Salaam
Another comment piece, this this time referring to a specific technique of war propaganda.
Why They have to Drag Hitler into It - the Cult of the Good War
By Peter Hitchens
Here comes Hitler again, plus evil dictators in general, appeasement and the rest of the bits and pieces, board, dice, tokens, model ships and planes, and wads of other people’s money that are to be found in that much-loved Westminster and Washington DC board game, ‘How to Start a War’.
I was just wondering, on Sunday morning, how long it would be before Syria’s President Assad would be compared to Adolf Hitler, and the American Secretary of State John Kerry almost immediately obliged by saying Assad had ‘joined the list of Hitler and Hussein’ who had used evil chemical weapons. Alas, all kinds of countries have used these weapons. Many that never used them still made and stockpiled them. If the possession or use of chemical weapons is itself a crime, few major powers are clean. Winston Churchill’s own personal attitude to this matter is interesting, and characteristically robust, but does not fit too well with the ‘Assad as Hitler and Obama as Churchill’ narrative.
It was perhaps a pity that a picture of Mr Kerry, and his spouse, dining with the future Hitler-substitute Bashar Assad (and his spouse, once the subject of an admiring profile in ‘Vogue’, now withdrawn) swiftly emerged from the archives . But what is that greenish fluid they are all about be given to drink?
Perhaps it wasn’t a pity. I myself find the wild mood-swings of the leaders of the ‘West’ , in their attitudes towards foreign despots, very informative. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Order of the Bath springs to mind, not to mention the reunited German state’s belated vendetta against Erich Honecker, whom they had once entertained and met as a diplomatic partner. And of course the very-swiftly-forgotten protests over Deng Xiaoping ‘killing his own people' in Peking’s Tiananmen Square, and the amazing licence granted to Boris Yeltsin to do things (including ‘shelling his own parliament’) which we would never approve of if Vladimir Putin did them. Though perhaps the Egyptian ‘stabilisation government’ or Junta, might get away with it. I see they are now charging Muslim brotherhood figures with murder, and nobody is laughing. As for Robert Mugabe, where does one begin?
These wild mood-swings inform me that their current spasms of outrage are false, and that the reasons they give for their behaviour are not reasons but pretexts, thus encouraging us all to search for the real reason. Does it lie in them, and in their flawed characters - or in some object they privately have, but won’t openly discuss? Perhaps both.
Mr Kerry (whose public speaking style I once unkindly compared to chloroform, after witnessing him alienate and bore a huge theatre full of American Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tennessee) also proclaimed that ‘we’ (that is, the Executive of the US government) were ‘not going to lose’ the approaching vote on bombing Syria. This was delivered as a statement rather than a wish. Well, in that case, why hold the vote at all? I do think people should stop trying to influence votes by the stampede method, under which you persuade the more sheeplike voters that, by supporting you, they are just doing what everyone else is doing. Baaaa.
If you actually believe in debate, and people making up their minds on the basis of the arguments, this is surely an outrage. Of course, if you don’t actually believe in unpredictable votes, and cynically regard all this debate stuff as top-dressing for absolute power, then that’s another matter.
But Hitler always comes into this because he is part of a cult, the cult of the good war and the finest hour, one of whose branches is the cult of the nice bomb and the moral bomber.
According to the scriptures of this cult, a wicked dictator called Hitler was overcome by a brave and good democrat called Winston Churchill. Churchill triumphed at Dunkirk, and then fought Hitler to save the Jews from the Holocaust, also liberating Europe at D-Day, so that we all lived happily ever after. A group of people carrying umbrellas, called the ‘appeasers’ and led by a man called ‘Chamberlain’, wickedly opposed Churchill and gave in to Hitler at Munich. If it had not been for them, Hitler would have been seen for what he was, attacked and overthrown long before.
Regular readers of this weblog will know that this version of events contains some nuggets of truth – Hitler was evil and was defeated, Churchill had many noble qualities. Britain, though defeated on land in 1940, was not invaded. But they will also, I think, admit that a) it is far from complete and b) there are probably millions of people in Britain and the USA who believe something very similar to the above, about the events of 1938-45. This, alas, still influences their judgement when their leaders try to get them to go to war.
The most fanatical followers of this cult are, however, not just harmless members of a re-enactment society spending their weekends making ‘Boom!’ and ‘eeeee—ow!’ noises as they play with their Dinky toys and Airfix models in the attic.
