Thursday 3 September 2009

Seventy Years On

My father served with Monty in North Africa, so don't give me that.

We ended up giving Poland to Stalin anyway. How was that any better than letting Hitler have Poland in the first place?

We lost our global status and were in debt to our great rival for it right up until 29th December 2006. Have you got that? 2006!

Moral standards collapsed during the War, and everything to do with the Swinging Sixties really started then. We laugh now about the women from whose bedrooms the Normandy Landings were reputedly launched. But it was, and is, no laughing matter.

There is always a baby boom after a war, so there was bound to be the Baby Boom after the War, imposing its views and tastes on both its elders and its juniors. Apparently for ever. There were warnings about this in the Thirties. But then, there were warnings about a lot of things in the Thirties.

Germany rules via the EU, and has better schools, policing, transport infrastructure, working conditions, and standards of behaviour than we have, as well as cleaner streets, a huge domestic manufacturing base, and ownership of her own industries. She is already out of recession.

Of course we had to defeat the country that was subjecting our towns and cities to nightly aerial bombardment. But how and why did we ever put ourselves in that position? What for?

25 comments:

  1. An unworthy war fought between "Master Races" which two new different Master Races (the Yanks and the Ruskies) won.
    At least it reduced the number of Master Races

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  2. No, it went from two to two. Just a different two.

    Seriously, though, no one could have accused either the United Kingdom or the British Empire of racial purity. Or the United States. Or the Soviet Union.

    If they were striving for it, then they weren't striving very hard, or very successfully, or both.

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  3. Because someone had to do it....
    Colour Sergeant Bourne in 'Zulu' :
    "Because we're here boy - there's nobody else !"
    Yes we lost the peace hands down on every front...yes the war wrought moral depravity and the destruction of all we thought timeless and truly british...it made drunkards, whores, bullies and thieves...but more than that it made generation where consideration,concern, charity and care disintegrated...
    Yes it's a despicably heavy price.
    but at least our descendants could look themselves in the mirror, at least they could sleep at night .

    We had no choice but to go to war...and when every nation which despises us [generally for trying to steal their country and massacre their population] launches a savage indictment, calling for revenge ; our nation can at least stand resolute and say in that late Summer of '40 - when there was no-one else against that madman and his diabolical evil...our nation stood alone like a sapling - enduring, but surviving in the heart of the storm...
    It's not very often that this country has ever placed morality before self-interest - in this case we did the right thing....and Aquinas and Augustine would concur...

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  4. David - er the US racial, immigration and eugenics policies of the 20s and 30s definitely repudiate that position...

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  5. "Because someone had to do it"

    Do what? Make sure that Stalin instead of Hitler got Poland? Why?

    "We had no choice but to go to war"

    Of course we had. We, and the French, could have said that the machinations of Hitler and Stalin over control of Eastern Europe were no concern of ours. Which they weren't.

    "late Summer of '40 - when there was no-one else against that madman and his diabolical evil"

    Which one, Hitler or Stalin?

    "the US racial, immigration and eugenics policies of the 20s and 30s definitely repudiate that position"

    I say again, either not very hard, or not very successfully, or both. Oppressing or persecuting particular ethnic groups is bad (although keeping out or restricting certain nationalities as immigrants may be perfectly sensible), but it is not the same thing as trying to create a pure one.

    Not something that could very easily be done, to say the least, by white Americans. Or by ethnic Russians, of whom Stalin was not one. Or by the inhabitants of these islands and by their dispersed kinfolk.

    Eugenics? Well, that's a whole other story, as British as anything else. Like anti-Semitism, in fact.

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  6. "Manifest Destiny" in mid 19th century USA, the expansion at the expense of Hispanic Catholics, native Americans and of ourse slavery right up to 1865 and the Spanish American War (the massacres in the Philippines) tend to show USA was like all Empires racist.
    The "right" to take other countries implies that the populations are children of a lesser God.

    And of course the Russians for generations had placed themselves above their neighbours and the Japanese Empire likewise believed themselves superior.
    All Empires do.
    So their comeuppance is to be welcomed.

