Airstrip One

Proffessor John Charmley's book, Churchill: The End of Glory, seems to have lit a slow burning fuse. It started in my e-mail forum, where a British correspondant chided me for comparing someone (I forget who) with Oswald Moseley. Didn't I realise, he asked, that Oswald Moseley would have kept us out of the war, and that Britain would have been a better place. The man, was, I admit, a sympathiser with the ideas of Oswald Moseley on more than Britain's neutrality in the Second World War. (Moseley was the premier fascist leader during and after the war). I treated his argument in the way one would expect, instead of looking at the merits of the case I thought "I disagree with everything else he's got to say, so this must be rubbish as well."

But then, but then. I also saw in one of those Yahoo! clubs an argument that Hitler was not really that interested in invading Britain, and this person I knew despised the brownshirts. And then I saw in another club another Tory say that Germany and Russia were best left on their own. What's happening?

First thing, it's not a fascist revival. The arguments are not along the lines of "Hitler wasn't a bad guy, you know". They are on the lines of strategic calculation. Hitler was more interested in the east. France, Belgium, Holland and Britain were all in the west. Therefore these countries would have been a diversion to Hitler, and so would not have been threatened unless they threatened first. To me this has its own problems. What guarantees could we rely on from Hitler? The same ones that the Soviets got, or that we got in Munich? Could we really sustain an anti-German build up of armaments in merely a cold war environment, with the Labour Party and many Tories adamantly opposing it in favour of social spending?

This line of thinking has never died in America, which is to be expected as there is no way that America was under threat from Hitler. Indeed Pat Buchanan's book A Republic not an Empire made this point. Britain is a bit too close to Germany to be totally sure of this.

But the thinking does need to be done. We can't deny that we lost our empire and overseas assets due to this war, just as we saw our living standards plummet. And let's not forget that we came very close to losing the war.. If we had not fought this war, what would happen?

But perhaps it is not John Charmley or Alan Clark who are responsible for this fire in the undergrowth, for the generation who fought in that war are tragically dying.