peter hitchens blog

Because the democracies, feeble and duplicitous as they were, were even so too scrupulous about what they would agree to. Peter Hitchens' Half Hour | 01-August-22 - YouTube There is no vague catch-all clause under which the actions of the Rada could be declared constitutional. ***Has it? I have generally felt more light-hearted in France, for that reason. It is the best thing about it. There just is not aVatican which can declare one or other of us correct, and the other a heretic. Comments (6) It was a progressive cause. Hence my use of the different term left-wing. I tried to get the attention of MPs, but, as usual, they were not interested. In fact I obviously did not say this, as there are no pictures of the Gestapo-NKVD prisoner swap, and I doubt very much whether the prisoners looked happy. Gay people were sent to death camps. I mean, come on! But we should not worship him as if he were a superhero - Mail Online - Peter . Even when they are, the loss will be permanent. Silly is an adequate reply to Amiss troubling and serious point. A Song of Ice and Fire. View blog Peter Hitchens . This is beyond doubt true. On the contrary, on the last days of February 2014, armed thugs many, if not most, heavily armed far-right and neo-Nazi activists from western Ukraine stormed Maidan square, killing and capturing police officers and forcing the hand of a government that, as well as being unpopular, was bankrupt and diplomatically isolated. It precedes the development of socialism either as an idea or as the ideology of any political faction or party. In that case he must stay in office, or those who wish him out of it, and will not rely on elections, must choose between two things. To a lesser extent, the axiom of "the woman's right . Both Stalin and Hitler, in reaching their pact, revealed that the wider public understanding of their ideologies (not least among the international left) was inadequate. Well, this is - in one way - a tribute to sheer determination. If those opponents (or indeed anyone else) stand in the way of the creation of the new world desired by these Godless Utopians, then it is therefore rational and permissible to kill and enslave them or to treat them in other ways which will lead rapidly to their deaths. PETER HITCHENS: Ken and Freda Walker, pictured, were tortured at their home in Derbyshire by Vasile Culea, 34. But several free and generally enlightened countries - including Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA - had also permitted it in various forms, and would in some cases carry on doing so into our own era. They agreed together to do it. April 16, 2023 , War on Drugs(alleged) Few people realise that we are the last nation in the world to have such a ceremony. ****PH: There are many layers to this. Sir Ian Kershaw, in his biography of Hitler, notes that the destitute future fuhrer, in pre-1914 Vienna, admired the *organisation* of the Austrian Social Democrats. It quite clearly and unequivocally deals, The inability of the President of Ukraine to exercise his or her authority, The President of Ukraine may be removed from office by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine by the procedure of impeachment, in the event that he or she commits state treason or other crime. Heinrich Heine's great prophecy of 1834 saw the Nazis coming a long way off: 'Christianity, and this is its greatest merit, has occasionally calmed the brutal German lust for battle, but it cannot destroy that savage joy. If, on the other hand, they had important things in common, that would not be so, and many might find the switch surprisingly easy (see the Leigh-Fermor reference below). I think this is important because if the KPD and NSDAP are simple opposites, divided by an impossible gulf of fundamental disagreement, then this would have involved mass changing of minds on an unprecedented scale. The issue here is that German middle-class conservatives, fooled as many were then, ***Has it? In November 1939. So why should the Americans be any keener? , Trotskyism It is important to reacl here that Yanukovych had offered early elections and had his offer rejected by the armed mob which was at that time governing the actions of the opposition. Secondly, Extreme is generally a subjective word we use about those whose politics we greatly dislike. On one side, here is the Red-Green fanatic Sir Keir Starmer, and his frightening and despotic claim to be 'the political wing of the British people'. Meanwhile, as far as I know this country is not at war with Russia. My point is wholly different. There were no police officers to be seen, as usual. It is that all ideas must be argued on their merits, and that all attempts to establish guilt by association should be regarded with suspicion. Wasnt their ghastly utopia of a racially-pure, eugenically-purged Germany precisely an attempt to create a new Aryan type of Man? Germanys famous wild inflation in the 1920s came after Berlin borrowed to pay for its aggressive war in 1914, hoping that conquest would pay the bills. Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog I am not a defender of the British government, in fact I despise it. Peter Hitchens blog The whole thing is remarkably specific. Professor Burgis: Finally, when it comes to the family, Peter Hitchens simply has no case. To imagine that we can defeat fascism by assisting a military victory of Chamberlain is like trying to cure cholera by plague. Were they on the side which said Man could be changed by power into something new, or the side which said that he could not? Peter Hitchens - Wikipedia This contradiction, baffling to outsiders, was never tested and never resolved in my hearing. In this case the Nazis have far more in common with the revolutionary Communist Left, which was also prepared to kill and destroy, in pursuit of its different Utopia, than they have with tinkering liberals or small-state, limited government conservatives. Stalin, Alexander Dubcek, Mao tse Tung, Clement Attlee, Olof Palme, Harold Wilson, Helmut Schmidt, Willi Brandt, Anthony Blair, Keir Starmer and many others have valid claims to be called socialist, but a dictionary definition which encompassed them all without a great deal of vagueness and even contradiction would be hard to find. The decision on the removal of the President of Ukraine from office by the procedure of impeachment is adopted by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine by no less than three-quarters of its constitutional composition (which was at no stage achieved) , after the review of the case by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (which did not take place) and the receipt of its opinion (which was not sought) on the observance of the constitutional procedure of investigation and consideration of the case of impeachment, and the receipt of the opinion of the Supreme Court that the acts, of which the President of Ukraine is accused, contain elements of state treason or other crime.. Eventually his Edna Everage act had its first success in Britain. , Marriage And that those who wish to use the Hitler era as a way of depriving others of legitimacy should understand that this period, precisely because it so throughly cast aside the restraints of Christian morality and duty, in both Berlin and Moscow, liberated many ideas from ancient, sometimes despised limits. Now we pay the price for that. To pray for someone is not to approve of them (we are instructed to pray for and love our enemies). Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams once called for him to be 'decommissioned' and Tony Blair told him to 'sit down and stop being bad'. It was only when people got in their way that the Bolsheviks revealed this tendency in themselves, though careful readers of Lenin might have guessed it. President Yanukovych was also legitimately elected. Like all bad Left-wing causes, they were very popular with students. ***. They were not necessarily referring to the Christian God. Has he read R. Palme Dutts November 1939 pamphlet Why This War? published by the Communist Party of Great Britain? (To see whats wrong with that one, ask yourself whether the German Democratic Republic was a democracy.). But I dont think it relaly helps much to all the Nazis socialist. Extermination is evil whoever is extermninated, whether it is based on racial, class or any other principle. The modern left disowns Eugenics. | Permalink, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11966835/PETER-HITCHENS-reveals-detective-novel-taught-NEVER-believe-says.html, April 13, 2023 Well, I shall never be a Royal adviser. , France They were demoralised by inflation which had destroyed their savings and pensions, by the poverty of blockade and defeat, and by the national humiliation of Versailles which had destroyed their standing and self-respect. I note that Ms Popova dispenses with constitutional propriety by stating However, the Ukrainian Constitutional Court has been highly politically dependent and its credibility has been low. | Permalink. The KPD was, As I have discussed elsewhere, drawing on Konrad Heiden, many former Communist who remained in Germany became actual Nazis. My late brother (who will crop up later in this argument) would occasionally use this expression, in those days often wrongly attributed to Marx himself. , Crime But I cannot join in the great torrent of unmixed praise which followed his recent death. I do not know. We had the chance to make her an ally, friend and partner. And, I might add, the nurses leader Pat Cullen is definitely not Florence Nightingale. Dutt here means, The British Marxist Brian Pearce remarked in his commentary Marxists in the Second World War, written under the pseudonym B. Farnborough, that during the entire period up to the Fall of France, the British Communist Party functioned as a propaganda agency for Hitler. An amazing fact emerges from Julia Boyds superb recent book Travellers In The Third Reich. I prefer not to quote it here.