On both sides, the First World War largely destroyed the civilisation that it was supposed to protect.
The Second World War pretty much finished the job, icing its own cake by handing over to Stalin the country whose independence the War had been fought to defend.
Just as Nazi Germany never had either the desire or the means to invade Britain, so the Soviet Union never had either the desire or the means to invade Western Europe, never mind the United States.
Look at the West now, its culture permanently dominated by the Baby Boom that was bound to follow the War; there were warnings about that, as about so much else, in the 1930s. And its polity controlled by old 1970s campus Marxists, plus a sprinkling of those who raised funds and carried bags for apartheid South Africa, with its official memorial to Hitler, and for the Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America.
Then ask yourself this: What on earth was it all for?
And yet we are seriously planning on doing it all again, launching new Cold Wars against Russia (of all places) and China, and possibly a hot one against an Iran which does not have a nuclear bomb and which would be no threat to Britain even if she did.
Why do we never learn?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
But didn't the War make the Attlee reforms possible by getting people used to a high degree of state action?
ReplyDeleteNo. They already were.
ReplyDeleteThe Welfare State had begun to develop before the First World War, and by the 1930s, Tory Britain already took for granted much of what the people usually held up as the pioneers of these things - Swedish Social Democrats, American New Deal Democrats, the New Zealand Labour Party - were still fighting for.
That even applies to public ownership. For example, electricity was nationalised between the Wars, by the Tories.
Before anyone asks about the Holocaust, it had nothing to do with why we fought the War, and it could not have happened if the German public had not been distracted by the War.
Churchill, on the other hand, knew exactly to what the railway lines to Auschwitz were taking people, but he refused to bomb them. But then, Stalin, to whom Churchill handed over Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe at the end of the War, had been planning a pogrom against the Jews at the time of his death.
Great post. The Cold War really hurt the cause of socialism/social democracy because it opened any economically left-wing person up to the charge that they were in bed with the Soviets or the Red Chinese or whoever. In many instances, such accusations were not fair and were just used to shut people up.
ReplyDeleteI would say that this is still the case to a certain degree in the United States. Look at how the Right tried to tar Obama as a "Commie" even though it was totally absurd on all possible levels.
Quite so. Whereas the Old Labour Left was mostly opposed to that sort of thing, and the Old Labour Right was very forcefully so, New Labour was ridled with them.
ReplyDeleteJohn Reid, Peter Mandelson, Ralph Miliband, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in those days the paid agency of an enemy power. Alistair Darling, Bob Ainsworth, Geoff Gallop (Tony Blair’s mentor at Oxford) and the International Marxist Group. Charles Clarke, Jack Straw and the nominally Labour but entirely pro-Soviet faction that controlled the National Union of Students.
Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and Trotskyism; Milburn’s only ever job outside politics was running a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as “Haze of Dope”. The most powerful man in the voluntary sector, an old university friend of Tony Blair’s, the recently knighted Sir Stephen Bubb, who was one of the surcharged and disqualified Lambeth councillors.
And so on, and on, and on.
Including the assembled New Labourites who sang, not The Red Flag, but The Internationale, at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook.
They have very cleverly described themselves as “Social Democrats” in the knowledge that, while almost all Britons on hearing or reading that term think of it as referring to the non-Marxist and anti-Marxist tradition within the British Labour Movement, it was also the name of the party of the Russian Revolution, to the Bolshevik majority within which looked back the Communist Party, the International Marxist Group, the Labour pro-Soviet faction, and the Trotskyists, partially overlapping as those, and many more besides, often were.
So it is arguable that they have not lied directly. But it is indisputable that they have used a term in such a way as to assume its meaning within the tiny Leninist subculture, rather than its meaning in ordinary usage even among the politically well-informed. In so doing, they have monstrously deceived the electorate.
Furthermore, the upper classes were the only section of society in which, right up to the fall of the Soviet Union and even beyond, it was perfectly respectable to profess oneself a Communist. It was just dismissed, in an attitude unknown to the rest of Britain at the time, as an amusing little eccentricity such as any proper toff is obliged to have. Not everyone might have known that the then Sir Anthony Blunt was a KGB agent, but everyone, including Her Majesty His Employer, knew that he was a Communist, and snobbish as only Marxists ever quite are.
Then as now, and really at every point in between, anyone who was sufficiently grand could secure advancement in the Conservative Party, and it was considered vulgar to enquire as to specific political opinions.
Who would look for them in the Conservative Party? Yet the utterly posh world of MI6 and the upper echelons of MI5 was absolutely riddled with them right up until the bitter end, to the point that it had become a standing joke even among the general public. Everyone knew that the KGB’s main recruitment ground was not the patriotic, socially conservative trade union movement or anything like that, but Oxbridge in general and Cambridge in particular, and only the public school rather than the grammar school circles even there. (There was in fact a huge amount of patriotism and no shortage of social conservatism in the USSR, but that is another story.)
The perfectly preposterous idea that Harold Wilson, of all people, and for heaven’s sake even Ted Short and George Thomas in the more recent versions, were somehow Soviet sleeper agents continues to serve what has always been its purpose, that of pure distraction from what ought to be the blindingly obvious.
In 1981, Michael Foot refused to endorse Peter Tatchell as a candidate for the House of Commons; in 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a seat in the House of Lords.