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If not Putin, who? It's because I love my own country that I can see the point of this sinister tyrant who so ruthlessly stands up for Russia

By PETER HITCHENS

Last updated at 12:38 AM on 26th February 2012

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Viewpoint: Peter Hitchens believes Putin makes Russia strong - and that's why he has fervent support

For months Western commentators have been predicting the fall of Vladimir Putin and lauding pro-democracy demonstrators.

But here Peter Hitchens returns to the country where he spent two years as a foreign correspondent - and offers a very different and provocative view of next week’s vital election.

I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it. I know that by saying so, I will trigger the lofty wrath of the right-thinking lobby which wants to portray modern Russia as the Evil Empire in a new Cold War.

In that war, which they are trying so hard to start, they will see me as a traitor. But it is exactly because I love my own country that I can see the point of Mr Putin.

He stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders.

He has underlined that by refusing to join in the rash American-backed effort to destabilise the Assad regime in Syria. He has dared to wield a real veto (unlike David Cameron’s disposable cardboard one) and face the consequences.

He has used his country’s huge oil and gas reserves to maintain an independent state. And he has rejected the current mania for privatisation and market forces as the cure for all ills.

Russia, he believes, has had quite enough privatisation. And that is why the searing beam of selective outrage is being turned on him by the global media and many Western foreign ministries, not to mention the ‘activists’ who roam the world deciding which governments are bad and which good.

That is why you are being invited to rejoice at the anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow, while dozens of other equally justified protests in other countries go unreported.

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• Thousands protest against Putin as Russian presidential elections draw nearer

That is why you are expected to hope that he is badly bruised in the presidential election next Sunday, March 4. It is why you will one day be invited to applaud some sort of mob revolution aimed at his overthrow.

It may even succeed. If so, it will be followed by the usual disappointment.

Creepy: Vladimir Putin in one of the frequent tough-guy poses that fuel his personality cult in Russia

Voice of protest: Demonstrations against Putin's government in Russia are frequent enough - but who could do better?

Who now cares about squalid Ukraine, whose ‘Orange Revolution’ was supposed to be a new dawn of humanity? But by the time their revolution goes sour, Mr Putin’s high-minded critics will have swivelled their searchlight on to another target. Russian corruption and repression will suddenly be acceptable and forgotten in a Moscow that will have been forced – – as it was in the Yeltsin years – to accept Western interference in its economy and around its frontiers.

Let us not be blind here. Mr Putin is without doubt a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government. His private life and wealth are a mystery. His personality cult – bare-chested tough-guy, horseman, diver, jet pilot – is creepy and would be laughable if it were not a serious method of keeping power.

Global issue: Russians living in London continue to voice their discontent at the Putin regime

The lawless jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky is his direct fault. The hideous death in custody of the courageous lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is a terrible blot on Putin’s thuggish state. The murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko are symptoms of the sickness of modern Russia.

The general cynicism of the Russian government is breathtaking. It does all the things that men of power want to do in the rest of the world but daren’t because of restraints of law and custom. If you doubt that, look at the way Western states behaved during the ‘war on terror’.

Meanwhile, who can deny that despotism and corruption are endemic in this sad, ravaged country?

I should know. I spent two of the most important years of my life in Moscow when it was much, much worse. It was the very heart of an evil empire whose aims and ideas threatened the whole happiness of mankind.

This is where, 22 years ago, I came to live in a dark and secretive building where my neighbours were KGB men and the aristocrats of the old Kremlin elite.

Here, in this mysterious and often dangerous place, I saw what lies just beneath our frail and fleeting civilisation – bones, blood, death, injustice, despair, horror, loss, corruption and fear. I grasped for the first time how wonderfully safe and lucky I had been all my life in the unique miracle of freedom and law that is – or was – England.

I learned to respect, above all, those who managed to retain some sort of integrity amid the knee-deep filth of communist Moscow. I also learned not to be too unkind to those who made compromises with it. I was there as a privileged person. Would I have been able to stay clean if I had lived as they did? Would you? I very much doubt it.

I saw the last hammers and sickles pulled down, and the braziers full of smouldering Communist Party membership cards the day the all-powerful Party died.

Creditable? Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny may promise much, but there are questions as to whether he would be able to deliver

I saw the tanks trundle along my street as they tried to restore communism, and I saw them, and their cause, depart for ever. I witnessed oppressed peoples throw off Soviet rule. In the course of that struggle, I saw for the first time what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, and also what a human face looks like when it is telling direct lies about murder.

When I finally left, I was sure that a horrible fog of lies and perversion had been scoured from the surface of the earth when communism ended.

I am confident that it will not come back. From now on, it is just Russia – heartbroken, ravaged, afraid, desperate and cruel, but no longer a menace to us. Nor is Putin’s frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin – a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive.

It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin – whose devastating documentary We Can’t Go On Living Like This helped end the communist era – is now working for Putin.

He recalls that the Yeltsin era was ‘a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust’.

But, now, he says, ‘we have returned to “normal”, “civilised” corruption’.

