April 30, 2001 Eric Rasmusen, erasmuse@indiana.edu



Peter Hitchens, THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN



2000, 2nd edition (first edition 1999).



"This revolution, though well under way, is not complete. Still to

come are the destruction or at least the serious diminishing of the

monarchy, the reduction of the power of the House of Commons, the

transformation of the practice of law, the end of the pre-eminence of

privileged institutions like the universities of Oxford and Cambridge,

the disestablishment of the Church of England and the dissolution of

the 1707 union of England with Scotland." (p. 3)



"Once, programmes for children had some reference to the outside

world, to the old traditions of story-telling. Now, programme-makers

devise Teletubbies who are living televisions, with little screens in

their stomachs, a simple reflection of the fact that children learn to

live their lives through the screen." (p. 8)



"...a highly literate cityscape of ornate shopsigns and wordy

advertisements has given way to a post-literate one of pictograms,

posters and logos." (p. 8)



"George Orwell had rightly pointed out in the early months of the war

that Britain was unique in having an intelligentsia that despised

patriotism." (p. 11)



"And she would think how different the shopping streets looked without

yellow lines painted along every gutter, and how pleasant the side

streets looked without cars parked nose to tail along them." (p. 23)



"Just as the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro still called his government-

controlled radio station 'Rebel Radio', and dressed in beautifully

tailored jungle fatigues long after he was past pensionable age, they

liked to think they were still revolutionaries." (p. 25)



 [of school texts which excerpt primary sources] "On the basis of five

skimpy pages, clearly biased, pupils are then invited to weigh the

'evidence' and decide whether it was fair to blame Germany for

starting the war, ..." (p. 60)



"All socialist governing elites face this problem, and generally solve

it by creating special enclaves of state provision which are open in

theory to all, but in practice only to them and their families." (p.

65)



"Oddly enough, the schools for the ordinary Soviet citizens were far

better than their equivalents in Britain, so long as you did not

object to the lies told about history, or to the Marxist

indoctrination and the anti-religious propaganda. Because the Soviet

schools  were the wholehearted servants of the state and the Communist

Party, they were disciplined, ordered places. Teachers had power,

there were right and wrong answers, there was an accepted body of

knowledge which had to be learned, and poor work earned bad

grades....It will be interesting to see if this survives the collapse

of Soviet power." (p. 65)



"...the strange truth that so many of the 1980s and 1990s Labour elite

were eduated at grammar schools and owe their advancement to their

excellent teaching, bu that none of them has ever lifted a finger to

save a grammar school from closure, let along resurrect one that has

been destroyed." (p. 66)



"...because the British Revolution remained unfinished, they could

only teach chaos.  They could not return to proper conservative

methods until they had finally wiped out the old culture. This they

still have not done." (p. 67)



"It is all sweeping lawns and white concrete, like a set from a 1930s

science fiction movie, a rejection of both the Gothic and Classic

traditions in favour of an unadorned, brutal modernity where there are

no shadowed corners-- the place where there is no darkness, perhaps."

(p. 68)



 "If the child needs a smack, he is  a free individual who has

overstepped the line. If he needs a child guidance clinic, there is

something wrong him which must be cured." (p. 78)



Quoting Orwell: " Moreover, with a smart-looking house to live up to,

they improve in self-respect and cleanliness, and their children start

life with better chances." (p. 95)



"How much smoother and simpler it is to go from place to place, yet

how much more pointless also-- for the true characters of British

towns have always been expressed in local building materials: flint

here, diagonal brick and timber pattern here, chequerboard brickwork

here, hanging tiles here, red sandstone here, dark liverish brick

here, pargetted plaster here." (p. 101)



"It would take some years before the Bishop of Durham, Dr David

Jenkins, would speak of the resurrection as 'conjuring tricks with

bones', but by the time he said these words few Anglican clergy found

them shocking." (p. 105)



[of the bishop of Woolwich] "Dr. Robinson had also distinguished

himself at the trial for obscenity of D. H. Lawrence's second-rate

novel *Lady Chatterly's Lover*.  He attained temporary fame by

comparing sexual intercourse to Holy Communion 'in a real sense', and

suggesting that this was a book which every Christian ought to read."

