This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Remember that this creature has actually been caught and is in the hands of the police. Is he trembling and afraid? Not exactly. He explains: 'I have been forced to write this letter... To be honest I’m not bothered or sorry about the fact that I burgled your house. Basically it was your fault.' The victims, he argued, knew they lived in a high-crime area, so they shouldn’t have left a window open. What is doubly funny about this is that it is almost exactly the same message given to honest citizens by our defeatist police. They, too, are always telling us that if we are robbed, it is our fault for not turning our homes into fortified bunkers. They assume that nobody has any morals or conscience any more, and also that robbers are no longer afraid of the law. And why should they be afraid? They know the law won’t hurt them, or punish them. The courts yearn to find some excuse to let them go –because otherwise the prisons will burst. It was while seeking an excuse to let the laughing burglar off that the police told him to write to his victim. They let him off anyway – no prison, just an ‘electronically monitored curfew’ and 25 hours a week of so-called 'structured activity'. The more syllables these phoney sanctions have, the less they mean. They mean 'let off'. Letting criminals off is what we are good at. Nearly 30,000 habitual criminals were also let off last year with cautions, after they had returned to crime. The prisons are bursting because hundreds of thousands of people who were once afraid of the law now laugh at it. Eventually, after 15 or more crimes, the state locks them up for a few weeks in an effort to look tougher than it is. But it is just for show. This is all quite obvious. Our Government refuses to learn from it because it is the slave of a foolish, Leftist dogma, that crime is a disease caused by hardship. It is not. It is human evil let loose, and till we return to that view, it will get worse. Like the laughing burglar, I’m not going to show any sympathy for the clowns who have got us into this mess and keep us there. No doubt you agree with me, in which case why do you keep voting for the clowns? That’s the bit I don’t understand. * * * On the same principle, the time will come when burglary, mugging, GBH and even murder will no longer be crimes, because we have all got used to them happening all the time. Well, when that day comes, we won’t need Mr Bean any more. Doesn't 'modesty' apply to footwear? Perhaps because I travel a lot in Muslim countries, I am fascinated by Islam’s growing need to swathe the female form in textiles. It has spread greatly in the past 20 years. Officially it is all about modesty. But the key words in the Koran are rather vague, and don’t seem to me to prescribe hijabs, niquabs, jilbabs or burkas. I was once told by a North African Muslim activist in Antwerp that the hijab headscarf had been adopted in Europe mainly as propaganda, to wind up the Western world. It’s been very successful if so, making several European countries try to ban it, which free societies can’t really do. But the founder of modern secular Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, thought Islamic ideas about women would hold back his country. So he really did ban the hijab, especially in public buildings. And now that the fiercely and militantly Islamist AK party has taken over the government of that vital country, in a silent but earthshaking revolution, it is a very big issue indeed. Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, is a fervent Islamist, as is his wife Hayrunissa. She is so keen to sport a hijab that in 1988 she was refused admission to Ankara University for insisting on wearing one, and came close to taking the issue to the European Court of Human Rights. But the combination of nun-like headgear and sexy footwear increased my suspicion that this is more about politics than religion. Gilded lives... and squalid secrets Whose home life is being described here? Is it perhaps some dismal tower-block existence in post-industrial Northern England? A mother who 'yearns to try her sleight-of-hand' at shoplifting, though she reckons it is not 'age-appropriate' for her now... 'so, off you go, children, but remember, only steal from large conglomerates'. A mother who 'doesn’t hide her occasional joint-smoking' from her teenage son. A son who says 'my mother smokes more pot than I do'. A mother who held her child’s 15th birthday party in her home at which beer and wine were provided – and vodka smuggled in. The vodka wasn’t removed once it was discovered. The mother recalls that amid the vomiting and the girls being walked in the night air to keep them conscious... 'out of my peripheral vision I witnessed [my son] smoke a joint, [and] swig vodka from the bottle'. A son who says 'I was 13 when, with my older half-brother, I smoked my first joint'. A mother who says she has given dope to her mother and father, aged 78 and 82. A son who was present when this happened. One, of all places, was in The Lady magazine, with Polly Samson, wife of millionaire Pink Floyd star David Gilmour. The other appeared in The Guardian, given jointly by Ms Samson and her son, Charlie Gilmour. You may recall that Charlie recently emerged from prison after swinging on the Cenotaph in a drug-induced frenzy. I have to say I feel more sorry for him than I did before. I didn’t want to return to this subject. But when I found these interviews, I wondered – is this sort of upbringing what Britain’s well-off chattering classes now regard as normal? I fear it may well be. I should add here that I dislike the hostile tone of the some of the attacks on Mr Reynolds among the comments on the previosu thread. I don't in any way endorse them, but at the moment I think Mr Reynolds is quite capable of looking after himself and will leave him to do so. At the same time can I ask contributors to mind their manners from now on. My case certainly isn't served (and Mr Reynolds's case isn't harmed) by personal rudeness. It's the argument that matters. Many readers will recall my account here a few weeks ago of a debate between me and Peter Reynolds, leader of the Cannabis Law Reform Party. The debate is now accessible on YouTube, here. It lasts about an hour and a half.
