Chapter 1: War: What is It Good For?

 Chapter 1 - War: what is it good for?

For no particular reason, I have been reading a 1939 Australian school English text book. 

At the end of the first chapter I found the following:

EXERCISES AND SUBJECTS FOR DISCUSSION

Beverley Nichols has suggested that if we are to think properly about war as it waged today, we should drop the word "war" and substitute the word "mass-murder" because the meaning of "war" for most people is inappropriate to what is actually done by armies to-day. Do you agree with this? And what is the meaning you give to the word "war"? [p12]

I don't know how I would have tackled the question at the age of 15, but this is what I would say about it today.

*

If the word "murder" means "killing", then "mass murder" simply means the killing of a lot of people at the same time (as opposed to "serial murder" which means the killing of a lot of people one after the other). So to say that war is synonymous with mass murder is to say that many people are killed in wars. This is true, but so obvious as to be hardly worth saying. 

But if "murder" means "unlawful killing" then we run into problems. A soldier who kills another soldier under orders from a superior officer is not acting unlawfully: indeed, he would be committing an offence if he refused to do so. So the claim that "war is unlawful killing on a large scale" is simply false.

So perhaps when Mr Nichols wrote "war is mass murder" he meant "war ought to be mass murder": a soldier who kills another soldier (in a just and lawful war under orders from a legitimate superior) ought to be subject to the same criminal penalties as a private citizen who kills another citizen in a private quarrel. But to the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever proposed this. There are such things as war-crimes; and there are often demands for reparations at the end of hostilities; but I have never heard anyone argue that individual enemy combatants should be tried in civilian courts. 

I don't think Mr Nichols was using the word figuratively. I don't think he was suggesting that we say "The Battle of the Somme was murder" in the way a motorist might say "The M25 was murder this afternoon!" Nor do I think he was saying "The soldiers in the next war are going to murder each other" in the sense that a teenager might say "When Dad finds I took his cigarettes, he's going to murder me."

Vegetarians occasionally wear badges saying "Meat is murder!" I am pretty sure they are not saying that they think that eating meat involves the premeditated unlawful killing of human beings. They don't literally think that non-vegetarians are cannibals. Neither do I think they are seriously proposing that meat ought to be murder. Even the extremist does not say that anyone who has at any time wrung the neck of a chicken ought to get twenty years to life in prison, and that a customer who frequents KFC should be charged as an accessory. 

After the exoneration of Derek Bentley, his surviving relatives proposed carving "Murdered by the British government" on his gravestone. I don't think that they literally thought that the judge, the home secretary or the hangman ought to have been charged and jailed in a court of law. It is theoretically possible that if individual police officers could be shown to have given false testimony under oath at a capital trial, they could have been charged with murder, but I don't think that was the point the survivors wanted to make.

It is possible that some anti-abortion activists do, in fact, think that a woman who takes an emergency contraceptive pill, a doctor who prescribes it and a pharmacist who supplies it are literally guilty of the same offence that Lucy Letby was convicted of, and should be punished by life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Donald Trump has used the term "execution" to refer to late-term abortion although he wouldn't apply the word “murder” to actual executions.

But in general "abortion is murder", "meat is murder", and "capital punishment is murder" are vivid ways of saying “we do not approve of abortion”, “we do not approve of meat eating" and “we do not approve of the death penalty”. So perhaps “War is mass murder" is nothing more than a vivid way of saying "I disapprove of war." 

As a matter of fact, the authors of the 1939 Australian School English text book which I happened to be reading for no particular reason have misquoted Beverley Nichols. .The phrase he actually suggested adopting when we have deleted the word "war" from the dictionary is “the mass murder of civilians." 

But if anything, this makes matters worse. If by "civilians" he means "people" then all he is saying is that many people are killed in war. Which we already knew. But if by "civilians" he means "people who are not soldiers" then he is trying to have his cake and eat it. The distinction between soldiers and civilians is a matter of great legal and moral significance—in war. From the medieval law of arms to the Geneva conventions it has been generally agreed that soldiers may lawfully kill each other in lawfully declared and just wars; but they may not lawfully kill anyone else. 

To say that war is murder is to say that there is no such category as war: an English soldier stabbing an SS officer with a bayonet on the field of battle is no different from a Mod stabbing a Rocker with a flick-knife on the seafront at Southend; or Miss Scarlet stabbing Mr Black in the kitchen with the breadknife. But if there is indeed no such category as war, then the distinction between civilians and soldiers does not exist. An Englishman in uniform opening fire on a group of Germans in uniform in a trench is doing exactly the same thing as an Englishman in civvies who opens fire on a group of German gentlemen enjoying some hofbrau in a bierhalle. 

You can't have it both ways. You can say that war involves killing lots of civilians, or you can say that war involves murdering lots of people, but you can't logically say both. 

*

Speaking personally, I would be very happy to stop talking about war—and also to stop talking about genocide, terrorism, pogroms and massacres —and instead adopt the neutral word "killing". It would then be necessary to distinguish between "OK-killing" and "not-OK-killing". Most of us would agree that the shooting of an armed terrorist by a law enforcement officer would be in the "OK-killing" category. Some of us think that strapping a person who carried out a not-OK-killing in 1994 to a chair and forcing them to inhale cyanide gas in 2024 would be "OK-killing"; some of us think that it would definitely not be. The British House of Commons is currently deciding whether the killing by a physician of a terminally ill patient who has positively asked them to do so is in the "OK" or "not-OK" category. 

Such a usage would massively simplify our deliberations around the ongoing Middle-east Crisis. We would be obliged to say that Israeli bombardment of Gaza is OK-killing, because it comes in response to the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas, which were very definitely not-OK. Although unfortunately, we would also have to explain why the October 7th attacks were not rendered OK by the (presumably not-OK) killing of Palestinians by Israel prior to October 7th, or why those earlier killings were not, in fact not-OK. 

Some of us might be inclined to say that none of this killing is OK and could both sides stop it as soon as conveniently possible. 

*

The assertion that the word "war" ought to be dropped comes in Beverly Nichols’ 1933 book Cry Havoc. Nichols is an interesting figure; extremely famous in his time, but almost entirely forgotten today. He ghost wrote Nellie Melba's autobiography and was one of the few newsmen at the late Queen's coronation in 1953. He may also briefly have been Siegfried Sassoon's boyfriend. (Biographies still rather quaintly describe actor/playwright Cyril Butcher as his "lifelong companion".) Although he wrote plays, religious books, children's stories and murder mysteries, he was best known for his columns and broadcasts on the controversial subject of gardening. His writing is florid, self-deprecating, and rather witty; a little like Jerome K Jerome transposed to a minor key. 