They re-enact this myth in the form of actual red war, and are to be found among professional politicians in Britain and America. These initiates periodically choose a new person to take the role of ‘Hitler’. This can be almost anybody, including such minor figures as Manuel Noriega of Panama.
For, in the ritual of the Churchill cultists, the important thing is not who takes the part of Hitler, but who takes the part of Churchill, and who takes the part of Chamberlain.
And the smaller the would-be Churchills get, the smaller the alleged Hitlers get too. Note that, despite its many crimes against the laws of civilisation, the Chinese People’s Republic has never been called upon to play the part of Hitler, nor is it likely to be.
Invariably, the American or British leader calling for war imagines he is Churchill. Invariably, those who oppose the war are classified as appeasers and equated with ‘Chamberlain’. And invariably, the targeted dictator is classified as ‘Hitler’.
The awful truth of the Second World War is that it is much more complicated than that, that it was not fought to rescue the Jews (and largely failed to do so) and that many entirely innocent and harmless people did not experience it or its aftermath as ‘good’; also, that of its two principal victors (neither of whom was Britain, despite Churchill’s role) one, Stalin, was as evil a dictator was one might find in a long day’s search.
Which is why western schoolchildren learn little about the Soviet Army’s part in the defeat of the evil Hitler, or indeed about Churchill’s increasingly subservient, not to say appeasing , relationship with Stalin in the later years of the war. Or why so little is said about how slight Britain’s direct contact with the land forces of Nazi Germany was between 1940 and 1944. Let alone of the complex diplomacy which brought Britain into war with Germany in September 1939.
Let’s discuss some of this. Just before my recent journey to Berlin, I visited my favourite second hand bookshop in search of serendipity, and there found, in stout 1960s Penguin editions priced at three shillings and sixpence, a book I hadn’t read for years (A.J.P. Taylor’s ‘The Origins of the Second World war’ and a book I had never read but felt I should have done ,Len Deighton’s ‘Funeral in Berlin’).What could have been better travel reading, on a journey to Berlin undertaken close to the 74th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Great War?
rest here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
Another comment piece, this this time referring to a specific technique of war propaganda.
Why They have to Drag Hitler into It - the Cult of the Good War
By Peter Hitchens
Here comes Hitler again, plus evil dictators in general, appeasement and the rest of the bits and pieces, board, dice, tokens, model ships and planes, and wads of other people’s money that are to be found in that much-loved Westminster and Washington DC board game, ‘How to Start a War’.
I was just wondering, on Sunday morning, how long it would be before Syria’s President Assad would be compared to Adolf Hitler, and the American Secretary of State John Kerry almost immediately obliged by saying Assad had ‘joined the list of Hitler and Hussein’ who had used evil chemical weapons. Alas, all kinds of countries have used these weapons. Many that never used them still made and stockpiled them. If the possession or use of chemical weapons is itself a crime, few major powers are clean. Winston Churchill’s own personal attitude to this matter is interesting, and characteristically robust, but does not fit too well with the ‘Assad as Hitler and Obama as Churchill’ narrative.
It was perhaps a pity that a picture of Mr Kerry, and his spouse, dining with the future Hitler-substitute Bashar Assad (and his spouse, once the subject of an admiring profile in ‘Vogue’, now withdrawn) swiftly emerged from the archives . But what is that greenish fluid they are all about be given to drink?
Perhaps it wasn’t a pity. I myself find the wild mood-swings of the leaders of the ‘West’ , in their attitudes towards foreign despots, very informative. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Order of the Bath springs to mind, not to mention the reunited German state’s belated vendetta against Erich Honecker, whom they had once entertained and met as a diplomatic partner. And of course the very-swiftly-forgotten protests over Deng Xiaoping ‘killing his own people' in Peking’s Tiananmen Square, and the amazing licence granted to Boris Yeltsin to do things (including ‘shelling his own parliament’) which we would never approve of if Vladimir Putin did them. Though perhaps the Egyptian ‘stabilisation government’ or Junta, might get away with it. I see they are now charging Muslim brotherhood figures with murder, and nobody is laughing. As for Robert Mugabe, where does one begin?
