This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Our ruling Left-wing elite seem oddly untroubled by the ruthless snuffing-out of national sovereignty across southern Europe. If the same thing had been done by a bunch of colonels, they would have been piously outraged. But of course these putsches are the work of the European Union, a project the Left have long supported. And the EU is more subtle than any colonels. There is no need for midnight arrests or tanks on the streets. The enormous invisible power of the EU’s law and institutions gets its way without any need for such things. The sheer dictatorial nerve of Italy’s new viceroy, Mario Monti, pictured right, is impressive. He has formed a government without a single elected politician in it. You may well say that Italy’s politicians are, like ours, a sorry collection of blowhards and amateurs. But that does not mean they should be replaced by something worse – robots under the command of the EU Commission. Once again, please pay close attention. This is the best warning you will ever get of what the EU is really about. It is an empire, in which the great nations of Europe, including ours, are intended to disappear for ever. It has from the start been based on a grave mistake – the idea that national differences and independence no longer matter and are obsolete. It is this mistake which led it into creating the mad single currency that is now ruining it. But people who are driven by ideals can seldom see when they are wrong. You and I may grasp that the euro has failed, as we always knew it would. But in the high councils of Euroland, they are unable to recognise this blazingly obvious reality. Their peoples must undergo collective punishment for their failure, and be driven mad by useless austerity programmes that devastate their countries while failing to dent their debt. They must submit to direct rule from Brussels, no longer allowed even to pretend that they are independent. It will be painful to see how much treasure will now be squandered on trying to fend off reality. But, as Britain learned during John Major’s Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, you cannot keep out the ocean with a garden fence. When all this is over – and let it be soon – it seems increasingly likely that several countries will have been forced out of the euro. This country may have been strong-armed into imposing a ruinous EU-mandated tax. Heaven knows what Germany will have to swallow. The sad thing is that, even after the turmoil, the waste and the pain, the major British political parties will continue to insist that this country should stay in the EU. Why do they do this? There has never been any good reason for us to belong. There are now hundreds of reasons why we should leave. When will we get a leadership with the courage to say so, and act accordingly? The Cenotaph lout proves jail sentences are a fraud Charlie Gilmour, in a drugged and drunken rage of self-righteousness, desecrated our most revered memorial to the fallen. A judge ‘sentenced’ him to 16 months in prison. A number of silly female commentators, fooled by Gilmour’s carefully styled courtroom appearance in which he dressed as HarryPotter, whimpered soppily about the savagery of the Bench. Gilmour’s mother Polly Samson and rich, rock-star adoptive father David Gilmour mounted a costly appeal and let it be known they thought it was all terribly unfair and out of proportion. Given the rock industry’s long-term role in promoting drugs, and the fact the younger Gilmour’s brain was ablaze with LSD at the time of his crime, it seems to me they would have been wiser to stay silent. Now, after serving a paltry four months of his sentence, the Cenotaph Swinger emerges from jail with a hard-man haircut (this will be by choice – it is many years since prisoners were compulsorily cropped), a sulky face and a roll-up fag behind his ear, very different from the meek, lost boy we were shown at the trial. And to those who say that prison doesn’t teach anybody anything, I would only reply that Charlie Gilmour now knows precisely what the Cenotaph looks like, and exactly where it is – and so do lots of other people who will think twice before using it as an adventure playground in future. What we have also learned, alas, is that prison sentences are even more fraudulent than they were. Criminals used to serve half of the term stated. Now it seems to be only a quarter. A 'spy chief' with no intelligence I am not sure what use Eliza Manningham-Buller ever was. MI5, which she somehow came to lead, is a bloated and expensive collection of plods which feeds on our fears and could probably be abolished tomorrow without any of us being less safe. I always laughed when she was called a ‘spy chief’, as if MI5 was the same as the marginally more glamorous MI6, which does actually employ some spies. One thing she knows nothing about is drugs. She thinks there is a ‘war on drugs’ and that it has ‘failed’. So the obvious solution is to ‘decriminalise’ dope. The same hogwash has gushed from the mouths of various other airhead celebrities and ex-Ministers. As I have repeatedly recorded here, cannabis use in this country is effectively decriminalised already, with most offences being dealt with by an unrecorded warning. Nor is this new. In February 1994, John O’Connor, former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad, said: ‘Cannabis is a decriminalised drug.’ Our security is going for a song I am still amazed that this Government gets good marks for competence on defence. The US Navy and US Marines are to buy the 74 Harrier jets which were so stupidly scrapped by the supposed Conservative Liam Fox. They cannot believe their luck. ‘We’re taking advantage of all the money the Brits have spent on them,’ says American Admiral Mark Heinrich. ‘It’s like buying a car with maybe 15,000 miles on it.’ It’s plain who is the loser in this deal. Tories are a joke to Dave I do wonder what David Cameron says in private about Patrick Mercer, who was so rude about the Premier the other day. Actually, I don’t wonder at all. Mr Cameron must spend long minutes every evening laughing at all the traditional Tories who continue so foolishly to vote for him. This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column This would have had nothing to do with bigotry, or racism or any of the other rude words flung at the British people by their ruling class of snooty elite liberals. It does not take much to see that mass immigration is a daft idea. The most basic argument for it – that it helps the economy – is false. And yet, here’s the mystery. Nobody wants it, and it is damaging – but it keeps on happening. Some people were stupid enough to think that this was just a Labour problem. They were not paying attention. The Tory Party has been keenly pro-immigration for decades. It made this view clear as long ago as 1958 when party stewards violently silenced anti-immigration protesters at a Blackpool rally addressed by Harold Macmillan. Many independent witnesses were shocked at the blood-spattered savagery of the beatings handed out to the hecklers. They should not have been. The more liberal the Tory Party gets, the more ruthless it has to be to its own natural supporters. As usual, the amazing thing is that so many of those supporters carry on voting for it. The elite wish to pretend that they sympathise with us about the problem. But secretly they want to change the country for ever, and see mass immigration as the best way of doing this. * * * 19 November 2011 11:28 PM
How long before the grey dictators march on London?
Change is sometimes bad, sometimes good. How do we tell?
All Hell Let Loose – Max Hastings on the ‘Good War’
This Government, like all before it, will only be happy when we have... The UK No Border Agency
Civlian juntas have seized power in Rome and Athens. Soon, similar gangs of grey men may be sweeping aside national governments in Madrid and Lisbon. Nobody much is protesting. In time – don’t rule it out – it could be our turn here, with Lords Patten and Mandelson forming a cabinet of none of the talents.
Inside their tiny, deluded world it is all the other way round. The euro is a sparkling success that must be kept alive at all costs. So is the European Union. We must march onward towards ever-closer union, even if it is so close that it suffocates us to death.
In the minds of Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, those to blame for the present problems are the countries that have inexplicably gone bankrupt, or the ones who are about to do so.
It is because we have given up the fight against it that the correlation between cannabis use and mental illness is now worrying our psychiatrists so much.
A security service whose ex-chief doesn’t even know these basic facts can’t be much good, can it?
My thanks to Mr ‘Demetriou’, who seems to have been breakfasting on Semtex when he wrote his explosive contribution to the ‘War War and Jaw Jaw (or was it the other way round?)’ posting. He asked, perhaps with a touch of aggression ’Why do you think Britain could have got through the last hundred years by defiantly resisting any sort of change whatsoever? You think transport could have stood still, do you? While everyone else went road and car. We could have ploughed on as a major economy with a bunch of railway lines alone? Ridiculous. This is an example of where you make a farce of yourself.’
As Mr ‘Demetriou’ knows perfectly well, I don’t think anything of the kind. What I don’t think is that ‘Change is Good’ ( a slogan actually adopted by some people, often in the course of introducing such unwanted horrors as the various revised prayer books of the Church of England ) . I think that change, and those who keenly advocate it, must be treated with doubt and some suspicion. In whose interests is it? Will its claimed benefits really come about? Have we carefully considered its unintended consequences? If it is justified, then let us have it. if not, as Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, (and not Edmund Burke as I mistakenly said in the first draft of this posting) rightly pointed out ‘if it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change’. The fact that it *is* change does not automatically mean that it is change for the better.
You might think (I do) that this is blazingly obvious. But listen and watch and see how often you find the idea being advanced that change is automatically ‘progress’ and that ‘progress’ is automatically good. In fact, see how often you come across the idea that there is such a thing as ‘progress’, and that something new is axiomatically better than what it replaces.
Think this absurd? In that case explain the supposed argument, sometimes used by contributors to this weblog, that ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s the 21st Century’. This line is offered as a clinching, overpowering, irresistible reason for discarding any former belief or habit or tradition. Why should that be, unless the reader has accepted some bizarre historical theory which validates all things by virtue of their newness?
This whole idea seemed to me to be implicit in the ghastly celebrations of the ‘Millennium’ (marked, in any case, a year early) so keenly pursued by New Labour and its Tory allies. Somehow a new world would begin on the flip of a calendar. Regular readers here will know how much I loathe the New Year holiday, a meaningless celebration of nothing at all. But perhaps it is worse than that perhaps it has a meaning after all, and is a small-scale rite of the same cult of ever-progressing time.
Anyway, to return to Mr ‘Demetriou’ and his charge. ‘why do you think Britain could have got through the last hundred years by defiantly resisting any sort of change whatsoever? You think transport could have stood still, do you? While everyone else went road and car. We could have ploughed on as a major economy with a bunch of railway lines alone? Ridiculous. This is an example of where you make a farce of yourself.’
I don’t think, and have never said that ‘Britain could have got through the last hundred years by defiantly resisting any sort of change whatsoever.’
I do think that Britain would be much better off if it had resisted some changes – the enormous expansion of the welfare state, mass immigration, comprehensive schooling, divorce law reform. I think it would also have been better off if it had been less willing to rush off and engage in foreign wars on the vaguest pretext, or in the belief that it had some global or European police function.
But I am all in favour of (for instance) the telephone, the electrical national grid, the building of international airports(I am less convinced of any serious need for domestic passenger traffic) , some limited expansion of the universities, the electrification of the railways (in fact, a great deal more of it than we have had) , the adoption of computers and the Internet, the Clean Air Acts, myriad advances in medical science, the restrictions on smoking and the general improvement in English food, at home and in restaurants. I’m sure I could think of plenty of others.
But I’m not in favour of television at all (I can’t think of any circumstances under which it would be a good thing, or any alleged benefit it brings which in any begins to justify the damage it does. ) mass car ownership - not because I’m against the proles enjoying the benefits of the rich, but because I can see the need for cars in remote country areas, also the need for ambulances, taxis, tradesmen’s vans and other individual forms of transport capable of carrying several people and a reasonable amount of tools, equipment or luggage.
Likewise I can see the need for a well-maintained roads (but not for a combination of heavy road spending, neglect of public transport and increased traffic leading to greater danger for cyclists and pedestrians on the roads).
I think this all perfectly rational, and it only takes a little imagination to see that a country shaped like ours would be better off, in terms of health, general wellbeing (!), physical beauty of landscape and many other aspects, if these changes had been resisted.
The idea that, in the meantime the railways and other forms of transport would have remained as they were is absurd. Had we not decided to go hell-for-leather for a car economy, our railways could have been almost universally electrified (diesel railcars might have been introduced on the lightest branch lines) and then also extended by sidings into every significant industrial and commercial centre. The Great Central main line(ripped up by Beeching) had already be built to Continental loading gauge and was designed to link up with a projected Channel tunnel, so could have formed the sine of a national goods and passenger network linking British railways with the Continent.
Containerisation, another unmixed blessing, has led to huge increases in rail’s share of goods traffic in the USA, and – if the money spent on Motorways were instead sent on widening tracks and raising bridges and tunnels in this country, the same thing could be achieved here. Why, we might even build more branch lines, connecting more of our countryside with the major cities, without in the process wrecking that same countryside.
Electric trams, now being successfully reintroduced across the continent ( and very marginally here) could have been retained and modernised, giving us an urban transport system that was clean, quiet and improved the look of the cities it served, and was not dependent on Arab despotisms for its fuel.
Such urban transport , together with suburban rail networks, fosters the creation of urban villages and works against the ugly and soulless ribbon development promoted by mass car usage.
Switzerland, it is true, has some Motorways, which largely serve as links with the road systems of Europe. But its rail and public transport links, rural and urban, make car ownership and use largely unnecessary in most of the country. I don’t believe that Switzerland is viewed as backward my most who visit it.
I just offer these as examples of how the imagination can be applied to the inventions of the past, and so might guide us in judging the inventions of the future. Just because things are as they are, it does not mean that they were bound to be as they are, or that this is the best possible arrangement. It is not just an exercise in fantasy to think in this way. It is an exercise in helping to choose the future.
