealings with it. Yes, it can still do harm – but it is much more likely to do so if we maintain our current policy. It does not feel as if four years have passed since I finally managed to visit North Korea. The experience feels as if it were yesterday. Those who have not read my account of that visit, or who would like to read it again, may find it here. I am glad that it took me so long to make the journey. Long years before, in May 1986, I was one of the reporters accompanying Margaret Thatcher on a visit to Seoul. Don’t be too impressed. We were crammed in the back of a very old VC-10, a long way from her unless she decided to stun us with a monologue, which from time to time she did. So I had been taken, tagging on the tail of her party, to the strange and perplexing border between the two Koreas at Panmunjom. Just yards away, with no physical barrier in the way, was the entrance to the Looking-Glass World of Communism which in those days stretched all the way to Germany. Around the small enclave in the Demilitarised Zone were dense woods full of wildlife. Strange music played from a ‘village’ of concrete blocks, plainly uninhabited, which the North Koreans had built for propaganda purposes. Tantalising mystery lay beyond the weird pavilion from which North Korean soldiers and their visitors gazed at us. How simple it all seemed then – evil over there, good on our side. I really, really wanted to see the evil half of the world, perhaps so that I might be better at recognising good when I saw it later, and used many methods to try to go there. But as a journalist I was forbidden. Tour firms refused to take me. The North Korean embassy in Moscow, which I pestered with requests, coldly ignored me. I suppose I more or less accepted that the North-South division was an oriental version of the German problem, and then went on to accept the idea that Pyongyang was some sort of heart of darkness, headquarters of evil, etc etc, until the lies of the Kosovo War, and then the Iraq war, corroded my credulity and compelled me to examine these things for myself. When at last, via a Russian academic in Australia and another link in China that I will not mention here in case I need to use it again, I found a way in, I was determined not to write the standard account that I had seen so many times. Nor did it seem likely to me that this small, isolated, desperately poor place could be a threat to the world, as so many people were writing. As I say, you can tread here what I wrote then. When we left, I and the others in our very mixed party made a half-serious promise to try to meet again for an event which still seems highly possible in my lifetime – the opening of the first Pyongyang Starbucks. This (though also probable as an actual fact) is a sort of metaphor for the transformation I have seen in so many other ex-Communist countries. It is one I hope for, and expect. But only if we can control our rather childish readiness to believe in the North Korean bogeyman. North Korea is not a giant, but a dwarf. Those soldiers marching in those enormous parades are ill-fed and on average many inches shorter than men and women of the same age in the South. Their uniforms are made of cheap poor-quality cloth. Their weapons ( I have seen them up close) are obsolete and decrepit. I wonder how much real ammunition they have for them? Or how much fuel they needed to hoard and gather to keep the vehicles moving during the funeral of Kim Jong Il ? I wonder ( and this is my own individual theory based upon observation) how many North Koreans , at all levels of society are either too hungry (if the rural poor) or too drunk (if the urban poor) to do their jobs properly. I have no doubt they could still do quite a lot of damage to South Korea if they wanted to. But I doubt if they could win any kind of war against a modern well-trained, well-equipped army made up of strong, well-fed young men. I saw little of the countryside and what I did see was carefully pre-arranged, but even so failed to hide the absence of modern farm machinery or modern agricultural techniques, plus the fact that a supposedly electrified rail system was being operated, where it worked at all, by diesel locomotives. It was quite clear that even in the privileged elite city of Pyongyang, which is closed to most citizens, electric power was in very short supply (our hotel’s power was switched off as soon as we left each morning, and probably not switched on again until soon before we returned in the evening) . But I do know that the surveillance and stage-management broke down on two important occasions during my visit. Once was when we arrived at our designated restaurant to fund a man, dead drunk, prone upon the grass in front of the entrance. When members of our party tried to take pictures of this, our furious and embarrassed escorts summoned loyal citizens to form a human wall around the drunkard until he could be removed. On another occasion, I managed to get left alone with one of our escorts, the less confident or the two, and to persuade him to let me to roam a little along the bizarre street in which we found ourselves. It contained several