Enemy of the people? The problem Russia has is that many want Putin out, but the replacements appear sub-standard

Marching together: The poster depicting Russian Prime minister Vladimir Putin in crown reads, 'Ugly'

This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word ‘Voruyut’ – ‘They steal’.

But in the communist era, the state and the Party stole their private lives, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers, and dragged them to death camps. And in the Yeltsin era, when Western ‘experts’ stalked the land, the nation’s rulers stole the whole country.

I am not arguing in favour of this state of affairs, just pointing out that if the only alternative is even worse, you might see its advantages.

But I can see no reason at all why Britain should seek to undermine Russia’s government.

And I can see many reasons why we should in future be friends. One of them is that Vladimir Putin, alone of all the major national leaders of our times, refuses to be pushed around by supranational bodies.

It would be good to see our own government doing the same thing. After all, how many of us are as keen as we used to be on the supposed cure-alls and blessings of human rights, privatisation, the United Nations, the European Union, open borders, political correctness and free trade?

Mr Putin’s Russia is refreshingly free of these things. I suspect that private speech and thought are – paradoxically – more uncontrolled under Mr Putin’s iron tyranny than they are in liberal Britain.

Russia also spotted long ago that the New Globalists – led by Anthony Blair – wanted to dissolve independent countries and replace them with dependent, subservient provinces in a New World Order.

When that process pushed into Ukraine and the Caucasus, Putin angrily resisted, and was lied about by Western media and politicians as a result.
To this day, a lot of people believe that Russia was in the wrong in its war with tiny Georgia in 2010.

Anybody but him: No arrests were made as thousands of Russians marched in opposition to Putin running for President

In fact, Georgia’s leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, provoked a dangerous conflict in the hope of manoeuvring the United States into supporting him.

Saakashvili, supposedly a democrat, came to power in a mob-bolstered putsch nauseatingly named ‘the Rose Revolution’.

Since then he has used Putin-like methods to crush opposition. In November 2007 he sent his police on to the streets of Tbilisi to club and gas anti-corruption demonstrators, and shut an opposition TV station. But because he is on the side of globalism, his sins are unknown.

This is what everyone should remember as they read and view the current wave of media unanimity about the evils of Vladimir Putin. The world is full of corrupt despotisms. But you never hear anything about most of them. The selective outrage about Russia pretends to be morally driven. It has another purpose.

Here is an alternative report from Moscow, the one you won’t read anywhere else. Let its theme be the slogan on the smart, expensive banners of official pro-Putin demonstrations, most of whose participants are bribed or cajoled into attending.

‘If not Putin, who?’

Shout it out loud: Russian protest leader Alexei Navalny led thousands through the streets of Vladimir Putin's native city demonstrating against his likely return to the Kremlin

The same question has occurred to Anastasia, which is not the real name of a TV reporter who knows in nasty detail how censorship has operated for years in Russian broadcasting.

So Anastasia, who regards freedom of speech in Putin’s Russia as an illusion, might be expected to be keen on the anti-Putin protests.

Yet, much as she loathes the repression, she is ‘totally disappointed’ by the opposition, which is amateur and offers no serious alternative. When she stops to think about the future of her country, she sighs: ‘The only rational conclusion is despair.’

She is – like many intelligent, informed Muscovites – unimpressed by and suspicious of Alexei Navalny, the fashionable Western-educated blogger who has made a name for himself by exposing corruption.

Western liberals seldom mention Navalny’s other side, a caustic Russian nationalism that has led him into the sordid company of neo-Nazis.

Westerners tend to accept his claim that a creepy video, in which he used the word ‘cockroaches’ to refer to terrorists from the Caucasus, is a joke.
Some joke. While actual cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says in the 2007 recording, ‘for humans I recommend a pistol’.

Opposition: Protesters shouted slogans during the rally - but the event passed by without serious trouble

Guardian readers and BBC types, currently lionising Navalny, would rightly cast him into outer darkness if he were an Englishman who held comparable views.

The same point was made to me by Dmitry (I have decided not to use his surname), a worker for a Moscow small business, introduced to me by a Putin critic, and absolutely not a plant.

‘Foreigners like meeting people who are protesting against something,’ he scoffs. ‘If I look at the whole political spectrum from Left to Right, I can see only one candidate to whom we can trust the future of my country, and that is Putin.’

His main motivation is a hatred of the Western-dominated Yeltsin era, and a strong patriotic pride. Dmitry says Putin saved the integrity of the country by crushing the Chechen revolt – something Yeltsin tried and failed to do, with equal brutality but much less foreign criticism.

‘In 1999, our country was on the edge of falling apart. If we had lost Chechnya, we could have lost the whole North Caucasus and been reduced in the end to a rump state of Muscovy. That would have been the end of Russia.’

Time for action: Demonstrators carry a poster depicting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the elderly Soviet Communists party leader Leonid Brezhnev

We should not underestimate the feeling of wounded patriotism in a country which – not unreasonably – feels itself constantly vulnerable to invasion.

Nor should we neglect the millions of older people who have – under Putin – received their pensions regularly, and been able to save without fear of inflation, thanks to the Moscow government’s prudent and astute use of oil revenues.

The mother of an old friend of mine, a naval widow who lived most of her life in conditions of unbelievable Soviet drabness, now looks forward to regular holidays on Turkish Mediterranean beaches.

As for corruption, Dmitry snorts at Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign. And, as so often, the loathed name of Boris Yeltsin comes up. He recalls Yeltsin, in the Eighties, as Moscow’s Communist Party boss, abandoning his chauffeured car, travelling on a crowded trolleybus and making a great show of his incorruptibility.

‘It made him very popular. But he ended up as the most corrupt of all. He destroyed everything that was good from the Soviet times. It was wasted and given away. The gap between the very rich and the very poor was greater than ever.

‘He ended up totally, totally corrupt and gave everything away to the oligarchs.’

Give me a shot: Opposition leaders, from left to right, Garry Kasparov, Alexey Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov hold a banner during the protests

To get the other view I visited Anna, a beautiful young mother, a member of Moscow’s gentle, bookish intellectual class.

Like so many Muscovites, she lives her life behind a grey-painted steel front door that looks as if it has been cut from the armour-plating of a warship, and tells you more about the nervous, lawless reality of Russia than anything I can say.

I asked her to answer that persistent question: ‘If not Putin, who?’

And she could not. Instead she complained – with justice – that Putin has destroyed, or prevented the rise of, any serious challenger. ‘There is no adequate leader because the stage has been swept clean of rivals,’ she mourned. She did not dwell on the other side of this, that Russia’s liberals discredited themselves for ever by being associated with the hated Yeltsin years.

Anna saw Navalny as inspiring, and a possible future challenger. She made light of his nationalism – even though people of her class and politics would normally loathe such views.

It was frustrating to talk to Anna, so intelligent, so concerned for her country and worried about how her son would grow up under Putin’s iron rule.

But she admitted that Putin’s nature had been clear for many years, and had not just suddenly emerged. He had crushed media dissent and rigged elections since he first came to power in 2002, yet nobody had complained. So why be so militant now?

Anna and today’s protesters are, in fact, angry at their own past complacency.

So they may well be. They are fine, admirable people and, in some unforeseeable future, I hope against hope they will get the Russia that they want. But this grim part of the planet is not like our secure, gentle island. Fear – fear of invasion, fear of chaos, fear of want – presses in from every direction. Fear is, in fact, normal. The best they can hope for is to neutralise it. Despots thrive on fear, for it gives them a pretext to gather power into their fists.

When Russians get rid of their fear and scrap their armoured-steel front doors, they may be ready for an ordered, lawful and incorruptible free state.

Until then, if not Putin, who?

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106406/PETER-HITCHENS-If-Putin-Its-I-love-country-I-point-sinister-tyrant-ruthlessly-stands-Russia.html#ixzz1nTM2YFKD

25 February 2012 9:56 PM

Our laws, our freedom and our people... Kidnapped by America

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

What is the difference between extradition and kidnapping? I used to know, but I am no longer sure. Because an emotional spasm about ‘terrorism’ caused us to take leave of our senses, we are all now at the mercy of foreign governments that take a dislike to us.

In some cases we can be snatched from our homes and families because we are charged with actions which are not even crimes here.

In some cases we can be hauled away in manacles on the demand of some politically driven American prosecutor.

I used to admire American justice, but since the state-sponsored panic under George W. Bush, I am sadly disillusioned.

The penalty for daring to plead not guilty – certain financial ruin and a possible 35-year sentence – is so savage that the presumption of innocence, and jury trial itself, have been to all intents and purposes abolished. This means that the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution – which guarantees the right to a fair trial, and is one of the glories of America – has been violated and destroyed.

That is bad enough, but we shouldn’t forget our other, equally unforgivable surrender of national independence, the EU arrest warrant. Bulgarian justice, anyone? Both the new US-UK extradition treaty and the EU arrest warrant were rammed through Parliament on the basis that they would fight ‘terror’.

Wise and far-sighted questions were raised about this enormous change when it was first proposed. The heartbreaking case of Christopher Tappin (pictured above with wife Elaine), the British businessman extradited to America last week, against whom there seems to be nothing resembling evidence of wrongdoing or guilty intent, is exactly what its critics feared. This episode is so unfair that any proper British patriot must surely be moved to cold fury by it.

What is interesting is that while the problem has been obvious for years, nothing has been done about it.

Worse, authority has pretended that there is nothing to worry about. Sir Scott Baker’s recent report into extradition said complacently that there was ‘no significant difference’ between what the US needs to do to extradite one of ours, and what we need to do to extradite one of theirs.

Is that so?

It was not always the official position. Baroness Scotland, Home Office Minister of State, speaking in the House of Lords on the afternoon of December 16, 2003, made it quite clear that if we tried to extradite an American citizen we would in future be required to meet ‘a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that’.

In short, this is an unequal treaty, of the sort made between colonial powers and their powerless vassals, or between conquerors and their victims. Now, whenever the United States mounts its very high horse on the subject of terrorism, I think we must recall that it was the US that compelled this country to surrender to the terrorist murderers of the IRA.