Establishment Hypocrisy about the King James Bible
Alas I was too ill yesterday to attend the Westminster Abbey service marking the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version (or, in the USA, the King James version) of the Bible. I am sure it was a glorious occasion (and yes, thank you, I’m better now). But I might have been grinding my teeth a little bit while I was there.
For while it is hard to find an establishment person - this year- who doesn’t say what a great and wonderful book the Authorised Version is, it is equally hard to find an Anglican church, Cathedral or Oxbridge College Chapel where it is still in regular use on the lectern. There are a tiny few, but that is all. This has been so for years, and has been getting worse for years.
And that is all fairly normal. I try to take my own pocket copy to such places, so that I can read the disturbing, timeless poetry of the Authorised Version in my head, to take away the plastic, diet cola taste of the modern version that has been read (through a needless PA system, in a building designed to allow the human voice to carry unaided).
But even in this 400th anniversary year, it doesn’t occur to anybody much to give the King James an outing. At evensong in Lincoln cathedral, and again in Canterbury, in the past few weeks, I have encountered modern versions. Since Evensong is, for the most part, a service conducted in the English of the 16th century, it is actually rather incongruous to have a modern Bible read amid the sonorous rhythms of Cranmer’s prayers, Coverdale’s psalms and the ancient canticles. Why do they do it?
I think it is because, while Evensong brings in the tourists as a kind of religious concert (it is almost always stripped of the Confession or of any congregational prayers except the Creed), and is therefore more or less tolerated by the C of E establishment, the Authorised Version is too powerful a reminder of what Christianity used to be before the liberals got hold of it, and remains banned. The only tribute to the Authorised Version that would be worth having, would be its restoration.
Don’t believe any of that stuff about it being hard to understand. Much of it is in words of one or two syllables, and memorable words at that. The difficult passages are just as difficult in the new versions.
Time for some responses to contributors. My refusal to join the religion of the car has got me into trouble again, so I’ll make a few general comments on this. I am told that Motorways relieved small towns and villages form heavy traffic. But this argument ignores the question of why they were exposed to such heavy traffic in the first place
Small towns and villages were shaken to pieces by juggernauts because the railways had been pulled up, or had withdrawn from the competition to carry freight. There are many anecdotes from the 1960s of local railway managers being instructed to put in absurdly high tenders for goods contracts, which they then duly lost, with the result that the branch line was closed to freight soon afterwards thanks to ‘lack of business’. But in general the railways had been losing the battle against heavily subsidised roads since the 1920s.
So to build more roads because building roads had created lots of extra traffic seems to me to be odd logic. My experience of small English towns and villages is that many of them have now been expensively bypassed ( often in a very ugly fashion) but that this has not by any means saved them from the traffic scourge. I have also observed a curious fact. The old-B-roads ,which one might once have chosen to use for a quieter journey, are now crammed with traffic driving right up to the 60 mph limit. Whereas A-roads running parallel to Motorways are frequently rather quiet. As a cyclist, I need to know these things when I plan my routes.
My own use of a car, as I have written elsewhere, is very small. I haven’t driven one for more than a year and my household’s car uses is also kept to a minimum. We use it when circumstances more or less compel it (and it is these circumstances, the whole car-based design of modern Britain, which assumes car ownership for so many activities, which create so much needless car use).
It is true that many modern rail journey can be unpleasant. Particularly since privatisation, the cramming in of seats so that they don’t line up with windows, the seats themselves, apparently designed for hobbits, the endless weekend engineering work, the grotesquely high fares and the absence of staff on trains or at stations sometimes make travelling by rail nearly as unpleasant as travelling by car. But this is an argument for improving the railways, not for abandoning them.
I am always a bit puzzled by figures on the ‘safety’ of certain roads. Dual carriageways, which largely avoid the horror of the head-on collision, ought to have fewer fatalities than single carriageways. So it is no great triumph that they do, given what they cost to build and maintain. This includes Motorways. Anyone actually *in* a car is hugely safer than he would have been 40 years ago – because of front and rear inertia reel seatbelts, widely worn, airbags, side-impact protection, anti-lock brakes and greatly improved trauma surgery in casualty department should all of these fail.
Does that mean that the road is safe? Or that a huge amount of effort has been made to make it quite a lot less safe than a railway, which is also a dual carriageway segregated from other traffic and fenced against pedestrians.