Don't rage at the laughing burglar - save it for the clowns who let him go free
Alec Guinness beats Gary Oldman, plus debating technique and Afghanistan
The Salford debate about Cannabis, now on YouTube
SPECIAL REPORT: The overthrow of Egypt's despotic ruler was hailed a success but nine months on, Peter Hitchens reports on a fearful and violent land
Mindbending Drug bends minds shock. A non-impartial commentary
Sunday, 27 November 2011
At last we know what thieves really think about the people whose lives they ruin. A bitterly funny and honest letter from a burglar to his victim disposes for all time of the notion that there is any point in being nice to crooks.
Mr Injustice Bean (pictured right) says that it is not a crime to swear at the police because they hear foul language too often to be offended.
This week she appeared at Buckingham Palace (pictured) swathed in her headscarf and also balancing on astonishingly high heels. Are such heels Islamic? It seems unlikely.
No, these are not from some sad social worker’s report into misery and deprivation in the lower depths of our society. They are taken from two freely given interviews with gilded, fortunate people.
I have now watched, for the first time in more than 30 years, the complete BBC version of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’, and am confirmed in my view that the recent film of the same book is a miserable failure, both in absolute terms and by comparison.
I do have a slight suspicion that the DVD set has been edited – I am quite sure the scene where Ricki Tarr goes to Paris Embassy and hijacks the SIS station there is much briefer on DVD than it was when I watched it. But then again, I know that memory is a fickle thing. On a recent visit to Moscow, I went to visit my old home and either they’d moved an entire Metro station (Akademicheskaya, since you ask) 500 yards north in the past ten years, or I had remembered the layout of the streets round my block quite inaccurately. I am, however, certain that the sex shop wasn’t there in 1992.
In listing things that the BBC version did and the film did not, I shall recognise that the film had to be much shorter.
But I shall also recognise that the film wasted large slices of perfectly good time with made-up scenes of George Smiley swimming, or roaming about the place, or of Peter Guillam sacking his boyfriend (Guillam in the book is heterosexual, but the TV version completely ignores his sex life).
The main thing that the BBC did was to understand the story. This illuminated its casting. Ian Richardson’s seductive glamour, and Alec Guinness’s
woebegone despair, together with Anthony Bate’s perfect impersonation of a high government official, with all his grandeur and faults, made thenature of the conflict quite clear. I think the BBC also got far closer to Connie Sachs, in the unlikely shape of Beryl Reid (again, didn’t she get longer in the original TV version than she does on the DVD?) . And Ian Bannen, as Jim Prideaux, successfully portrays a certain type of Englishman now extinct – but crucial to the plot – patriotic, sporting, ruthless yet kind, unintellectual yet beautifully educated and a skilled linguist. In my view the depth of the long-lost pre-war homosexual relationship between Prideaux and Bill Haydon, revealed in the final pages of the book, is the key to everything else in the story, and adds greatly to the sense of loss and hurt, and of disappointed hopes, which the story so well portrays. Haydon has remained sexually omnivorous to the end (Smiley has to pay off a girlfriend and a boyfriend, after his exposure) and was presumably playing a game with the young and naïve Prideaux. Prideaux, by contrast, was loyal. And in the end, Haydon sold him to the Kremlin, to be tortured and broken, to save himself. That is why Prideaux stalks Haydon at the end, and why he kills him with his bare hands, not (as in the absurd film) with a distant and impersonal shot.
It also explains the haunting closing credits of the TV programme, the golden heart of Oxford on a summer’s evening, as a choirboy sings that most melancholy of the Anglican canticles, the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ to Geoffrey Burgon’s plangent setting. Evensong, Oxford and summers long ago, combined with Simeon’s plea to be allowed to ‘depart in peace’, for he has seen ‘thy salvation’ – it is perhaps a clever allusion both to the root of the betrayal , and to Smiley’s final effort of will and mind, which saves the service from treachery. I have always thought so.
The TV series also gives a far better account of Control, and is in a way much fairer to Percy Alleline, whose ambition at the beginning, pomposity when at his height, and bleak devastation at the end is wonderfully portrayed by Michael Aldridge. The horrible Islay Hotel, the sort of bleak, sequestered location in which le Carre likes to set his heroes, is also more faithfully shown.
It makes an attempt to show Haydon’s own rather feeble attempt to explain his treachery (and Smiley’s scorn for it). I wish I could see a repeat of John le Mesurier’s rather fuller portrayal of a Philby-type figure, reminiscing about his treachery, in the BBC play ‘Traitor’, shown in 1971. But I expect it’s been wiped. I’m still waiting, in a way, for a real, honest account to turn up in an archive, by one of these people, of why they did what they did. I think it might, even now, reveal too much about the wider demoralisation of the British governing classes. I have never forgotten the way in which establishment figures such as Graham Greene (whose brother Hugh had been a really destructive Director-General of the BBC) more or less openly sympathised with Philby.
On other subjects, I think the important point about the cannabis debate, which is now viewable on YouTube, is that this much is clear: There is no clear-cut case for legalisation. The arguments advanced as certainties by its supporters are all open to serious question. In which case, surely the wise thing is to retain the status quo. Once legalised, it could never be re-banned, or only with grave difficulty.
The general civility of the debate (greater than takes place when we discuss the matter here in writing) is easily explained. First, jests, sarcasm and teasing are easily understood in spoken language, and often unnoticed in written language. An actual human being, with a face and voice, is bound to engage some of the sympathies even of his opponents, in the flesh. The same person’s ideas, coldly expressed in print, come with no such filter. I think it quite permissible to hit hard at ideas I disagree with, and don’t mind the same in return. And in written exchanges, this will happen much more than in personal ones. Mr Reynolds and I continue to disagree strongly with each other, and to dislike the other’s arguments. But that does not mean we hate each other.