IT WAS President Bill Clinton who laundered the grisly and sinister Godfather Gerry Adams, giving him a visa and allowing him to spread his soapy propaganda and raise funds across the United States. President George W. Bush, Mr Anti-Terrorism himself, actually altered his schedule to fit in Mr Adams (who was too busy to make the original time) for a jolly St Patrick’s Day chinwag in the White House.

So put that in your Guinness and drink it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. If it’s terror you’re against, you know where to look for its supporters and sponsors.

Britain should – tonight if possible – withdraw from these unequal treaties, which are nationally humiliating, lawless and limitlessly dangerous.

If you must be rude, do it with style

I want to like Adele Adkins, but she is so coarse, I can’t. And if she has to make rude gestures, why does she need to use the awkward American one-finger salute instead of the traditional British V-sign, as majestically deployed recently in the Lords by Baroness Trumpington, fearsome widow of my old headmaster? Come to think of it, why don’t we order Lady Trumpington to steam to the Falklands at top speed? The Argentines wouldn’t dare attack if she was there.

Heroic Marie's death isn't an excuse for war

I am very sorry for the death of the reporter Marie Colvin, above, who was a woman of great courage and selflessness. But let it not become a pretext for yet another war of intervention. We have done enough harm in Libya – and I might add that the piteous state of Somalia is entirely the fault of foreign interference.

The question Cameron can't handle

I promised to tell you about David Cameron’s obdurate refusal to answer a simple question, and my long battle to squeeze the truth out of Downing Street.

My question concerned the Prime Minister’s very public withdrawal from his position as patron of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). He took this post (of course) before the last Election in time to pick up some Jewish votes. Many previous Premiers have held the same title, which involves no work but demonstrates continued high-level support in Britain for the state of Israel.

Pro-Arab and Islamic organisations, plus the usual angry anti-Israel campaigners, have worked hard to break this link. Meanwhile, British foreign policy under Mr Cameron has become quietly but firmly aligned to the needs and desires of ultra-Islamic Saudi Arabia – hence our mad aggression towards Iran, and curiously selective support of the bits of the Arab Spring that suit Saudi aims.

Muslim organisations in this country rejoiced (as, I am sure, did the Saudis) when Mr Cameron pulled out of the JNF.

It was obviously a huge snub to pro-Israel sentiment, and an attempt to grub votes for the Tories in Muslim areas. But a bland official statement (presumably worried about losing Jewish votes) maintained that it was the result of a routine review of the PM’s charity commitments. Several other charities were said to have been affected.

I simply asked which these charities were. And they would not tell me. After several months of to-ing and fro-ing, in which I had to involve the Information Commissioner, I began to wonder if they even existed. To this day, they won’t identify one of them.

But I can now name three estimable but politically unimportant charities affected, The Don’t Walk Away Campaign, United Estates Of Wythenshawe, and The Campaign For The University Of Oxford.

Downing Street wouldn’t tell me because it’s so obvious that these nice people, about whom Mr Cameron had once pretended to care, were casually thrown overboard to provide cover for a major political switch.

Samuel Hayek, chairman of the JNF, informs me that during early discussions on the proposed snub, he was told that Mr Cameron’s continued support caused ‘a conflict of interest’.

I’ll bet it did – a conflict of interest between sticking to a personal commitment freely made, and a series of unprincipled, sordid needs that emerged a bit later. We all know that kind of person. The instinctive oily slipperiness of this Prime Minister makes Anthony Blair look straightforward and reliable.

23 February 2012 2:45 PM

You Wanted Nostalgia? Try this

Mr ’Bunker’ , if I have correctly understood him, is anxious for me to reprise a posting in which I demonstrated his amazing ability to contradict himself without ever realising he was doing so. I am pleased to oblige. It is an amazing talent, comparable to the ‘Boneless Wonders’ which used to be on display at fairgrounds. The thrilling thing about it is that the performer is apparently quite unaware of the contortions through which he puts himself, and at the end of the business believes he has done nothing extraordinary. He does himself an injustice. I have never seen anybody spend so long missing the point, or so willing to repeat the exercise.

Anyway, back we go to days, weeks months and years lost in the mists of time, to the 4^th April 2011, at 9.57 am. The fog begins to clear, and emerging out of it we dimly descry these words, gradually growing clearer:

'Bunker Mentality Part Two - Mr 'Bunker' contradicts himself'

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air. But I wouldn't want this response of mine to Mr 'Bunker' to be confined only to the intrepid few who struggled all the way to the top of the last 'Bunker Mentality' thread, way above the tree line, into the high, parched zone where the oxygen is thin and altitude sickness strikes at the unwary.

So here it is again. I might subtitle it 'When 'Can't' means 'Won't':

'I think the best witness against Mr 'Bunker' is in fact himself. He makes my point so well, that I will here give him the opportunity to do so, in a selection of quotations from his earlier posts:

On Saturday (2nd April) he said:

'I have a position of absolute unbelief in gods. Absolutely.'

Three days before, he wrote :

'The truth is:- I am agnostic by your own definition - "one who acknowledges the possibility of God's existence" '.

The day before that :' I do acknowledge that it is possible that God exists. I do acknowledge that it is possible that God exists. I do acknowledge that it is possible that God exists. I have never said that his non-existence can be proved. Why? Because it can't. It is logically impossible.'