***. The old left-wing sneer (commonly used in my 50-years-gone Trotskyist days towards the National Front and similar movements of the time) was that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. It is Article 111, which reads (with notes on what happened and did not happen inserted by me in the text) : The President of Ukraine may be removed from office by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine by the procedure of impeachment, in the event that he or she commits state treason or other crime. But in broader society the Nazis were ready to accept motherhood outside wedlock, as Jill Stephenson notes in her study Women in Nazi Society (Croom Helm, London 1975). The Jacobins were famous for their mass murders of opponents, without any serious attempt at justice, not just the executions by guillotine, but mass drownings (noyades) too. A pension that would once have been reasonable if not generous shrivelled to a pittance. , First World War Hoyer writes :' Nobody was safe as entie families, blocks, streets and factories were wiped out. The wooden talisman is fast decaying; the day will come when it will break pathetically to pieces. (Though perhaps Churchill was a closet leftist, too after all, he also entered an alliance with Stalin in 1941!). Much of the modern Left is suspiciously hostile to Israel, for sins which they overlook in other countries. Humanity is multi-faceted and people respond in many different ways to such crises. I do not know. But I think his success comes from the loathing of the suburbs, of respectability and of becoming our parents. Professor Burgis: Hitler and Stalins brief pact was widely regarded by leftists around the world as a shocking betrayal of socialist principles. In the same spirit, hes argued in exchanges with historians who objected to his, If you use the argument that Hitler was right-wing, Professor Burgis: and he insinuates that leftists who speak out against Israels, Professor Burgis: One obvious point is that killing Communists who were accused (often falsely) of opposition to Stalin is a far cry from Hitler killing people. But were all or even most of the defections of this nature? This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column. , USSR She was transferred directly from the Gulag to Ravensbruck. I think that both systems also made it similarly complicated and difficult for workers to move from job to job. It was under Thatcher's reign passed the bill which unleashed the ambulance-chasing solicitors and killed-off legal aid. How Christian will the ceremony be? The conclusions and proposals of the temporary investigatory commission (which do not exist as there was no such commission) are considered at a meeting of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (which did not take place., as it had no such conclusions to consider) . Part of the brick structure dates from 1856. And they were far from unique in the world. This argument ( as I shall repeatedly stress) is much more about what people actually, There is another curious aspect of Utopianism where there is definitely an overlap between the 1930s Left and the Nazis, and this is the Eugenics movement, which at one stage led Marie Stopes, heroine of the contraceptive cause, to give Hitler a book of her ghastly love poems (In August 1939 she sent a copy of her, a telegram of 'respectful greetings' to Hitler, declaring that his 'far-seeing population policy based on racial hygiene and principles of heredity' would safeguard the future of the German nation. I wouldnt dream of disputing this. This project, we often forget, was brought in to reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease. For example, theres little doubt that Stalins man-made famine in 1932-33 was deliberately aimed at killing Russian and Ukrainian peasants in large numbers. Everyone knows how to tweak them. It was certainly made by von Papen, as his 1934 Marburg speech demonstrated. It was obvious that something had gone badly wrong at the funeral of the late Duke of Edinburgh, when the Queens Majesty was compelled by our Government of National Panic to sit alone with half her face concealed by a mask, which I must describe as probably useless. I know too much about the subject to put it so simply. On the murders of Communists, I was simply employing logic: If you use the argument that Hitler was right-wing because he killed Communists, which is exactly what my opponents contended, then you are in a difficulty unless you are also prepared to state that Stalin was right-wing because he killed Communists. Why are we in this? His first attempt at mocking his fellow Australians on British TV (he was ambitiously billed as a leading young comedian) was abruptly taken off the air midway through the segment. They were not, after all, the utter, irreconcilable enemies they pretended to be. In any case the Social Democrat Konrad Heiden makes no such excuse