Orderly and Humane?
Reprinted from Peter Hichen’s Blog at U.K. Mail Online
Some time ago I decided to write a book about the damaging and deluded cult of national victory which has done this country so much damage since 1945. No doubt it will receive the usual mixture of abuse and silence which most of my books receive. But I shall write it anyway, as it seems to me to be a truth urgently in need of being expressed, especially as we shall soon be marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the supposedly ‘Good’ Second World War. It is now possible to have more-or-less grown-up attitudes towards the First World War, whose last remaining justification – that it was ‘The War to End All Wars’ – crumbled into dust and spiders’ webs in September 1939. But the 1939-45 conflict is still wreathed in delusions, delusions often employed to try to justify modern wars which are alleged to have comparably ‘good’ aims.
The belief in its goodness is in fact ludicrous. Our main ally (rejected at the beginning with lofty scorn, embraced later with desperate, insincere enthusiasm) was one of the most murderous tyrants in human history, whose slave empire we helped him to extend and consolidate, and to whom we afterwards handed thousands of victims, to whom we owed at least a life, though we knew he would murder them.
Our purpose in joining the war was not only not achieved, but the country whose independence we claimed to be ‘saving’ sank under successive waves of horror, cruelty, lawlessness, murder and despotism, to emerge 60 years later and many miles from where it had been when we ‘rescued’ it.
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The belief in its goodness is in fact ludicrous. Our main ally (rejected at the beginning with lofty scorn, embraced later with desperate, insincere enthusiasm) was one of the most murderous tyrants in human history, whose slave empire we helped him to extend and consolidate, and to whom we afterwards handed thousands of victims, to whom we owed at least a life, though we knew he would murder them.
Our purpose in joining the war was not only not achieved, but the country whose independence we claimed to be ‘saving’ sank under successive waves of horror, cruelty, lawlessness, murder and despotism, to emerge 60 years later and many miles from where it had been when we ‘rescued’ it.
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