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  7. David seriously ; haven't time to argue the rightness of the war with you now; but on the whole american 'arian' eugenic breeding and sterilization programmes - together with state legislature to 'purify the races' - is all there to be read. Just because the post WW2 US chooses to deny it ever existed ; it's all there - mengele-in-the-making !

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  8. What comeuppence have you in mind? The Americans and the Russians certainly haven't had any. They are still going strong.

    Neither American nor Russian civic identity is ethnic in basis. One is imperial-republican and the other is still basically imperial-monarchist: whoever serves the imperium, classically conceived of in broadly Constantinian (i.e., Christianised) terms in America and explicitly in such terms in Russia, is an American or a Russian, as the case may be. Britain was the same. So was Spain. So (really very successfully where the religion was concerned) was Portugal. And so on.

    As to how Catholic the Hispanics really were (and are) or not, the answer is "not very". Latin America has never been a terribly Catholic place, really. Whereas the captured American West was settled largely by Germans of whom about half were orthodox, practising Catholics, reflecting the balance in Germany. Plus Irish, Italians, Poles and others.

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  9. As I said, Britain was as guilty as anyone else where eugenics was concerned. I know an awful lot about it.

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  10. Well of course Imperialists always look to Constantin and the Papacy to justify Imperialism.
    All nonsense of course.
    The churches looted and nuns raped during the US-Mexico War were certainly Catholic. And even if they were not "terribly Catholic", I am not sure that justifies their rape and exploitation by Catholic Portugal Spain and the manifest destiny of Christian USA.
    Even on the outbreak of Civil War, the Confederacy was looking to expand slavery into Central America.
    Sometimes I wish life would be better if I wasa member of a race who perceived themselves to be superior.
    Unfortunately I just believe myself to be as good as anybody.
    And even then people think I am above my God given station in life.

    My point was not that ALL the master races had got their comeuppance. Obviously the Japanese and Germans did as did the ludicrous Itialian fascists.

    A generation before the Czars and Habsburgs and a previous German Reich had been destroyed.
    In the 1950s and 1960s the French, British Empires also got their just desserts.
    As for USSR ....well we might say the Berlin Wall settled their hash.
    And USA is of course a nation at war with itself as we can witness with Fux News every night.

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  11. The collapses of the British, French and Portuguese Empires, the first two directly and the third indirectly as a consequenece of the War, are among the strongest arguments against it.

    It is not that we should never have left. We and the French, at least, always intended to eventually, and had already established all sorts of patterns of internal self-government, systems for identifying and training up local leaders, and so on.

    But we were forced, largely under American pressure and baecuse the War had bankrupted us, to pull out long before the proper process was complete, leaving the countries in question to whoever was able to muscle himself in, often aided and abetted by the Soviet Union or by China.

    In Africa alone, not only would there have been no National Party victory leading to apartheid in South Africa, and no Rhodesian UDI, if there had been no War, but there would also have been no Idi Amin, nor any other of the host of ghastly post-colonial despots, up to and including Mugabe. Independence would have happened by now. But the post-colonial African nightmare would not.

    The other particularly strong argument against the War is the apparently never-ending economic, social, cultural and political dominance of the Baby Boom. There is always a baby boom after a war, so there was bound to be the Baby Boom after the War, imposing its views and tastes on both its elders and its juniors.

    There were warnings about this in the Thirties. But then, there were warnings about a lot of things in the Thirties.

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  12. The argument that Imperialism was on the wane and would have ended anyway is a bit like the apologist argument for the Confederacy that slavery would eventually die out anyway.
    Although of course Slavery actually increased in the ealy 19th century.
    Yet the "end anyway" argument is undermined by the "Cornerstone Speech" and other evidence of the Racism at the heart of it.

    The British and French (Belgians Portuguese Dutch, Belgian also)...imperialism was not some kinda right they could give. Or be negotiated.
    It was a right to be taken.
    How those gaining freedom use it is NOT the issue.

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  13. The South always wanted to keep slavery. Whereas Britain had already begun the transition from Empire to Commonwealth. At a sensible pace.

    What "freedom"? Were Ugandans "free" under Amin? Were Centrafricans "free" under Bokassa? Are Zimbabweans "free" under Mugabe?

    They could have been as free as Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and indeed Britons. If the War had not intervened, and forced decolonisation, always the eventual objective, far too early.