For that is the next point about road ‘safety’. It has been achieved largely by driving cyclists off the roads, and by equipping many urban roads with severe anti-pedestrian defences, fencing and underpasses ( and slow-responding light-controlled crossings) forcing walkers to trudge hundreds of yards to negotiate junctions. And of course by discouraging children from using the roads at all. I suspect that the number of children cycling and walking to school is a tiny percentage of what it was in my childhood. Now they’re all in cars. So are the adults who used to walk or bicycle to work. This means that the roads are *statistically* safer.
But they are not really safer. They are just so dangerous that vulnerable people stay off them altogether. We should be careful not to count that as an achievement.
As for the ever-fascinating ‘what if’ of the Second World War, can we please be spared such tedious comments as ‘if we lost the war, why are we speaking English and not German?’ . Appearance and reality are not the same thing, and one doesn’t have to be physically conquered and subjugated to be defeated. You could argue that our principal rivals in World War Two were the Americans, and we are now speaking American. But our laws are made in Brussels and Luxembourg, by an organisation wholly dominated by Germany.
I am not only aware of Pat Buchanan’s ‘Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War’. I have written about it here and suspect the index will throw up a reference, or Google will.
Why do writers assume that Britain was Germany’s principal foe? This simply isn’t true,. From the start, Hitler’s target was the USSR. Had he wanted to defeat and invade us, he would certainly have concentrated more on his Navy and his U-boats, and on amphibious capacity. But he never did, because he never cared enough. Under Hitler, the German Navy was never built up into a serious challenge to the Royal Navy, and was never meant to be. After the Norwegian campaign was over, there was precious little of a fighting German surface fleet left anyway. Though we shouldn’t go on too much about ASDIC or convoys. The RN was far too over-confident about its ability to handle U-boats at the start of the war.
Also, why do people assume that all other things would have been equal had we behaved more wisely in 1939? I’ve touched on this before. But consider: If Britain and France had permitted the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia out of cynical self-interest, rather than in a some naïve belief that they were buying peace for the future, they might then also have been sensible enough to ‘betray’ the Poles (this thought raises the old question of whether it was better in practice to be a ‘betrayed’ Czech or a ‘’saved’ Pole). But these ‘betrayals’ were foreordained by the fact that we didn’t have the power to do anything else.
Oh and by the way, if we had 'stood up' to Hitler at Munich, as some still say we should ahve done, what weapons would we have used to do so?
But if Poland had in fact agreed to hand over the territory Germany wanted, would the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact have been signed? And if not, when and under what conditions would Hitler’s attack on the USSR have taken place? He would have had little chance of making the successful surprise assault he contrived in 1941. Would Stalin’s attack on Finland have happened, or his seizure of the Baltic countries? Which side would Mussolini have ended up on? A wise British policy would have been to keep him neutral? What about the Balkans? The imponderables are limitless. As for a refusal by Britain and France to declare war releasing German troops for the Russian campaign, surely this is unlikely? If France had maintained a substantial army on the German border, Hitler would have been compelled to leave major forces to guard against an attack. I don’t believe he had such a problem after the Fall of France.
On the subject of Atomic weapons, I had understood that all the research, especially the famous Farm Hall Tapes, showed that the Germans had got nowhere with nuclear weapons and our fears that Heisenberg was en route to a bomb were unfounded.
This book comes tantalisingly close to being right. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. But first, a general introduction:
By far the best popular history book of the season is Max Hastings’s ‘All Hell Let Loose’, his summing up of the Second World War. The book, dealing with the whole war, military, political and social, is deeply informed by several previous works by Sir Max on detailed aspects of the war. There are no doubt small things with which one might quibble. But it is a powerful, tightly-packed and skilfully written judgement which tugs the reader on to the end and actually distracted me, on an uncomfortable and ill-lit aeroplane, from theoretically easier reading. Unless this is a subject that simply doesn’t interest you, this is a book worth reading.
I should note here that I do not know Sir Max, have spoken to him once in my life (in an exchange on the BBC ‘Moral Maze’ programme), have never worked for him, and have for years disagreed strongly with many of his opinions on domestic politics. Even so I should also note that he is willing to admit to past mistakes and misjudgements, and recently did so, much to his credit, on the issue of the European Union. He has for most of his life been a clear spokesman of centrist, conventional Toryism. But I wonder if his detailed knowledge of the truth about the alleged ‘Good War’ has caused him over time to wonder about this view.