As to who ‘won’, well, Mr Reynolds won the vote – but my pre-debate survey showed that most of the audience had already smoked dope and could be assumed to be partial. So perhaps I swung more opinions. In fact, ‘winning’ in such events is as important as the final score in ‘Have I Got news for You’ – not important at all. The point is, has it made anyone think, or helped anyone think?
I’d just like to offer a brief opinion on other thing. Why have our soldiers been dying in such large numbers in Afghanistan, after a long period with few casualties? They should of course not be there at all, but I had assumed that the government, realising this, had instructed their commanders to take fewer risks with lives. This seems not to be so.
From what I can see from the TV, the people of Carterton are making a praiseworthy effort to show their respects to the returning dead. But as they are compelled to do so on a suburban grass verge on the edge of that town, they cannot possibly replicate the scenes which used to take place in Wootton Bassett. The cortege is (deliberately in my view) routed out of RAF Brize Norton by a back gate and away from the centre of Carterton. The official excuses for this route are pitiful and embarrassing. I still think this is shocking and wrong.
How small Tahrir Square turns out to be. How scruffy and modest it is. It could be in Bradford or Sheffield, if it were not for the wistful, sad Egyptian sunlight and the gentle, dusty chaos that lies over almost everything in Cairo. Television broadcasts, like the photographs in estate agents’ windows, have a way of making places look bigger than they really are. They also make them look simpler.
Just a few months ago a great revolution took place here, or seemed to. A mighty despot fell. The world gasped. Freedom and democracy, we were told, had come to Egypt.
But what really happened? And how will it affect us, in our safe and stable cities under our cool grey skies? Was it just a melodrama of shouting and posturing? Or has the world actually changed?
I sought to find out in this confusing, shocking city, so vast that its population, 17 million, is greater than that of many European countries, so old that parts of it pre-date the Bible.
Cairo is a puzzle, an education and perhaps a warning. In the warm November dusk, some beautifully restored streets of the old city could be in Seville. A few of its grander squares and avenues are like Paris, distinctly European in shape and atmosphere, much closer to Italy than to the great cities of the Islamic world.
But look closer and you find the sad neglect, the crumbling pavements and unpainted facades that are so common in this part of the planet – private affluence and public squalor. And where a European city would have churches, Cairo has mosques, even if some of them are incongruously flanked by branches of a cheeky chain of wine shops called Drinkies.
Here you may get a disturbing preview of what an Islamic Europe might be like if it comes to pass. Other areas are a little like communist Moscow in a heatwave – glowering offices and blocks of flats, colossal military bases and academies, secluded special clubs and hospitals for various favoured elites set in their own walled estates, grandiose murals recording military victories – the concrete legacy of Egypt’s long Cold War flirtation with the former Soviet Union.
But a short distance away the ordered grandeur, and the Russian regimentation, both stop abruptly and give way to half-Middle Eastern, half-African claustrophobia and chaos, with tiny dwellings piled crookedly on top of each other and scruffy little cafes where each glass of tea comes with its own free cloud of flies.
Even lower down the scale are the great ‘Cities of the Dead’, cemeteries still in use, but where the hopelessly poor live, eat and sleep among long streets of ornate tombs.
Beyond this macabre zone, hastily built and largely illegal suburbs of crude red brick eat into the lovely green floodplain of the Nile, wasting some of the most fertile land in Africa, until they wash up in a drift of tourist tat at the feet of the Pyramids. If it were not for the commercial power of tourism and the supervision of the United Nations, people would be living in the Pyramids too.
Nowhere else in the world is like this. You cannot put it in any category. It is both modern and ancient.
It contains cosmopolitan thinkers, familiar with the ideas and fashions of Chicago and Shanghai. And it houses near-medieval peasants, with a shaky grasp of the outside world but a deep knowledge of the Koran.
Perhaps most important of all, this is much more of a real nation than most other Arab countries, with a long and distinct history and a strong, genuine patriotism. It is part of Arabia, but it is also very much a state in its own right, not a series of lines drawn in the sand by departing imperialists.
Out of this series of paradoxes and contradictions, how do you make a society? Can you have a democracy at all, and if so would it be a good idea?
The modern world tends to answer ‘Yes’ to both questions because the modern world doesn’t think too hard about what makes the West free and prosperous. Is it, in fact, democracy?
And are revolutions always good? Well, they are impossible to reverse. Everyone, every institution linked with the old regime of ex-President Hosni Mubarak, is now dismissed with the contemptuous word ‘f’loul’ (it rhymes with ‘pool’).
This means a combination of things: ‘has-been’, ‘discredited’, ‘counter-revolutionary’ and ‘unwanted’, with undertones of corruption and tyranny. If you are one of these, then you are well advised to keep quiet, for now at least.
Strangely, it does not apply to the military that actually propped up Mubarak. They are known by their English acronym SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces). They are let off because of their superb timing. They dropped Mubarak just in time, and sided with the crowd, or mob, who called for his dismissal. But I was told by a well connected source that their real target was Mubarak’s younger son and would-be heir, Gamal. The army disliked Gamal and had for years chafed at the idea that he would take over.
But the old president had waved away the advice of his generals. The generals saw Tahrir Square as a way of destroying Gamal – now in prison – while preserving the essential parts of their power. That is why they have been so keen, since then, to keep the revolution within tight limits.
