Sooner Than I Had Expected

Sooner than I had expected, I must return to the topic of the Second World War, and with it to that of the relationship between Britain and the US since the War. The simpletons who were dragged into the Iraq War still don't get the point, and the crooks who dragged them in still pretend not to.

What do you think that we actually fought the War for? Because Hitler was a nasty man? Grow up! For "Hitler", of course, read "Saddam Hussein": again, we didn't in fact go to war with him for that reason at all; but the fantasy that that was why we went to war with Hitler is a useful way of silencing criticism of the latest adventure, and indeed of those yet to come.

By 1940, we had made peace with Stalin, who was by then already far worse than Hitler did not actually become until later than that. We fought the War on the same side as the Soviet Union (with the US one of the two biggest winners at the end of it) and Maoist China. That was our perfectly legitimate attempt to defend an Empire which was by then already well on the way to becoming the Commonwealth, a family of free nations safeguarded, both as free and as a family, by the Crown.

But the Americans made us give up the Empire (they had their reasons, but those reasons were not ours), and the Soviet Union's victory put it in a position to expand its influence dramatically, so that the Commonwealth, like the world in general, came to include numerous either Soviet-backed or reactively anti-Soviet (and therefore American-backed) dictatorships instead. Apartheid South Africa, for example, was set up by people who had been imprisoned for pro-Nazi activities during the War. The South Vietnamese regime praised Hitler. Numerous Fascist outfits in Latin America gave refuge to wanted Nazis. And so on, and on, and on.

Of course I'm glad that we beat Hitler once he had decided to pose a threat to us. Whether we should ever have got ourselves into the position where he did (he and his circle were dedicated if rather unrealistic Anglophiles, several were good English-speakers, their expansionist ambitions were in any case to the east) is the stuff of a PhD and then some. There have been attempts, and there will doubtless be more. The real threat to our interests was Japan, and trying to contain Hitler because we couldn't possibly have fought on both fronts was a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

And it turned out to have been right: we would have lost the War without Stalin and Roosevelt, whereas we could have won without them if we'd only been fighting one, rather than both, of Hitler and Hirohito. Mercifully for us, they both decided to attack both the US and the USSR as well.

Which brings us to Britain and America since the War. America entered the War for her own reasons, and on her own strictly businesslike terms with us. Nothing wrong with that. But it gives the lie to the popular fantasy of a "special relationship", a term which no American has ever used.

We went to Korea, but so did a lot of other people. The Americans opposed us in Suez (when they were right, but that is not the present point), and didn't go to Malaya. We stayed out of Vietnam. They were practically on the other side in the Falklands War, when our nearest thing to an ally was France. And the Gulf War was much like Korea.

All in all, there is simply no factual basis whatever for the warmongering lie that we have an unbreakable military alliance with the United States.