(p. 106)



"...an increasing social theology, suited to the new social democracy,

in which Christian charity to your neighbor was expressed through

political action at home and abroad, rather than in your own conduct."

(p. 109)



"Thomas Cranmer and the great translators also consciously built their

books to last, just as the architects of church buildings had  done,

and continued to do. They believed that  some ideas lay outside normal

time and could therefore be expressed in a way that defied passing

fashion.  This belief survived until the late twentieth century, the

first era in history which consciously preferred the temporary to the

lasting, the modish to the classical. It affected many other things

apart from language: Christopher Wren's church buildings are quite

unlike his other architecture, though obviously by the same hand." (p.

109)



[Of Parliament halting the effort to change the Church of England

prayerbook] "The 1928 episode was the last time  that Parliament felt

qualified to intervene in Church affairs, by forbidding it flatly to

change." (p. 113)



"... it is noticeable that many of the new suburbs now springing up

have no church buildings anywhere near them." (p. 119)



[Of old and new prayers of confession that Hitchens quotes in full]

"But the main difference between them, though hard to measure, is that

the 1662 version is extremely difficult to say without being forced

into serious and painful thought, while both new versions are

perfunctory and lack any real sense of, to be blunt, fear. They sound

like apologies offered by  railway companies for late trains, or by

hotels for bad service, hurried and weak, lacking any sense of the

scale of what is being asked, and what could be granted in return, or

of the consequences of insincerity or failure to live up to what is

said." (p. 124)



"The old have usually become unpersons long before they die. Any

visitor to the House of Lords cna see this process in its purest form,

since perfectly healthy, active and intelligent people can be found

there in large numbers, who have effectively ceased to exist because

they are no longer in active full- time work. Yet this mildly comic

truth is only a slight caricature of society in general. After their

final retirement from office or factory, people increasingly drop out

of the consciousness of friends who only knew them because of what

they did, rathe than because of who they are." (p. 126)



"... older members, who generally face a long period of ill-health

before death, thanks to the 'advances' of modern medicine." (p. 126)



"At Christmas 1997, the female workforce in Britain would outnumber

the male workforce for the first time in recorded history  a

development with such huge consequences that it has, of course, never

been debated, directly legislated for in Parliament or discussed in a

general election campaign." (p. 130)



"Lord Reith, the founding genius of the BBC, had warned that it was

only  the brute force of monopoly which allowed his corporation to

take a conservative moral position." (p. 132)



[Of cinemas] "Until thirty years ago, performances ended with the

national anthem, incredible as this now seems even to me." (p. 133)



[Of cinemas as opposed to TV]"The cinema-goer usually prefers to go

with a companion, and is in any case watching with all the other

people in the audience. Films, even nowadays, are often applauded.

There can also be genuine infectious laughter." (p. 133)  [ER: college

film society showings are perhaps more fun because the audience is

made up of people so like each other]



"...the average length of a single camera shot is now three to four

seconds in programmes, two to three seconds in commercials..." (p.

136)



[Quoting Neil Postman quoting Reginald Damerall] "'No child or adult

becomes better at watching television by doing more of it. You have

yet to hear of television-viewing disability.' This, of course, is the

opposite of reading, ..." (p. 136)



[Of satire] "And once they had laughed at them, they could never again

look back at the war in quite the same way. Every stiff upper lip,

every brave widow, every episode of courage, generosity and sacrifice

would henceforth be seen through the cracked, yellow filter of

'satire'" (p. 148)



[Quoting Bennett's *Forty Years On*] "*Franklin:* Have you ever

thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out

of date? *Headmaster:*   Of course they're out of date. Standards

always are out of date. That is what makes them standards." (p. 151)



"The cultural revolutionaries have understood that a nation's

literature is one of the ways, perhaps the most important way, in

which values are transmitted unchanged from generation to generation.

They understand that Shakespeare's Englishness is not  an accident,

and that Shakespeare and Englishness have helped to form each other.