absurd shops, with no staff and no customers, supposedly selling such nonsensical combinations of goods as motorbikes and cornflakes. The only busy spot was a small shop front with opaque doors, outside which a few men squatted. When I asked my escort what it was, he said it was a bar. I suggested we visit it. In a state close to panic, he emphatically refused and steered me as far away from it as possible. Readers must understand that these escorts are human beings, who must be presumed to have wives and children, and that I for one thought it wrong to push them too hard into awkward positions. Put these two experiences together with a third, when I opened my hotel room window, high up over central Pyongyang, quite late one evening. the city was almost wholly silent (there was very little traffic, mechanical or human). But from far, far away I could clearly hear a voice singing. My guess is that Pyongyang is fuelled by rice wine, much as Hogarth’s London was fuelled by gin, and that the regime, within limits, is happy to numb its population in this way. I describe elsewhere the boundless privation and misery which I am sure exist in the parts of the country that foreigners never see. I am, not in any way trying to defend, justify or understate the sheer nastiness of such a state. But I am trying to point out that it is a dead end. Without the Soviet subsidies, and the Chinese ones, which kept it going in Cold War days, North Korea is simply bankrupt. A small elite live in the strange, curtained luxury enjoyed by the privileged classes of officially egalitarian states , though much of it is exaggerated by myth and rumour, and their lives would probably seem cramped and limited to a well-off western family. The larger privileged class who are allowed to dwell in the capital live reasonably well by their own standards, but may by now be aware of how poor they are by comparison with their cousins in Seoul. It is genuinely unclear just how much most North Koreans know of life outside, and if I eventually return this will be one of the questions I will be most anxious to answer. Far more than they used to, I think, thanks to the many who have slipped across the surprisingly ill-patrolled border with China, some of whom have returned or got messages about their lives to their relatives still stuck in Kim’s dark, decaying paradise. The real problem for the country’s rulers (who of course know perfectly well how backward their country is, and how poor) is how to get out alive. They cannot risk a sudden collapse, as happened to East Germany. They would probably be torn to pieces, if the populace ever thought that the security apparatus had lost its will to kill. South Korea does not want this either. It greatly fears millions of refugees sweeping south, uncontrollable in their hunger and disillusionment, and then the enormous economic burden of reconstructing the blighted North from scratch. It was bad enough in Germany. It would be far, far worse in Korea. There are far too many Western politicians who enjoy having North Korea to use as a bogeyman, for their various reasons. There are also that nasty new breed of foreign policy moralists, whose aim is to feel good about themselves rather than do actual good unto others, and who like to lecture the rest of the world about evil dictators, and long to put all such dictators on trial. It seems to have escaped them that this is why modern despots are so reluctant to stand down and increasingly fight to the death. If young Kim, the ‘Great Successor’ could be guaranteed a nice quiet exit and a chance to spend more time with his foreign bank accounts, my guess is that he and his entourage would be only too happy to go. But we won’t let them. We mistake their noisy self-aggrandisement for genuine aggression when I suspect they are just trying to say that they want Western Europe and the USA to come to their rescue (how they long for a high-level American visit). They greatly fear that they will simply become a colony of China, which will probably happen sooner or later if the ‘West’ doesn’t take advantage of the few months of opportunity that I think will follow the change of leadership. These people need help, and above all a way out. They are , as I have written elsewhere, a stagnant remnant of the great flood which global communism caused. If we are genuinely concerned, we should realise that. I suspect there are people starving in North Korea now, who might well be saved from starvation if only we were to adopt a more imaginative and thoughtful policy, instead of pretending that this tiny, impoverished statelet is a menace to the planet. First of all may I thank the hundreds of people who have contacted me to express sympathy on the death of my brother. I have tried to reply to as many such messages as I can, but it is physically impossible to answer them all in a reasonable time. So may I say to all of you who took the trouble to write, that I am very grateful that you did so, and am comforted by what you said. This applies perhaps most especially to those who wrote to me across great gulfs of disagreement. Civility between opponents is a light in the