When I say that the book comes close to being right, I refer to two features of it. First, Sir Max’s treatment of the Anglo-French ‘guarantee’ to Poland is properly contemptuous.
He sums it up thus: ‘France promised the military leadership in Warsaw that its army would attack Hitler’s Siegfried Line within thirteen days of mobilisation. Britain pledged an immediate bomber offensive against Germany. Both powers’ assurances reflected cynicism, for neither had the smallest intention of fulfilling them: the guarantees were designed to deter Hitler, rather than to provide credible military assistance to Poland. They were gestures without substance, yet the Poles chose to believe them’.
I might add that the Germans, more sensibly, treated them as the worthless rubbish they were. A pity it wasn’t the other way round, really.
He also notes that the London and Paris declarations of war were ‘gestures which even some anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile’.
The withering account of the betrayal of Poland surely points an accusing finger at those who made a promise they had no intention of keeping. But it does not go deeply into the reasoning behind this disastrous policy or explore the possible alternatives.
Maybe this will happen in Sir Max’s next book. The great clay edifice of the ‘We Won the War’ cult has been eroded into shapelessness, and much diminished, by the downpour of truthful revelations which has washed over it since it was erected in 1945.
But, as readers here well know, it is still historically dangerous to challenge the view that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable in 1939. Indeed, to say this is almost always to be immediately misunderstood and misrepresented by the legions of people who still fear the truth.
For the keepers of conventional wisdom will instantly assert that anyone who says this thinks that Britain should never under any circumstances have gone to war with Germany. They also usually claim that opposition to the 1939 declaration of war implies opposition to Churchill’s decision to fight on at all cost in 1940. The unstated implication of these arguments is that people who take my position are motivated by a secret sympathy for German National Socialism, a libel they dare not state openly but seek to insinuate by subtle signals.
Speaking for myself, I suspect that Britain might well have needed to go to war with Germany in 1941 or 1942, much as the USA did. It would then have been in our interests to do so, and we would have been capable of fighting effectively, which we weren’t in 1939. The same goes for France.
As for 1940, once you have started a war then you must fight it to the end. To declare war on a country, and then make peace with it, is to invite humiliation, subjugation and enslavement. The position would have been quite different if we had not started the war in the first place, but as we had, Churchill did the right thing. The choice was pretty awful – Churchill had the sense to see that it would cost us the Empire and most of our accumulated wealth. But he was right to believe that this was a price worth paying to avoid a Hitlerian peace.
As for the unspoken suggestion that conservatives are some sort of National Socialist fellow-travellers, as so many socialists are or were Communist fellow-travellers, it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what conservatives believe and value. And it is also based on a failure to grasp that conservatism is intensely patriotic, whereas socialism has always been intensely internationalist. It is a false equivalence of opposites.
Sir Max also addresses the question of the bombing of German civilians, fairly realistically. But he makes two classic mistakes, commonly made by defenders of this action. He accuses those, like me, who think the bombing was morally wrong, of arguing that it was *as bad as* and in some way equivalent to the mass-murder of Jews by the Hitler state.
But most rational critics of the Arthur Harris bombing campaign do not think this at all. They think that the bombing was morally wrong on its own account.
It was not remotely comparable to the mass-murder of Jews (and others), a unique crime whose culprits probably caused the excavation of a new pit in the deepest parts of Hell to hold them.
But it was still utterly wrong.
As for the supposed military argument for it, that it diverted artillery and men from the Eastern Front, this wasn’t its intention.
And it must be stressed that a campaign of bombing properly directed at military targets would also have caused this diversion. I doubt very much whether the appalling losses inflicted on his men by Harris would have been much greater if he had followed this course. But, as we know, Harris hated to be distracted from his attacks on civilians and was most reluctant to allow his bombers to be used for anything else.
Such properly targeted bombing might also have done far greater damage to the Reich’s war effort than incinerating, suffocating, roasting and dismembering lots of innocent women and children, who cannot conceivably be blamed for Hitler.
In any case, it is pretty clear from Sir Max’s account that the Soviet Forces would have won anyway, even without this help. The decisive moment on the Eastern front came in the winter of 1941-2, when we had not begun bombing Germany on a grand scale. After Hitler failed before Moscow, he was doomed to lose in the end.
