Political commentary
It is hypocrisy
Colin Welch
Now is the time for New Year resolutions and soon, alas, will come the time to break them. Backsliding is all the more like- ly, in that the resolution I propose is to forswear for 1983 that pharisaic hypocrisy to which we British are peculiarly addicted. A peculiarly difficult vice to deal with too, since, visible and odious as we find it in others, we can hardly ever discern it in ourselves. Let me give two topical examples of hypocrisy in action — one the ban on the Sinn Feiners, the other the monstrous growth and self-righteousness of the CND.
In opposing the ban, I find myself in unusual company — Mr Ken Livingstone and Mr Michael Foot. `If there is any evidence that the Sinn Fein representatives are involved in terrorism,' Mr Livingstone wrote recently in the Times, 'then they should be arrested and charged. On the other hand, if they are free to walk the streets of Belfast, then they should be free to do so in London.' 1 couldn't agree more.
Ulster is supposed to be part of the United Kingdom. Granted, certain regula- tions and laws, applying there but not here, may be justified by the extraordinary and horrible circumstances prevailing there. But the exclusion order and the machinery by which it is enforced can have no such justification. On the contrary, they strongly suggest that conduct and opinions which are totally unacceptable here are perfectly all " right over there. By implication they display a callous and hypocritical indif- ference to the welfare and feelings of our compatriots in Ulster. They appear to place them in a different and lower category. By doing so, they suggest that the United Kingdom is a sham. They thus play directly into the hands of the IRA, which has always regarded the United Kingdom as a sham or worse. They must also depress and demoralise the loyalists of Ulster who must wonder, however reluctantly, whether their security and interests can indefinitely be trusted to people in Westminster who get into the most frightful flap at the prospect of something happening here which, together with horrors far worse, happens there almost every day.
`You can if you like do that there there, but you can't do that there 'ere.' Mr Foot called this an anomaly. Nodding for once, Frank Johnson thought it 'not ... a very good anomaly'. It seems to me a very good anomaly indeed, and one packed with hypocrisy.
Mr Edward Gardner in the House refer- red to clear and grave warnings by the Metropolitan Police about the conse- quences of the Sinn Fein visit. More sur- prisingly, Dublin and Belfast police are also supposed to have supplied information on which was based the 'right and responsible' decision, as Mrs Thatcher called it, to im- pose the ban. What on earth can they have said? Is it conceivable that the Belfast police in particular could have advised that the Sinn Feiners would be more likely to com- mit or organise acts of terrorism on a well- publicised visit to London than they are daily supposed to be in Belfast? If they did not give such advice, how the ban? Fears of public disorder? But the law under which the ban was imposed is supposed to be about terrorism, not public order.
In Ulster rumours and fears of a 'con- spiracy' to dish the province proliferate. Mr Powell only repeats what few there dare wholly discount. In rebutting these 'charges of the utmost gravity', these allegations of 'a treasonable conspiracy', these 'unfound- ed fantasies', Mr Prior for once lost his temper. I am certain he was personally justified in doing so. But surely in calmer moments he must sometimes reflect on how things look from Ulster, on how conspiracy theories must be engendered by how we treat and talk about Ulster: Sinn Feiners once talked secretly with the very Home Secretary who now bans them; internment ended; the Sinn Fein movement legalised; an unwanted assembly created for them to exploit; access to British Ministers guaranteed; prominent chaps like Mr Berm declaring it to be only a matter of time before we withdraw from Ulster, as we withdrew from India (but we did not hand over India to a murderous minority).
Conspiracies are in fact elusive, few and far between, though the mysterious darkness in which Ulster is governed is bound to make them credible. But, even where they don't exist, hypocrisy will do their work for them, as will also that `nonsense content' in Britain's public debate about Ireland, which Conor Cruise O'Brien recently found 'dangerously high'.
The Russians openly state, as Sir John Hackett reminds us, that they are spending great sums of money throughout the world on 'peace movements'. This money must go somewhere. It must finance conspiracies or, to be more precise, the conspiratorial and perhaps most important parts of what are turning into vast popular movements. CND leaders proudly proclaim that they have never received a kopek from Russia. With the word 'knowingly' added, we may believe some or most of them. No doubt Russia does good by stealth, and hopes that hypocrisy will supply free of charge whatever else is needed.
It is hypocrisy which has arrogated to CND the beautiful word 'peace', as though we do not all passionately desire peace, dif- fering only about how best we think it can be preserved. It is hypocrisy which urges the `banning' of a bomb which nothing can now eradicate from human knowledge. It is hypocrisy which substitutes demonstrations and hysteria for rational argument about this complex and fateful issue. It is hypocrisy which points out (quite rightly) that nuclear deterrence is terribly dangerous and not wholly reliable, without suggesting any alternative. It is hypocrisy which equates Soviet communism and our im- perfect western world, as though there were nothing to choose between them. It is hypocrisy which pretends to know, what no one can know, that Russia has no designs on western Europe.
It is hypocrisy which continually refers to President Reagan as 'bellicose' but never the late Brezhnev or the surviving An- dropov, with his beguiling and deceitful proposals; which urges us to be rid of our own bomb while sheltering still under the Nato nuclear umbrella; which opposes not only the bomb but also the increased spen- ding on conventional forces which would be needed without it; which ignores the hor- rors of biological, chemical and even con- ventional war waged with modern weapons; which claims that countries without the bomb are less rather than more likely to suf- fer nuclear attack, for all that Japan had no bomb in 1945; which denounces the Cruise missile as a 'first-strike' weapon, when in fact it would take at least two hours to get to Moscow!
Above all it is hypocritical to make no distinction between possession of the bomb and use of it. As a book* just published by the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies puts it, unilateralists often confuse the capacity to cause mass destruc- tion with an act of mass destruction, 'an er- ror of some magnitude'. (Incidentally, if the West were laid waste by a nuclear at- tack, and your finger, by pressing a button, could launch a terrible nuclear retaliation on the aggressor, would you press it? Per- sonally, I would not: the deterrent, having failed to deter, would have no use for me. Vengeance belongs to Someone Else.)
What disturbs me as much as anything about the 'peace' movement is the effect it may have on the Russians. What the Rus- sians have done so much to create they may mistake for the most important reality. Hitler is said to have told his generals, `Believe me, I have met these gentlemen [Chamberlain and Co. at Munich], and they will not fight.' His mistake brought terrible suffering to Germany as well as all the rest of us. I would not like Russia to fall into a like error. If she did, whatever the outcome, history would place an insupport- able burden of guilt on the 'peace' move- ment — history, that is to say, if there is history. I hope there will be and that, start- ing with 1983, it will be happy for you.
* Protest and Perish: a Critique of Unilater- alism. Philip Towle, lain Elliot and Gerald Frost. £3.75.
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