darkness, a recognition that we are all more united, as humans, than we are divided as supporters of causes or believers in faiths. I shall once again be travelling during the next few days, so this is my last chance to write here until after the Feast of the Nativity. The Mail on Sunday will not be appearing on Sunday because it is Christmas Day, so there will be no column that week. This will be a long gap, and during the brief period of peace in the storm of life, which I hope Christmas will be, I thought I would try to explain why for me, and for many others I suspect, this is such a precious season. Of course, like most children in countries where Christmas is celebrated, I was from my earliest childhood thrilled by the promise of presents, the exhilarating, intoxicating smell of the pine tree in the house, the rich foods and the feeling that this was above all others a special time of year. I cannot remember (and for the sake of Mr ‘Bunker’ I am sorry about this) ever being particularly enthused about Father Christmas. Perhaps this is the fault of my father, who could be wonderfully unsentimental about his children, forgetting our names even though there were only two of us and he had presumably helped to choose them, referring to us as ‘that boy’ and ‘that wretched boy’ (these titles were interchangeable, depending on our most recent crimes and misdemeanours). There is also a superb passage in my brother’s memoir ‘Hitch-22’ in which he records trying to strike up a conversation with our father one breakfast time. The head of the Hitchens family blasphemed briefly before growling ’It’ll be family prayers next’, and returning to a bloodshot examination of the Daily Telegraph. Many years of shipboard wardroom breakfasts, conducted in grumpy silence as the ship pitched and rolled and the plates slid this way and that, had left him hopelessly unprepared for domesticity. I have no recollection whatever of him attempting to impersonate Father Christmas. In fact I much preferred the weeks before Christmas, the strange light in the sky (the melodramatic, suspenseful nature of late December English weather is perfectly described in John Masefield’s enchanting book ‘The Box of Delights’) , the carol singing, the stirring of the pudding (the Church of England has now abolished ‘Stir-Up Sunday, in its incessant effort to get rid of everything about the Church that anybody actually likes. The prayer for that day contains an exhortation to ‘Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’ and refers to ‘plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works’, and that Sunday, a month before Christmas, was also in many homes the traditional date for stirring of puddings. I have never been sure if this is an accident, or a light-hearted insertion by a jolly Bishop centuries ago) . And, as a boarding school child, there was the long clattering train journey home behind a snorting steam engine (F. Scott Fitzgerald, in one of his short stories, don’t ask me which, is the only author I know of who has been able to reproduce the excitement of such a land voyage at this time of year. I suspect he quite liked trains. He is buried, perhaps irrelevantly, perhaps not, in a small graveyard in Rockville, Maryland, very close to the railway line which runs from Washington DC to Chicago, within earshot of the evocative moaning hooters of the huge American locomotives. It was only when I visited his modest tomb that I realised that his full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and that he had been called after the author of the US national anthem). So for me the season is one of darkness illuminated with carols sung by lamplight, the sun low in the sky, and a promise, never entirely fulfilled on the day itself, of something wonderful to come. That sticks, when all else falls away. It is only more recently, when it has become (as it wasn’t in my childhood home , though we got plenty of religion at school) an occasion for churchgoing that I have been captivated by the extraordinary, disturbing beauty of the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for ‘the Birth-day of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day’ as prescribed in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer. If you are really fortunate, you may be able to find a church where these passages are read at midnight on Christmas Eve. Listen carefully, if you do. It may not be long before this lovely ceremony is entirely stamped out by modernising fanatics. You could be one of the last to hear it. The Gospel is the soaring, fiery declaration from the opening of St John’s Gospel – ending with ‘and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of his father, full of grace and truth’. But the Epistle, that of St Paul to the Hebrews, borrows from something much older, the 102nd Psalm, when it draws itself up at the end to declare this promise :’And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish: but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment: and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up , and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’. Now, I know there