Informed Cairo rumour, nearly as good as news, says that the ex-president is now being royally treated in hospital. And the trial of Mubarak has been postponed again and again, suggesting that the military hope the old man – he is 83 and far from well – will die before too much truth comes out, and before a verdict is reached.
No new president will be elected until 2013, by which time the army should have agreed on a candidate.
As Sally Toma, one of the original revolutionaries, puts it: ‘They used us.’
Sally is a striking woman, and unusual in not wearing the headscarf that is virtually compulsory for females in Egypt. In quieter times she is a psychiatrist and an expert in cognitive behavioural therapy. Now she analyses her country, saying: ‘They couldn’t have removed Mubarak without us. We couldn’t have removed him without them.’
But she fears the old Mubarak party machine will re-emerge under new names, predicting that the elections will be ‘a disaster’.
And while this curious revenge drama proceeds, the army is the supervisor and controller of the sinister limbo in which Egypt now finds itself.
Towering over the Nile, the burnt-out headquarters of the old ruling National Democratic Party reminds the city of the dangers of chaos. No effort has been made to clean it up, or to remove the cadavers of burnt vehicles from its forecourt. It is as if someone wants to make the nation’s flesh creep. This could happen again. It could be worse next time. As one revolutionary said to me: ‘This is a frightened society.’
In the coming poll, dozens of parties are preparing to contest long and wearisome parliamentary elections. There are more than 50 parties, many of them in complex alliances with each other, plus hundreds of independents, fielding more than 6,000 candidates for 498 seats in the People’s Assembly, the lower house, and 270 seats in the Shura Council, the upper house.
Supposedly because the SCAF cannot guarantee order in the whole country at once, the polls will take place in three regional rounds, beginning on November 28 and not finishing until January 10 next year.
Meanwhile, the vital tourist trade shrivels as Western visitors nervously watch TV footage of riots and massacres on the Cairo streets, and wonder if anyone is in charge. Perhaps Turkey would be better this year, they conclude, and thousands of Egyptian families wonder where their next meal is coming from.
Egypt’s fantastic bureaucracy, already horrible, has become even worse as nobody wants to take responsibility for anything. So business suffers. Prices have risen sharply, making life that little bit more miserable. But the thing that everyone complains of, high and low, rich and poor, is that the country has become less safe since the old order fled. In the stately old Al-Azhar Mosque, dossers slumber in the pillared courtyard. They would have been moved on in Mubarak’s days.
In Cairo’s middle-class heart, professionals look on with dislike and apprehension as teenagers from the city’s slums invade their once-select districts. Parking and traffic laws, planning regulations, restrictions on street-trading, all seem to have vanished, leaving a general impression that authority has gone on holiday.
The most spectacular sufferers are the Copts, Egypt’s huge minority of ancient Christians, who make up ten to 15 per cent of the population of 82 million, and proudly point out that they were in the country centuries before Islam had been invented. Under Mubarak, they were reasonably well protected, though there were serious outbreaks of anti-Copt violence a year ago. But now they feel very nervous.
As in all Muslim countries where Christians are a minority, it is difficult to find out how bad things are. Muslim ‘tolerance’ of other religions, never very generous, has always been offered in return for submission. Keep quiet, and we’ll just about let you survive. Complain, and you’re in trouble.
So I will not give the real name of Pierre, the young Copt who, speaking softly in a city-centre cafe, explains that many professions are closed to him, a problem that has grown worse in the past 30 years as militant Muslims have grown more common in Egypt.
He does not look or dress differently from his Muslim fellow citizens, though he has a small blue cross tattooed on the inside of his wrist. This is a sign he can show other Christians and it is useful to the guards of Coptic churches, screening worshippers for dangerous infiltrators. But there have been cases of thugs demanding to examine the wrists of suspected Christians and, finding these crosses, beating them severely.
‘We were very optimistic about the revolution. We thought it would bring us justice,’ Pierre says. ‘But we are the ones who lost most. Since the revolution, the Salafi Muslim militants and the Muslim Brotherhood have become politically ambitious. All Egyptians are being hurt by religious extremists.’
When a Coptic church was destroyed by angry Muslims in the Aswan district in October, the authorities helped the Christians rebuild it. But Pierre complains that they did not punish the culprits.
‘So it will happen again. If nobody is prosecuted, there will be more of these attacks, and it will get worse for the Copts.’
This is not idle talk. A few days after the church was destroyed the Copts massed around the state television station in Cairo to protest against the destruction of the Aswan church. Some Muslim eyewitnesses have told me, convincingly, that among the thousands of Copts were people prepared for violence, with rocks and Molotov cocktails. But that cannot excuse what happened next.
Soldiers drove armoured cars into the protesters, crushing people to death – and while they did so an anchorwoman on the main TV channel was urging ‘honourable citizens’ to defend the army against Coptic attack.
Pierre recalls: ‘And the thugs responded, and came out carrying knives and clubs, and started beating us up.’
The same TV station never showed any footage of the appalling carnage that was going on yards from its studios, and also just yards from pleasure boats, full of dancers, cruising along the Nile. At least 27 died. Some witnesses claim they saw thugs throwing corpses into the river.
Another Copt joked bitterly to me that if the country’s Christians were such good fighters that the powerful, US-equipped army needed to be defended against them, they should obviously replace the army on Egypt’s border in future.
