The Aftermyth of War

My, what a lot of emails I have received today!

Anyway, first off, perhaps we should have fought Nazi Germany because of anti-Semitism. But we didn't. And we couldn't have done. Until the alliance with Hitler, Mussolini's Italy was actually less anti-Semitic that Britain, France, the US or the USSR. The British, French and American ways of expressing it might have been less direct than the German ones at that time (well before the Holocaust), but does that really make them any better? Even most Germans had little or no idea about the Holocaust, and everyone else only became aware of it when they saw the newsreel of camps being liberated towards the very end of the War.

Furthermore, Churchill himself was personally anti-Semitic, and a dedicated Zionist for that very reason: he wanted the Jews to go away. The Zionist underground agreed with him, very nearly coming to an understanding whereby Hitler would have expelled the Jews by sending them to Palestine, which he and the Zionists would have conquered together for the purpose.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937 (two years after he had called Hitler's achievements "among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world"), Churchill wrote that:

"Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed, functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism."

This passage was not removed from the book's reprint in 1941. No wonder that he was thrown out of Downing Street while the war against Japan was still going on, Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did so well against him in the other half after Labour and the Liberals disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. Like the myth of all classes suffering equally (which would at best have been laughed out during or immediately after the War), or the Dad's Army myth of all pulling together in an essentially jolly lark of a war effort, the myth of Churchill had clearly yet to be established in the popular mind.

In 1940, Germany had no designs on the United Kingdom or on any part of the British Empire, and merely wished to expel, not to exterminate, her Jewish population. Having made peace, we could just have turned down Hitler's desired military alliance with Britain, undoubtedly hastening the end of Nazism in the process.

Our subsequent alliance with Stalin was morally no better than an alliance with Hitler would have been; indeed, at that stage, it was morally more distasteful, although of course it was strategically necessary and needs to be judged on that basis.

And its impact in the United States was not only to keep America out of the War (as was always going to happen until she was actually attacked, and not a moment longer), but also to turn, not just Midwestern Republicans, but also Southern Agrarians and some of those in the Catholic encyclical tradition (notably the high-profile radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin), from people who mocked and despised Hitler (although they might have admired Franco, Salazar, and up to a point Mussolini), into people who saw him as the bulwark against Soviet expansion, which in turn they saw as allied to their atavistic enemy whether as heirs of the American Revolution or as Irish-Americans. Many (including Father Coughlin) became rabid Jew-haters, which they had not been before.

The Southern Agrarians and the Catholics were Democrats, and indeed significant beneficiaries of the New Deal. But the seeds were being sown for the destruction of the majority Democratic coalition a generation later, against the backdrop of progressive domestic but appalling foreign policies, when the Democratic Party that had in this period first loosened its Southern Evangelical and its Catholic moorings finally let them slip altogether. Ahead lay Ronald Reagan and George Waterboarding Bush.

And behind all of this lay, and lies, the supreme tragedy of the twentieth century, namely the decision of the United States to join the Allies in 1917, rather than, by refusing to do so, to force them to make an equitable peace with the Central Powers, since neither could by then have beaten the other. No Treaty of Versailles, and thus no Nazism. No Soviet Union. No carve-up of the Balkans. And no carve-up of the Middle East.