Spiked, April 19, 2019

Notre Dame: incarnation of civilisation
Without our history and collective memory, we are but animals.

Spiked, January 11, 2019

Just say no to Veganuary
Veganism isn’t a diet – it’s a cult of purity.

Spiked, November 25, 2016

The wrath of the Do-Gooders
Are bien pensant observers the most hateful people in politics?

in the Catholic Herald, July 19, 2013

Mice and men

Science is breaking down distinctions between humans and animals, argues Patrick West

Chimera's Children - Ethical, Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Human-Nonhuman Experimentation
Edited by Calum MacKellar and David Albert Jones
Continuum, £18.99

One of the central beliefs of Christianity, and indeed of Humanism, is that human beings and animals are different in kind and type. Man has a soul and free will, while animals - slaves to nature - have neither. We hold dear the boundary between us and them, and the thought that it could rupture fills us with horror: consider the fables contained in Animal Farm, Planet of the Apes or The Fly. Even today, when humans are often referred to as "highly-evolved apes", there persists a revulsion towards bestiality, which some speculate arose out of a fear of creating a human-animal cross-breed.

This fear - a natural impossibility - was unfounded until the 20th century, when scientific advances tempted many to break this sacred border. In the 1920s, Stalin ordered Russia's top animal-breeding scientist, Professor Ilya Ivanov, to turn his skills to the quest for an ultimate soldier by crossing human beings with apes. Stalin had told him: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat". Ivanov went to French West Africa, where he inseminated female chimpanzees with human sperm. Having failed with this technique, he asked the French authorities if he could have a native female patient unwittingly inseminated with sperm from a dead chimpanzee. He was refused. Such attempts to fuse man with beast - not least with such racist and sexist overtones - only reinforced a strong taboo.

In recent history, most of us only came to realise that human-nonhuman experimentation had achieved respectability when in 1997 a photograph was released of a mouse with an apparent human ear protruding from its back (the cartilage had been grown by seeding cow cartilage cells and then implanted under the mouse's skin), but paradoxically most Catholics were less taken-aback. Those concerned with the sanctity of life had long been following scientific developments in this field.

As Chimera's Children explains, the first successful example of transgenic animals producing human products was as far back as 1982, when a human growth hormone was produced in the serum of transgenic mice. Two years later researchers in Australia introduced human eggs and sperm into the fallopian tube of a sheep. Since then, this technique has been used successfully to produce a variety of human therapeutic proteins from "non-human animals". Scientists have also created organ-donar pigs with human genes and mice with human immune-system cells - the mice can pass on the human genes to subsequent generations.

Chimera's Children chiefly outlines the current developments in the creation of human-nonhuman combinations, the legal positions currently adopted throughout the world, and summarizes different religious or cultural perspectives on this research. While ostensibly neutral and non-prescriptive, the editors do take a line common with many biologists: that there isn't really such thing as an individual. Scientifically-speaking, this is true. A lichen, for instance, can be considered a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a green alga. More than 500 different species of "alien" bacteria exist in the human body, making up 100 trillion cells. We are not all ourselves. So stem cells derived from certain types of hybrid embryos that are 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent animal, in the editors' view, shouldn't alarm us. This is because "species differences are a matter of drawing an arbitrary line, and are to some degree illusory and unreal, a matter of quantitative not qualitative differences."

Mainstream Christians and Humanists would disagree. There are, however, those such as the physician and Christian ethicist John Wyatt. He accommodates such scientific developments by talking of human beings as "flawed masterpieces", and that Christians have a duty to correct flaws in the masterpiece, to restore it as much as possible to God's intention. This, however, does raise the spectre of eugenics.

Chimera's Children is patchy and inconclusive. But it is a necessary work, not least because the furore over BSE and GM foods "created an atmosphere of distrust of science and scientists in some quarters of society". Whether we like it or not, the gap between human and animals is collapsing. The establishment of an ethical framework is thus imperative, say the editors: "If this is not done the danger is that ethical principles will no provide sufficient guidance and the gap will be filled by prejudice or commercial interest". But how this will be done is anyone's guess.

in spiked, September 4, 2013

It's true, Brits now love ze Germans

Forget Fawlty Towers, it seems the old enemy has become our best friend.

in Culture Wars, October 17, 2012

‘It was either us or them’

Review of 'Unpatriotic History of The Second World War, by James Heartfield' (Zero Books, 2012)

in spiked, December 3, 2010

Germany: don’t onlymention the war

From Bratwurst to Brecht, the BBC’s German season was a welcome change from British TV’s obsession with Nazis.

From The Catholic Herald, November 5, 2010

A demonic scheme to destroy the Dutch Jews

Reprinted from The Catholic Herald

Ashes in The Wind, The Destruction of Dutch Jewry
By Dr Jacob Presser
Souvenir Press, £15

In the popular imagination, when one thinks of the fate of Dutch Jewry in the Second World War, the lives of Anne Frank, Edith Stein and Charlotte Saloman spring to mind. More recently, Paul Verhoeven's 2006 film Zwartboek (Black Book) has raised consciousness as to the miserable fate of Jews in Holland during that conflict.

