Brendan Clifford

It has been demonstrated in recent years that the United States is not only the leader of world democracy, but is the foundation on which it exists, and without which it is unlikely that it would exist.

Leaving aside the United States, the democratic world is Europe.

Europe was laid out as a democratic patchwork by Britain and France, at the Versailles Conference of 1919—which was controlled by Britain and France, with Britain in the ascendant over France.

During the next twenty years Europe, with few exceptions, discarded the democratic system—the system of representative government conducted through the conflict of political parties elected on the basis of a general adult franchise.

The conflict of parties in recently-established nation states was found to be incompatible with the maintenance of State authority.  The system of party conflict was essentially divisive.  It operated by seeking out points of difference, exaggerating them, and depicting the other party as being wilfully destructive.  Where the parties were aligned with antagonistic class interests, they acted to intensify them.

The framework of that system was the League of Nations.  In principle the League ordered the world into a series of nation-states which governed themselves democratically.  The democracy increasingly took the form of a party political antagonism of classes.  But a nation is a consensual combination of classes.  In order to establish the authority of the national state, the various countries therefore set aside the political system of class antagonism by means of establishing the dominance of national socialist, or fascist, parties—whose purpose was to restore the authority of the State by restoring the consensus of the nation by mediating the class antagonism.

This change was brought about by different ways in different places.  In ideological form it began in Italy where Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist before the first World War, brought Italy into the War as a British ally—against the opposition of both the Socialist Party and the Catholic Church—in exchange for a British promise that Italy might take large tracts of bordering Austrian territory if Austria was defeated.  

After the War he generalised what he had done as Fascism, which roughly meant  a bundle of things—including both nationalism (for which read Capitalism) and Socialism.

In Germany the change was brought about electorally and legally—two things which in the democratic era one might have thought were close to being the same thing, but which in their usage just now are tending to become opposites.

Those currently in authority in the EU—the usurping Commission—seem to have read up on the supposed origin of Democracy in ancient Athens and come to the conclusion that democracy is an anarchic phase of transition between aristocracy and monarchy—meaning that Ms Von Der Leyen is the autocratic Queen!

In Finland the change was enacted by a civil war, which many agree was the closest thing there has ever been to a literal war between classes, in 1917.  The capitalist class won, and apparently saw advantage in allying itself with the National Socialist form when it came along.

In Spain the development happened in the course of a military coup d’état against a Republic which was unable to restrain its widespread Anarchist support from engaging in Voltaire’s injunction to“wipe out the infamous thing”, the Roman Church.  The military coup systematically gathered social support to bring about the establishment of a political order which included the Church, along with a Syndicalist force called the Falange.

The Spanish development was different because of the length of time the military coup took to consolidate itself, and the way it constructed a social regime in the course of securing itself—which it did not have clearly in mind at the start—and the intervention of other European forces, both democratic and Fascist, in the course of the War.

Franco was something different from Mannerheim in Finland, Mussolini in Italy, or Hitler in Germany.  Only Horthy in Hungary is in some degree comparable to him.  He constructed a viable State in the course of a Civil War, gave it a Fascist structure because that was what was appropriate in the circumstances, and he kept it out of the Fascist War on Russia.

And the presence of Spain (and Portugal) as Fascist states in post-1945 Europe gave the lie to the propaganda description of the War which Britain started as the Anti-Fascist War.  

Franco did not give way to any “pro-democracy activism”, but he treated his system as an emergency operation in the national interest, and made provision for it to end in a transition to Constitutional Monarchy.  And the national state he had constructed was stable enough to ward off an attempt to treat the Civil War as a feud and to treat the regime as a murder gang that must be punished by law.

Europe—newly democratised—was confronted with Fascist Spain in 1945:  and let it be.  Where did it get the sense to let it be—contrary to the sharp new ideology of the Anti-Fascist moment?

Political experience is accumulated by States and their main components in the course of time. The States of mainland Europe (excluding the Iberian Peninsula) had, since 1919, been a series of fundamentally different things.  In 1945 they were the debris of the Fascist war on Communism—which they had failed so spectacularly to win.  Spain, though only six years old, was the oldest State—the oldest regime in continuous existence.

The others were post-Fascist States.  They had suddenly ceased to be Fascist States by being conquered by Russia, and they had been taken in hand by their military conquerers—Russia and the United States.  And, seeing no future for their recent past, they became Pro-Democracy activists.  But they were again being set up as States by others—as in 1919.

The Anti-Fascist War—insofar as it deserves the name—began when six countries of Fascist Europe invaded Communist Russia in June 1941.  Britain had invented Total War in 1914, but the Fascist War on Russia was the most total war ever fought.