are plenty of readers here who find this sort of thing meaningless or actively repellent, and who could not imagine themselves taking it seriously or taking part in the ceremony which follows. But I ask them, at this season, to set aside their scorn and their reductionist belief that the universe is no more than the sum of its parts. And to try reading these words out loud with an open mind and seeing if their poetry does not catch them somewhere deep inside. The dead are very present in our minds at Christmas (as A.S. Byatt rightly remarks in the extraordinary quartet of books that begins with ‘the Virgin in the Garden’ ) and the past so close around us that you can almost touch it. There is no moment at which the fierce, all-consuming passage of time is felt so clearly. Is everything that is gone lost forever? Or does it continue to exist in eternity? Well, as with all things, you may choose. But if you choose to hope that our small, squabbling lives have some greater meaning and purpose than we can at first see, then the words ‘Thou art the same, and they years shall not fail’ seem to me to be so full of meaning (and themselves so very old that their mere survival is in itself astonishing) that they are enough to make anyone tremble. Well, that’s it. I think Christmas is a religious festival, and pointless without religion. But I wish you all, even the unbelievers, a peaceful and blessed Nativity, safe and warm amid the blast and tumult of our tottering civilisation. This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column We all know now that Neville Chamberlain made a huge fool of himself when he came back from Munich in September 1938 claiming to have won 'peace for our time' and 'peace with honour', and waving a worthless piece of paper in which Hitler promised that Britain and Germany would never go to war again. But look at the newspapers of the time and you will find almost all of them crammed with sickly praise for Mr Chamberlain. He was invited on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace by King George VI and was there cheered by a gigantic crowd, many of whom would die in the war that followed. They should have booed him - not because of what he had done but because he was fool enough to think that Hitler could be trusted. They applauded him because they did not want to be bothered by the boring details of European politics, and preferred to think that he had in fact bought peace. Something similar is happening to us. Many people who should know better are still cheering David Cameron for his supposed mighty veto in Brussels on December 9. They are doing this because they passionately want it to be true. They want Mr Cameron to be a patriotic conservative. But he isn’t. They want Britain to stand up to the EU. But it hasn’t. Mr Cameron did not in fact use the British veto. There was no treaty to veto. France and Germany were quite happy to get what they wanted by other means - France positively wanted to do so, and Jean-David Levitte, a senior aide of President Sarkozy, has described Mr Cameron’s action as a 'blessing'. They were happier still to let Mr Cameron take the blame on the Continent - and the credit among his gullible and simple-minded 'Eurosceptic' backbenchers, who really oughtn’t to be allowed out on their own if they are this easy to swindle. Nor did Mr Cameron save the City of London. The French, who have never forgiven us either for Trafalgar or for not surrendering in 1940, are still determined to destroy the City. And they can do so - as long as we are idiotic enough to stay in their power by belonging to the EU. They can and will do this through 'Qualified Majority Voting', under which Britain does not have a veto. Wishful thinking on this scale may not lead to war, as it did in 1938. But it will not help us get out of the EU, or protect us from those who pretend to be our partners, but are in fact our rivals. Stop cheering. Start booing. President Obama wisely didn’t claim 'Mission Accomplished' when he posed with troops to proclaim the ‘end’ of the invasion of Iraq. If only it were the end. Once the U.S. troops go, Iraq will become a new battleground between Iran, already hugely powerful through Shia Islam, Turkey, which hates and fears the growth of an oil-rich Kurdish state, and Saudi Arabia, which hates and fears Iran. Not only was this war fought on a false excuse. It was then justified by another false pretext. And now its outcome is a far graver risk of instability and war than existed before we started. Now, which Middle Eastern country can we mess up next? * * * Well, I knew that, and you probably knew that – but the anti-religious lobby have until now always pretended that they were just nice, tolerant people. They’re not. They’re as intolerant as the Spanish Inquisition, but not yet ready to show it. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. The British Government annually aids the creation of thousands of fatherless families, by the simple procedure of subsidising them with your money and mine. That is why we have so many father-free homes. Married families with fathers are better, and we should stop being afraid to say so. Rather than doomed projects to use the State to 'transform 120,000 households in the grip of drugs and crime', all we need to do is stop these subsidies, and the number of such households will instantly begin to diminish. Setting up yet more social-worker agencies to poke their noses into people’s lives never works. Yet the Prime Minister plans to do this. It is as illogical and hopeless as trying to turn down the central heating by stuffing raspberry jelly into the controls, instead of simply altering the thermostat. But the mad revolutionary dogma of political correctness falsely condemns the obvious solution as a ‘war on single mothers’. No, what is needed is a war on the people who want to keep those mothers single. * * * Last week we learned that more than £1billion in fines will never be collected. And the unlovely Ryan Girdlestone (pictured) was let off without punishment after hurling a 40 lb paving slab at a 79-year-old pensioner. He faked remorse in court, then laughed about it on his Facebook page. These things follow dozens of ‘crackdowns’ and ‘tough’ speeches. These crackdowns and speeches are all lies. Yet you still vote for the people responsible. Why? This is because he’s a rather dull mainstream leftist, who talks about politics when he ought to be urging our neo-pagan country to return to Christianity. At the moment we’re more interested in shoes and booze than we are in God. Since all three major political parties are also controlled by dull, conformist leftists, the Archbishop (pictured) is superfluous when he enters the political arena. He is powerless in the material world. As we have seen in the past few months, he doesn’t even control his own cathedrals. But when the Prime Minister talks about religion, it’s a different matter. Mr Cameron has the power to shift this country sharply towards Christianity. All he needs to do is to dismantle the many anti-Christian laws which have attacked the faith over the past half-century – for example, instant divorce, mass giveaways of contraceptives to children, the teaching of promiscuity in schools, the licensing of greedy commerce on Sundays, plus of course the total abandonment of right and wrong by the justice system. He won’t do any of those things. In fact, he’d sneer at anyone who sought to do so. So his creepy pose as a ‘committed Christian’ (committed to what?) on Friday is – like almost everything about this man – a brazen fraud on the public. Of the two, I think I prefer the Archbishop, who promises nothing and delivers nothing, to a premier whose parcels, when we eagerly open them, are always empty. Oh, and Merry Christmas.
31 December 2011 10:13 PM
Welcome to 2042 - the year when Britain is no more than a memory
Pyongyang Revisited – or, still no chance of a Flat White in North Korea
And Thy Years Shall not Fail – a Christmas Reflection
Don't forget they cheered Chamberlain's 'victory' too
So which country will we ruin next?
We need fathers - not social workers
A sermon of empty words
Sunday, 1 January 2012
The New Year has always seemed to me to be a time for enjoying a bit of gloom.
So in the spirit of hearty pessimism, I’d like to take you forward 30 years, for an imaginary peep into the pages of the ‘China Daily’ of January 1, 2042. You can judge for yourselves how imaginary it really is.
'Cabinet papers issued today by the state archives of the People’s Republic cast an interesting light on the final years of the country formerly known as Great Britain. Younger readers should know that, 30 years ago, this once-important nation (now dissolved) occupied the vacation islands, famous for their mild climate and their picturesque historical theme parks, which lie off our far western coast.
'A memo from Prime Minister David Cameron to his deputy, Nicholas Clegg, runs in part "...and thanks so much, Nick, for your continuing self-sacrifice in our joint cause. I’m so sorry you have to put up with those moronic cartoons portraying you as the junior partner when – as we both well know - this is a liberal government in which I am happy to let you get your way.
'"I am especially grateful for your recent performance, a fine piece of acting. The dim old buffers who still vote for my party, however many times we let them down, were genuinely taken in, and thought a) that I had struck a blow for Britain in Brussels and b) that you were angry about it."
'There are also memos to the Interior Minister of the time, Theresa May, congratulating her for "sounding as if you really mean to do something about crime and immigration" and a ruder one to the Justice Minister, Kenneth Clarke, chiding him for "letting the cat out of the bag: it won’t do, old boy! Can’t you just be satisfied with getting your way? There’s no need to gloat in public."
'A letter from Mr Cameron to Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish government, is strangely friendly, given Mr Cameron’s frequent public assertions that he was against Scottish independence. Experts from the University of Shanghai have concluded that Mr Cameron secretly wanted a Scottish breakaway as the only chance of his party ever again winning an Election on its own.'
