Hoping it Might be So - Truth versus Desire

I have puzzled for some time about how best to respond to Mr Meredith. I am baffled by his rather huffy response to me, as I believe there was nothing intemperate or personally rude in my reply to him, let alone ‘invective’, as alleged. I’ve checked the deep stores and magazines where my invective is stored under UN supervision, and it’s all still there.

 

 I’m also very interested by his repeated failure to admit that he is simply wrong about my reference to the failings of HM ships before 1939. My principal source was clearly the (authoritative) Times obituary of Admiral Le Bailly, one of the navy’s most distinguished engineers,  and the mention of Herman Wouk a minor footnote. Even when this has been clearly pointed out to him, he does not retreat at all, but repeats the original mistake.

 

I don’t see any point in rehearsing my argument, because Mr Meredith hasn’t so far even acknowledged its existence. He could do so in several ways, either by rebutting or even refuting it with facts and logic, or by accepting it. But maintaining *that* he disagrees with me, without in any way saying *why*, is not a response.

 

His approach to argument is summed up in these words ‘

 

‘only my opinion maybe, but I'm entitled to it’.

 

But  why is he ‘entitled to it’? He is free to hold it and to express it, surely . But if he seeks , on a public forum, voluntarily to challenge someone who has a wholly different opinion, then I think he is obliged to make out a case for his own position, or a case against mine, other than

‘only my opinion maybe, but I'm entitled to it’.

This he does not do.  And he maintains his position by simply ignoring what I say.

 

If he wants to know what my argument is, he will find it set out in my two previous contributions, and also under the heading ‘Churchill Cult’ in the Index. But I don’t get the impression he does want to know.

 

I suspect he doesn’t want to know, for the same reasons that (for many years) I also didn’t want to know. I imagine that he (as I and many others have done) finds the mythical version of events sustaining and comforting. This is mainly because it is obvious that at the end of this great war our country was sadly and permanently diminished, and it was a powerful consolation, amid the rubble, the bereavements, the many men returning gaunt and haggard from Japanese PoW camps (or worse still, not returning from them) ,  the debts and the demoralisation, the thousands of ruined marriages and broken homes,  to think that ours had been a great moral conflict in which we had stood against evil and for good.

 

The historic facts , alas, do not support these contentions. I wish they did.  I know the truth is sad and painful. But I have stopped wishing, and begun thinking. I have done so mainly because this myth is now used for a quite different purpose.  Few now even know how destitute we were in 1945. Fewer still remember what sort of country this still was in 1939 and what we lost by our rash rush into a war we were not equipped to fight. 

 

The myth nowadays is constantly employed to justify new wars. And that is why it is necessary to challenge it - for the sake of our future. 

 

As for ‘hindsight’, what is history but hindsight? What are memory and experience but hindsight?  There is no use advising the corpses of Halifax and Chamberlain on what they should have done when they were still alive. But there is a great deal of point in analysing how they came to do what they did.  The point, as always, is about the future (not least our current political class’s costly and dangerous near-obsession with supposedly Churchillian intervention against supposedly Hitlerian  tyrants in foreign countries) .

 

Why does Mr Meredith not see this?

In a way, I think he himself answers this question in the following passage. ‘(just how the hell did Stalin manage to not notice 4,000,000 Axis soldiers, 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses massing on his borders?)'.

 

It’s a good question, and one over which historians often puzzle. It wasn’t just the massed armies he ignored. He ignored repeated despatches from his own best intelligence agent, Richard Sorge. He ignored warnings sent to him by Churchill personally.

 

The answer is simple, and not surprising to anyone who carefully observes human behaviour, and above all the extreme difficulty which most people encounter in changing their minds, even when the reasons to do so are overwhelming. I am an expert on this, as I meet it so often.

 

Stalin refused to believe the overwhelming evidence that Hitler was about to attack for a simple reason - *because he did not want to believe it*.

 

Stalin wanted to believe that his pact with Hitler was an enduring personal diplomatic triumph, which protected the USSR against the danger of war. Red Army officers who reported the early stages of the attack were actually shot for doing so, as the news they brought was considered subversive in itself.

 

Belief, as I have so often pointed out here, serves desire.  But where the facts can be shown to be different, and in the case of the 1939-45 war they certainly can be if we allow ourselves to study them,  that means we have to abandon the desire and face the truth.