That War was a test of durability.  It proved to be catastrophic for the Fascists.  But Europe remained loyal to the Fascist cause to the bitter end.  There were no democratic revolts in favour of the enemy!

(The apparent exception, the Warsaw Uprising, was actually a Polish attempt to gain control of the city, before the imminent arrival of the Red Army to liberate it:  and to keep it out!)

The Anti-Fascist War was a war for Democracy and Freedom.  That was generally agreed from 1941 to 1945.  The main force of Democracy and Freedom was Communist Russia.  That was generally agreed.  The Communist system of Democracy took a different form from the Capitalist.

Communism and Capitalism were united in defence of Civilisation!  Fascism was a force of Evil that had somehow arisen beyond the parameters of Civilisation—represented by Communism and Capitalism—and was now endangering the whole of civilisation.

Communist Democracy stopped the European Fascist advance at the gates of Moscow at Christmas 1941, broke the Panzers at the battle of Kursk in 1942, organised itself on a very wide Front and fought its way relentlessly to Berlin.  Europe was conquered into freedom!  Fascism was broken by conquest.  Europe must learn to live without it!  

But how could States which had been so purposefully fascist, and which had ceased to be fascist only because they had been conquered by Communism,  account for things in such a way that they could remake themselves in the instant into functional members of the opposite of the system they had made for themselves?

The trickery of Democracy—and the European Commission is now close to describing it as trickery—was beyond them in the past.  That was why they had become Fascists.  How could they now remake themselves backwards into that tricky system, in a condition of subjugation caused by catastrophic defeat by conquest, and account to themselves for how they had brought all this about?

Fascism was an emergency measure for dealing with the fragility in the ultra-democracy of the artificially-constructed ‘nation-states’ (many of which were not actual nations!) formed by the conquerers in 1919.  

It was not ended by internal development.  It was broken by conquest and subjugation.  It had not run its course as an emergency measure.  It was destroyed in mid-course by the Communist/Capitalist alliance formed against Nazi Germany.

In Spain Fascism ran its course as an emergency measure.  It continued in Spain for a generation after 1945, and then phased itself into a viable system of party-political democracy.

East of the Pyrenees what happened in 1945 was in many ways a repeat of what had happened in 1919.  In 1919 the existing system of Europe was made war upon by the two great Western Empires—the British and the French.  When they declared war on it, they declared that it was Evil.  And when they won the War, they destroyed its structures—and they scotched the sources of tradition with it—knowing vey well that tradition is closely bound up with State authority.

(A difference emerged between France and Britain in 1920, which led to another War twenty years later!  The French, who had borne the main cost of the 1914 War in human and physical terms, plundered and annexed and humiliated defeated Germany with gay abandon, along with the British, in 1919.  But, when the French tried to enact measures that would prevent Germany from reviving and taking revenge for the humiliations inflicted upon it, Britain objected that that would not be ‘fair’!  It insisted that France could not have a Rhine frontier—which would have given it a defensible border—and that the German territorial state should continue—except for Alsace/Loraine going to France and other bits going to Belgium and Poland.

Britain, in its very effective War propaganda (much admired by Hitler) declared that Prussia (its close ally for many centuries!) was established on an evil system, and that in the process of national unification the ‘good’ German had been infected by the evil of Prussianism.

Whether this was true or false is beside the point.  It was the case made by the British propaganda that deluged the world for about six years.  Irish Home Rule demagogues—Tom Kettle and Robert Lynd—were to the fore in propagating it.  Few voices of dissent were heard.  Amongst those few were Roger Casement, who was familiar with the workings of the British State from the inside, in its upper regions, and James Connolly, who was an acute observer of it from the lower regions on the outside.

Both said outright that Britain was making war on a commercial rival and was doing it in a way that would destroy European culture.  Both were disposed of in 1916:  and so their case was lost by default!

The British case was the ‘pragmatic truth’ of 1919.  But, when the French wanted to put it into action—by reducing the size of the German state and separating the ‘good Germans’ from the Prussians—Britain wouldn’t have it!

In the German demoralisation of 1919 there was support for partition into Rhineland Bavaria and North German States.  But this proposal seemed to set off the British ‘balance-of power’ instinct—praised by Churchill as an “unconscious” drive.

The British Establishment suddenly saw that the disintegration of the German territorial state would restore the dominant position of France in Europe—and make it the main enemy again.  So it vetoed the Rhine Border and the Rhineland state:  and Hitler’s first notable action was his stand against Bavarian secession.

