Fools and Knaves?

This posting takes up an argument I have been having with Mr Charles Stephenson on the comment thread of ‘1914 Revisited – Part Two’.

(the exchange is reproduced below).

 

But first, what is a ‘viable’ position?  Mr Stephenson seems to think that it is one validated by fashion. I think it is one validated by facts, reason and experience. If a man had been counted wise and successful all his life, and then suddenly deserted left his home and family, and took to criminal violence, debauchery and drunkenness, would he still be wise or good, or a ‘serious intellect’? Or would we think that perhaps we had misjudged him before?

 

Mr Stephenson responds to my point -  that two major political figures, John Burns and John Morley, resigned from the Cabinet that the two of the Left’s greatest figures opposed the war and that a demonstration against war filled Trafalgar Square to overflowing on Sunday 2nd August 1914 (which I offered as evidence that Asquith did not ‘take a united country into war’ as Mr Stephenson had maintained, and there was ‘significant opposition’, as Mr Stephenson had said there wasn’t) -  by saying:

 

‘ Many of them were against war on principle; the Labour leader was a pacifist. It wasn’t just this war it would have been any war. In any event, just two of Asquith’s cabinet resigned; the leader of the Labour Party (37 MPs I believe and so roughly equivalent to today’s pre-coalition Lib-Dems) also resigned when the majority of his parliamentary party supported it;’;

 

I think this still represents significant opposition, especially in a country where the ‘establishment’ was in favour of war, and when the warning of approaching war was so very brief. Had the anti-war forces in politics, the newspapers and the country  (the Manchester Guardian was fiercely opposed to war) had more time to mobilize before war was a fait accompli, I think we would have seen far greater opposition. But, like all bad decisions, this one was rushed.

 

Mr Stephenson continues (do I hear a sniff of scorn here?)  :

‘ and there was (according to The Times) a ‘socialist demonstration in Trafalgar Square.’

 

Well, yes, ‘The Times’ was ferociously in favour of war. Other reports, detailed by Douglas Newton, gave the demonstration far greater prominence and treated it more seriously. The organisers had perhaps a couple of days to assemble their forces. I would like to see anyone, even Mr Stephenson,  fill Trafalgar Square at such notice even in these days of easy mass communications and much larger population.

 

 

Mr Stephenson concludes : ‘You say that ‘the arguments made for it were and remain demonstrably thin.’ This wasn’t apparent to the likes of . . . I won’t bother itemising a list of those who disagreed at the time, many of whom were considered serious intellects both then and now. Yet you argue that they were, all of them, merely fools or knaves. I submit that this this is not a viable position.’

 

I am not interested in what was ‘apparent’. I am interested in what was the case, the very thing which serious intellects are supposed to be able to distinguish. The task of all philosophy is to penetrate the disguises in which history advances itself. Much of the point of 'King Lear' is to show what happens to those who mistake their friends for their enemies, and appearance for reality.

 

So: the naval threat didn’t exist (or rather it came from the USA, not from Germany) . Britain had no treaty obligation to France or Russia. The 1839 Treaty of London did not commit us to go to war for Belgiumm, and the Cabinet knew it. The threat to the French coast from the German navy was imaginary, and in any case irrelevant. We had no material interest in entering the war. The impression, given by Grey and shared by most enthusiasts for war, that Britain would not be involved in a land war but would fight purely as an naval power, was utterly false.   Modern war was already known, by observation,  to be static, costly and bloody in the extreme.  The idea that this was a war for freedom and democracy was exploded by the fact that our principal ally was Tsarist Russia, a fact not mentioned by Grey in his speech to the Commons urging war. At least Churchill acknowledged that there were moral problems in an alliance with Stalin.

 

‘Fools and knaves’ is Mr Stephenson's formulation, pressed on me in a Paxmanesque 'Yes or no! Answer the question!' fashion'. I might have myself chosen more nuanced words, such as ‘unwise’ , ill-infornmed, 'vainglorious' or ‘unscrupulous’. But if pressed, I cannot really disagree with his assessment of the men who ruined the British Empire forever in an evening.

 

Here I will digress a moment to respond to ‘EricD’ who wrote ; ‘ What alternative did Britain have in August 1914? Suppose Britain and the Empire had abstained from Armageddon. The German armies would have torn France apart and marched victorious through Paris. Without France holding on the West, the Kaiser's legions would have turned on Russia and brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees. An intolerable German hegemony would have arisen in Europe, and the militarist autocracy of Imperial Germany would hardly have been liberalized by vast military triumph. Britain and the Empire would have been left isolated between rising American power on one side and a predatory German Empire on the other. What alternative could the Cabinet of 1914, knowing what it did at the time, have pursued that would have led to a better future for the Empire? I'm not so sure. If you haven't already done so Mr. Hitchens, I would highly recommend the book "Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914" by Max Hastings’

 

Yes, I have read Sir Max’s book ( and my article in the ‘American Spectator’ to which I linked here  on this blog two weeks ago http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/07/an-article-about-the-first-world-war-for-the-american-spectator.html is in part a review of it).