Although Zwartboek received many awards and accolades internationally, reaction to it in The Netherlands was decidedly mixed. This owed to the fact that the movie was a tale of ambivalence, in which not all Germans were portrayed as evil, many Dutchmen were showed as being complicit with the Nazis, and in which some Jews were depicted as collaborating against their own people to save themselves. By eschewing a Manichaean narrative, Verhoven's film proved difficult to digest among compatriots who wanted to believe that their grandparents had behaved better.

Ashes in the Wind, first published in 1965 and released in a new edition, had a similar effect on the reading public. Its central theme is that war can make good people do bad things, and how ideology can make good people behave with appalling inhumanity - and not just the perpetrators of an ideology, but sometimes its victims, too.

In a world where the boundaries between good and evil are perennially questioned and doubted, the Holocaust is often invoked as an ethical reference point, to affirm that morality is not perspectival and provisional. This is one reason why discussing the Holocaust has become problematic. But long before postmodern historians and far-right anti-semites came to be accused of belittling the Holocaust, Dr Presser - a Dutch Jew who survived the ordeal - reminded us that we cannot comprehend this catastrophe with childlike simplicity.

The Jew/German Nazi dichotomy collapses here on many fronts. It was not only Nazified Germans who were responsible for effecting the Holocaust, such as the concentration camp Kommandant who gave his son fifty Jews for target practice as a birthday present, but ordinary Germans who sank to levels of barbarity. In the Amsterdam house raids of July 1942 "German female employees hung out of the windows taking snaps for their albums and, judging by their screams of laughter, were having a highly enjoyable time; several German police officers joined in the merriment, which increased to hilarity when a young Jewish women, suddenly wrenched away from her pram and child, had a fit of hysteria".

Elsewhere, there are tales of German remorse (or at least displays of it): the Commander of German Security Police and Head of Zentralstelle consulting a rabbi, cursing "the fate that had put him in this predicament", or of a German soldier "who got drunk every night to forget his part in gassing Jewish children in trains. He could not put it out of his mind and kept thinking of his own five children."

Additionally, the Germans did not regard "the Jews" as a coherent ethno-religious group. They showed little interest in monitoring and rounding up the "Portuguese Jews" (presumably, Sephardi), which adds weight to the argument that Nazi anti-semitism was racially, rather than religiously, inspired. Indeed, the Christian churches mostly conducted themselves courageously. The Catholic hierarchy constantly spoke out against the incremental measures taken against Dutch Jews. The Lutheran Church was somewhat less forthcoming. But the real heroes of the appalling episode were the Calvinist Dutch, who, the Nazis complained, sided with Dutch Jews at every opportunity for " 'so-called' reasons of conscience". (Many Gentile Dutch men and woman were as brave as to display solidarity by wearing yellow stars; still, Holland had the highest collaboration rate of all the German-occupied European countries). Perhaps this denomination's resistance can be partly explained culturally, in that Calvinists, who traditionally shunned idolatry and ritual, may have been immune to Nazism's seductive use of icons and lavish ceremony.

There was cleavage within the Jewish community, too. In the transit camps antagonism arose between Dutch Jews and German Jews, the latter accused by the former of "behaving like a caste, an oligarchy... and [who] far too often showed a 'German' predilection for bossing people about". There were even Jews who remained members of the Nationall-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland, a Dutch political party that may have not have began as anti-semitic, but by 1940 certainly had become so.

In this essential work, Dr Presser directed his most concentrated opprobrium towards the Jewish Council of Holland itself. German Nazis were objectively the villains here, of course; but he intimates that the Jewish Council's betrayal of its own people was ethically even less defensible.

The Nazis sought to get rid of the Jews by stages, with little disruption as possible. To do this they need co-operation from the victims themselves. The invaders followed threats and instructions with concessions, and the Jewish Council duly appeased, hoping that by sacrificing a few the majority could be saved. This ingoing game of cat and mouse had a salami-slice effect on the community, which withered. The Nazis had established a daemonic scheme which had chilling consequences, and that "by granting temporary privileges to a minority, they succeeded in liquidating the rest without too much fuss or bother." Every Dutch Jew who survived the death camps, Dr Presser relates, was forced to betray someone, to leave another to his sorry destiny. It was the fate of the survivors to have to live with their consciences thereafter.

Ashes To The Wind reminds us that while, today, we are prone to invoke the Holocaust as a morality tale, it was an event blemished sometimes by ambiguity and amorality.

Patrick West

in Telegraph blogs, April 1, 2010

Being obsessed with Nazi war films isn't morbid – it's entirely human

in spiked October 10, 2009

‘To coventrate’: destroy a city from the air

A documentary about the Luftwaffe bombing of Coventry in 1940 challenged prejudices about both Germans and Brits.

in spiked 20/11/2008

Stalin and Hitler were both evil? Go figure!

The BBC’s latest high-profile documentary on the Second World War finds a new way to tell us the blindingly obvious.

in spiked 19/9/2008

In praise of the ‘Nazi Channel’

UKTV History shows that commercial channels can provide enlightening programming, too