Major Street, the very intelligent Information Officer of Dublin Castle, after writing his books on The Administration Of Ireland in 1920 and 1921, was transferred to the European scene to counter French efforts to take Germany in hand.  This was Weimar Germany which, to conciliate Allied propaganda, had obediently made its futile revolution against Kaiserism (a stabilising force in Germany), only to be trampled on still further in the Versailles Peace ‘Negotiations’—which took the form of a series of Diktats enforced by a Starvation Blockade!

Britain conspired prudently with ‘Weimar’ Germany against the restrictions of the Versailles Agreement which it had imposed in 1919.  It then acted openly with Hitler in breaking its provisions—beginning with the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1934 and culminating in the Munich Agreementof 1938.

British support for Fascism/National Socialism was not problematical for the Empire:  it made sense in terms of Power Politics.  A resurgent Germany was a check on France and a counter to Soviet power.

The Versailles system established in 1919 was weak and brittle.  German democracy lacked any foundation in traditional State authority.  It encouraged free expression of actual social antagonism.  It provided fertile ground for growth of the international socialism of Russian Revolution—which conceived of the working class as an international class which was destined to become the generalised ruling class of Europe.  

The growth of Communist Parties everywhere was strong enough to suggest that that was a realisable prospect.  The counter to it was not literal class war, such as apparently happened in Finland right at the start.  It was national-socialism, the purpose of which was to restore the combination of classes in the power structure by means of elements drawn from both sides, and thus establish effective authority in the nation-state.

Churchill—the future hero of the Anti-Fascist War—was, in the 1920s, lavish in his praise of Italian leader Mussolini for finding the anti-dote to International Socialism in National Socialism.  And in the early thirties he hoped that, if Britain was ever put in the position in which Germany was put in 1919, it would find a Hitler to save it!

The problem is not why Britain actively supported the Nazi regime in breaking free of the Versailles strait-jacket, and restoring itself as a regional Power facing eastward—as it did by means of the Munich Agreement in 1938.  The problem is why, a few months later, it suddenly decided to make war on Germany over the trivial issue of the city of Danzig.

Churchill had nothing to do with this.  He was a Great Man, in Platonic form, waiting for his moment—and he could not be choosy when the moment presented itself.  He became a Great Man of the Anti-Fascist War, joining Stalin in saving Europe from the force that had saved Europe from Stalin!

But, when he came to write the history of that War, he at least had the grace to sub-title it as An Unnecessary War!

Capitalism and International Socialism joined forces to save Democratic Civilisation from National Socialism.  It was an absurdity!

In the final months of the 1939-45 War, as International Socialism was saving Central Europe from National Socialism by conquering it in a war of self-defence, Churchill cast around for ways of making war on his great (un)Democratic ally in the East—which was doing what it failed to do in 1920:  spreading the revolution!

The time had come to get to grips with the real enemy—now that the intermediary fascist conflict had been got out of the way.  He said frankly that he had always considered Communism to be the real enemy—even when he was obliged to lavish praise on it in public—because, without it, his war of pin-pricks against Hitler Germany would have fallen flat.

Democracy in 1945 existed in two mutually-contradictory forms.  The effective form—that broke the power of National Socialism—was the Communist form.

It was democratic in that it enlisted the mass of the people in the construction of an industrial economy, a State, and an Army under the direction of an extensive Party organisation drawn from the populace.

The other form was the Liberal Democratic.  It was organised as a system of conflict between a number of ideologically antagonistic parties from which the populace as an electorate chose one of them by vote every few years to form a Government.  Between elections the mass of electors went about their private concerns.

The system of liberal democracy in Europe, when restored superficially by the Western Occupying Powers, could not at the outset brand the Russian system as an even greater  system of despotic tyranny than the Fascist system had been!  If that was the case, what had the War been about?

It took some years of time and forgetfulness to pass, and for a new order of feeling to be generated—appropriate to the paradoxical nature of the outcome of the War, before Western Europe could settle down as a toy-town democracy under the wing of the United States.

(And, at the same time, conditions of life for the working class of Europe were much improved, as compared to the pre-War situation.  This had to be done to counter the attractions of the Russian system of production, with its empowerment of the workers.)

The United States was kind to Europe.  It shielded it from existential agonising over its recent past—which it had experienced as good, but must now experience retrospectively as evil—and about how quickly and smoothly the social substance of the evil past had become the beneficent present.

And it set Europe up in business again, conferring on it effective demand for the output of the greatly increased industrial capacity developed in America during the War.

*

It is said that Hitler expected the Third Reich to last a thousand years.  In June 1940 Churchill spoke of the British Empire lasting a thousand years.  In Churchill’s hands the Empire lasted about three years after that speech!