For I know that unless I write a gardening book now...swiftly and spread it before the last bud outside my window has spread its tiny fan...It will be too late to write it at all. For shortly I will know too much; will dilate, with tedious prolixity of the root formation of the winter aconite, instead of trying to catch on paper the glint of its gold through the snow, as I remember it last winter, like a fist full of largesse thrown over a satin quilt. [Down the Garden path, page viii]

Overwritten, of course, but overwriting was a fashion of the era. We'd now probably call it a "humblebrag": he's making a virtue out of the fact that he is not going to write a technical volume while making it quite clear that he knows a lot more about horticulture than you do. The book it comes from (Down the Garden Path) was sufficiently famous that Sellar and Yateman (authors of 1066 and All That) wrote a parody of it, lampooning Nichols as "Knachbull Twee". ("If one is a real garden lover it isn't necessary to definitely read gardening books....")

In 1932, Nichols had written a pamphlet stating that in any future war he intended to be a conscientious objector. No less a person than HG Wells disagreed. Wells argued that refusing to serve in the army didn't advance the cause of peace; and didn't in fact absolve the conscientious objector from blame for any bad things his country might do in the war. Every citizen contributes to the war effort and every citizen shares the fruits of victory. One recalls AA Milne's assertion that a pacifist was like the starving man who said that his conscience would not allow him to steal food—but was perfectly happy to sit down to dinner with someone who's conscience did. Being a CO, says Wells, is simply a sacrifice to the God of Peace; it may satisfy your own conscience but it does no good. Today he would probably have called it Virtue Signalling.

Beverley thinks this is a fair point. He thinks that the average pacifist "rails against the horrors of war and says he will have none of this nasty business". But refusing to fight doesn't go far enough: a consistent pacifist would refuse to pay his income tax, or at any rate, that part of it which goes to buy arms, and not support the war effort in any way at all

An out and out pacifist is therefore ipso facto an anarchist. It may be that he is right to be an anarchist—it may be that this denial of systems is the one system which would work. That is not the point. The point is that you cannot be an anarchist on some things and a constitutional liberal on others. [Cry Havoc, p15]

I don't know about you, but that paragraph made me catch my breath and make a mental note to donate £5 to the Beverley Nichols Preservation Society, should such an organisation exist. (There is certainly a trust which maintains his cottage in Huntingdonshire.) There is a bracing clarity and specificity to it, and a genuine anger as well. He is quite clear what point he is making and what point he is not making. And he seems to care about what the word "anarchist" actually means.

He doesn't think that the mere fact that war is horrible is sufficient to prove that pacifism is right; but he does think that is where the discussion should start. He also thinks that discussions about social justice should take the privations of individual poor people as their jumping off point. 

If that sounds involved, I would merely explain, humbly, that I am trying to say that I should like to see a model of a hideously wounded soldier on the respectable tables of disarmament conferences, and I should like all parliamentary debates on unemployment relief to be carried out in the somber and foetid atmosphere of a Glasgow slum.  [p15] 

He goes on: 

I am not trying to back out of the extreme pacifist attitude of complete non-resistance. It may be right after all... I shall not have made up my mind until I have written this book, which is the reason why I am writing it. [p14]

Writing a book about a question he doesn't know the answer to in order to help him make up his mind? This particular blogger wants to embrace the fellow and call him "brother". 

*

In 1914, a British general is alleged to have said that although the new flying machines were terribly clever, they would never be widely used in warfare because they would frighten the horses.[*] Nichols  likewise sees the introduction of air warfare as marking a decisive break with the past. The battle of Mons in August 1914 was one of the first engagements in which aircraft were deployed: 

"That Saturday was one of the last Saturdays, on this planet, when the word 'war' was still invested with a certain morality. It was also one of the last Saturdays when it still bore the remotest resemblance to the wars of the past.” [p24]

He claims that the beginning of the battle was not very different from Waterloo and Agincourt: organised groups of soldiers fighting each other, with even a certain amount of sportsmanship. "The enemy" he says "was largely composed of Bavarian ploughboys in German uniforms". The British dragoons decently refused to charge them with bayonets while their backs were turned. But this old fashioned sense of decency and fair play was obliterated by the arrival of the impersonal and indiscriminate bi-planes. It is presumably not a coincidence that a legend developed that on the night before the battle, the soldiers had seen a vision of ghostly archers or angels. 

Nichols couldn't know, of course, that twelve years after he wrote, allied aircraft would be dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities. Like HG Wells, he assumed that World War II would be fought with poisoned gas. But he was quite correct in thinking that the new warplanes would inevitably be deployed against civilians. His remark that it was now possible to "blow up babies in Baghdad by pushing a button in Birmingham" is disturbingly prescient. 

At any rate, after 1914, he believed that you could no longer talk about the morality or the nobility of war.

(Chivalry) died inevitably, a little later, and for ever, on the poisoned fields of Flanders. That there was magnificent and incredible individual sacrifice and heroism, on both sides, no man in his senses will deny. But chivalry, as a unifying, purifying spirit fled affrighted from all the armies at last, whether of the Allies or of the central powers. [p23]

He says that if he is going to write a book about war, the word "war" needs to be clearly defined "unless we are going to argue at cross-purposes". Someone who used language in such a flowery way would naturally be concerned with finding the mot juste. 

As soon as the first shot in the air was fired the word “war” became obsolete. It should have been struck out of the dictionaries of the world, and a new word should have been put in its place…. [p24]

But he is not really talking about clarity and definitions. He wasn't, like Private Baldrick, suggesting that the 1914-18 conflict was only "a sort of a war." He didn't think that if the Prime Minister were to come on the BBC and announce that a state of war existed between England and Germany, the people listening to their wireless sets would be in the slightest doubt as to what he was talking about. And he's not like one of those pedants who chips in and says that, actually, I think you'll find, a conflict fought in the air is not a war but merely a sparkling white wine. He's not talking about lexical meaning at all. 

What he is talking about are the emotional associations of the word war. When children who have learned about history in English schools hear the word 

Across their young brains there flashes the silver of ancient swords, over the shallow waters of their understandings there flutters the reflected gold of flags flying in forgotten winds... [p25]

Even if they have seen supposedly realistic war movies, they will have picked up the sense that war is a "grand and inspiring affair"

We want another word. What is it to be? It must be a word devoid of decency, a word devoid of sense....A word with no historical associations, carrying no sonorous echoes of tragic beauty. A word trailing no clouds of glory. There is no such word. And the only phrase which truly expresses the situation is ‘mass murder of civilians. [p26]

You might think that there is sometimes some excuse for the mass murder of civilians. You could be perfectly sane and still believe that the large-scale unlawful killing of noncombatants is a lesser evil than Hitler's Thousand Year Reich would have been. But that isn't the point. The person who takes that view needs to justify his position, rather than hide behind the normalising word "war". 

