A Desire For The Good

Peter Hitchens writes:

The electronic mob has swung behind me for once. I, the Hated Peter Hitchens, am being pelted with praise on Twitter, for my recent assault on the Prime Minister and his contradictory, infantile and self-righteous desire to drop nice bombs on Damascus.

Nice bombs, by the way, explode, burn, kill, bereave, crush, rip, tear, scorch, amputate, maim, disfigure and disembowel in exactly the same way as ordinary bombs. But they have been launched by nice people in a good cause, so they are nicer than nasty bombs, in some mystical way.

I suspect the distinction is only visible inside the minds of those who demand that they be launched, and those who order them to be launched. I doubt very much if the service personnel who obey the orders (who tend to be free of illusions) can see the difference. And I am sure that those on the receiving end cannot.

But leave that to one side.

A lot of this praise is qualified with a formula that runs something like this. ‘Never thought I’d agree with Peter Hitchens’. ‘I’ll have to lie down now that I’ve found myself agreeing with Peter Hitchens’, or ‘Amazing that Peter Hitchens has written something intelligent’.

Something similar happened in the pre-Twitter days of the Blair war on Iraq. Those who opposed the invasion eventually noticed that I too opposed it. I was even invited to speak on the platform at a ‘Stop the War’ rally. I declined, partly because (as I put it to them) I opposed the war for what they saw the ‘wrong reasons’.

These were not pacifism (I am not a pacifist, and haven’t been one since my teens, when I quickly realised the huge and – to me – unacceptable implications of adopting this admirable position).

I saw it as an assault on national sovereignty which wasn’t in the interests of my country or of the USA, and for which no reasonable case had been made.

Also I couldn’t possibly speak from the same platform as those who denied Israel’s right to exist, especially as they claimed that the state resulting from Israel’s removal would be a ‘Free Palestine’. Whatever that state would be, I think we could guarantee absolutely that  it wouldn’t be free.  I couldn’t then, and can’t now, see what this questionable cause has to do with a desire for peace in the Middle East, a goal which depends entirely upon reasonable compromise.

The BBC, which had until the Iraq war been giving me an increasing number of invitations to discussion programmes, suddenly all but ceased to ask me on. It was faced with the impossible calculation which runs as follows : ‘Right wing person=bad person. Opponent of war = good person . This does not compute. He cannot realty exist. Do not invite him on.’

For about two years, my invitations dwindled to almost nothing, except when they came from half-witted researchers who rang me up to ask me to defend the invasion, or the ‘war on terror’, or bombing, or torture, or Guantanamo, despite the fact that my easily-available published work opposed all these things. When I did occasionally get on to panel shows, audiences and presenters were often puzzled, as they also are by my attacks on the Tory Party.

The football or boxing-match model of politics seems to have entirely taken hold. You are on one side or the other. If you diverge, you have gone over to the other side.

Life is not actually like that.

But of course my new Twitter admirers of today know in their hearts that I am a monstrous reactionary. So while they cannot fault the facts or logic of my attack on the Syrian war, they are chary of giving me any kind of general endorsement, just as I am chary of welcoming their applause.

Mind you, a lot of the Left never read my own paper, the Mail on Sunday, or its sister the Daily Mail. Few even know that they are separate publications and that I write for only one of them. They prefer to excoriate them from a safe distance. If they did read them, they would know (apart from anything else) that both papers are pluralistic in offering prominent platforms to several different views, and that there are strong divergences among conservative voices.

Melanie Phillips and I, for instance, disagree quite strongly about the ‘war on terror’, Iran and the Iraq war. Max Hastings, Stephen Glover and I have all been among those urging caution over Syria. Quentin Letts tends to be a more traditional Tory, as does Andrew Roberts. The Daily Mail’s leader column last week was strongly critical of the rush to war. The MoS was highly doubtful about the Blair war, and was also among the very first in criticising the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, and publishing the disturbing pictures of kneeling, shackled, blindfolded prisoners there.  It has also taken a strong pro-liberty line in domestic matters, as have I.

No doubt many left wing anti-war people would dislike my stance on mass immigration (though they might be surprised by my consistent positions on liberty, identity cards and the forcing down of wages). I expect they would be hostile to my views on education largely because I voice them (though grammar schools are surely fairer to the poor than selection by wealth as we have now). I expect my most profound division with most left-wing people would come over the sexual revolution and illegal drugs.

This is because the modern left, far from being a social democratic movement dedicated to the  bettering of the lives of the poor,  has become , above all things, a liberationist movement dedicated to the greatest possible personal autonomy.

This autonomy, as it happens, cannot readily co-exist with strong monocultural settled nation states with powerful conscience-driven moral systems; nor can it coexist with a strong and influential Christianity, or with the tightly-knit united married families prescribed by that system.

That is why the greatest and most urgent passions of the left are often engaged in denouncing the Christian religion (sometimes dressed up with a bit of anti-Islamism, but essentially aiming at the Christian faith because it is the one whose strength or weakness affects them personally), and in pursuing a globalist multicultural internationalism.  

And yet many of the left are also still as disgusted as I am by war. Their post-Christian ethic still rightly sees war as an evil in itself, very hard to justify. When their more advanced thinkers (like my late brother, and like whoever wrote Anthony Blair’s Chicago speech on the ‘Responsibility to Protect’) take these beliefs to their logical conclusions – namely idealistic war and nice bombs – they balk. In fact they are balking at a consequence of their own beliefs, the pursuit of globalism, the dismantling of borders and nations, the dismissal of absolute prohibitions on ends justifying means.

Good for them. But it will plainly take more than this to get them to question their own beliefs.

I don’t mind at all if these people loathe me personally. I can even see why they do. I used to be like them. But to any of them who like what I say about the Syria war, I make one request. Now read my books, read this indexed and archived blog. See if anything else I say might possibly make sense.  Ask yourselves if the thing we have in common – a desire for the good – might perhaps be more important in the long run than the things which divide us. And let thought take the place of thoughtless, ill-informed scorn.