... They have grasped that much of the canon of English literature is

about this country's separation from the European continent, about its

Protestant, independent nature, about its good fortune in being set

apart from the rest of the world. They would tend to classify these

things as 'insularity', 'Little England-ism', 'chauvinism',

'xenophobia', and 'racism'. By its nature, this literature is also

dominated by men.  With the notable exception of Queen Elizabeth I,

there are few great female figures in this historical landscape, and

precious few female writers to record it and celebrate it.  In the

different kind of country envisioned by the revolutionaries, women

will play a far greater role, and therefore this past is generally

classified as 'sexist'. " (p. 182)



"Perhaps more galling for those who believe that government action

solves all problems, a fully functioning family does not *owe* the

state anything much.  If it feeds itself, clothes and schools its

children and cares for its old and ill, it does not need to show the

almost feudal fealty to government demanded of the rest of us in an

age where the authorities, rather than God or the Squire, seem to be

in charge of everything and to require most of our money to pay for

their services." (p. 191)



"In his *History of England 1914-45*, A. J. P. Taylor points out that

the only agents of the state a Victorian Briton was likely to meet

were the postman and the local policeman." (p. 191) [Now, what is

different? Passport office, social security numbers, city zoning

officials, state police,...]







[Of Church of England support for unilateral  no-fault divorce in

1966] "Then they asked what would or should happen if an innocent

spouse were divorced against his or her will. Their answer was useless

and empty: 'The sense that it *is* harsh persists and we cannot claim

to have found how to dispel that sense entirely.   The fact of the

matter is, we believe, that when a marriage comes to grief, wounding

cannot be avoided.'



  What an astonishing reverse this is, compared with the 1954

declaration that it was always painful to *uphold* moral absolutes.

Now they were saying that  pain was inevitable  when those absolutes

were tossed aside." (p. 199)



"Much of this argument has now become a sort of liberal common sense.

The idea that family rows are more damaging than divorce, the

allegation (supported by dubious statistics) that marriage is a trap

in which men violently  mistreat women, the suspicion of child abuse

behind the veil of married respectability, are now common ground among

many liberal commentators and social workers, who treat marriage as,

at the very least, a suspect institution." (p. 203)



[On sexual 'experimentation' by children:]"(What, by the way, are

these 'experiments' and the other 'experiments' in drugtaking seeking

to prove or disprove, which is not already known? It is interesting

that this word is so frequently used for wrong actions taken by the

young.)" (p. 204)



"By the end of the 1950s, the country was seriously divided on the

issue of obscenity.   It was not a party division-- few of the great

clashes of the past fifty years have been." (p. 208)



[On the half-hearted prosecution of *Lady Chatterly's Lover* for

obscenity:] "He produced one witness, a police officer who described

how co-operative Penguin Books had been in providing copies of the

work. And that was it.



By contrast, the defence barrister, the future Lord Chancellor Gerald

Gardiner, had thirty-five witnesses ready to testify to the book's

merits, and another fifty in reserve if needed." (p. 211)



[Of the 1967 prosecution of *Last Exit to Brooklyn*:  "When it came to

trial, in November 1967, this is what the *defence* lawyer said: 'This

book will shock and nauseate. You may think it is unbearable and

horrifying, but it is not  a crime to write a book that shocks or

disgusts, or even nauseates.'...



The publisher, Sir Basil Blackwell-- the only witness whose age,

seventy-eight, was recorded by *The Times* in its report-- said the

book had 'slight' literary merit. In brave and candid testimony, Sir

Basil revealed he had only read the book so that he could appear as a

witness against it.  He said, 'Dickens was  a great artist.  He

certainly portrayed wicked and evil men but he made them live.   He

did not produce them as mere lay [sic?] figures in an endless stream

of filthy language and foul behaviour. It is all one thing, abominable

thoughts, abominable words and abominable conduct.'



Did it deprave or corrupt? Sir Basil replied frankly: 'I felt it

depraved because I felt that my memory and my mind was impaired,

vitiated and defiled by the language that I read.... I felt I was

seriously hurt by the book and watned to go away and cleanse my mind.'