Britain’s 1939 War on Germany had at least an undertone of anti-Fascist purpose.  It ended in defeat in June 1940—and therefore led to an increase in the Fascist presence in Europe.

Britain had depended on France to bear the main cost of the War again, as it had in 1914-18. France remembered how Britain had prevented it from making a secure settlement against Germany in 1919-20 and was cautious in its commitment to battle.

Britain did nothing much for ten months after declaring War in 1939.  Its small Expeditionary Force idled at the Front during the Autumn, Winter and Spring of 1939/40, as did the very much larger French Army.  Germany responded to the Anglo-French declaration of war on it in May 1940.  As the weaker force, without command of the resources of half the world at the disposal of the French and British Empires, it had to act energetically, if it was to survive.

It had been given a ‘practice war’ in September 1939, when Britain and France had drawn Poland into a Tri-partite military encirclement of Germany in order to induce the Poles to refuse to negotiate with Germany over the unsustainable position of Danzig.  Germany responded to the military encirclement by striking at Poland, in the expectation that Britain (and France), instead of delivering on the military guarantee to Poland, would stand idly by—which is what happened.

Britain provoked the German/Polish War, and made it the occasion for declaring war on Germany.  Germany responded to that declaration of war some ten months later and, with the expertise gained in its Polish War, broke the order of the Anglo/French deployment with a feat of Arms.

The British Army rushed into Belgium and then rushed out again, and went home, when it found itself in danger of being cut off from its way home.

The French Army then faced a debacle, after a German breakthrough from the Ardennes Front. France found itself occupied by the State it had declared War upon, and abandoned by the Ally who had led it by the nose into causing that War.  Its democratically elected Government decided to negotiate terms of settlement with the State on which it had made war and lost.

Britain declared that the terms of the Anglo-French alliance prohibited France negotiating with the enemy without British approval—even though it had lost the War and Britain had left the battlefield!  

The British propaganda denied that the battle had been won by a remarkable German feat of arms, and asserted that the French Establishment was riddled with Fascist Fifth Columnists who had opened the Front to Germany.  It broke off diplomatic relations with France, treated it as an enemy, and made War on it—by destroying its Fleet in the first instance, and then by fostering terrorist activity within France under the name of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Ungentlemanly Warfare was not going to win the War.  It had a different purpose:  to maximise the German intrusion into French affairs:  to make things as difficult as possible for the French to make a viable settlement with the State on which it had declared War, and lost:  to degrade the French Government—the Popular Front—into something that could be represented as having opened the Front to the Germans in May 1940.

Fascist Italy was neutral in the War declared by Britain until Britain left the battlefield.  There was no necessary unity among fascist states.  Fascism was national socialism—the counter tointernational socialism.  Mussolini was a revolutionary socialist who took his movement into the First World War on nationalist grounds, under British urging, and who formulated the merger of Nationalist and Socialist Revolution as Fascism after the First World War—and was highly praised for it by Churchill.

Mussolini remained British in international orientation, even after Britain reneged in 1919 on the promises it had made in 1914 to get Italy into the War.  And he was a backer of Austrian Fascism against Germany.

Austrian Fascism was patriotic against Nazism.  It was the kind of thing that is represented in The Sound Of Music—but with the fascist character of the hero obscured.

The showdown between the Austrian and German Governments was not between liberal democracy and Fascism.  And Mussolini was a backer of Austrian independence—until he began to realise that Britain was subverting the Versailles system by building up Germany against France.

Then, when Britain subverted the Czechoslovak State which it had created in 1919, and allowed it to be dismantled by Germany—and by Hungary and Poland under German authority—and followed this a few months later by bringing about a war on Germany with the intention that France would fight it:  and lost that War in May/June 1940, it was not unreasonable for Italy to conclude that Britain was no longer capable of exercising the guiding role in world affairs which it had asserted in its wars against Napoleon, and to assert a position for itself in the post-British order of things.

Britain was no longer capable, after June 1940, of fighting the War which it had declared but, because it was not in danger of occupation, and its Navy was still the most powerful in the world, it did not need to end the War it had declared by making a settlement.

It kept Europe unsettled by means of pin-pricks.  One of these pin-pricks was its intervention in the Italian/Greek War.  The Italian and Greek states were both Fascist.  Britain offered military assistance to the Greeks because Italy had joined forces with Germany in the other War as the Anglo-French front was collapsing.  