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  14. The British, French, Belgians, Dutch etc had no right to set the pace of change.
    Their responsibility was merely to get out. Nothing else.
    A considerable number of Britains perceived problems are because of post colonialism, post imperialism.
    It shames Guardian readers and puts up the blood pressure of Daily Mail readers.
    Yet the aplogists for Empire contrive to blame the victims of Empire.
    Shelley spelled it all out for the British in "Ozymandias" (sp).

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  15. Many of the local populations didn't want the British to leave to leave. There was enormous difficulty on that point in the West Indies, the Pacific, and elsewhere. Considering what happened in many places once they did, that is hardly surprising.

    In Anguilla, Harold Wilson had to send in troops to restore order because the population demanded to stay British, as it stays to this day.

    Most Commonwealth countries in the West Indies and the Pacific retain the Queen as Head of State even now, and other than Tonga (one of those old British allies that are in the Commonwealth without ever having been in the Empire), I am not sure if any does not retain some sort of constitutional tie. Perhaps Dominica (although Dame Eugenia Charles was very pro-British, and nearly overthrown by right-wing American mercenaries) or Guyana; I'd have to check. But I wouldn't be surprised if they still had appeals to the Privy Council.

    Compare and contrast their histories (some troubled, but none comparable to various other ex-colonies) with that of post-imperial Africa and much (arguably all) of post-colonial Asia. In the West Indies and the Pacific, those which became independent earliest, and/or have abolished the monarchy, have really had the most trouble.

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  16. But David you can hardly convince me on the point of "pro British" colonial subjects.
    You once tried to argue that there is a large number of "pro Union" Catholics in Norn Iron.

    I kinda vaguely remember Anguilla which I am indebted to Wikipedia for informing me is 103 sq miles and has a population of 13,000. Thats even more than St Helena/Ascension/TdaC and the Pitcairns, not to mention South Georgia and not viable I would think as an independent nation. Might as well declare independence on Rockall (population one sea lion).

    I obviously know next to nothing about the West Indies but your belief in pro union Irish catholics in spite of all evidence to the contrary suggests that you are not credible on these matters.

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  17. Influnced by the whole "Empire Is Bad" thing, London wanted Anguilla to be part of the state also (and still) comprised of Saint Kitts and Nevis. The Anguillans were having none of it.

    The patterns of internal self-government, with an eventual view to independence (and to universal suffrage where it did not already exist), were vastly better examples of the people in question running themselves than the despotism that succeeded it in formerly British Africa and in much or all of formerly British Asia.

    All because the cost of the War, and the ideological subjugation to Americanism as a result of the War, had forced us to pull out ludicrously, disastrously early. Even though no one except the (Soviet or Chinese-backed) despots-in-waiting had really wanted us to.

    Just look at the affection for Britain that people from those countries still have. They can't always quite say it, but they know when they were well-off.

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  18. Oh, and on the pro-Union Catholics thing, forb whom would any anti-Union Catholic now vote? Pro-Union Catholics? There is no longer any other kind.

    Again, people know when they are well-off. And people, like the ageing SF leadership, who grew up poor but show no current sign of being, certainly know when they are well-off. No one could be more pro-British than them, really. Again, they can't quite say it. But so what?

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  19. David in your world there are proUnion Irish Catholics and pro British Colonised who in your world cant quite bring themselves to say so.
    The evidence and indeed common sense suggests there are very few pro Union Catholics and almost as few pro British colonized.
    Naming three pro Union Irish Catholics would be a difficult task......like naming three famous Belgians.

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  20. I can name you five: Gerry Adams,
    Pat Doherty, Conor Murphy, Martin McGuinness and Michelle Gildernew.

    Each on the payroll of the hated British State several times over, even to the extent of getting their London houses paid for by a Parliament that they do not attend. Yet they still feel the need to have houses in London, so anti-British are they, really.

    The abject poverty, rampant discrimination, and political exclusion that were the formative experiences at least of Adams, McGuinness and Doherty are no longer there to form a rising generation that might dissent from this status quo and ever demand, even if purely peacefully, any discernable progress towards a thirty-two county Republic.

    So yes, they have sold out. But no one minds. Why would they?