Three days before that:

'I'm at a loss as to why you introduce the compatibility of science and religion into the discussion. As far as I remember, I haven't mentioned science. (Actually he has. On 12th March he said :' Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the bible could not be true.') And I'm certainly not someone who thinks that science has all the answers. Far from it. '

He then hilariously states (first quoting me) :' Mr 'Bunker' ... denies any personal involvement in his own choice of belief." What? My "choice"? I thought we'd sorted that out long ago. You may have "chosen" a belief, a religious faith. I didn't. I couldn't. Because I found religion impossible to believe in.'

Why was that? We do not know. We cannot tell. And nor can Mr 'Bunker' seem to accept that 'impossible' is a word that permits of only one meaning, and it is not compatible with 'unlikely', 'improbable' or even 'incredible'. Yet he uses it as though it is. If he 'found it impossible' to believe, what was his reasoning for this finding? And if there wasn't any reasoning (and there is no evidence of any so far) my hypothesis, that it was his personal choice, comes lumbering over the horizon again.

But does he really deny the influence of personal preference over publicly stated opinions? Let us delve deeper onto the archive. We find (six days ago) Mr 'Bunker' acknowledging that motive and desire play some part in belief :'What a very odd business this "belief in God" (or gods) is. I ask myself - just what is the reason why obviously intelligent people go in for it. And actually believe it. Or - as I think may often be the case - say the[y] believe simply for opportunistic reasons. Why do some people believe - and others don't? '

A good question.

(Yet on 17th March the same Mr 'Bunker' (who now acknowledges that people may have reasons for their beliefs) had said :' I cannot CHOOSE to believe[r]. What an odd notion - choosing (!) to believe.')

A week ago, Mr Bunker was saying :' there were two positions open to me. I agree. But - as you will agree - I reached a considered opinion. To have opted for the other position was an impossibility for me in the light of my assessment of the evidence and probability. You perhaps call that "choosing". I call it being "forced" to adopt the only position left open to me. '

This confirms my stated point, that Mr Bunker is using terms appropriate to proof and truth for a decision which can only be based upon evidence and probability, and introducing possibility and impossibility into a question where they cannot be established. He also uses the term 'forced'. which means either that it was against his will or that facts and logic offered no alternative. Yet he has repeatedly accepted, during this discussion, that facts and logic alone cannot close the question.( I quote the precise words of Mr 'Bunker' :'I have never said that his non-existence can be proved. Why? Because it can't. It is logically impossible.')

On 21st March he was saying:' ...(If I remember rightly I said atheism was forced upon me. I didn't choose it.) Well I'm afraid you've got it wrong - once more. You shouldn't be asking "who", but "what" forced me ... And the answer is quite simple. Circumstances forced me. Intellectual honesty with myself. The inability to believe something which I found impossible to believe. -- Is that clear now? - Yes? '

Well, no, not to me it isn't. How can someone be 'unable' to believe in the existence of something whose non-existence he himself says cannot be logically established (see 'Bunker' above, passim)?

On 19th March he had said: 'I have not chosen unbelief. If I may say sloppily, unbelief has been forced upon me.'

This was shortly after he had proclaimed: ' If we continue this discussion on religion/belief/atheism on the basis of logical and rational argument, I shall win. For the simple reason that I have logic and reason on my side.' and ' I, an atheist, am not illogical.'

Not long before this, he had said :' When I say I believe there is no God, I am stating my considered opinion, a very firm conviction admittedly. But not absolute certainty.'

This would appear to me to be a direct contradiction of his recent statement that :''I have a position of absolute unbelief in gods. Absolutely.' '

I would add here that , since I posted this comment, Mr 'Bunker' has been whizzing around like a dying bluebottle on a windowsill, in smaller and smaller, and more and more erratic loops, to which my only response is to smile indulgently. While his ally, Mr Wooderson has been amusing us with the distinction between actual impossibility ( ie real impossibility, which is actually impossible) and something he terms 'psychological' impossibility, ie not impossibility at all, but a groundless conviction of impossibility lodged in the Atheist mind, resting on the prejudices, desires, wishes and fears of the individual.’

On Brave Reporters, and Other Things

I did not know Marie Colvin, though I have certainly seen her across crowded rooms, usually at award ceremonies (I try as hard as I can to avoid war zones) and couldn’t possibly have been unaware of her extraordinary bravery and persistence. There’s no doubt she lived an admirable life, and demonstrated real courage. I think I disagree with her view of the world in general, but I also think her decision to stay behind with a group of potential massacre victims in East Timor was so powerfully selfless that it deserves an actual monument.

I have known other reporters – in more than one notable case also women – who have a similar disregard for physical danger, and in some cases (let this not be denied) an actual joy in venturing into high, hard remote places where danger and discomfort are certain. There are some, often photographers, who are exhilarated greatly by the noise and fear of battle. I rather envy them. I have enough imagination to know why they enjoy it and why they yearn for the summons to the war zone. But I have too much imagination, and too much fondness for my own skin, to follow them.