All kinds of thoughts intrude here, not least about the unspeakable savagery of the Soviet advance into Central Europe, and whether we should have got ourselves into a position where the Soviets were our principal ally. Their cruelty to each other and to those they conquered must once again be judged to be frightful *in itself*, not in comparison to national Socialist barbarism, but on universal grounds.
I repeat, this is not to say that it was equivalent to Hitler’s savagery. It was not. But because Stalin was not as evil as Hitler, or evil in the same way as Hitler, it does not mean that he was not profoundly evil.
But the overwhelming message from this book is that the comforting fantasy of the ‘Good War’, with which British people have sustained themselves for so long, is insupportable.
His spare but terrible descriptions of warfare, many of them culled from poignant letters home found on the corpses of dead soldiers, make it clear that for most people, most of the time, this ‘Good War’ was Hell. It broke lives and spirits, reduced strong, confident men to whimpering, snot-bedabbled wrecks, voiding their bladders and bowels, tore apart loving homes, compelled gentle people into acts of unspeakable barbarism, laid waste great monuments of civilisation, betrayed most of those for whom it was supposedly fought, was marred by ceaseless incompetence and self-aggrandisement by military and political leaders and was on many occasions futile *on its own terms*. The conduct of the troops of the civilised countries, though never nearly so base as that of the Germans or the Red Army, was often disgraceful.
Between the lines, and sometimes explicitly, Hastings also gives the impression that several major campaigns were fought for reasons of domestic morale, propaganda, diplomatic advantage or plain folly. They made little difference to the outcome of the war. Those who died or were maimed for life in the course of them might as well have stayed at home, for all the material good they did to the causes they fought for. Those who were bereaved by them, if they knew this, might be even more heartbroken than they already were.
Of course, this is part of the problem. There are still many people living who took part in the Second World War or who were deprived by it of husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. As long as they survive, it will be difficult to confront the truth head-on, for these people need their myths to make their sacrifices bearable. That is reasonable and right. Personally, I deplore the modern habit of revealing the intolerable truth when our own troops are killed by so-called ‘Friendly Fire’, that stupid phrase. This is terribly common in all modern wars, and is inevitable as long as artillery and aerial bombing and strafing are employed in war. But who wants to know that a family member has died in this awful way? Leave them at least to believe that they were killed by their enemies. There is some small comfort in that.
A few small quotations serve to remind us of the fact that Man, when he chooses to be, is the most terrible creature on the planet, and also capable of the most extraordinary endurance and kindness. Make what you will of that. I know what I think.
Sir Max quotes a German soldier in Stalingrad who wrote: ‘When night arrives - one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights - the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately for the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them .Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.’
And much later he records an incident in Holland as the Americans clawed their way towards the Rhine.
‘Airborne soldier Pfc Bill True was intensely moved when, one evening in the midst of the Dutch battles, a little girl approached the foxhole occupied by himself and another man, and handed them two pillows. Here was a tiny, innocent gesture towards decencies of civilisation which otherwise seemed immeasurably remote.’
I cannot myself read these words without weeping, though when I think about it I am unable to explain exactly why, of all the horrors and dramas of this vast book, this one short passage should have such an effect. But there it is. It took me ages to transcribe, because I kept having to stop and wipe my eyes.
I might also quote this brilliantly economical description of modern war’s true, unavoidable cost. During the Battle of the Bulge, ‘twenty inhabitants of the village of Sainlez near Bastogne were killed by bombardment that reduced every home to a shell; among them were eight members of one family named Didier: Joseph, forty-six; Marie-Angele, sixteen; Alice, fifteen; Renee, thirteen; Lucille, eleven; Bernadette; nine; Lucien, eight; and Noel, six.’
The bombardment, though this is not entirely clear, was almost certainly ours, the good side’s.
There is a strange and slightly guilty pleasure for an Englishman of my generation, in reading books about the Second World War, a bit like eating bully beef sandwiches accompanied by mugs of strong, sweet tea. For me, it has always been safely in the past, a great saga of valour and justice. To read, in warmth and well-fed safety, about its privations is a little like coming into a warm, firelit room at dusk on a snowy winter afternoon.
I still feel this. But since a long ago December dawn on the Hungarian-Romanian border (why, it must be more than 20 years ago now), when I began a journey that would bring me close to real gunfire and real corpses, more than once, I also feel something else. It is our duty to imagine this event not as the buried past but as the blazing present, and to question all decisions which might take us back towards it, with all the intelligence and scepticism at our command. Yes, war is sometimes necessary. But the calculation of whether it is a fit price to pay should be made in the knowledge of what that price really is.