If instead of the phrase “we shall not sheathe the sword" [Prime Minister Asquith] had used the phrase “we shall not desist from gassing babies” the emotions of his audience might not have been so exalted. [p26]

This is hardly an original insight. You can't name a thing without also saying how you feel about that thing. A person who lets off a bomb may be a "terrorist" or a "freedom fighter" depending on how you feel about his politics. A person who strikes a child might be "smacking" or "hitting" (or even "beating") depending on how you feel about that particular form of punishment. We evangelise; you proselytise; they are religious fanatics. Chaucer spotted it six hundred years ago: a rich woman and a poor woman may both go to bed with man who is not her husband:

But that the gentile in hire estaat above

She shal be cleped his lady as in love,

And that oother is a povre womman

She shal be cleped his wenche or his lemman

And god it wood, myn owene deer brother

Men leyn that oon as lowe as lith oother

The word "war" has a reference ("armed conflict between nations") and also emotive content ("noble heroes fighting with honour"). What Nichols wants is a word with the same reference, but which invokes different emotions. 

And this is presumably why the authors of the Australian text book which I am reading for no particular reason asked their students to think about Mr Nichols. They believe that the distinction between reference and emotive content is the whole key to literary appreciation, English composition, and the control of language.

*Mrs Patrick Campbell is alleged to have made the same remark about homosexuals. 

This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essay should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present. Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.

www.patreon.com/rilstone

 

This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essay should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present. Please consider joining the Patreon if you find this kind of thing interesting.

www.patreon.com/rilstone

The Poet, The Tourist, and the Waterfall

 

What The Hades?

Passage to Pluto

By Hugh Walters


5...

I recently attempted to do an on-line CBT/mindfulness stress-reduction course.

Apparently, it is possible to relieve stress by imagining that your anxieties are an orange and letting the orange gently float away into a relaxing sunset. You have to imagine the texture of the orange and the colour of the fruit-bowl and what kind of relaxing beach the sun is setting over.

I assume that this works for some people or the therapists wouldn’t keep selling it.

The main thing I discovered from the course was that I didn’t have a visual imagination.

Come to think of it, I must have known that already. So the main thing I discovered from the course is that some people do have one.

I definitely know what oranges look like. If I appeared in a court and was asked to describe one orange in particular, I could state some solid facts about it. “There was a blue spot near the stalk, your honour. I thought that was odd at the time.”

But forming a mental picture of the orange and holding it before my mind’s eye: and then adding the tree, the sunset, the yellow bird and the tallyman tallying his bananas entirely eluded me? The best I could achieve was brief mental orange shaped snapshots amid the encroaching darkness.

Is this normal? Is this common? Is there a three letter abbreviation that I can apply for?

For the record, I found that breathing in through my nose to the count of six and then slowly blowing the seeds off an imaginary dandelion made me as calm as I am ever likely to be.

I suppose that this disability—or perhaps it is a superpower—affects the way I read and the kinds of books I enjoy. It might explain why I find “difficult” books like the Silmarillion relatively approachable, and approachable books like Conan the Freebooter relatively difficult.

It would also explain why I like fiction where someone has taken the trouble to actually draw the pictures he wants me to see, instead of leaving me to do all the hard work for myself, or “comics” as we used to call them.

I have talked before about book-memes on Facebook: I have even insinuated that the "Reading is Brilliant" threads are often implicitly anti-literate. You tell me that books are magical devices that carry me away to places I have never been where I will meet people who are more real to me than my friends and family. I am apt to reply “Are they bollocks!” I tell you that Tolkien’s archaic prose and Salman Rushdie’s oblique metaphors are the exact things which make them both in their different ways great writers. I fully understand why you want to reply that I have taken all the fun out of reading. Across such a chasm, no bridge can be constructed. If you enjoy being physically present in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, experiencing all the smells and textures and sounds of dissected corpses and arcane machinery, you don’t want to hear Mr Pedant telling you to pay attention to the actual words Mrs Shelley used to describe it. Or, indeed, pointing out that she didn’t.

I blame school teachers. For everything. Many people of my shape and demeanour are unable to quite shake the belief that football is primarily an excuse for big kids to kick little kids in the shins and a pretext for repressed adults to look at teenagers in states of undress.We don’t quite literally believe it, but we feel in our guts that it must be true. And some people enjoyed Eng. Lit. almost as much as I enjoyed PE. It must as strange to them that I would pay money to watch actors performing Shakespeare as it is to me that they would pay money to watch other people doing a kick about on a field.

It's a prejudice. But not everyone realises it's a prejudice. Some people think that “I had to sing boring hymns at infant school” is a theological position.

Miles Kington said that the trouble with O Level French was that O Level French is not the language that French people actually speak. I think that school PE did sometimes involve the playing of a game that was in some respects quite similar to the one that football fans enjoy. But school English was largely detached from anything the normal theatre-goer or the normal novel-reader would engage in voluntarily. I don’t know what the normal poetry reader does. Is there even such a beast? Or is poetry written by the sorts of people who write poetry for the benefit of the sorts of people who publish and review poetry books? You can fill a medium sized coffee shop with people who want to hear actual vernacular performance poems, but that wouldn’t be caught dead between the covers of a school anthology.

Now, obviously, speaking for myself, I like thinking about books. I like writing about books. I like reading books about books (“criticism”). I even like reading books about books about books (“critical theory”). Whether we are talking Demons of the Punjab or a Passage to India, I have no truck at all with people who say “You ought not to think about this: you ought to just allow it to wash over you.” ("It's just a TV show! Just a piece of entertainment! The whale is just a whale and he said her hair was red because red is the colour her hair actually was!") But I think it is a really bad idea to think about a book before you have read it, or instead of reading it. I think it is an error to suppose that Dickens wrote David Copperfield mainly to give students raw material for their essays. (A surprising number of people believe that the main reason God wrote the Bible was to give Vicars something to preach sermons about.) I think that your first, second and third reaction to Waiting For Godot ought to be “What a strange, puzzling, fascinating, peculiar play.” I think that it is okay to whistle a catchy tune without wanting to find out what makes a tune catchy. He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

But perhaps we are simply talking about people with, and people without, visual imaginations? If the majority of people genuinely can think of an orange when they are told to think of an orange, then presumably, when someone speaks of horses they really do think that they see them, pounding their hoofs in the receiving earth. And if you are in that majority, then the person who tells you to count up how many I-ams Shakespeare put into each of his pentameters and find out what "puissance" means is missing the whole point of the play. You aren’t being taught to play football better: you are being told that you oughtn't to have been "playing" it at all. 