 

 

But ‘EricD’ is not, I fear, thinking about what he writes. Why should Britain have cared if in 1914

‘German armies would have torn France apart and marched victorious through Paris.’ ?

 

France was not, and never has been, our traditional ally,  let alone our friend. if France had fought and resisted Germany in 1940 as bitterly and determiendly as she fought against Britain in the Vichy years (Mers-el-Kebir, Dakar, Syria) , the Blitzkrieg might have failed.  . We hadn’t cared when something similar happened in 1870. In 1815, we and the Prussians had both joined hands to defeat France and occupy Paris. I believe there were victory parades, and ho does he think Britain owns the rather grand embassy we still occupy in Paris? 

 

Why would German hegemony have been ‘intolerable’ exactly, if we had stayed outside it? We have it now, and we are trapped in it. Is that better? Germany in 1914 was a law-governed state with a larger manhood suffrage than Britain’s, and a huge and powerful opposition in the form of the Social Democrats. By comparison with tsarist Russia, our ally in 1914, it was a model of modern liberal governance. Even the most cursory reading of my three-part essay on the war over the past week will show a) that Germany’s interests lay in the east, not the West, that it only attacked France because France was allied with its real target, Russia and b) that Germany’s elite was interested in a ‘liberal imperialism’ rather similar to today’s EU. I don’t see how the nations and peoples of eastern and central Europe would have been particularly worse off under such hegemony as they were in the War and what followed. Rather the contrary. As Tooze demonstrates, America's military and financial power was largely created by our participation in the Great War. Without it, her challenge would ahve been at least delayed, perhaps cancelled. Russia, as always. was a tougher old goose than most people thought. It is unlikely Germany would ahve been able to relax in the east for many long years. 

 

By staying out in 1914, Britain would have remained rich and independent enough to avoid absorption into any such hegemony, and there is no reason to believe that Germany would have cared, priovdied we had left her to get on with her eastwards (liberal) Empire-building.  I am quite sure of this. No doubt Britain would have declined from its position in 1914 anyway, but our involvement in the war was not decline, it was cataclysm, descent into debt and subservience in a matter of two years, accompanied by moral pollution and the loss of our best young men.

 

What alternative could the Cabinet have pursued? The alternative that Woodrow Wilson pursued, of staying out of a conflict in which we had no interest, using our wealth to influence the outcome in our interests, employing our natural defences of the sea and our costly and long-cherished weapon, the Royal Navy to deter anyone from dragging us in.

 

Here are my exchanges up till now with Mr Stephenson:

 

Mr S:

‘Mr Hitchens, The reason why Britain went to war against Germany in 1914 is, at bottom, straightforward; the government of the time considered that it was in British interests to do so. It may be that the Liberal cabinet was composed of knaves and fools, but there was little or no opposition in the House of Commons, the press, or indeed the country as a whole so far as can be judged. Indeed, the leader of the Conservative Party stated in parliament on 3 August: ‘on behalf of the party of which I am leader in this House, that in whatever steps [the government] think it necessary to take for the honour and security of this country they can rely upon the unhesitating support of the Opposition.’ Even British labour leaders, who had maintained an anti-war stance up until the point the government declared war on Germany (4 August), fell in with the decision. These included most, though not all, of the 40 Labour MPs in Parliament at the time. Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party were in support and only the Independent Labour Party remained opposed. You appear to be of the opinion, if I have understood you correctly, that all these people, many of whom were by no means lightweight in any sense of the term, were wrong. Wrong moreover not just in hindsight, but wrong at the time. As a very distinguished historian once put it: ‘It’s unfair to criticise a man because you know something he didn’t know.’ I think then that you are being unfair.’

 

Me:

 

Mr Stephenson writes : 'Mr Hitchens, You mention three people who opposed Britain’s declaration of war in August 1914; John Burns, Ramsay MacDonald, and Keir Hardie. No doubt there are several more names that could be added. But, and it is a very big but, these voices were very few and, dare I say it, not those of people particularly well regarded or influential at the time. The Liberal Government under Asquith took a more or less united country into the conflict. Certainly the Conservative opposition, who might well qualify as ‘proper’ conservatives, were at one with them. That this happened was essentially down to one thing and one thing only: it was judged at the time to be in Britain’s essential interests to do so. Were all these people fools and/or knaves?' Don't know about well-regarded or influential . John Burns, like John Morley, who also opposed war, was a member of Asquith's Cabinet, so he must have been a *bit* well-regarded. Morley himself was one of the most distinguished Liberals of his age. Ramsay Mac was Parliamentary leader of the Labour Party and would later become Prime Minister. Keir Hardie is generally counted to have been a great man even by his opponents. If accounts of the Trafalgar Square demonstration are true (and they come from several separate sources) , that hardly makes it a united country. But then, remember the way things went over the Iraq war, which had almost universal political and media support, or at least compliance. Fools? In my view yes. The default position of any wise and civilized person, faced with a choice of war or not (and this was a war of choice) is to be against unless overwhelming reasons dictate war. As I rather thought I'd shown in this series of posts, the excuses and pretexts for war advanced at the time and since don't stand up to examination now, and , more crucially, didn't stand up to it then. Though some of them may have been knaves too. That's another discussion. As to the Tories being 'proper conservatives' in 1914, were they? I don't see why. They never were at any other time.