Sir Basil said that he had stopped the sale of the book at his Oxford

shops when he discovered its true character, and confessed, 'I would

rather do anything than read it again.' " (pp. 216-218)



"Unlike the pagans theirs was a sterile phallus,disarmed by condoms

and pills-- the first heathen sexual cult to be based around sterility

rather than fertility." (p. 219)



"...men often seek companionship as they slither down the slippery

slopes of immorality..." (p. 220)











"We welcome into our houses the machines that vacuum the thoughts out

of our heads and pump in someone else's." (p. 227)



[Of Patrick in Amis's novel, *Take a Girl Like You*] "Patrick's view,

that his ideas are freethinking and unconventional, is wonderfully

typical of the sexual left, who have always acted as if they were

dissident free spirits making their own minds up, rather than

succumbing to the most basic  primitive hedonism, crude desire

rationalized, the conformism which  existed everywhere before religion

and civilized ethics rose up and fought against it." (p. 238)



[A quote from a February 11, 1928 letter from Virginia Woolf to

Vanessa, her sister:] "I have had a most shameful and distressing

interview with dear Tom Eliot who may be called dead to us all from

this day forward.   He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God

and immortality and goes to church.   I was shocked.   A corpse would

seem to me more credible than he is.   I mean there's something

obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God."

(p. 238)



[Quoting Valerie Riches:] "In th 1960s, arguments were put forward by

the Family Planning Association that making contraception available to

the unmarried would reduce illegitimate pregnancies, an argument

subsequently taken up by the abortion law reformers.  On the contrary,

rising figures of illegitimate pregnancies and abortions followed the

easy availability of contraception and abortion.   So the propaganda

line became that a *free* contraceptive service would reduce the

number of abortions. (p. 240)



  A starting point for the quesiton of why homosexuality is bad is why

*anything* is bad. Why is murder bad? Why cannibalism?



 The death penalty is disliked because for the modern liberal there is

nothing more important than life, or even remotely as important-- not

the soul, not freedom, not even consumer goods.



Raven, Alms for Oblivion,  Places Where They Sing  recommended by

Hitchens on the decline ofthe Biritsh upper class.



[Of Silvermans's arguments for abolishing the death penalty in

England:] "Silverman  gave a great hostage to fortune, declaring that

there had never been a time in the history of this country when

convictions for murder had reached hundreds a year-- something which

would take place less than twenty-five years after his bill was

passed." (p. 269)



[Of Britain:] "Alone of all European countries, her recent past is

unsullied by collaboration or even by dishonorable neutrality... The

countries invaded and occupied in 1940 all have shameful memories,

which explains why so many of them have enthusiastically buried their

past beneath a layer of bland secular modernity. " (pp. 273, 274)



[Of the police:] "They now merely enforced the letter of a

bureaucratic law rather than  the spirit of an agreed and respected

moral code.  As a result, they often seemed frighteningly neutral

between criminals and householders.   There was an alarming  growth in

cases of law-abiding citizens, stretched to the limit, reacting with

violence to vandalism or theft and finding themselves in the dock."

(p. 292)



[Of the new nobility:] "Despite regular displays of tender conscience,

many of its members have no true stake in society as a whole, being

able to buy themselves out of the urban mess and the education

disaster." (p. 295)



[Of the modern treatment of sex as recreation:] "But in truth it

imprisons children in a world where they always come second to adult

pleasures, it imprisons women  in endless competition with their

sisters for fun-- a competition in which the rich and beautiful

are the only winners for as long as their wealth and beauty last and

not for a moment longer--  and it imprisons men in an ultimately

sterile quest for passing pleasure." (p. 298)



[Of the European Human Rights Convention:] "For the first time, the

British people would have positive 'rights', which sounded attractive

but actually converted this country from one where all is permitted

unless  prohibited, to one where all is prohibited unless permitted."

(p. 304)



[Of the Belfast Agreement on Northern Ireland:] "The agreement itself,

as few have noticed, contains provisions for referendums on the future

of the Province *every seven years* if necessary. It is not stated,

but clearly implied,  that these referendums will go on  until they

come up with the 'right' answer, i.e. incorporation into the Republic.

And after that there will be no more." (p. 311)



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