I am not a formalist. I am not claiming that the only things you can definitely say about oranges is that they have three syllables and don’t rhyme with anything. I have just read the latest Knausgaard, The School of Night, which would, incidentally, be an excellent jumping on point for anyone who hasn’t read any Knausgaard and would like to find out what all the fuss is about. It is nominally the fourth volume in his excruciating Morning Star metaverse. I think if I use the search function in my Kindle it may turn out that the main character, Kristin Hadeland, is the John Doe who the agnostic Church of Norway clergywoman buried in volume one. But it stands very independently as a novel; about a student at a prestigious photography school whose art is not appreciated by his contemporaries, who makes a possibly unwise agreement with a mysterious figure, while, incidentally, helping out with a fringe production of Doctor Faustus. He becomes extremely famous and successful but finds that some extremely reckless things done as a young man come back to haunt him in middle age.

It’s a story.

And certainly, I wasn’t “just reading the words”. If you were “just reading the words” of Knausgaard you would go insane. It isn’t true (pace Private Eye) that he ruthlessly chronicles every character’s bowel movements: it is true that if someone is going to have a cup of coffee, there is a serious danger that we will learn about how the granules gradually dissolve in the cup and the milk swirls around in a swirly milky pattern. Which is why the publishers were rather spot on to use the epithet “addictive” to describe the book.

Besides, a hand-held vacuum cleaner was a very useful thing when we left crumbs in places where a big vacuum cleaner was impractical, on the kitchen worktop for instance, or we might make just a small mess somewhere, perhaps we’d spill thirty or forty grains of rice onto the floor when we tipped the bag, and who would go to the cupboard to get the big vacuum cleaner then, which had to be lifted and carried, plugged in and switched on? No, it was much easier to turn to the small one that sat so snugly in the hand and was always at the ready. I lived in the age of hand-held vacuum cleaners, but it didn’t mean I had to bow down to them, just as Giordano Bruno in his day had felt unobliged to bow down to the Catholic Church.

It took only about ten pages to go from “Who is this awful man and why do I care about his awful life?" to peeping out from behind a metaphorical sofa thinking “oh god please don’t you aren’t really going to steal a dead cat from the vet oh…” or indeed screaming “stop agonising go to the police and admit that you failed to report an accident you bloody fool”. In the final section it becomes very clear that a very bad thing indeed is about to happen, and the blow by blow description of the trivial minutiae which are occurring while it is pointedly failing to do so become almost physically painful. I certainly wouldn't want to attempt a GCSE "compare-and-contrast-two-minor-characters" essay about it. I cared far too much about the actual story and wanted far too badly to know what happened next. Did I feel that I was temporarily in Norway? That Kristen was someone I had actually met? Did I feel that my mind was full or oranges, oranger and more orangey than anything I had ever oranged before?

Did I bollocks.

4...

There is, you may be surprised to learn, a point to this.

As you know, we have been engaged for several years in a critical re-reading of the works of Hugh Walters, who was my favourite science fiction writer when I was at primary school. The latest volume is called Passage to Pluto. It is exactly the same as all the others. 

While re-reading the book, I am fairly sure that I had a visual flashback to the pictures I made in my head when I first read the story, I think in the summer of 1972. At the end of the book, three astronauts are saved at the last possible moment from Certain Death by their erstwhile comrade Chris Godfrey. During the rescue, young common northern engineer Tony Hale does something very reckless and dangerous in the engine room. As I read this passage, I distinctly saw the two characters in my head: Tony crawling around the engine room, Chris at the helm of the rescue ship. I could distinctly see their faces. And I observed (can you observe yourself having a memory of a mental construct?) that I was picturing Tony as Stephen (Peter Vaughan) from the Tomorrow People, and that, by a process of elimination, Chris was being played by Nicholas Young, (John), from the same series. 

We have established that I was reading Walters’ books and watching the first run of the TV show, at exactly the same time. I don’t know if some after-the-fact firing of synapses hyperlinked the two aesthetic experiences in retrospect, or if Kid-Andrew was consciously “casting” the characters during his primal reading. Roger Price’s teenaged mutant heroes were at least two-dimensional, where Hugh Walters’ cast are basically cardboard cutouts, so it would make sense to have used the TV show to add a bit of reality to the books. 

Was I remembering stuff I had seen on the telly as a substitute for what the writer failed to describe? Did the spaceships look as if they were made by the BBC visual effects department, tin foil and wires an all? I think they might have done. Did my lack of a mind’s eye force me to lean on stuff I had seen on TV as a ready made source of imagery? Or was mental-picture building something I unlearned through watching too much TV, not a neurological faculty which I happen to have been born without?

I think these are excellent questions. What happens when we read a book. Just how do our brains transmute words into emotions? Do some people really experience reading as hallucination, or is this just a rhetorical exaggeration? Was I exaggerating when I talked about the orange? 

It’s all very interesting. Which is just as well, because Passage to Pluto really isn’t.

3...

Hugh Walters’ books are ostensibly rip-roaring adventures about Man’s first tentative steps into Space. But that’s a cover story. From the first volume, what he has really been engaged in has been a theological debate. Can you continue to believe that there is a friend for little children above the bright blue sky when you’ve been as far as Mars and found no sign of Him? Can one person be a man of action, a man of science and also a man of faith? Does the presence or absence of a deity make a difference to the way a human faces Certain Death?

In the previous volume (First Contact?) Walters’ offered an elegant solution to the problem. God literally exists: but He is simply the most highly evolved being in the Universe. Angels are extraterrestrials who occasionally look in on Planet Earth to see that we are evolving correctly. This information is so mind-boggling that in the final chapters of the book, our protagonists’ memories have to be erased.

A lessor theologian might have rested his case at this point. But Walters continues the dialectical process. Passage to Pluto is a riposte to First Contact. The new proposition is “God exists: but the being who exists is not God.”

It is clear that the author's attention is focussed on this question. I don’t think that even the youngest reader could have missed the fact that Passage to Pluto is Hugh Walters by numbers, a reversion to the formula established in Blast Off At Woomera. It’s the kind of plot he could have written in his sleep, and possibly did. Our heroes prepare for launch (page 1-42); they are blasted into space (page 43) there is a Terrible Disaster (page 72) a daring rescue is attempted (page 90); and at the last possible second they are saved (page 120).

Everything comes into focus on page 53. Our hero, Chris Godfrey (now a grounded deputy-director of the space programme) learns that his friends have no way of getting back from Pluto. There is no hope and this time they are quite definitely going to die. 

“Oh God, what shall I do?” Chris prayed, desperately.

And then the idea came.

"And then the idea came." The subject isn’t broached again until the very last page of the novel. The long shot has paid off and the day has beens saved and everyone is safely back on earth. Funny Whiskers, the retired RAF pilot, asks if they are going to “have a wonderful celebration”.

The four young men who had returned safely from the most incredible adventure the world had ever known looked at each other uncomfortably. Chris spoke for all of them. “That can come after” he said “but first we are going to give thanks to God for our safe return".