If anyone had ever asked us, we would have said that we did not want millions of people from Asia, the Balkans or the dead Soviet Empire migrating to this country.
We rightly complain that young people cannot get work. So why import foreigners to do that work, while paying our own children to take to crime and sit at home smoking dope?
It makes no sense at all, not least because the South East of England is now one of the most crowded places on Earth, and feels that way.
And so it goes on. I doubt if we shall ever know exactly who is to blame for the latest border fiasco. Theresa May, the liberal, PC Home Secretary, is protected by a mysterious media bodyguard of flatterers and defenders. But the reason for the mess remains the same as it has always been.
Those figures showing that most illegal migrants who arrive here are allowed to stay, or that foreign criminals are not deported, or that passport checks were skimped, are not evidence of government failure. Nothing much will be done about them.
They will be nearly as bad next year and the year after.
They are evidence that the real policy is and always has been to act against our wishes and interests. Everything else is a pretence.
The truth is the opposite of the public stance. It is typical that our major airports have all now got huge new signs proclaiming 'UK Border', just at the moment when that border has more or less ceased to exist.
One day, perhaps, those to blame for this disgrace will be punished. But I think it will by then be too late.
We are too trusting for our own good.
We ALL pay a terrible price for Britain's lethal motorways
If a train crash cost as many lives and hurt as many people as the M5 pile-up, the whole rail system would be paralysed by inquiries and speed restrictions.
In fact, our horribly dangerous roads still see thousands of needless deaths a year, but nobody does anything because all the misery comes in small packets, so that one or two homes mourn, and the rest of the nation carries on unaffected.
We do not see a pattern. The futile attempt to blame a firework display for the motorway horror is an example of this. The real problem is that such roads are unavoidably crammed with vehicles that are much too close together, travelling much too fast.
Just try driving on a British road at a reasonable speed, and at a sensible distance from the car in front. See how long it takes before some moron is nudging your back bumper and flashing his lights, or before another moron cuts into the space you have left.
As for fog, it is not exactly a surprise in November, is it? Yet since motorways were introduced here, people have driven too fast in such fog. It is amazing more people aren’t killed.
I’d plough up all the motorways in the country, and rebuild the rail network that Beeching trashed. Motorways are a horrible idea. They have ruined our countryside and our cities, and it’s no surprise to me that Adolf Hitler liked them so much.
But as long as we have them, the police should be made to patrol them properly, so that sane people have some protection against the thoughtless, homidical chancers who currently rule our roads.
Today, maths dunces like me don't stand a chance
I was never any good at maths. Only the dedicated patience of a great teacher helped me get the lowest possible grade at O-level.
These days I probably would not even know how bad I was at maths. There would be nobody around who could tell.
When Channel 4’s Dispatches programme tested 155 teachers in 18 schools, they found that most of them could not do simple calculations.
How could such people have helped me? You cannot teach maths if you are hopeless at it yourself.
And I suspect the same goes, in many cases, for reading, writing and spelling.
Our schools have now been so bad for so long that those in charge are themselves ignorant. Worse, they may be unaware of it, or scared to admit it.
Do they fail to correct spelling mistakes because they don’t know how to spell themselves?
Do they struggle to teach reading because they are barely literate? It is all too possible. And how can such people have the blazing enthusiasm for books, history or science that makes the young want to learn?
It is useless to blame these teachers. They, like their pupils, are the victims of a cruel, 50-year experiment on defenceless human beings.
That experiment, known as ‘progressive education’, has conclusively failed. There is no better evidence than the vast disaster of our state comprehensive system that discipline, rigour, authority, selection and tradition are vital in the schooling of the young.
But the mad experiment seems to have smashed common sense, knowledge and thought so completely that there is now nobody left in the education establishment who is able to stop it. And so it goes on and on and on, wrecking lives and hopes.
All this time, the rich and powerful are exempt from it, and don’t care.
What can I do about the fact that my new mobile phone has opinions and wants to impose them on me? It is a paid-up member of the Global Warming cult.
Instead of just telling me that it is fully charged, it sternly orders me to save energy by unplugging the charger from the wall. Well, as I don’t believe in man-made global warming and reckon the amount of power involved is tiny, I shall of course ignore it.
But how long before it starts reporting me to the authorities?
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