for the Beefsteak Nazis, in his contemporary account of the mass-defections - and nor does Patrick Leigh-Fermor (who really cannot be accused of being on one side or other in this debate but who was in Germany at the time and experienced it) in his contemporary account of one such in A Time of Gifts a former KPD street fighter who said of his comrades I was astonished how easily they all changed sides. I think that the selective condemnation of Israel for faults observable in many other countries, whoever does it, is a clear sign that its selective critics object to Israe's special character as a Jewish state. In normal times dozens of heavy, fast passenger and goods trains rumble across it every day. Ms Popova argues that The impeachment process is a drawn-out procedure that is reserved for cases when the president has committed treason or other crimes. Nazi Germany, in this case, was following the democracies. I think his position on the Inquisition tends to support my view rather than his. Professor Burgis: Hitchens writes that Stalin was also an anti-Semite and that some of the purges against supposed counterrevolutionaries particularly targeted Jews. But Germany lost. ***This is point-missing, on a prize-winning level. And they did this because their target supporters were the dispossessed - and so responded to organisations which offered them comradeship, welfare, music, warmth and sometimes even food. Karl Marx himself was famously anti-Semitic. I must correct the impression that a courageous popular response to armed repression led to victory for the protesters. Trains had been crossing it at walking pace for weeks. From that date anyone involved in homosexual acts could be sent to prison for three to five years. About the same time the secret police forces of the Communist USSR and Nazi Germany engaged in an amicable prisoner swap. bantam, 5216 pages, $36.39. It was as if I had said The left-wing are Nazis, which I did not say, rather than that The Nazis were left-wing, which I did say. If we did enter such a war, as a NATO member, we would instantly widen the current conflict to cover the whole of Europe. | Permalink, https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-16/the-double-life-of-john-le-carr%C3%A9, April 27, 2023 They told me it has undergone regular intrusive and visual inspections since a stepped-up inspection regime was implemented in 2012. After that they had even less in common with their western European namesakes. , Elections The actual total was 328. , South Africa The pre-1960s British Labour Party, full of Methodism and Temperance supporters, was in fact a combination of social conservatism and social democracy, with its official Clause Four utopianism pushed to the margins of action for most of the time. Under both Stalinist and Hitler regimes they did not get the full fruits of their industry, or even the fruits available inthe democracies. , Propaganda Not a bit of it. In 2002, his close friend Martin Amis published a book about Stalin calledKoba the Dreadarguing that Stalin should be condemned just as severely as Hitler and that everyone in the West who supported the Russian Revolution deserved denunciation. However alien I might find his deeply conservative worldview Hitchens, the brother of former leftistChristopher, thinks atheism breeds immorality and worries about the dangers of legal cannabis I expect someone as smart as him to do better thanthat. Many ex-Communists renounced the KPD (the German Communist Party) and became supporters of the new regime. In many years of travelling, I have never seen anybody doing major work on it. Even the anti-Russian Washington hawk Robert Kagan has clearly stated that it was provoked. This would actually be a coherent response ( see above) . This is surely the standard which the United Kingdom upholds in its own affairs and elsewhere. Ms Power rightly says that For men and women to respect one another, we would have to understand in the first place that we are different from one another. What would happen were they to be killed by Russian forces, or captured by them? , Mass Immigration She argues that the Rada acted under Constitutional Article 85/7. Prof Burgis seems rather touchingly unaware of the details of this monstrous occasion, which really should be more famous. I suspect that if the railways were still nationalised, this would not have happened. The lazy clich was untrue. Up till now, Britain took the view that vehicles with engines could only be used by people with licences, and would carryproper number plates and be strictly regulated. If Rishi Sunak now has a Love Actually moment, and tells the USA exactly where to put its star-spangled banner, he will win the next election hands down. The parade was not, as Professor Burgis mistakenly says, held when the pact was signed but almost exactly a month later when Poland had been finished off by both Soviet and German armies in alliance. But were they correct, or even truthful, about that? talkTV is coming soon! This is admittedly the most severe form this policy has ever taken. Professor Burgis: and he insinuates that leftists who speak out against Israels brutal oppressionof the Palestinians are antisemitic. The Jacobins were explicitly and fiercely anti-Christian . As Hitler said, sneering gently: When an opponent declares I will not come over to your side, I say calmly, Your child belongs to us already What are you? , BBC , Divorce The revolution had originally promised workers control of factories. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. I think that I shall meet my fate somewhere upon a London street, splatted on a pavement or a pedestrian crossing by an electric bike or an electric scooter. Or was it a certain idea Stalin and Hitler had in common? If it were not for the understandable desire of patriotic Poles to keep the memory of it alive, it might well have been wiped from the archives by now. That is to say, they wouldnt and shouldnt fight. I think the conflict between the Nazis and Christianity, though Hitler concealed and delayed it as much as he could, while he tackled easier enemies, is one of the key things about them. That is why I was so filled with anger when the Bank of England began printing money through Quantitative Easing, a trick which imposed harsh inflation on savers without spreading into general prices. So our greatest Prime Minister had to steam round the North Atlantic in circles for 90 minutes while the President of the USA, comfortably asleep aboard the cruiser USS Augusta, woke slowly from his slumbers. She was supposedly the inspiration for Humphriess grotesque, bitterly cruel parody figure, Edna Everage. Nothing remotely resembling this procedure, which, as you know, overturned the democratic election of Yanukovych in an unchallenged poll, and therefore had to be heavily armoured against abuse, as in all democratic constitutions. What are they doing there? But were they correct, or even truthful, about that? Its ferocious control, through fear, of individual life, made it unnecessary seek formal direct state ownership or control of major institutions. But it did not then claim that it should have become the government. , Hitler In a short time they will know nothing but this new community. . The required figure was 338 out of 447. Categories: Cold War But (as I shall also discuss) it has an interesting if worrying converse. But he leaves out the opposition to Christianity and the scorn for the family and its privacy. On the contrary, on the last days of February 2014, armed thugs many, if not most, heavily armed far-right and neo-Nazi activists from western Ukraine stormed Maidan square, killing and capturing police officers and forcing the hand of a government that, as well as being unpopular, was bankrupt and diplomatically isolated. In which case the police too are involved in the chain. I would say we should always be on the lookout for dangerous fanatics from all directions. This says that its authority includes: 7) calling elections of the President of Ukraine within the terms specified in this Constitution; But I can see nothing in these terms which allows them to call an election when a living President is still lawfully in office. And (please remember these words were published in November 1939): The Government must be compelled to make peace. Not their policy. April 6, 2023 I made a fuss when they first appeared. In fact the last act of this putsch took place when several EU Foreign Ministers brokered a deal for early elections and major reforms, between President Yanukovych and the protest leaders. Such rules, as I noted earlier, are generally stringent. Nobody in Washington DC has ever heard ofi t.President Bidens insulting little day-trip to Belfast, set beside his vote-grabbing tour of Ireland, tells anybody who wishes to know that he couldnt care a fig for us. Railway rumour says this is because of a huge crack in the brickwork. This was despite transmission of the virus spiking within the community. Workers in Britain, the CP argued in December 1940, could not fight against the Hitler tyranny while Britain is capitalist; while India is in bondage; while the capitalist class controls the Army and the workers are unarmed. We have now had three surveys, the Danish mask study, the Cochrane Review and this one, all pointing the same way but still the mask fanatics wont give up. My generation was terribly afflicted with Suburbophobia. But I know perfectly well that astute political movements try to lessen the tax-burden on their, Professor Burgis: Hitchens writes that Stalin was also an anti-Semite and that some of the purges against supposed counterrevolutionaries particularly targeted Jews. And everyone who goes to the shops now can see that the money in their accounts is shrinking visibly. My late brother (who will crop up later in this argument) would occasionally use this expression, in those days often wrongly