    As for other lands, compare the attitude of post-colonial African and Asian leaders towards Britain to that of the "ordinary" Africans or Asians whom one meets either over here or over there. Those leaders, rather lacking in democratic legitimacy (unlike the patterns of internal self-government prior to, and always intended to lead to, independence) were, and are, wildly untypical.

    This contrast applies less to the West Indies and to the Pacific, where leaders are almost as rarely anti-British as West Indians and Pacific Islanders are in general. Just contrast the attitude of West Indian-born (or Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi-born) people in this country with that of their grandchildren born here.

    Speaking of Pakistan, consider that if we had stayed out of the War, then there would have been neither any Pakistan nor any State of Israel. Truly something for everyone in the present global climate.

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  21. David, I am grateful you did not include me in the Famous Five. After all I accepted the Queens Shilling for over 32 years and she still gives me a rather generous proportion of that Shilling as a civil service pensioner.
    You wrote the original post with a sense that in "winning" the War, almost as much that you hold dear was "lost".
    As a person who lived thru a war, I find myself in a slightly different position. Some things certainly "lost" (not least people of all backgrounds that I knew)but on the other hand so much more has been gained.
    In that sense I have the advantage on you. Youre a much younger man and have not seen War and Terrorism up close and personal.
    For historical precedent of Adams, McGuinness, Gildernew, Murphy,Doherty, you should really look to the 19th century.....emancipation, democracy, literacy, even support for Gaelic language. Nothing was ever enough. We always wanted more.

    The question really is if......GFA actually copper fastens the Union you love, why do you oppose it?.
    Why do I so love it?

    Of course as a man with a sense of historic irony you will be pleased that the British Government has decreed that the PSNI must find £17 million in budget cuts and it is being opposed by the Policing Board.
    And leading the opposition is the excellent Acting Chief Constable JUDITH Gillespie and her allies on the Policing Board. The chief opponents are Alex Maskey MLA who is the same man who once stole £300 from a cashier in the Ulster Bank on a whim, Philip McGuigan MLA too young to have a "history" and Martina Anderson MLA (12 years for conspiring to blow up England).
    And somehow this is NOT an issue unlike Lockerbie "bomber".
    Oh the leading conspirator in Andersons Active Service Unit......Paddy Magee is now a PhD and an occasional guest lecturer at QUB.

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  22. oops looks like my last comment isa bit unclear. Acting Chief Constable Gillespies biggest ALLIES on the Policing Board are Sinn Féin-Irish Republican Army.

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  23. "if......GFA actually copper fastens the Union you love, why do you oppose it?"

    As much as anything else, I don't like a situation in which all parties are in government all the time, so that no one is asking any questions.

    On the earlier discussion of how people from the old Empire see Britain, consider that the East African Asians came here rather than going to India or Pakistan, that the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo called for Britain to invade Zimbabwe, and that soon afterwards the people of that country elected a party openly funded from Britain.

    They are not the only ones, of course. Add up the salaries, the expenses, the things that go through as staffing costs, and the backhanders from the Police and MI5, and just how much of Sinn Fein's money these days does *not* come from the hated British State?

    The War created the baleful situation in Rhodesia, and thus in Zimbabwe. With his Battle of Britain record, Ian Smith felt that he was entitled to the "freedom" for which, by the Sixties, people had managed to convince themselves had been the whole point. And "freedom" for him meant "freedom" from black rule, though also, to be far, from Soviet or Chinese domination.

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  24. Oh the money Sinn Féin-Irish Republican Army gets is effectively Danegelt.....loadsa money not to bomb Bishopsgate again.
    I dont think the Saxons liked the Danes any better. I dont think the Danes had any more respect for the Saxons because they gave them loadsa money.
    As there IS undoubtedly peace (and your theme for the week is appeasement anyway) you should be grateful as a "unionist" that SF has been so easily bought off.
    But actually you dont believe it yourself David :)

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  25. Oh, I don't know.

    I suspect that making any noise about a United Ireland will come to be seen as the stuff of middle-class male adolesence, and accordingly associated with first joining Sinn Fein.

    Everyone will be very indulgent while they wait for him to grow out of it and become a participant in politics as usual.

    This may already have started.

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