We've lost our Innocence - So Why Are We Still so Gullible?
How astonishing, after all the disasters of the last 50 years, to read a distinguished historian (Michael Burleigh) writing in the Daily Mail today that he believes:
‘….we should launch devastating attacks on ISIS's nominal headquarters in the city of Raqqa in Syria. Vast bombardments, using B52s, would inevitably mean civilian casualties. But unless we are ready for this to drag on for several years, it seems to me this is necessary to obliterate its command and control systems.
‘It may be an unsavoury choice, but Churchill had to make many of those for the greater good — in the firebombing of Dresden, for example. The problem with sending troops to fight IS is that they would inevitably stoke local tensions further. Western forces cannot be used because the entire Arab world would object. More depressingly, the Arab nations — which are terrified of even getting involved in airstrikes — would not dream of sending in ground forces.’
The whole thing can be found here:
Oh dear. I am currently busily re-reading my ancient copy of Vera Brittain’s memoir ‘Testament of Youth’, having seen the duff new film, and watched the excellent BBC-2 1979 dramatization. This older version, much closer to the text and its spirit, rubs in yet again how thought has been displaced by visual tricks, and how vanishing direct knowledge of the recent past allows people to take liberties with the facts which would once have been shocking.
In this passage, she has just attended, in the English church at Boulogne, a service marking the third anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. She is in Boulogne because she is serving (and has been for some years serving) as a volunteer temporary nurse, often treating men with horrible and shocking wounds – a form of courage in its own right, and a way of life once unthinkable for an unmarried, gently brought-up young woman who would normally never even glimpse an unclothed adult male body. She had by then suffered the deaths of her fiancé, Roland Leighton, and two very close friends. Not long afterwards she was also to lose her only brother.
‘…as we stood in honour of the dead who could neither protest nor complain, I was as ready for sacrifices and hardships as I had ever been in the early idealistic days…
‘…Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually rededicating themselves – as I did that morning in Boulogne – to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.’
I think the expression ‘disastrously pure in heart’ is one of the saddest things anyone has ever written. 'Blessed are the Pure In Heart, for they shall see God' is one of the Beatitudes which we used all to know by heart. The exploitation of that purity by Church and state in 1914 was one of the worst betrayals of human goodness in history, and we live in the moral ruins which resulted from the slow realization that the whole thing had been a monstrous fraud, finally and unavoidably clear when the European war had to be fought again in 1939, 20 years after the end of the ‘war to end war’ and the ‘great war for civilization’.
As far as I can see, Miss Brittain was not a pacifist while she wrote the book, or during the experiences it describes, though she later became one, and was excoriated for her opposition to the British bombing of German civilians.
Which brings me round to Professor Burleigh (whose book ‘Moral Combat’ sought. among other things, to justify the British bombing of German civilians). Can he really think Dresden was bombed ‘for the greater good’? Perhaps. He is an interesting and powerful historian, but keener on war than some. And while I disliked ‘Moral Combat’, finding its case for bombing inadequate and unconvincing, I think another of his recent books ‘Sacred Causes’ is excellent.
But why is he advocating carpet-bombing Raqqa? And why is he comparing it to Dresden?
Of course the murder by fire of a captured prisoner of war is a dreadful act, and the filming of it, and the distribution of that film, cruel and grotesque. But it does not change the nature of the conflict. Is it possible that it is entirely meant to goad us into a reaction both foolish and ultimately self-destructive?
He rightly blames naïve Western intervention in the area for the growth of ISIS, though I’m not sure he goes far enough back in history. : ‘Hatreds that were once held in check by strongmen (despots and brutal dictators such as Saddam Hussein of Iraq), but which have now been unleashed by the naive intervention of Western powers determined to replace their authoritarian rule with democracy. Islamic State came into being only because Saddam had been toppled, and President Assad of Syria has been crippled by the Western-backed revolution in Syria.’