I’ve mentioned before that in a long newspaper career I have, almost inevitably, blundered into one or two war zones. I never meant to. Once, a prosaic trip to record the slow takeover of East Germany by the West led, by a series of wholly unpredictable but unavoidable steps, to going from East Berlin to Budapest, from Budapest to Szeged, and then to my crossing into Romania just before Christmas 1989. I think my then office just took the view that as I was already half-way there, I might as well keep going as it was cheaper. I swallowed hard and duly kept going. The best part of it was the leaving - I did what I had for many years longed to do, went down to the station and got on the first train out, not caring where it went as long as it was somewhere else.There were no tickets. As it happened, it took me (in the company of the highly civilsied and hospitable members of a Russian orchestra) through the lovely mountains of Bulgaria to Sofia, which seemed like Paris afetr Bucharest.

Most of what I saw in Romania now seems farcical – Romanians were given to exaggeration and weeping hysteria. But luckily I didn’t believe the tales of horror I was told in the border town of Arad, about what lay ahead on the road to Bucharest (actually I took the train, which ran to time and which I reckoned would be safer by far than a car if the reports, delivered with much wailing and gesticulation, of Secret Police helicopters strafing the roads were in fact true).

I am not at all ashamed to admit that I (literally) hid under my bed when shooting broke out just outside my Bucharest Hotel. I was in the middle of a long-awaited phone call to my home when it started, so I couldn’t pretend to my wife that all was calm. But under the bed was the place to be. I could see through the uncurtained windows the tracer streaking about the place, and I’d read enough accounts of lives ended by stray bullets to conclude that this was the only sensible thing to do. I’d do it again, too. As it turned out, the shooting was meaningless, done for show and not a battle at all, but I didn’t learn that till later.

But the following day I went to visit one of the Bucharest hospitals, and there saw quite a lot of people, in dirty beds, swathed in stained bandages, horribly pale, who had been hit by bullets, stray or otherwise. I imagined myself as one of them, and inwardly swore to do all in my power to avoid it for as long as I lived.

So imagine my feelings a bit more than a year later when, in Vilnius to report on Lithuania’s peaceful secession from the USSR, I was attending a dull and worthy press conference and a shouting person rushed into say that the Soviet Army had begun shooting people. So they had (my account of this miserable episode is to be found in ‘The Cameron Delusion’) . I can’t say I hurried with any enthusiasm to the scene. The same was true of my unintended landing in Somalia, just before Christmas 1992 (these things always seem to happen in the very dead of winter) which I describe in ‘The Rage Against God’. I also got into some bad trouble in the Congo a few years ago, the only one of these occasions when I have had a pretty strong sense that I might actually be about to die (though I had a more concentrated terrifying moment while riding my bicycle through Peckham and nearly being trapped between a lorry and its trailer, when I really *did* think that I was about to die and felt strong physical terror).

So it’s not for me. Is that why I also tend to resist the reporter’s justification for doing these things - that we must bear witness, and expose the misdeeds of tyrants. Why must we? In what way is a reporter qualified to decide the rights and wrongs of what he or she, for a few days or hours, witnesses as an outsider who often doesn’t even know the local alphabet, and needs an interpreter to tell him which is the gents and which the ladies? On this basis he can conclude that the rebels are right, and the government is wrong? Well, hardly, yet this is what is increasingly allowed, and encouraged to happen.

In a way I wouldn’t mind if it were sustained. But the pattern is always the same – a great deal of coverage designed to encourage international pressure and/or intervention. Plentiful coverage of the intervention or ‘revolution’ up to its ‘success’ . Then silence. I can remember when BBC News bulletins were dominated every night by South Africa. Yet how often do we now hear a word about what is going on there? Iraq is barely covered. After the wild euphoria of Tahrir Square, detailed coverage of what has followed in Egypt has been comparatively sketchy and infrequent. As for Libya, the failure by most media organisations to record the scandalous outcome of Western intervention is an active disgrace. Libya is fast becoming a failed state, with criminal gangs roaming unchecked and racially-bigoted arbitrary arrests and mass torture worryingly frequent and unrestrained. This is what we helped to bring about with our ill-informed enthusiasms. Shouldn’t we at least be more interested?

There’s another sort of selectivity as well. Pro-Israel journalists such as me have known for years about the Syrian government’s tendency to murder its citizens, particularly the great 1982 Hama massacre under Hafez Assad, since when the ‘West’ has several times attempted to make Syria into its ally. But the mass of the press corps seldom if ever mentioned these things concentrating as they were on the villainies of Israel next door. And then of course there’s Bahrain, where the furious repression of Shia protestors has by and large been forgotten, and doesn’t seem to worry William Hague half as much as similar action in Syria.

Hitchens’s Rule of Outrage for Foreign Ministries and Journalists states ‘Where outrage is selective, it’s not genuine. It may therefore have a purpose which has little to do with compassion, and much to do with politics and diplomacy’.

This of course does not mean that brave journalists shouldn’t do their jobs, or that their courage should be demeaned. But those who read what they write, or watch their reports on TV, should always ask why this particular crisis, this particular country, has attracted attention and coverage, while others, similar if not worse, go ignored. It costs a lot of money to send a reporter to a war zone. Someone has to decide when it is worth it, and when it is not. How and why are these decisions taken?