These wild mood-swings inform me that their current spasms of outrage are false, and that the reasons they give for their behaviour are not reasons but pretexts, thus encouraging us all to search for the real reason. Does it lie in them, and in their flawed characters - or in some object they privately have, but won’t openly discuss? Perhaps both.
Mr Kerry (whose public speaking style I once unkindly compared to chloroform, after witnessing him alienate and bore a huge theatre full of American Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tennessee) also proclaimed that ‘we’ (that is, the Executive of the US government) were ‘not going to lose’ the approaching vote on bombing Syria. This was delivered as a statement rather than a wish. Well, in that case, why hold the vote at all? I do think people should stop trying to influence votes by the stampede method, under which you persuade the more sheeplike voters that, by supporting you, they are just doing what everyone else is doing. Baaaa.
If you actually believe in debate, and people making up their minds on the basis of the arguments, this is surely an outrage. Of course, if you don’t actually believe in unpredictable votes, and cynically regard all this debate stuff as top-dressing for absolute power, then that’s another matter.
But Hitler always comes into this because he is part of a cult, the cult of the good war and the finest hour, one of whose branches is the cult of the nice bomb and the moral bomber.
According to the scriptures of this cult, a wicked dictator called Hitler was overcome by a brave and good democrat called Winston Churchill. Churchill triumphed at Dunkirk, and then fought Hitler to save the Jews from the Holocaust, also liberating Europe at D-Day, so that we all lived happily ever after. A group of people carrying umbrellas, called the ‘appeasers’ and led by a man called ‘Chamberlain’, wickedly opposed Churchill and gave in to Hitler at Munich. If it had not been for them, Hitler would have been seen for what he was, attacked and overthrown long before.
Regular readers of this weblog will know that this version of events contains some nuggets of truth – Hitler was evil and was defeated, Churchill had many noble qualities. Britain, though defeated on land in 1940, was not invaded. But they will also, I think, admit that a) it is far from complete and b) there are probably millions of people in Britain and the USA who believe something very similar to the above, about the events of 1938-45. This, alas, still influences their judgement when their leaders try to get them to go to war.
The most fanatical followers of this cult are, however, not just harmless members of a re-enactment society spending their weekends making ‘Boom!’ and ‘eeeee—ow!’ noises as they play with their Dinky toys and Airfix models in the attic.
They re-enact this myth in the form of actual red war, and are to be found among professional politicians in Britain and America. These initiates periodically choose a new person to take the role of ‘Hitler’. This can be almost anybody, including such minor figures as Manuel Noriega of Panama.
For, in the ritual of the Churchill cultists, the important thing is not who takes the part of Hitler, but who takes the part of Churchill, and who takes the part of Chamberlain.
And the smaller the would-be Churchills get, the smaller the alleged Hitlers get too. Note that, despite its many crimes against the laws of civilisation, the Chinese People’s Republic has never been called upon to play the part of Hitler, nor is it likely to be.
Invariably, the American or British leader calling for war imagines he is Churchill. Invariably, those who oppose the war are classified as appeasers and equated with ‘Chamberlain’. And invariably, the targeted dictator is classified as ‘Hitler’.
The awful truth of the Second World War is that it is much more complicated than that, that it was not fought to rescue the Jews (and largely failed to do so) and that many entirely innocent and harmless people did not experience it or its aftermath as ‘good’; also, that of its two principal victors (neither of whom was Britain, despite Churchill’s role) one, Stalin, was as evil a dictator was one might find in a long day’s search.
Which is why western schoolchildren learn little about the Soviet Army’s part in the defeat of the evil Hitler, or indeed about Churchill’s increasingly subservient, not to say appeasing , relationship with Stalin in the later years of the war. Or why so little is said about how slight Britain’s direct contact with the land forces of Nazi Germany was between 1940 and 1944. Let alone of the complex diplomacy which brought Britain into war with Germany in September 1939.
Let’s discuss some of this. Just before my recent journey to Berlin, I visited my favourite second hand bookshop in search of serendipity, and there found, in stout 1960s Penguin editions priced at three shillings and sixpence, a book I hadn’t read for years (A.J.P. Taylor’s ‘The Origins of the Second World war’ and a book I had never read but felt I should have done ,Len Deighton’s ‘Funeral in Berlin’).What could have been better travel reading, on a journey to Berlin undertaken close to the 74th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Great War?
rest here
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
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