Less humorously, a senior figure in the Egyptian elite suggested to me with a straight face that mysterious armed men had swarmed out of boats up the banks of the Nile, and had seized the armoured cars from the soldiers before using them to shoot and crush the protesters.
The person involved was so well connected, and the story so ludicrous, that I will spare his blushes. The only reason for such rubbish gaining currency – and in censored societies all kinds of hogwash quickly gain the status of truth – is that the army is deeply embarrassed about its behaviour. So it should be.
The question that nobody can answer is what this really means. Pierre’s view is harsh and simple. ‘We are scared of the coming elections because of Islamic involvement in political life. But it is not only us. All the liberals in Egypt are afraid of what is coming.’
Certainly the military seems to have allowed Muslim intolerance to rampage through the streets. Many reports of the Tahrir Revolution were coy – or silent – about the daubing of Jewish Stars of David on pictures of Mubarak. You can still see scribbles on the walls near Tahrir Square that make this connection. One, decorated with two stars, says baldly: ‘Mubarak is a traitor for keeping links with Israel.’
Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel has always been hated by the masses. This is a country where loathing of Jews, and venomous resentment of the Jewish state, are common among all classes.
And this is a big difficulty. For Egypt’s elite made their cold but practical peace with Jerusalem in return for £30 billion in American aid, cash that has sustained them in power for years.
Egypt’s proud patriotism is nowadays mainly based on the cult of the October War of 1973. That was when Egyptian troops drove the Israelis back from the Suez Canal, and overcame the burning shame of their rout at Jewish hands in the Six Day War of 1967.
Yet in September, Cairo’s Israeli embassy (hidden on the top of a suburban block of flats) was sacked by angry demonstrators. It took hours – and American top-level intervention – before Egyptian commandos rescued the besieged staff.
This is a shameful breach of the Vienna Convention, under which all states are obliged to defend the embassies of foreign countries on their soil. It is also a sign that the Egyptian state may not be able or willing to sustain this bargain for much longer.
What does the Egyptian elite think? Well, the man who scaled the building and ripped down the Israeli flag, Ahmad al-Shahat, is a national hero and has been given a flat, a job at a quarry and a commemorative plaque by his local provincial governor, in recognition of his illegal act.
And those who attacked the embassy with hammers (all new, and all the same brand) have been given suspended sentences by a military court. Islamic militancy is on the loose, directed against its external and internal enemies. But when you talk to, say, the official spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Freedom Party – modelled on Turkey’s successful AK Party – any certainty about anything vanishes in a fog of emollient phrases.
In his peaceful, ornate apartment in a pleasant Cairo district, the devoutly bearded Dr Mahmoud Ghozlan is endlessly reassuring. His movement has been unfairly demonised by the regime over the years. There will be changes if his party is in charge – the borders of Gaza will be opened, the Israeli peace treaty will be revised, the Americans will not be able to use Egypt to interrogate suspects, but nothing fundamental will change, at home or in diplomacy. The Copts have nothing to fear from a Muslim Brotherhood government. ‘We have lived with them for 15 centuries. We are fellow Egyptians.’
I have the feeling I so often get with Islam’s more genial spokesmen, that I am not being told everything and that maybe another message is being passed to the voters. It is impossible to know for sure. There is, however, no doubt that many Copts are emigrating, or thinking of it. I would rely rather more on their actions than on reassuring words from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Of course there are other parties. And they too have their doubts. Amr Azz, a 28-year-old candidate for one of the many democratic parties, told me in his sparse shop-front headquarters that the Muslim Brotherhood ‘speak differently in the foreign media. They have more than one face’.
But shopkeepers and passers-by near his office echo the familiar themes of the ordinary Egyptian – life has grown more dangerous, jobs are few and prices have got higher. It sometimes feels as if the authorities want people to associate their new freedom with insecurity and poverty, so that they begin to wish for a return to a more rigidly ordered society.
And my own brief straw poll showed a strong feeling among Muslim Egyptians that the Muslim Brotherhood, now officially approved by the military, will do well in the elections, because it is the one force that seems likely to bring back some stability – and also because it is well organised and present in every village.
But will it win? I was given a fascinating prediction by one military insider, anxious not to be quoted. He said the Muslim Brotherhood hoped to win 31 per cent of the seats, as that would give it the power to dismiss the cabinet. But it does not want to win outright, as it would then have to take responsibility for the government.
That might taint its hard-bought reputation, gained over many decades, for purity and cleanliness. Like most people, it prefers power without responsibility – and the generals may be willing to cohabit with the Muslim Brotherhood as long as they do not have to give too much away. The mystery remains, as to how much they will have to give for such a deal.
How much colder can the peace with Israel get, without it turning into open hostility? How much can Egypt side with the Hamas regime in Gaza without provoking actual war? Can Egypt’s long and lucrative relationship with the United States survive if this important country abandons moderation, and joins the Islamic militants?
And if the spirit of Tahrir Square is suppressed by a new authoritarian regime, as corrupt as the old one, will the revolutionaries take to the streets again, this time without restraint?
These are the forces released by the Cairo uprising. Will those who applauded them at the start be quite so pleased if they now catch fire again, with all the alarming possibilities they offer?
What surprises me most, and continues to puzzle me, is why the Western world is so carelessly willing to wish revolutionary chaos on other people, from the safety of our rich and stable law-governed societies.