How does Walters want us to read this? My first thought was that Chris’s mind was not, after all, wiped at the end of the last book: that he (the viewpoint character since the first volume) is aware that the stories now take place in a theistic universe. He has acquired the capacity to invoke the deity at moments of crisis. He is become Neo in the Matrix, a kind of Space Buddha: or at any rate a very Anglican Lensman.  It is astonishingly easy to accidentally add a T to his name while typing this kind of article.

But in fact, I think that Walters intends to refute the message of the last book. Granted the existence of extraterrestrials, one race must by definition be more evolved than all the others; and since we are all agreed that evolution means improvement and that improvement implies moral advancement, the most evolved being in the universe must be morally superior to all the others. So we might as well give the most-evolved and most-moral being in the universe the name “God”. But The Most Highly Evolved Being would hardly be the sort of thing you could pray to, and certainly not the kind of being who would care if you went to Mass at the beginning of your mission, or sung hymns of praise in the camp chapel after you came on. The God of religion has nothing to do with the “God” our heroes encountered on Uranus. Proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing. The Most Evolved Being could not have saved the lives of Chris's friends. The Church of England God has apparently done so. Which may be why Whiskers, who originally proposed the M.E.B theory, wants to have a party rather than a church service.

The third possibility is that I am reading slightly too much into this; that Walters has completely forgotten what he wrote in the previous volume; and chucked a couple of Sunday School references in because that’s the kind of thing you expect to find in vaguely improving children’s fiction. But it's much more fun to pretend that isn't the case. 

2...

So: our heroes are blasted to Pluto, partly because it is the only planet they have never visited and partly because the boffins have discovered a mysterious new Planet X out beyond its orbit. The boffins have also invented a new, atomic powered, near light-speed space-ship which can get our heroes to Pluto and back in weeks rather than years. They still have to be put into cryogenic sleep to prevent their being squished by the acceleration. (I am not entirely sure that would work.) The ship is called Pluto One, but there is a back-up ship called Pluto Two. No-one has ever seen a Disney movie.

Chris, the hero of the first thirteen volumes, has stepped back from his role as an astronaut in order to become second in command of the space programme. His friend Morrey has been promoted to boss-astronaut. making him responsible for all the agonising and soul-searching when Certain Death is on the horizon. Chris is, of course, very sad that he is not going into space with his friends. (Did I mention there was a back-up spaceship?) He is also very sad during the training, the launch, and while his friends are on their two week journey. (Did I mention that there was a back-up spaceship?) And of course, when disaster strikes, he is very sad indeed that is not there either to help out or to perish alongside his friends. (Did I mention that there was a back-up spaceship?)

When the Famous Three arrive on Pluto, they discover there has been a Very Bad Accident and they have lost all their fuel. We never find out what the Very Bad Accident was: probably, I don’t know, some sort of meteor strike. (The chances of this are “unimaginably remote...yet it had happened”.) I suppose by this point we know the formula as well as the author and are happy to fast-forward to the Certain Death part of the story. Although the ship is powered by nukes, it uses chemical fuel to turn around and navigate an earthward course. And they can’t escape from the gravitational pull of Planet X (which is a massively dense asteroid, or just possibly a massively dense alien construct). So the crew are faced with an agonising choice between eating three worms or running three times round the playground in the nude, sorry, dying slowly from asphyxiation or quickly by crashing the ship into Pluto.

Did I mention that there was a back up space ship and that Chris was very sad that he couldn’t go into space with his three comrades?

And so, in the final pages, readers are subjected to this kind of thing:

Chris let out an involuntary groan as his body took the full force of the chemical motor’s thrust. ….But it didn’t matter. No matter what his suffering, Chris was determined to do his utmost. He was prepared to go beyond the limit of human endurance in his desperate bid.

And this:

Caution must be thrown to the winds. He would risk ALL in the effort to save his friends.

And this:

Twenty-four thousand miles an hour. Gosh! that would take some slowing down.

And in case we haven’t got the point, this:

It was all or bust! He was going to catch up with Pluto One or die in the attempt.

Meanwhile, back on the the main ship, emotions run understandably high

A flood of admiration and gratitude flowed over the three astronauts. Chris was attempting the impossible in order to save them. Who but Chris could do such a thing?

And, indeed, on earth, where they don’t quite know what is going on:

Sir Billy and the others were staggered at the fate that must have befallen the four young men. ….. Feelings of utter despair spread among the scores of tired men and women in the control room…

It’s all quite exhausting.

1...

The book shows every sign of being unplanned and unrevised. While Chris is risking all to save his friends, we are told, out of the blue, that in between meeting God on Uranus and being blasted to Pluto, our heroes developed an interest in motor racing, and became more than decent amateur drivers: and that the nerve and reflexes needed when going round tight bends in a fact car is quite a lot like the nerve and reflexes needed when accelerating a space ship to save your friends from Certain Death.

It seemed that the amateur racing driver had pulled off another incredible feat by flinging his ship along at breakneck speed, and then applying the brakes at the last split second.

Very probably. But surely this should have come at the beginning of the story, not at the very end? Walters should surely have started the book with Chris dramatically winning the Isle of Mann TT race, leaving the readers asking “I wonder what this has to do with the rest of the story?” Then, in the last pages, when we’ve mostly forgotten the opening, he could have revealed that amateur racing stands you in good stead when you need to push a space ship beyond its operational limits, and we would all have said “Aha!” 

But he doesn’t do that.

Again; after the Daring Rescue, Tony (the naughty, northern, chocolate stealing one) crawls into the engine room to do a certain thing, and is berated by the others for his recklessness. What he has in fact done is set the abandoned ship to crash into Planet X, which results in the destruction of the asteroid. Chris is quite cross and says that they will discuss it in his office when they get back to school. But it turns out a few pages later that, er, Planet X was not only going to mess up the orbit of Pluto (did I mention it had super-strong gravity?) but also of Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and eventually Earth, so the young scallywag's mischievousness has in fact saved civilisation as we know it. Fair enough. But why didn’t the boffins mention that Civilisation was imperilled? Because it only occurred to the writer at the last minute, that’s why.

In the opening chapters, the crew are very worried about the fact that, what with Einstein and relativity and everything, after four weeks of zooming through space at an appreciable percentage of light-speed, they will be twelve hours out of sync with the people they left behind on earth. There is some speculation about what effect this will have on them. They were, if you remember, quite worried about missing birthdays when they were first put in cryogenic sleep.

The eventual resolution to this philosophical dilemma is, er, nothing.

“What’s happened to the time-slip?” asked Morrey. “I don’t feel any different.” It was true, they had forgotten about this mysterious effect of space travel. “Our time should be twelve hours different from yours,” Tony exclaimed, “but it’s the same.”

Possibly this is a set up for something that will become important in the next volume. Or, possibly, it isn't.

Finally, he have to go through the obligatory Death Row Drama on the Definitely Doomed Ship. This time around the astronauts and the ground crew engage in a more than usually morbid game of suicidal astro chicken. The crew of Pluto One don’t want Chris to sacrifice himself in a futile rescue attempt: so they consider scuppering the ship to make such a gesture pointless. But Chris guesses that that is what they are going to do because it is what he would do if the positions were reversed, so he says he’ll embark on the suicide mission even if they commit suicide first.

“By the way, you fellows,” Whiskers said, “Chris tells me that he’s coming to join you even if it’s only to pick up the pieces.”

And Walters’ writing becomes borderline hysterical:

The argument between the astronauts went on for some time. An outsider would never have guessed from the calm, detached way in which they were discussing the problem that these three young men were trying to decide the manner and timing of their own deaths….

But this position was different. What they had to face was not a sudden catastrophe that would destroy them before they even knew it, but the knowledge that their lives would end in fifteen or sixteen days’ time! With a little help from their computer, they should be able to calculate the precise moment. As leader of the doomed trio, Morrey was determined to set an example. If anyone did crack up—and who could blame him?—he must not be the one.

They play long-distance chess with Whiskers to take their minds off the inevitable, because of course they do. 

0....

With the exploration of Pluto, there are no new worlds to conquer. Despite having established last time around that interstellar travel is possible via a network of divine gravity beams, Walters isn’t prepared to send our heroes outside the solar system. So you might imagine that we have just tackled the final volume.

But in fact, the series is going to go off in a slightly new direction. And the next volume will offer yet another perspective on the God question.

If you find this kind of thing interesting, please consider supporting my Patreon

My reviews of previous books in the series may be found here.

 And now it's precisely 20:27!

 It's nearly 2026!

Away In a Culture War

In England, complaining about the Post Office’s commemorative stamps is almost as important a Christmas tradition as the sending of cards. This year’s stamps seem particularly innocuous: slightly abstracted illustrations of the traditional nativity story characters. 

Nowadays we have Big Stamps and Small Stamps to go on Big Letters and Small Letters: so the big second class is an angel and the small second class is Mary and Joseph; the first class stamps have Mary and the Baby Jesus and the shepherds, respectively, on them. The Wise Men get a £3.40 stamp to themselves. That’s the flat rate for sending cards air-mail anywhere in the world, apparently. It’s all a bit irrelevant because everyone uses Amazon and Moon-Pig.

I think the pictures are intended to suggest a kind of collage: Mary’s robe is a single, two-dimensional block of patterned fabric or paper. Mary and Joseph are riding a donkey; one of the three shepherds is bringing a lamb as a gift; and there are specifically three wise men, who seem to be wearing crowns. Those details owe more to Victorian carols than to the actual gospels, but then so does the whole popular nativity tradition. All of the pictures have a starry, starry background, and there is one big yonder star for we three kings to follow. Mary and the Baby have halos.

So far, so nice. But all eleven figures have dark skins. And Mary is wearing some sort of head-covering. So naturally the usual suspects have crawled out of the woodwork to say that the stamps are anti-white propaganda, the most Muslim Christmas stamps ever, and to chant about the halo looking like a crescent moon. Which it does, a bit, if you squint.

Well: Bethlehem was in modern Palestine and Nazareth was in modern Israel. The Maguses came “from the East”, which would be modern Iraq, and the idea that they were Persians or Babylonians fits the story pretty well. None of these people were white Europeans. Unless you are going with the legendary Wee Three Kings: then I suppose there is a quite well established tradition that one was European, one was Asian and one was African. That probably represents the idea that the rulers of the whole world came to pay their respects to Jesus.

But I don’t think the Post Office’s artist was shooting for historical accuracy: the clothes certainly aren’t based on first century garb. I think—at any rate, I hope—that he drew them that way specifically in order to annoy the sorts of people who are, in fact, annoyed that he drew them in that way. We are living at a time when a resurgent Christian Nationalist sect is systematically othering brown-skinned people, and celebrating a shield-bearing crusader Christ. So of course every piece of artwork, every carol service and every nativity play should make the point—be it ever so subtly—that in the story, Jesus was not one of us: he was one of them.

Yes: Christians have always localised the story. Art galleries are full of paintings of renaissance noble women giving birth in rather clean fifteenth century sheds. The Mystery Plays showed Caesar ordering the whole world to attend a census—even if they live as far away as Barnsley or Rotherham! Whisper it softly: African churches sometimes imagine African Jesuses, and black children sometimes hang their stockings out for a Black Santa. In any other year, a white baby would have been quite unobjectionable. 

But if you are living in 1930s Germany, it is incumbent on you to make the point that, as a matter of historical fact, Mary and Joseph were Jewish.

*

Roderick Spode’s Christmas-themed rally is, in the grand scheme of things, merely absurd. A thousand black-shorts singing Away in a Manger at an open air carol service should scarcely register as a news item. Every city in England has a thousand-seater cathedral and every one of those cathedrals will be standing room only for multiple iterations of Christmas carols during the festive period. It is all very well to want to demonstrate your commitment to faith and homeland, or, indeed, to be a shining beacon of light against the fading of our cultural identity. It is slightly odd to do so by doing exactly what nearly everyone up and down the country was going to be doing in any case.

But I found some of the discussion around the non-event rather interesting.

If you were a very devout vegetarian, you might, I suppose, refuse to acknowledge the distinction between chicken, pork, and beef and refer to them all as “meat”. Or, indeed, “dead animals”. But it might prove problematic to fry beef in Col Sanders eleven spices, or to make a chicken wellington. Words usually mean things, and definitions usually include some things and exclude others.

In 1979, the Monty Python team released a highly successful mind-virus which causes carriers to believe that all disagreements about religion or politics are intrinsically ridiculous. It wouldn’t be funny if there wasn't some truth in it. In any political movement or church or fandom there really will sometimes be bitter disagreements about matters which seem trivial to anyone outside the cult. Or in some cases, matters which are really genuinely trivial. But as a result of the mind virus, whenever anyone asserts a point of principle on any subject, there will invariably be a wiseacre on hand to mutter “popular front of Judea” as if that terminated the discussion.

If we ask whether or not Spode is "really" a "Christian" are we indulging in that kind of sectarian hair-splitting? We have, I think, a perfect right to be skeptical about any sudden conversion. The man in the pew, and indeed in the pulpit, could be forgiven for asking if the man who has knelt down with a thousand other people in a crowded football stadium (while Cliff Richard is belting out Blessed Assurance with a Pentecostal choir) had in any meaningful sense "turned to Jesus". Billy Graham himself used to play down claims that so-many-thousands of people had been “saved” at one of his evangelistic meetings. They came forward, he would say: only God knows if they were saved. 