The Fascist Greek dictator, General Metaxas, refused the offer of British military assistance because he did not need it, and because acceptance would automatically bring Germany into his War on the Italian side—which was, of course, the British purpose.  But Metaxas died.  The offer of British assistance was pressed on his successor, who was not worldly-wise.  The offer was accepted.  Greece became a Front in the British War on Germany.

The German route to Greece was through Yugoslavia.  Yugoslavia split apart at a touch.  The various peoples in it had been thrown together by Britain in 1919 with scant regard for national cohesion.  Lloyd George’s maxim was:  

“The whole state of society is more or less molten and you can stamp upon that molten mass almost anything as long as you do it with firmness and determination”.

But this kind of thing is easier said than done.  Yugoslavia dismantled itself easily into its component parts and they aligned themselves militarily against one another within the framework of the general War that Britain was intent on bringing about by drawing others into it.

British success in spreading its War to the Balkans in April 1941 probably had the very far-reaching effect on the post-War Settlement of Europe by delaying the European assault on Russia for a month.  If the assault had been launched a month earlier, and had reached Moscow before Winter set in, and the Soviet State had retreated beyond the Urals, the subsequent course of events would have been different.

A factor in the German decision to make War on Russia was that a victory in Russia would bring about a settlement with Britain, and end the uncertainty that hung over Europe.

There were only two forces in the world capable of doing battle with Germany as it had become in June 1940:  America and Russia.

American democracy was determined not to be lured into another European War, and Russia was not going to risk itself in an offensive War.  So Britain’s only hope lay in Russia being attacked.  That happened in August 1941 by Germany invading and its East European allies joining in.  The exceptional barbarity of the following years—the extermination of Poles and Jews—was concentrated in the hinterland of the European advance.

If Europe had won, and Russia was put out of the game, Britain would have made a settlement with Germany—it is not suicidal, though it likes to pretend that it would rather be wiped out than violate a principle!  And if Europe failed to win in Russia, then the outcome was inevitably an expansion of Communist power across Europe.

With Russia giving a good military account of itself, the only way of preventing that outcome was to find a way of drawing in the only uncommitted Power, the USA.  And that is, presumably, why Churchill seconded a US ultimatum to Japan in 1941—and lost the Empire that was intended to last for a thousand years!

For a few hundred years Japan had been living peacefully within its own borders—’navel gazing’, as we now put it—when American warships visited it in 1850 and told it it must enter the world market, or else . . . !

Britain had done the same thing with China—but by means of actual war—ten years earlier.  [The story of how Britain got China hooked on opium, disabling the country and garnering huge super-profits is beside the point here!  It was the Chinese Communist Party which expelled the Imperialists and put the country on a sound footing!  Ed.]

The Japanese authorities saw that peaceful self-sufficiency was no longer allowable, so it geared itself up for Imperialist Capitalism:  and proved to be good at it.  It formed a mutually-beneficial alliance with Britain, and helped to secure the British Empire in the Far East.

The United States, by systematically extending westward expansion, had come to regard the Pacific area as its sphere of influence.  It was irked by the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 and, after Britain became its debtor in the First World War, demanded that Britain should end its alliance with Japan—or else face a direct challenge to its naval power.

Britain did not renew its Japanese Treaty, and the Japanese were denied racial equality in the Versailles system—though it was one of the victors of the Great War.  Then, in 1941, the British Empire seconded an American demand that Japan must desist from certain of its Imperialist activities.

Japan, forced into the imperialist system by American warships, decided to fight for its life against the American/British ultimatum, and it pulled the plug on the British Empire in the Far East!

And, perhaps with a sense of poetic justice, we can note that Britain’s botched Great Power manipulations in World War 2, which forced it to look to the USA to pull its chestnuts out of the fire, had the unintended consequence that the USA gradually forced Britain to disengage from its Empire, and to defer to the new world role adopted by its erstwhile colony!

Brendan Clifford

Major C.J.C. Street: The Administration Of  Ireland, 1920; with a substantial extract from his Ireland In 1921 and a review of his other writings on Britain’s world role, and inter-war Europe. Introduction by Dr. Pat Walsh. Intelligence Officer Street produced this exceptionally informative justification of the Black and Tan War in Ireland, using the secret archives of Dublin Castle (with many captured IRA documents and officials statistics of incidents.) 192pp (9.5″ x 6″). Index, Bibliog. ISBN 0 85034 089 6. AB, 2001. €18, £15

The Starvation Blockade On Germany In The Great War. A Summary by Angela Clifford of Two Definitive Works by Eamon Dyas: Blockading The Germans and Starving The Germans. Belfast Historical & Educational Society. March 2022. Belfast Historical & Educational Society. 2020. ISBN: 978-1-87207837-3. €9, £10