In response to Mr ‘Macabre’ ( and later to Mr Wooderson). I certainly don’t claim to be ‘impartial’ . I can’t imagine that anyone coming here thinks I am. The briefest study of this site will show that I am not, and do not claim to be . Nor do I have any duty to be impartial, as I am not financed by taxes or established in a position of unassailable monopoly by a Royal Charter. That is the BBC (and it is a duty they consistently fail to observe). I am an openly partial commentator writing for an openly conservative newspaper. I am against the taking of mind-altering drugs on many grounds, perhaps the most important of all being that if we are dissatisfied with the world as it is, we should endeavour to improve matters and improve ourselves, not hide from reality by frying our brains and becoming – what’s the phrase? - ah, yes, ‘comfortably numb’. There are many other reasons. I have discussed them before.
As for being ‘prejudiced’, Mr ‘Macabre’ would have to produce evidence that I had formed my judgements before establishing the facts. If he cannot (and I bet he cannot), ‘prejudice’ is just a word used by lazy conformist left-wing bigots to describe the reasoned opinions, based on facts and experience, of people who don’t agree with them. It is of no value in the argument.
As for ‘insults’, the identity of Mr ‘Macabre’ is a secret and he is in no way affected in his personal life by the hard things I say to him and about him. I cannot affect his reputation because nobody except him knows who he is. But in any case I have not ‘insulted’ him. I have not made remarks about his appearance, his parentage or anything of that kind. I have merely described him truthfully as what he appears to me to be – a self-seeking apologist for law-breaking, who is happy for others to suffer as the price for his pleasure.
If he doesn’t want to be described thus, he should not say such things or aid such a contemptible cause. As the old jibe goes , if he stops telling lies about me, then I’ll stop telling the truth about him.
I am amused that he thinks ethics are ‘irrelevant’. This is not a view I share. In my view ethics (and in my case Christian morals) are always ‘relevant’ in every moment and corner of life, but I suppose someone with his views would find it difficult to accept the idea that humanity is bound by an unalterable moral code which sometimes prevents people from doing things they want to do.
He says ’ There are millions of cannabis users in this country who would be willing to give their consent and participate in such tests. There are others who subject themselves to dangerous clinical trials of pharmaceutical drugs who would not think twice about participation here either.’
By ‘such tests’ he means tests in which people are given cannabis to discover if it makes them irreversibly mad. I don’t actually care if people are *willing* to undergo such tests. They could not be *permitted* to do so by any moral person. Were I a scientist, especially a qualified doctor of the sort who would be needed in any such study, I would have to say to such people ‘No, I cannot permit you to take this risk’. I would assume that anyone willing to do so had rendered himself unfit to decide by revealing such a recklessness about his own self-preservation. I suppose if these volunteers were cannabis users, as Mr ‘Macabre’ breezily assumes they would be, their attitude would provide something pretty close to proof of an association between that drug and insanity.
I think there is quite enough circumstantial evidence against cannabis (see, yet again Robin Murray, the Swedish Army Survey, the South London Longitudinal survey etc etc etc) to argue wise caution on the part of the state on calls for ‘decriminalisation’. Apart from anything else, once made legal, cannabis could never realistically be made illegal again (as these campaigners well know). It is very difficult to re-ban something that has been unbanned. So as we are lucky enough to have a law, all we need, when examining calls for its destruction, is wisdom and normal caution.
Mr ‘Macabre’ is kind enough to repeat my jibe about the unsurprisingness of the connection between cannabis and mental illness. Good. I think it rather a good point, neatly made. But of course he does not understand it, so gripped is he by his prejudice in favour of self-destruction.
He says, first quoting me, : ‘ "…given that cannabis is not an innocent gardening aid, furniture polish, cooking oil or birdseed, in which a capacity to send its users mad might be a bit of a shock,"
I never argued cannabis was any of these things”
No he didn’t, but then again, I never said he did. My point was simply that it is hardly surprising that a drug which messes with your brain….messes with your brain. Some substances turn out to be unexpectedly and surprisingly dangerous in ways people would not have expected, such as industrial chemicals or asbestos. But cannabis, like its friend and ally tobacco, isn’t one of them. Smokers must have had a pretty good idea, as, racked by appalling coughs and gurgling with phlegm, they lit up the first of the day, that this thing wasn’t good for their lungs or throats. Cannabis users, as they zonk their brain cells, must have a pretty good idea that this activity might have a long-term baleful effect on their ability to think and reason. And that if it affects their brain, a notoriously sensitive and easily-damaged organ, it might also be hurting that brain.
So when great piles of correlation show that cannabis users fail at school, suffer panic attacks, think they are persecuted and (of course) become highly sensitive to criticism and unable to cope with opposing points of view, and that some of them become so seriously ill that they become permanently delusional and irrational, and incapable of leading proper lives, it might be reasonable to connect the two. Indeed, it might be irrational and self-seeking self-deception to *refuse* to connect the two.
He then quotes me again "but is sold on the basis that it is a powerful mind-altering drug, as indeed it is. Well, I never. A powerful mind-altering drug that upsets people's mental health. I mean to say, who would ever have thought it ?" and adds; ‘Well I imagine the answer to that would be you. But without the evidence, sans an "unethical" experiment, a thought would be all that your case amounts to.’
Well, I think one or two other people might have managed to form a similar opinion. And as for his attempted jeer that ‘a thought would be all that your case amounts to’, I’d say *some* thought, certainly – a process apparently driven out of his contributions by a raging, all-consuming self-interest in his own uninterrupted and unrestricted pleasure, and who cares who pays, or how?
Correlation, as it happens, is the foundation of epidemiology and the method first used to discover the causes of cholera and lung cancer. The fact that correlation is not causation does not mean that correlation means *no* causation. Does it now? If Mr ‘Macabre’ wishes to launch upon the world this revolting and dangerous poison, notorious for centuries for its baleful effects on its users, the burden of proof that it is safe lies on him. He cannot ever prove that (though apparently he is prepared to risk irreparably ruining the lives of his human guinea pigs to try to do so). So it must stay illegal. Now I begin to see the meaning of his pseudonym. Macabre indeed. Dr Feelgood meets Dr Mengele.
Mr Wooderson joins in : ‘Continually repeating the absurd claim that anyone who advocates reform of the drug laws must be doing it for entirely self-interested reasons doesn't make it any more true.’
The claim is not absurd. In almost all cases it is absolutely correct. I find most people tend to discredit arguments offered by pesons who are concealing a substantial personal interest in the outcome of a debate. I don’t see why this shouldn’t apply here. I have no interest here at all, save the protection of my fellow-creatures from a needless evil. And that is not selfish, and it is not secret. I say it again and again because it is true, and because of Mandelson’s law, that you have to keep on saying something till you yourself are sick of the sound of it, before most people hear what you are saying. Oh, and the fact that it always annoys people such as Mr Wooderson suggests to me that it discomfits and disturbs them. Good.
The fact that he then advances a whole load of feeble and exploded ‘arguments’ which have been repeatedly and patiently dealt with, cut to pieces, shredded and pushed down the plumbing here ( see index) shows that we are in some way dealing with a force of unreason. If it is not motivated by selfishness (the most powerful shaper of irrational opinions) , then I can think of one or two other explanations which are even less complimentary. I will leave him to guess what they might be.
But one of the great frustrations of this weblog is that I can repeatedly, with facts and logic, destroy various cases advanced here. And a few days or weeks later, I then see them advanced again, often by the same people, as if I had never taken the trouble. This is called ‘being unresponsive’. I have criticised this bad habit, so damaging to debate, many times before. I think I’m rather patient with this sort of thing.
My favourite secondhand bookshop has once again delivered an unexpected delight – a vintage copy of Vance Packard’s ‘Hidden Persuaders’, one of those books you think you’ve read and haven’t. I remember being repeatedly urged to read it back in the 1960s, when it was already quite old. In fact it’s still very fresh. The advertising and market research techniques that it exposes are still very much in use, though Colour TV has made them infinitely more effective. And we are still not armoured against them.
In fact the continuing success of supermarkets, a sort of mass hypnosis under which we repeatedly buy large piles of things we don’t really need, and which are not as nice as they look, is a tribute to our willingness to be seduced by clever lighting, cunning use of colour and the strange power of large heaps of goods to make us want to buy those goods.
I have a simple technique for dealing with this, much like Ulysses’s neat trick for listening to the lovely music of the Sirens without being lured on the rocks and killed.
Well not that much like, as supermarkets don’t lure you to your death, just into excessive spending. But vaguely like it. I simply make it physically impossible for temptation to work. Ulysses stuffed his crew’s ears with wax and commanded them to lash him to the mast of his ship while they sailed by, so he could hear the beautiful singing and survive. There’s a rather horrible picture of this scene from The Odyssey, in Manchester City Art Gallery. The Sirens, a good deal cheekier and much more lightly clad than most women in Victorian art, sit smirking and carolling amid the decaying corpses of their past victims, while an enraptured Ulysses strives to burst his bonds and his grumpy crew sail on by with their plugged ears, well aware they’re missing a great performance.
But I digress. My infallible device for resisting supermarket attempts to lower my blink rate and soothe me into idiotic lavish buying is this. I go to the supermarket by bicycle. With only a modest basket and a backpack in which to carry my purchases, I am forced to buy only what I really need. I try as hard as I can to buy as much as possible from proper butchers, bakers and greengrocers, buying from supermarkets only those things I can’t get anywhere else. Making a shopping list is also useful – and it is interesting that this old practice was almost entirely killed off by the spread of supermarkets.
I am of the British generation which can remember the days before supermarkets, days of small refrigerators, string bags, parcels and actual grocers with counters. The last one of these I can remember is a pleasant corner grocery in the Coventry suburb of Earlsdon, back in 1976. It had a bacon-slicer and a coffee grinder, and a pleasant aroma. In Oxford in the late 1960s, Sainsbury’s still had a counter, and assistants standing behind it who fetched things from shelves, rather than let you do it yourself. Small grocers, catering to students and little old ladies, would still sell four ounces of butter, cut, weighed and wrapped. Too unhygienic now, of course.
But the relationship between buyer and seller was more direct and, I think, more honest. In still remembea triumphant momentina shop in Swindon where a shopkeeper, assuming rightly that I was a callow recently-graduated student, but assuming wrongly that I'd never done my own housekeeping before, tried to sell me a bag of soft, decayed onions. When I pointed out the problem she swiftly replaced them, and never tried any such tricks on me again. Cunning supermarket packaging (especially of fruit) often prevents you realising your apples have been two years in cold store, and will turn to mush within hours of being taken out of the chill cabinet, until it is too late.
We all know (or knew) about butchers pressing the scales with their thumbs (canny shoppers would sarcastically suggest that if the butcher’s thumb was on the scale, then perhaps he would chop it off and include it in the parcel with the scrag end of neck). And in George Orwell’s ‘Coming Up For Air, there’s the old joke about the Methodist grocer’s bedtime litany :
Grocer: ‘Have you sanded the sugar?’