But in this case there is a more specific skepticism because of a perceived mis-match between Spode’s new-found faith and his political beliefs. Someone suggested that he was “about as Christlike as a traffic cone full of angry wasps.”

Possibly. But if the criteria for genuine conversion is Christosimilitude then I should say we are looking at roughly two thousand years of false conversions, with Spode falling only slightly shorter than everyone else. All the popular candidates for "Christlikeness"—Mother Theresa, say, or Saint Francis, or Desmond Tutu, or John Paul the Second—have their detractors. The Catholic Church maintains a list of around ten thousand people who it thinks quite definitely went to heaven, but there are some odd people on it. Actually having existed has not always been an essential criteria for canonisation. 

Our good friend CS Lewis was once asked if there was such a thing as a non-practicing Christian. He said yes, in fact nearly all Christians were non-practicing. The only person who ever practiced Christianity perfectly was Jesus himself. Lewis's definition of “practice” was quite specific: 

“It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God. It means looking at everything… and saying ‘How would He wish me to deal with this?’”

Which is a pretty high bar to clear.

A nice sounding Anglican clergyman (a part time comedian and former Satanist, apparently) wrote in the Guardian that:

"Jesus was very clear that none of us is in a position to judge each other, so I’m generally loth to pronounce anyone 'not a real Christian'".

Which is very charitable of him. But he goes on to say that “care for the most vulnerable in society” has always been the core Christian value, and that Spode’s followers might have an issue with (for example) the passages in Exodus which exhort Jews to be nice to foreigners and immigrants because they were foreigners and immigrants in Egypt. Perfectly good point, that. But it does rather make it sound as if Christianity is a social movement and that there is a suspicion that Spode is not fully on board with the programme. The headline to the opinion column, presumably added by a sub, stated that there is no sense in which someone like Spode could be considered a genuine Christian. None. 

The same paper carried an extended essay by an American, Bill McKibben, bewailing the way in which, in his country, the far-Right has co-opted Christianity.

According to this essay, in the 1950s and 1960s the overwhelming majority of American Christians believed in a broadly liberal Jesus. As the decades wore on, a re-branded fundamentalism which conflated Christianity with a narrow range of conservative causes came to dominate the protestant church, to the point where opposing abortion and homosexuality had become almost the whole of the faith.

At the end of the 1950s, he writes:

“a cool 52% of Americans were part of the so-called mainline denominations: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and the like. That meant most of the nation subscribed at least nominally to a religious life marked by a kind of polite civic normality and a somewhat progressive reading of the Bible….”

The mainline Jesus was “a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”:

“The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message is about love for others, especially for the poor—and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ’s response to violence is to turn the other cheek—not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater too.” 

"Not as an act of passive acceptance" is an interpretation of the text, incidentally: not what it literally says. Jesus's parents were "homeless" in so far as they were not in their home town and couldn't find a hotel: they weren't destitute. 

McKibben seems to take it for granted that sweater-sharing and cheek-turning would naturally be expected to get a person crucified. I don't buy this. It is a good joke to say that Jesus was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, but it doesn't make much historical sense. Bart Ehrman has written that any convincing reconstruction of Jesus has to be able to answer the question "Why did he get the death penalty?" I don't think "For being nice" is a plausible answer. 

McKibben goes on to say that it is “entirely fine” to believe in a Jesus-story shorn of its supernatural elements: it's all about the message. Any talk of "resurrection" seems to be a round-about way of saying that the preaching wasn't forgotten when the preacher died:  

“This person’s message is sufficiently subversive that he is eventually put to death by the reigning imperial power, but that execution is powerless to quell his spirit or his message, which then spreads across a growing community of followers who try to behave as he had.”

It was Jesus' message—not any faith the he had literally come back to life—that the Church preserved: it was Jesus behaviour that they sought to emulate. When workin' folk are out on strike, that's where you'll find Joe Hill. 

“The idea that personal salvation—as opposed to concern for others—was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical…”

Really? Did mainline Methodists and Lutherans in the 1950s really believe that Wesley and Luther—not to mention St John and St Paul—were borderline heretics? I find it hard to believe that this could literally have been the case. A hymn-book full of far away green hills and rugged old crosses says differently. 

But let’s take him at his word. For the first half of the 20th century, the American church had substantially abandoned the New Testament’s divine saviour in favour of a humble rabbi. America may have been colonised by puritan extremists, but its civil system was created by skeptical deists. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson go through the Bible and tear out all the religious bits? So perhaps the proposition isn't as absurd as all that.

If the liberal consensus only arrived at their ethical Jesus by denouncing the Christ of the New Testament, then the evangelicals have done nothing worse than restore the church's historic faith. They have literally put the Christ back into Christianity. But their restored Christ is a macho culture warrior with a gun in one hand and a spanking paddle in the other.

How should we understand this? Should we say "In the 21st century, a large cohort of Americans rejected the purely ethical Jesus and restored the theological Christ: and it just so happened that most of them were hard-line political conservatives?" 

Or are we obliged to say that "the Christ of Christianity and the ideology of the far-Right go together like a horse and carriage?"

Plenty of anti-theists would gleefully go along with the second option. Once you overwrite the humble rabbi with God’s supernatural offspring, you have already committed yourself to a whole complex of authoritarian and patriarchal ideas. If you replace the jobbing carpenter with a divine world-saviour, you have opened the door to some very unhealthy ideas about divine retribution. Have you ever seen Passion of the Christ? In a church which preaches that version of the Atonement, James Dobson and John Smyth are features rather than bugs.

CS Lewis, again, argued rather cogently that you couldn’t and shouldn’t have a “Christian” political party—let alone a “Christian” government—because Christians don’t necessarily agree about all the nitty-gritty bread-and-butter political questions. What would be desirable would be a strong Christian presence in all the parties. 

He thinks that you could perfectly well have a sincere Christian fascist and an equally sincere Christian communist—or at any rate, sincere Christians prepared to make common cause with the British Union of Fascists and equally sincere Christians willing to ally with the British Communist Party. The hypothetical Christian fascist might think that humans were so sinful that they need to be governed by a theocratic dictatorship. The hypothetical Christian communist might believe Jesus was primarily a social reformer and that the church departed at a very early stage from his teachings. That is, the Christian fascist misapplied and exaggerated doctrines which Lewis thought were sound; but the Christian communist worked from premises that Lewis utterly rejected.

So, it seems we have a consensus. All parties are agreed that if you believe in the Christ of theology, you are more or less bound to be a conservative; and that if you are a liberal, you are more or less bound to believe in a non-theological Jesus. Your only options are to embrace the Republican Christ, or else assert that since Saul of Tarsus tripped over his shoelace on the way to Damascus, there have been hardly any True Christians. 