A pouple of responses on ‘Old England’, particularly to ‘Darren W’. I am not claiming any sort of privilege. Nor do I believe in any such thing as ‘Good Old days’. I have to repeat every few weeks here that I do not believe there ever was a ‘Golden Age’ because people insist on attributing this view to me, which I don’t hold. My main point is that England was a different place before these changes, as foreign to its current inhabitants as Belgium or Portugal. The steam trains and the greyness stand as symbols of a much greater difference. It really, really was different . As to why my generation made such a mess of it, that is what I have spent four books trying to explain and recount. I urge him to read them, if he’s really interested.

He is right that 1914 was the moment it all came to an end, but things don’t instantly alter at such moments. In 1959, there was still a lot of pre-1914 England left, you could talk to people who grew up in it, experience manners and customs which dated from before 1914 and see towns and villages which had changed little since those times. Now you can’t. I reckon the last doors closed around 1970. I was there. I know how different it was. I think those who live now should be aware of it. ‘We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long’.

22 February 2012 2:50 PM

The Abolition of England

John O’Sullivan, that fine writer, has published an interesting reminiscence of my brother Christopher in ‘National Review Online’ which is friendly without being sycophantic or actually slobbering (as some of the eulogies have, alas, been) and is all the better for that. A little searching online will easily find it. There are a number of interesting points in it, but one that I found most interesting was this. ‘Christopher also admits that he had been born into — and shaped by — the last generation of old England. For most of his journalistic career, he had embraced causes and ideas inimical to that distant country. That England had been badly and unfairly managed in various ways; he did not apologize for opposing them. But it had its virtues and, now that it was vanishing, he knew he would miss it — that England of the stiff upper lip, emotional self-control, the Royal Navy (and its campaign against slavery), the instilling and maintenance of high educational standards, lively and free debate — and, not least, chivalry towards the fair sex.’

Leaving aside any other issues, the phrase ‘the last generation of old England’ applies just as strongly to me. We were just in time. Partly because of our Navy background( for the services maintain tradition after civilian society has abandoned it), and partly because of our now unthinkable boarding-school experiences on the edge of Dartmoor, we saw, smelt, heard, savoured and absorbed an England that has now completely gone.

A few examples. We rode, thinking it normal, on trains hauled by steam locomotives. We learned by heart the customary measures of our country, sixteen ounces make a pound, 14 pounds make a stone, eight stone make a hundredweight, etc. We sang hymns ancient and modern. We were sent out to play games in the cold and the wet. We expected to be busy all the time, even on holiday there always had to be something to do. I noticed in John Masters’s book Bhowani Junction – and I intend to write more about Masters on another occasion – the narrator of one passage noting that the British officer class were always busy ‘in those days’, ‘those days’ being the 1940s. We were brought up with the same attitude. If there was ‘spare time’, you were jolly well expected to make use of it. Given that my headmaster had, amongst other things, devised the British Army’s standard-issue ammunition box, I suppose we should have expected no less. Many a Saturday afternoon was spent busily clearing brushwood, picking stones from new playing fields or polishing things. Oddly enough, it was rather enjoyable and we would have a glow of satisfaction afterwards.

All this fitted into a calendar and a physical landscape quite different from what we now know. I think some elements of it are half-recreated in the TV series ‘Call the Midwife’ , which cunningly drains the colour from so many of its scenes. You had to be a lot more patient, both in the short term and the long term. I still remember being shocked when the first credit cards were introduced to this country, under the slogan ‘It takes the waiting out of wanting’.

I reckoned that no good would come of such an arrangement. You had to wait for what you wanted. And I seem to have been right.

In those times, Anglican Christianity also had a considerable hold on national life. Even if people didn’t take part in its services, they knew what they were and when they happened. For instance, I am fairly sure that most people would have known that today, 22^nd February, was Ash Wednesday and known that the Litany ( a rather beautiful if fearsome penitential service) would be read in church that day. The rather Roman Catholic habit of holding Communion services with ‘imposition of ashes’ would have been regarded as a bit foreign in the England of my childhood.

And corporate bodies, colleges, judges, Government minters and so forth, would probably have made some effort to turn up. Now, I have the great good fortune to live in Oxford, a city where the past can still be found hiding in various shaded and secluded corners, so I was pleased to gather that the Litany was to be read early this morning at Magdalen College Chapel. I thought there might at least be some sort of shadowy official presence, a few dons in the pews. Choral Evensong at Magdalen, on Saturday or Sunday evening is one of the great glories of Oxford, and indeed of England.

But as it happened I was the only member of the congregation, apart from the estimable College chaplain and his wife, in the half-lit glories of that superb room. The three of us made a reasonable fist of things ( the Litany requires a back-and-forth series of versicles and responses and couldn’t really be read by a Minister on his own) . I left, as I often do leave Prayer Book services, with my head ringing with poetry and my temporal mind thoroughly disturbed by the different rhythms of the eternal.

But it struck me as worth mentioning that this great Anglican ceremony, which is full of mighty poetry and 50 years ago would have been a recognised part of many people’s Ash Wednesdays, has now dwindled almost to the point of vanishing.