Wife : ‘Yes’
Grocer : ‘Have you watered the treacle?’
Wife: ‘I have’
Grocer: ‘Then come up to prayers’
But the moderately wily person could cope with all that sort of thing. The thing most of us can’t cope with is marketing men getting inside our heads while we’re not looking, and persuading us to do things we wouldn’t normally do, while imagining we are making our own decisions.
There is a very enjoyable section in ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ on the campaign to rehabilitate the prune, and the ways used to get Americans to buy this unlovely comestible after it had gone out of fashion . I wonder if this would have been possible in Britain – where the infliction of stewed prunes on several disgusted generations, and the grim portrayal of militant and aggressive prunes in the matchless Molesworth books, have surely driven the hated prune from our tables forever.
There are also interesting reflections on silly mistakes which advertisers used to make, before they began to consult market research men and psychologists. You can see here why such semi-sciences as psychology and sociology have become so important in our universities in the last 60 years or so. They have powerful and lucrative commercial and political applications.
Packard’s description of the extraordinarily rapid advanced of these techniques into politics is of course the most crucial part of the book. And his mentions of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and one of the most significant men of the 20th century, are particularly fascinating. Adam Curtis’s brilliant TV programme (yes, they exist, see below) ‘The Century of the Self’ rightly dwelt on Bernays, the father of propaganda, who invented the expression ‘the engineering of consent’ to describe what PR men do. Implicit in all this is a contempt for the basic ideas of ‘democracy’, i.e. that the people should rule, combined with an outward respect for its forms. Thus the people are manipulated into deciding what the elite wants them to decide anyway. And this is then called the people’s will, and used to legitimise various types of elite government.
They are also made to do things by being tricked into thinking that they are rebelling while they are being manipulated. People love to think of themselves as rebels, especially while they are conforming, which explains both the huge continuing market for denim jeans, and the unending fantasy of left-wing establishment types that their modish, hackneyed ideas are ‘dangerous’ and nonconformist’.
Bernays’s campaign to start women smoking in public by staging a ‘march’ demanding a woman’s ‘right’ to smoke in public was an effective example of this. I wonder how many painful early deaths resulted from this piece of genius. His technique of using more or less bogus ‘surveys’ to create opinion and demand is also still very much in use.
Now to TV. First, there’s no question that some TV programmes, considered in their own right, are good. I hope the ones I’ve been involved in making were good, both in content, nature and purpose. Secondly, as I’ve said elsewhere, a person such as me, who wishes TV had never been invented, is not debarred by that belief from appearing on it now that it *has* been invented. By refusing to do so, I wouldn’t uninvent it. I would simply deprive my cause of a useful platform.
But there are caveats to this. TV-watching is usually habitual. That is to say, once someone has sat down in front of the TV he does not want to get up and start doing something else. Why, he isn’t even required to rise from his seat to change the channel any more. I‘m sometimes surprised that adult nappies aren’t sold to allow people to watch continually without having to take physical needs breaks.
So the ‘wonderful nature programmes’ which are the justification for allowing little Barnaby to plant himself in front of a vast plasma screen with a bowl of ice-cream will usually turn out to be a pretext. Barnaby may start with Polar Bears and David Attenborough. But it won’t be long before he is slumped, slack-jawed and with dilated pupils, in front of the cartoons as his brain turns to grey goo and his imagination shrivels, atrophies and dies. The wonderful cartoon strip ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ has some superb satires on this, as well as on the appalling sugar-crammed cereals that form so much of the childish diet.
If TV could, in practice be treated like (say) alcohol, and kept in a locked cupboard away from the children, then it would be much less harmful. Most of its damage is done in the child’s formative years (I recommend here my chapter on the Telescreen in ‘The Abolition of Britain’, some of it based on Neil Postman’s superb book ‘Entertaining Ourselves to Death’).
But this is most unlikely. TV’s hypnotic, soothing power makes it an immensely tempting child minding tool, the Third Parent in every home, a place where the child can be left transfixed and quiet, safe from physical danger on the traffic-infested street or out in the paedophile-haunted parks and countryside. The trouble is that that the TV is itself so mentally dangerous, at least as mentally dangerous as the outside world is physically dangerous, and more pernicious because its harms aren’t obvious.
And since TV began to be broadcast in colour, even the most appalling dross looks warm and tempting on the screen. It is because its power to do harm cannot be controlled, and because very few humans have the will to resist it, that I wish it had never been invented.
I say this largely to stress to people just how dangerous and damaging TV is. I have no hope that it will be abolished. But I do think there is some hope that a substantial minority will start to resist it, and safeguard their children from it.
Those in doubt might like to read Ray Bradbury’s disturbing satirical novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (nothing whatever to do with the awful Michael Moore), and/or watch the film that Francois Truffaut made of it. It is about a society in which books are illegal, and TV (on huge wall-size screens much like those we now have but almost unimaginable when Bradbury was writing in 1953) is virtually compulsory. Robert Redford’s very clever film ‘Quiz Show’ also makes a good job of portraying the corrupting effect of TV on civilised thought and on education. The moment when the TV arrives in the home of the poet Mark van Doren ( beautifully played by Paul Scofield) is heartbreaking. It is the end of a golden age of thought, reading and conversation, and the beginning of a plastic age of trivia and cheating.
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