Indeed so. There was some naivety about. As a certain historian wrote in the Sunday Times in December 2003, reviewing a book by William Shawcross (‘Allies – the United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq’) :
‘William Shawcross is one of a handful of European intellectuals who have bravely resisted the Gadarene rush to condemn Bush and Blair for liberating a country [Iraq] accurately described as "a prison above ground and a mass grave beneath it".
‘Much of the international left's hatred of Bush is explicable by a juvenile frustration at the replacement of a self-indulgent, vain baby-boomer who had been at Oxford by a focused, religious, Texan businessman who rejects everything they stand for. Some of this hatred has spilt onto Tony Blair, another decent man who is willing to use the word "evil", and who in foreign policy has broken with the left's habit of excusing squalid Stalinist or Third World dictators whenever they are opposed to America.’
He knows who he is. But we all make mistakes, me included. My trouble is that, the more I know about the free, democratic West’s war-waging in the past century or so, the more it seems to me to have been misconceived, ill-led, politically naive at best, cruelly profligate first with the lives of its own people and then with the lives of other peoples. We pay the price now for the violent takeover of Iraq we launched 90 years ago, and enforced by aerial bombing, and of course for our more recent war in the same place, and our part in the terrible destabilisation of Syria, which has ruined so many formerly contented lives in the name of freedom.
Carpet-bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia produced what? Shock and awe in Iraq achieved what? Who now revisits the Kosovo we ‘liberated’ by bombing it? ? Who would admire the results if they did? Is the devastation of Syria’s formerly prosperous cities justifiable by any moral measure? When will we get out of the habit of forgetting the horrors of wars, and claiming good results from them?
Who, as they congratulate their own ‘West’ for ‘ending’ the Holocaust , bothers to note that World War Two was not just *not* fought for that purpose, and so cannot be credited with that aim or that result (which was incidental to it, and not its intention at any stage). The conductors, designers and leaders of that war actively avoided any serious efforts to save the Jews of Europe from mass murder, despite knowing what was going on thanks to the incredible courage of brave men and women.
Here is an account of one appalling example of this active, knowing failure
That’s not all. Next week we mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, the one part of the immense Allied bombing of German cities that everybody has heard of. At least they have, and in many cases are troubled by what they know.
But who among the enthusiasts of the last ‘War for Civilization’ even knows about, or is prepared to confront the appalling barbarities of the deportations brought about by the Potsdam agreement, the handover of anti-Communists for Stalin to murder, or the general betrayal of the whole of Eastern Europe as the price we paid for the freedom of the Western part?
Oddly enough, it is those who agitate righteously for war against Russia now, who seem most oblivious to the devil’s bargain the ‘West’ struck with Moscow from 1945 to 1989, under which we forgot the plight of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ( and indeed the peoples of the old Russian Empire) under a Communist regime – in return for our own liberty and prosperity.
The wretched truth remains, that the enduring myth of World War Two as a crusade for goodness continues to encourage the delusion that future warfare may also be benevolent.
I’m not here going to go deep into the horrible matter of the burning to death of a Jordanian pilot by ISIS. I refuse to watch the film, believing that by doing so I serve the purposes of those who made it, and being in enough peril of perdition already. Who can do anything but weep at such things? The question seems to me to be more worrying. If we do rightly feel terrible grief and anger at this man’s fate (and I don’t doubt that we do), what righteous and civilised action can we take, in all conscience, to respond to it?
Or do we prefer not to think, and just to follow our instincts? In that case, we’d better start warming up the B-52s and loading their bomb bays with the highest of high explosive. But as we do so, we might think of our forebears - ‘men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation … continually rededicating themselves … to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.’
We cannot be as pure in heart as they were. Their innocence is inconceivable to us. Our morality is more righteous than pure, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, but oddly prepared to use violence to get it. So why aren’t we more suspicious, when presented with ends which are portrayed to us as lofty and ideal? Having wholly lost our innocence, we seem to have retained our gullibility intact.
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