The China Daily continues: 'No trace can be found of any serious plans to reform the country’s disastrous state schools, nor to curb its out-of-control welfare system, known to be widely abused by criminals and to encourage parasitical sloth.
'As for the economy, the archives contain only a plaintive note from the Finance Minister to the Premier, bearing the words, "There’s no money!"
'The documents make it plain that the governing class of the country formerly known as Great Britain had no idea how to cope with the problems they faced and were mainly obsessed with public relations. In the light of this, the events of the next 20 years should have come as no surprise.'
I don't recall Dickens writing an Estuary English soap opera
Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is one of the best books ever written. David Lean’s 1946 realisation of it is one of the best films ever made - not least because so much of its dialogue is taken direct from the original.
So why is the BBC’s new adaptation so astonishingly, disappointingly, ridiculously bad?
It is because the BBC is so full of people who simply refuse to admit that they have anything to learn from the past. In their world, all drama must be either Doctor Who or EastEnders (or in this case a combination of the two).
Pip Pirrip, raised in a blacksmith’s cottage, could not possibly have grown up to look like a male model. Herbert Pocket was never a vicious snob. Miss Havisham was a yellow-skinned, deranged hag, not a self-harming young woman.
Estella was an unattainable beauty - not a stroppy person with the adenoidal voice and the scowling visage of an affronted North London social worker.
Perhaps above all, Joe Gargery was a man of almost saintly goodness and humour, rather than the glum and self-righteous person in this TV travesty, who always looks as if he’s just off to a Chartist meeting.
I reread the opening chapters of the book to reassure myself about this and was repeatedly convulsed with laughter and moved close to tears. The TV version produced no emotion at all and resorted to incessant loud music to tell us how we should have been feeling.
The vandals behind it also managed to insert a scene in a brothel - perhaps they can tell me where this occurs in the book. Dickens, being a proper writer, managed to envelop the foul figure of Bentley Drummle in a cloud of evil without any such crudities.
And the script was full of modern soap opera language, often in Estuary English quite unlike the speech of the time – ‘con man’, ‘close the deal’, ‘he owes me’.
Yes, of course you need to make changes when you adapt an immense book into three hours of drama. But you need to stay close to the truth of the original, or you are destroying it. Something similar is now happening to Sherlock Holmes thanks to the half-witted cinema versions. In an age when few read any more, this third-rate stuff is in danger of replacing greatness with cut-price hogwash.
A Canadian judge has ruled that a teenager was under the influence of an ‘antidepressant’ when he knifed a close friend to death.
Judge Robert Heinrichs was told in his Winnipeg court that the killer (also a user of cannabis and cocaine) grew more irrational once prescribed the ‘antidepressant’.
‘He had become irritable, restless, agitated, aggressive and unclear in his thinking,’ the judge said.
‘In that state he overreacted in an impulsive, explosive and violent way’.
Now off the drug, he was ‘simply not the same in behaviour or character’.
It is a painful case, but it underlines the urgent need for a proper inquiry into these widely used pills.
We're making North Korea worse
Small politicians try to look big by exaggerating the size and the danger of their foes. The West’s ridiculous attitude to North Korea is an example of this.
I have been there, and can report that this bankrupt, starving statelet is so poor it cannot even warm its own government buildings and must have used up much of its petrol reserves to stage the funeral of its deceased leader.
Its rulers are trapped in their palace. If they show weakness, they will be torn to pieces by their hungry, disillusioned subjects. Above all, they need a way out. If we do not help provide one they will, in the end, have to collapse into the arms of China.
Sometimes whole countries can get things utterly wrong. This is usually because they prefer soft dreams to the raw truth.
Far too seldom the enemies of Britain actually admit their real goals. The greatly overpraised Professor Richard Dawkins (pictured) has now blurted out in a Left-wing magazine that his aim is to 'destroy Christianity'.
I do wish people would get more angry about the gap between the anti-crime rhetoric of politicians of all parties, and the truth.
Poor old Archbishop Rowan Williams doesn’t really matter much.
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