Finger Lickin' Good

A couple of tasters from R J Stove's splendid hatchet job on Andrew Roberts in The American Conservative:

"It is tempting to make an entire article not only from Roberts’s forensic amorality but from his outright factual ineptitude. In a spasm of revisionist daydreaming, Roberts has announced that the Australian prime minister in 1938 was Robert Menzies. This would have astonished the actual Australian prime minister of that year, who bore the name Joseph Lyons. Presumably relying on one-volume encyclopedias’ entries, Roberts never got around to discovering that the Australian leader baptized Joseph Benedict Chifley was known to all his compatriots as Ben Chifley: not, pace Roberts, as “Joseph Chifley.” Someone might also with benefit have advised Roberts that the Brighton bombing aimed at Margaret Thatcher occurred in 1984, not 1985, and that Nelson Mandela was released from jail in 1990, not 1994. Virginia Woolf could hardly have contributed to the periodical Encounter, since she suicided 12 years before it began."

"Roberts’s infatuation with the Anglosphere compels him to assume, instead of proving, that the Anglosphere actually exists. But does it, outside neocon fantasies? Did it have any meaning before the Thatcher-Reagan personal friendship or the FDR-Churchill political marriage of convenience? What grounds, historically, are there for concluding that a shared tongue unites peoples? Bernard Shaw’s celebrated “divided by a common language” quip suggests the contrary. So, too, for that matter, does the Serbo-Croat experience.

Could it not be conjectured that America has owed its entire essence since at least 1776 to the fact of Not Being Britain? But for its Not-Britain-ness, would America even be America? How many American leaders before Reagan actually imagined that an “Anglosphere” determined their policies, as opposed to being intermittent rhetoric? How many British leaders? (One such leader, Lord Palmerston, famously said the opposite: “we have no permanent allies, only permanent interests.” For similar convictions across the pond, consult the Monroe Doctrine and Washington’s Farewell Address.)

What meliorating effect, pray tell, did this “Anglosphere” have upon Eisenhower’s clobbering of Anthony Eden in the Suez affair? Or upon Harold Wilson’s refusal to permit British troops in Vietnam? Or—if bilingual Canada is considered an Anglosphere component—upon Pierre Trudeau’s “A plague on both your houses” stance toward both America and Britain? What price have Irish-Americans ever put on the Anglosphere’s desirability? How much did pro-British sentiment in Australia and, particularly New Zealand, matter against Britain’s 1970s support for the European Common Market (support that Roberts strangely likens to the actions of “an abusive parent”)? Nobody expects any historian to have all the answers. Trouble is, Roberts’s cocksureness prevents him from even asking the questions.

Yet there is worse. Roberts commits the same sin for which Orwell rightly castigated Britain’s wartime Stalinists. They did not, he complained, ask themselves: “Is this policy right or wrong?” Rather, they asked, “This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?” As has already been explained, no British or American crime fails to elicit from Roberts a frenzied justification. Suppose Britain had run its own Auschwitz. Suppose America had carried out its own premeditated Holodomor —as distinct from imperial Britain allowing Irish and Indian famines through gross incompetence. Can we imagine that Roberts would not be there, spin-doctoring apparatus at the ready, to defend such corpse factories? Indeed, on what logical grounds could he oppose them? We know that atomic warfare as practiced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to say nothing of Dresden’s incineration, meets his full approval: “Fortunately,” he smugly asserts, “the English-speaking peoples’ wars are fought by professional soldiers under the direction of elected politicians, with intellectuals having very little to do with them until they are safely won, after which they can criticize with hindsight and moral superiority.” Pius XII, Admiral William Leahy, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe might have disagreed with Roberts on this last point, but what did they know?

“Live not by lies,” Solzhenitsyn pleaded. Lenin had an approach far more congenial than Solzhenitsyn’s to the likes of Roberts: “Truth,” he explained, “is what serves the revolution.” So it is with Roberts’s notions of truth: they serve the neocon revolution. The old-style revolutionist advocated cloth caps, gulags, a command economy, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Roberts-style revolutionist advocates democratism, sexual liberation, endless war against “Islamofascism,” a Ponzi-scheme economy, and the dictatorship of the Anglo. There is no reason for the second apparatchik, any more than the first, to impose on the intellects of the rest of us. Orwell again:

Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of ... any ... regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore."