Banging On

I will select 'Geraint' as being the most blatant of those commenting here who have so completely misunderstood what I say that they actually misrepresent it back to me. they do this, I believe, so as to avoid actually thinking about it.

 

'Geraint' writes: 'Peter Hitchens declares that we were not in contact with the enemy until 44. That would be a surprise to those in North Africa/Crete/Malta and Italy. That's not even including against the Japanese at Malaya and Burma. Indeed it is the surrender at Singapore that did more to lose our Empire than the Nazis.

 

But I didn't write that we were 'not in contact with the enemy until 44'. Such a  statement is obviously absurd. I wrote 'The British army, having been driven from the European continent in 1940,  was not in contact with the main body of the enemy from 1940 to 1944.' The difference between the two is enormous. Yet 'Geraint' is quite  happy to put at least half his name to this total untruth.

 

How can one strive against this sort of thing? How can one deal with the people who think I say that a German-Polish deal in 1939 would have resulted in permanent peace (I don't, and have often speculated on how and where else Hitler might have pursued his eastward drive if he had been at peace with Poland). How can I deal with those who seem to think that May 1940 would have happened anyway even if Britain and France had not declared war on Germany in September 1939. How can I deal with those who can't see that France, undefeated and powerfully defended, would have remained a military problem for Germany, which it was not once it had been defeated and occupied?

 

How can I deal with those who repeatedly ask to me stipulate the exact date and nature of Britain's entry into the war, if not in September 1939, when the question is self-evidently absurd and I have just explained why it is self-evidently absurd?

 

How can I deal with those who seem to think that countries go to war because they disapprove of other people's governments - in which case how could we ever have had the USSR as an ally?

 

How can I deal with those who refuse to acquaint themselves with the actual history of Hitler's treatment of the Jews first of Germany and then of the rest of Europe, and the history of the democracies' failure to do anything about it?  Who cannot distinguish between the persecution of German Jews designed to drive them out of Germany, and the deliberate industrial murder of all the Jews of Europe, which only began after the war (triggered by the Polish Guarantee) had begun. And who still imagine that we went to war in 1939 as an anti-racist crusade? Or indeed that the rescue of Europe's Jews ever formed part of our warlike purpose?

 

How can I deal with those who don't grasp that Britain was actually bankrupted by war by 1940, and never recovered? That she wasn't, and could not afford to be, a major European military power?

 

How can I deal with those who cannot see that taking advantage of the tension between Germany and Russia, complicated by armed Anglo-French neutrality,  would have been a classic balance-of-power policy? Whereas our declaration of war in 1939 *destroyed* that balance?

 

The answer is that I can't. And I can't because the myth of the  'Finest Hour' is as potent in the modern British mind, especially among people of a certain age (mine, mainly), as the great religious stories were in the minds of their forebears. It is a tale of lone heroism, of good triumphing over evil against the odds, of heroic brotherhood with selfless allies . Alas, it is not true. And it leads us, every few years, into folly after folly after folly, in which innocent people die screaming for no good purpose. That's why I keep on and on about it. 

 

How can I deal with those who cannot seen that taking advantage of the tension between Germany and Russia, complicated by armed Anglo-French neutrality,  would have been a classic balance-of-power policy? Whereas our declaration of war in 1939 *destroyed* that balance?

 

The answer is that I can't. And I can't because the myth of the  'Finest Hour' is as potent in the modern British mind, especially among people of a certain age (mine, mainly), as the great religious stories were in the minds of their forebears. It is a tale of lone heroism, of good triumphing over evil against the odds, of heroic brotherhood with selfless allies . Alas, it is not true. And it leads us, every few years, into folly after folly after folly, in which innocent people die screaming for no good purpose. That's why I keep on and on about it.