In order to test my hypothesis, I turned to an online magazine called Christian Today. I think it would be fair to describe this publication as a bit on the socially conservative side. A representative sample runs thus: 

“The judgement of God has finally come upon the United Kingdom. Quietly. Silently. Like a thief in the night. It came in the form of an irrational, emotive and Godless parliament who this week voted to permit the killing of babies in the womb up until birth, and has now introduced the National Suicide Service, with its vote to permit assisted suicide. God has given us what we voted for.”

The magazine tries to navigate a "both sides" critique of Spode and his opponents. A sub-headline directs our attention to the parable of the mote and the beam. Aren't both sides, the far-Right and the anti-fascist, guilty of co-opting the Christian message to their political beliefs? Aren't both sides equally prone to demonise their opponents? When the liberals speak of Spode as if he was some kind of anti-Christ, aren't they guilty of the very same divisiveness they accuse him of? 

The essay acknowledges that there are valid criticisms of the Unite the Kingdom rally: that it illegitimately shoe-horns politics into Christmas. But they note that an anti-fascist counter meeting depicted Mary and Joseph in a refugee boat. Surely that is also political? And therefore just as bad? The Left should not demonise the Right over what is, after all, a mere difference of political opinion. (This approach does not, of course, apply to questions about assisted dying and legalised abortion: it is perfectly okay to demonise people who disagree with you about that.)

But the Left are far more culpable than the Right in this regard. The Right may have introduced politics into religion; but the Left have replaced religion with politics. The established church has been reduced to a party political mouthpiece: 

"It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer. Now it seems more accurate to describe it as the Green/Labour/Progressive party at politics."

Well: when people said that the Church was the Tory party at prayer, I think they meant that Conservatives generally worshipped at their parish church, where Labour voters were more likely to attend one of the non-conformist denominations. The Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. No-one, I think, ever claimed that the Church of England consistently supported Conservative party policy.

The Guardian writer said directly that there was a consensus in liberal churches that a gospel of salvation was heretical. The Christian Today article accuses church leaders of being unable to tell their flock "what God says about salvation", preferring instead to claim divine authority for their personal beliefs about "the EU, immigration, climate change and Donald Trump!" 

The Guardian writer said that Christmas is about "a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”. Which rather reminds one of Geraldine Granger telling the good folk of Dibley that the Christmas story was about a baby born in a stable ("the poorest of the poor") who "says things that are so astonishing that millions of people are still living their lives by them today." So Christian Today is being perfectly fair when it hauls liberals over the coals for reducing the meaning of Christmas to "let's all be nice to each other because a cute baby was born to a teenage mum and became a refugee."

So perhaps Christmas does belong to the Conservative Christ much more than to the liberal Jesus. The baby in the Nativity story is not a humble carpenter with some new-age theories about love. Like Harry Potter and Anakin Skywalker, he's the Chosen One. As a baby, he is celebrated by a whole army of supernatural beings. As a young child he is venerated by all the Kings of the world. The Right can validly claim that by abolishing the liberal Jesus, they have put the Christ back in Christmas.  

The Christian Today essay ends with another attempt to be even-handed—offering prayers for both the Right and the Left, the Spodests and the liberal Church Leaders. But the writer 

“prays that Christ will really be exalted in [the Unite the Kingdom] carol service in London on Saturday” 

adding that 

“I suspect that I would be more likely to hear the actual gospel of Christ at the rally on Saturday, than I will in some churches on Sunday.” 

Whereas he prays that the Left 

“will stop using their own personal Jesus for their own personal politics and instead come to know and proclaim the Christ who really is there.”

Is this where we are? The Far-Right have the wrong politics, but the correct Jesus? The Liberals have only politics; they don't have Jesus at all? It sounds depressingly like the English Civil War, in which one side was Romantic But Wrong, and the other side were Rotten But Right. 

*

In the 1980s, a rumour occasionally went round campus that the GaySoc had decreed that on such-and-such a day; homosexual students would identify themselves by wearing blue jeans to lectures and straight students by wearing something else. I don’t suppose it was actually true: but it was quite a clever thought experiment. Everybody wore blue jeans all the time. So the question was "If I wear my Levis tomorrow, will everyone assume I am gay? And if they do, does that matter, particularly?"

If everyone agreed that wearing red baseball caps represented my support for Roderick Spode then I would not wear a red base ball cap ever again. Not that I was planning to do so in any case. If I watch the new TV show about the kid with the magic wand, it will be widely taken as signifying my assent to the proposition that my trans friends shouldn’t be allowed to go to the lavatory. So I won't: although I probably wouldn't have done anyway. 

I accept that we may have to cede the Union Jack to the far-Right. I will be quite sad if Christmas goes the same way: but I expect that it will. The more people tell me that I must say Happy Christmas and that saying Happy Christmas signifies my opposition to the Woke war on Christmas, the more inclined I am to say Season’s Greetings or Happy Holidays. 

This year, it is one rather ludicrous man saying that we should all get together and sing Away in a Manger in order to assert our national identity and resist cultural erosion. Next year, the thought may creep into actual churches. Five years down the line, there may be general agreement that singing Away in a Manger is what we do to stick it to the brown folk. In which case, all us non-fascists will have to stop singing it. Which would be a shame. But we managed without the song from the first year of the Christian era through to, I think, the one thousand eight hundred and seventy eighth. Go back to the eighteenth century, and you'd find people struggling through December the twenty-fifth without Silent Night, turkey, Santa Claus or the Muppet Christmas Carol. I think we’ll cope.

But what happens when Spodist converts start to attend ordinary services? What is the Rev. to do? 

Perhaps he will say “We welcome everyone—money-lenders, pedophiles, Nazis, people who saw Monty Python's, Life of Brian….” and continue preaching whatever message he was going to preach in any case. In which case I suppose the Spodists would say that the Vicar, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King and the Pope were Woke. Liberals may be reluctant to say that people who don't agree with them are Not True Christians; the Right have no such compunctions. 

So what is Rev. to do? Stick to his pacifist guns, watch the Christian Nationalists drift away and lament his pews returning to their previous bum-free status?

Or experience a sudden revelation that the core of Jesus message was always white-ethno-nationalist-anti-Islamiscism?

In 2015, it would not have been possible to imagine a British Conservative leader using the language that Badenoch does—and completely impossible to imagine a Labour leader talking like Starmer. Who knows where the Overton stained glass window might be in 2030?

I take it for granted that, by then, either Spode or someone more extreme will have kissed King Charles's ring. And the church, like the schools and the museums, will have to choose between bending the knee to the Party or being disestablished or abolished. 

At which point, carol services will be the least of our worries

Happy New Year.


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