Actually I don’t have any great passion *against* Paul McCartney, as some readers have suggested. I just think his sort of thing is a very poor substitute for the beauties of the former culture, just as a concrete college piazza at some ‘Uni’ or other is a poor substitute for an Oxford quadrangle or a Cambridge court.

Let those who enthuse about ‘In My Life’ by the way, try comparing it (or any of the works of McCartney) with Philip Larkin’s ‘Whitsun Weddings’ . Larkin, like Robert Frost and W.B.Yeats, is proof that the modern world can produce great poetry.

Teapots, Weeds and Geniuses

When will people learn? I am grieved to see still more innocent, well-intentioned contributors, armed with logic, hurl themselves on to the rocky beaches of ‘Bunker Island’, that logic-free fastness. These are pointless suicide missions. I beg them not to continue. The rest of us have to watch in horror as they are needlessly cut to pieces by Mr Bunker’s awful little jokes about Goblins and Santa Claus, or prostrated by his amazing power to bore, which causes seagulls to drop out of the sky round his shores, stunned into insensibility by the repetitive tedium of his latest imaginary triumph.

They really must grasp that within range of Mr ‘Bunker’ a mysterious force field operates which renders logic inoperable. I suspect that Mr ‘Bunker’ keeps this force-field going with an enormous solipsism machine deep in his, er, bunker. This itself is powered by a combination of vanity and of the corpses of the many logical arguments which have died, fallen to the ground and decayed on this inhospitable shore. I suspect that without the outside stimulation, it wouldn’t be able to sustain itself.

I note that (having been de-bunked yet again without noticing it) Mr Bunker is now bizarrely changing the subject , trying to construct an inconsistency in my critical view of Bertrand Russell’s Victorian Cambridge scorn for religion (a position developed, and common among intellectual snobs, in the days of the paddle steamer) and of my favourable citation of Albert Einstein’s non-specific views on Theism. He says the two men were of a similar age.

This is perfectly true, but so what? Russell was a mathematician and philosopher. Einstein was a physicist. Russell’s views were formed in late-Victorian Cambridge, well before the discoveries which made Einstein famous and which make his observations on cosmology interesting. Mr ‘Bunker’ also says (I’ll take him on trust, solely for the purpose of this argument, lacking time to look up the details) that ‘Russell, the leading logician, mathematician and philosopher, was agnostic in the sense that he "couldn't know", but was just as atheistic as I in the sense that he was devoid of any belief in supernatural beings’.

Thus Mr ‘Bunker’, who defies logic for every waking hour of every waking day by inventing an inexplicable and unsustainable ‘impossibility’ to justify a certainty he otherwise cannot support, has such a hilarious lack of self-knowledge that he actually equates himself with Bertrand Russell.

Now, Russell and Einstein were undoubtedly geniuses. But is Paul McCartney one? Daniel McKean thinks he is. He says :’ The band that brought us 'She's Leaving Home', 'Here, There and Everywhere', 'Something', 'Penny Lane', 'Tomorrow Never Knows', 'In My Life' and so on are certainly not 'trivial'. McCartney himself is undoubtedly a genius; a deeply gifted songbird whose melodies have been recycled by hundreds of thousands across the globe and studied by classical musicians as well as 'pop' musicians. If the Beatles music is so trivial, why is it that each time their music is released on the latest technological format, their sales increase and break more records, decades later?

There are several points here. What is about these songs that Mr McKean thinks is so marvellous? Can he cite the particular elements of them that rise to the level of ‘genius’? Can he explain why they are works of ‘genius’?. Also, does he really believe that mass sales are themselves a sign of quality? Many trivial things, pitched to appeal to a mass market, sell plenty. Does that make them good, let alone works of genius?

I am well aware that many people like the Beatles. If it were not so, then they would not have become rich and famous. The question is whether their renown is based on a lasting quality, or on that fickle and evanescent thing, well-marketed popularity. People get angry, rather than argue reasonably, when I raise the possibility that the Beatles are forgettable and will be forgotten (except in the way that famous stars of the past are remembered for being famous in their time, though their appeal is now incomprehensible). Merely to hold the view that the Beatles may not last is a sort of dissident position. What’s more , neither side can be certain of the outcome.

Now, as one who remembers his first sight of the Beatles (and what an odd name that is, if you think about it) in their neat uniforms on some early-evening TV show in the early sixties, and can recall such works as ‘Love me Do’ .Twist and Shout’ and ‘I wanna hold your ha-a-a-and’ when they were freshly-pressed 45-rpm records in rough paper sleeves, retailing at seven shillings and fourpence a go, I have always been puzzled by the way they never went away again afterwards. And I am also puzzled by the way they became intellectually respectable, pretentiously praised by critics who, it seemed to me, saw which way the wind was blowing. There were scores of such groups at that time. They are almost all forgotten.

The thing that seemed to distinguish the Beatles from the others was that they had the power to produce a worrying hysteria in girls aged about 14 or 15. These girls, screaming, often made it quite impossible for anyone to hear the Beatles at their live concerts (but as they dominated the audiences nobody seemed to mind). It was on that strange, unexamined hysteria, that –in my view - their exceptional success was based.