 

 

 

Mr S:

 

Mr Hitchens, You mention three people who opposed Britain’s declaration of war in August 1914; John Burns, Ramsay MacDonald, and Keir Hardie. No doubt there are several more names that could be added. But, and it is a very big but, these voices were very few and, dare I say it, not those of people particularly well regarded or influential at the time. The Liberal Government under Asquith took a more or less united country into the conflict. Certainly the Conservative opposition, who might well qualify as ‘proper’ conservatives, were at one with them. That this happened was essentially down to one thing and one thing only: it was judged at the time to be in Britain’s essential interests to do so. Were all these people fools and/or knaves?

 

 

Me:

 

Mr Stephenson, with the air of a High Priest Bearing the Urn of Certainty Down the Steps of Truth, says : ‘Mr Hitchens, So all of those who supported British entry into the war in 1914, apart perhaps from some who were knaves, were fools! An interesting, if totally ahistorical, position. Good luck with it.’ I don’t see that I need much luck. Since I have shown that responsible persons opposed the war at the time, and that they had good reason to do so, and that the arguments made for it were and remain demonstrably thin, and since it is beyond doubt that it was a colossal and irreparable national disaster, what need of luck? Any observation of modern public life would tend to confirm a high quotient of fools. As for knaves, I’m not prepared to have that discussion right now as I’m too busy, though there is one rather prominent candidate for the title, alas. Mr Stephenson appeared in an earlier posting not to realise that John Burns was a Cabinet Minister in 1914, or even to know who John Morley was, or to reckon that the Labour Party of the time was an important political force, or to grasp how large the anti-war protest in London was on the Sunday before war broke out, or to know anything of the substantial opposition to war among Liberal newspapers, as he said ‘these voices were very few and, dare I say it, not those of people particularly well regarded or influential at the time. The Liberal Government under Asquith took a more or less united country into the conflict.’ United country? Trafalgar Square full of protestors, and, for goodness sake, at one stage five of Asquith’s Cabinet resigned rather than support war, though some of them later withdrew their resignations. This simply isn’t the case, and I don’t think anyone who had read my postings properly would have said it. As for ‘ if the Tories weren’t 'proper conservatives' in 1914, and ‘never were at any other time’ either, then is it the case that the UK has never had a conservative (as opposed to Conservative) government? Ever?’ , I should think that was about right. Pre-1914 was by its nature a conservative thing in itself, but its competing political factions neither understood the nature of this nor valued it (as they showed by risking it). The trouble with people such as Mr Stephenson is that they think any idea that is generally accepted is naturally right, and are disturbed if anyone suggests that such ideas need to be proved or demonstrated.  

 

Mr S:

 

‘Mr Hitchens, So all of those who supported British entry into the war in 1914, apart perhaps from some who were knaves, were fools! An interesting, if totally ahistorical, position. Good luck with it. Slightly off topic: if the Tories weren’t 'proper conservatives' in 1914, and ‘never were at any other time’ either, then is it the case that the UK has never had a conservative (as opposed to Conservative) government? Ever?

 

 

Mr S:

 

‘Mr Hitchens, You argue that you ‘have shown that responsible persons opposed the war at the time, and that they had good reason to do so.’ I don’t doubt that there were ‘responsible persons’ that opposed British entry into the war, or that ‘they had good reason to do so.’ The trouble is there weren’t that many of them and they weren’t influential enough to have any effect. Many of them were against war on principle; the Labour leader was a pacifist. It wasn’t just this war it would have been any war. In any event, just two of Asquith’s cabinet resigned; the leader of the Labour Party (37 MPs I believe and so roughly equivalent to today’s pre-coalition Lib-Dems) also resigned when the majority of his parliamentary party supported it; and there was (according to The Times) a ‘socialist demonstration in Trafalgar Square.’ You say that ‘the arguments made for it were and remain demonstrably thin.’ This wasn’t apparent to the likes of . . . I won’t bother itemising a list of those who disagreed at the time, many of whom were considered serious intellects both then and now. Yet you argue that they were, all of them, merely fools or knaves. I submit that this this is not a viable position.