attributed to Marx himself. My own view is well summed-up by the attached commentary by Maria Popova in 2014. https://www.ponarseurasia.org/was-yanukovych-s-removal-constitutional/. And then all the old rules were torn apart, with amazing speed, in the name of freedom and a thing called equality which was of course nothing of the kind. But such things do appeal to those who have lost driving licences or never had them, people high on drink or drugs, and people too lazy to walk half a mile. I do hope so. , Monarchy We have treated Russia with amazing stupidity. It says, in summary, that law may be ignored when it suits you. The agreement lasted nearly two full years and provided the Third Reich with indispensable raw materials and fuel for its war on the Scandinavian nations, the Low Countries, France and Britain. Here again we see how Utopianism, the belief in human perfectibility, is a key division in thought, perhaps the key division. In the same spirit, hes argued in exchanges with historians who objected to his Daily Mailarticle that the Nazis extermination of German Communists doesnt substantiate the claim that the Nazis were very left-wing because Stalin also killed lots of Communists. The collaboration was not extended to those elements in the churches, whether Protestant or Catholic, who did not play along. Nobody will answer these questions when I ask them. So you must have been referring to Article 111, and it is clear that Article 111 had not been followed in any way. When Churchill turned up in a battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, to meet FDR at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, US Navy warships intercepted him to tell him to come back later - as FDR was still asleep. Yet the Professor imagines that such a diabolical pact can be forged over several months, signed, celebrated with many toasts, reinforced by an officila vjsit by Molotov to nazi Berlin, guards of honour and all, and then maintained for nearly two years, without in any way affecting our judgement of the permanent inner natures of the two parties involved. Silly. The USA, quite reasonably, was using us for its purposes as it has done ever since. I should note here that the recent book on East Germany and its Communist founders by Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall, says that in 1936 Stalin arrested 55,005 German Communists who had taken refuge in the USSR . In both states these were simply acts of utilitarian state policy, not driven by any principle about the sacredness of life. Hitler conveyed his thanks and wished the Congress success in its momentous work on 'population policy and race cultivation.'. This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column. Can he give me an example of another *sort* of government, non-Utopian, using this method? In a column for Jacobin magazine, Professor Ben Burgis has issued a response to my passing remark in a Mail on Sunday column https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11848611/PETER-HITCHENS-End-crude-smear-against-conservatives.html that the Nazis were left-wing. David Roman, then a correspondent in Kiev for the Wall Street Journal, has since described the events I must correct the impression that a courageous popular response to armed repression led to victory for the protesters. Comments (12) This gathering, taking place in a country by now obviously in the grip of a homicidal, racialist tyranny, sent a telegram of 'respectful greetings' to Hitler, declaring that his 'far-seeing population policy based on racial hygiene and principles of heredity' would safeguard the future of the German nation. Most have heard of the SS Lebensborn programme, which was much more concerned with the bearing and raising of children for the service of the state than with whether their mothers were married. But the KPD's total membership in 1932 had been 360,000, so substantial numbers of former KPD members survived alive and at liberty. But I dont myself think that you can wholly separate organisation from policy. I can tell you most of this because I spent seven gripping years, from 1977 to 1984, writing about . The lower middle classes were for the first time prepared to consider a form of politics in which the state, once captured by their party, would expropriate others to benefit them (the normal course of action for parties of the left). Everyone in pictures from the prisoner swap looks happy. Peter Hitchens: 'A political crisis is coming' - YouTube The issue here is that German middle-class conservatives, fooled as many were then and some are now into believing that the Nazis were just a noisy, violent type of conservative, were shocked when *in practice* they found this was not true. This countrys attitude towards events in Ukraine is based on a slavish decision to do what the Americans tell us to do, rather than on any serious estimate of our own national interest.

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