Brendan Clifford

“Britain should be preparing for war—instead we’re fretting over fiscal rules”.—so says Paul Mason in City AM (9th April).

Under his many disguises Mason has always remained a British patriot.  British patriotism carries many things of the moment along with it on its erratic journey.  These things are discarded in a moment when the opportunity arises for Britain to do the thing which distinguishes it from all other states, except its offspring, the United States—altruistic law-making.  Making war on the world for the sole purpose of improving the world.

Tony Blair’s farewell message to his party on his retirement was that it should never forget that Britain was a war-fighting state.  It makes war for peace, of course, but it is never so much at peace with itself as when it is making war.

Between wars it frets over things like “fiscal rules”, from which there is no escape.  But these rules do not apply in war.  War is, in that regard, the realm of freedom.  It sets all law aside and engages in communal action in the cause of freedom.

Freedom means winning.  No other sensible meaning can be found for it.

The thing that makes Britain’s wars so special is that for five hundred years they have all been wars of choice.  It has fought no necessary wars:  in the sense of wars of defence against an invader.  It has fought wars of ambition, freely undertaken.

Its last really great war was the Second World War.  It brought about this war by its diplomacy without have any serious intention of doing the fighting in it.  It brought its Army home after less than a year, while refusing to negotiate a peace.  It left Europe in a state of war and left others to fight it.

Communist Russia won that War, and in the course of doing so it extended its power into central Europe, while the Untied States salvaged Western Europe for a system of subordinate capitalism and democracy.

We have Churchill’s word for it that the Second World War brought about by Britain was an unnecessary war.  Europe has felt guilty about it ever since, largely because of what happened to the Jews during it.  It blames itself for it, and it is disabled by that guilt.  But Churchill described it as The Unnecessary War, brought about by British diplomacy.

He uses those very words in the sub-title of his history of it.  He was the hero of it, but he shows as a historian that it should never have come about.  It was the wrong war.

It came to be called the Anti-Fascist War.  Churchill, the hero of the Anti-Fascist War, was a supporter of Fascism.  He went to Rome to praise Mussolini.  He wrote that, if Britain was ever put in the position in which it put Germany in 1919, he hoped that a man like Hitler would emerge to liberate it.  He saw Fascism as the force that saved Western civilisation from Communism in the 1920s and 1930s.  He saw the “Anti-Fascist war” as being essentially a distraction from the necessary war against the real enemy, Communism.

But he was a practising politician, as well as a historian, and he ended up in 1941 relying on Communism to defeat the Fascism that had saved Europe from Communism.  Fascism had been made the enemy by the bungling of others.  It had become necessary that it should be defeated in order to clear the way for making war on the main enemy—who had become the ally of the moment.

But, when Germany surrendered, Communism had made itself so strong by defeating it that Churchill could not see his way to making war on it without strengthening it further.

Paul Mason says Britain is now back again in the 1930s situation.  He is well advised not to know very much about the 1930s.  But he could of course plead Churchill’s maxim in support of his wilful ignorance:  Truth is too valuable to be allowed to travel without a bodyguard of lies!