The other evening I chaired an event in Edinburgh at which Robert Harris was introducing his splendid new novel, Munich. It’s sure to be a best-seller, deservedly, and Harris has reached a rare and enviable position in which his novels are translated even as he writes them; the German edition of Munich will be published in November, and Harris will be launching it in Munich, actually in the Führerbau, where Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French prime minister Daladier met. The last two took little part in the conference; it was a duel between Hitler and Chamberlain, and one that Chamberlain won. Not only that, but when war was for the moment averted, Chamberlain was cheered in the streets of Munich. It’s difficult for many to recognize even now that in 1938 the prospect of war seemed as frightening and terrible to the mass of the German people as it did to the British, French, and Italians.
This was still the case a year later. When war did break out in September 1939, the Berlin-based American journalist William L. Shirer remarked that there was no enthusiasm, but only apprehension, in the streets. It wasn’t like 1914 when there had been wildly enthusiastic crowds in Berlin, as indeed in Paris. In 1938–39 the horrors of the First War were too close, too vivid in memory. As for Hitler, he later said that September 1938 would have been the best time for Germany to go to war. To that extent Munich was a defeat for him; he felt cheated of the war he had wanted at the time of his choosing.
If Neville Chamberlain hadn’t gone to Munich, Hitler would have got his war then. The German General Staff thought it would take a month to defeat the Czechs and occupy Czechoslovakia; Hitler said it would take a week. He might well have been right. Meanwhile, in 1938 there was little appetite for war in either France or Britain; the British Chiefs of Staff reckoned they wouldn’t be ready for war until 1940. In 1938 the RAF had only one squadron of Spitfires—twenty planes. Over the next year 50 percent of U.K. government spending went to rearmament. 1940 was the earliest Britain could win the war in the air and prevent a German invasion.
Appeasement became very unpopular once war became inevitable. This was understandable; it was a failed policy that hadn’t prevented war and even seemed shameful. Nevertheless Chamberlain’s decision to go to Munich and negotiate with Hitler had one other important beneficial consequence: Hitler had agreed in Munich that the incorporation into the Reich of the Sudetenland, with its majority German population, was his last territorial demand in Europe. Six months later this was revealed as a lie. So, whereas in 1938 there was public reluctance in Britain to go to war to compel the Sudeten Germans to remain Czechs, in 1939 the mood was very different. War was accepted as unavoidable and the British people were united as they hadn’t been a year earlier.
Harris plays with the idea of anti-Nazi resistance to Hitler and the possibility of an army coup. There has always been talk of this, but he’s not convinced. Rightly, I think. It took five more years and the imminence of German defeat for the aristocratic opposition to spring the July plot. Before then, talk of a coup was met with the statement that Prussian generals don’t mutiny. Interviewed by the enigmatic Otto John in a British internment camp after the war, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, Chief of the High Command in 1938, said it was all nonsense. He knew nothing about it (and he was the only man who could have given an order). The idea, he said, was madness; Hitler was “immensely popular.”
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Long before I started writing about politics, I learned one important lesson: What is said to be inevitable doesn’t necessarily happen. Way back in 1965 I read a book by the distinguished American columnist Richard Rovere. I can’t remember the title, but I’ve never forgotten the content. Rovere argued that, following the disaster of Barry Goldwater’s campaign in the 1964 presidential election, the GOP was finished and there would never be another Republican president. Demographics and the way the world was moving were stacked against the Republicans. I found the argument mighty convincing.
Well, as you know, it was cockeyed. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 and again in 1972. Indeed there would be only one Democrat president—Jimmy Carter—between 1968 and Bill Clinton’s election in 1992—and Carter was to be a one-term president.
I’ve seen the same sort of thing often enough in Britain. During the Thatcher years many wise men and women declared that there would never be another Labour government, and during the Blair years the same thing was said of the Conservatives. In both cases the wise and well-informed were wrong.
Back in 1991, by which time I was writing political columns, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer assured me that the single European currency would never come about. He told me it was “just something got up to keep old Mitterand happy.” This was, it appeared, the received wisdom of Her Majesty’s Treasury. Wrong again.
When the euro was introduced in stages between 1999 and 2002, with the United Kingdom staying out of the new eurozone, lots of British politicians, economists, and financial journalists were agreed that it couldn’t work and was bound to collapse quickly. They became even more convinced of this when the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, and yet more so when austerity was so damagingly imposed on the Mediterranean members of the eurozone. Gleefully, week after week, we were assured of the imminent breakup of the eurozone, tomorrow at the latest.
But tomorrow came and the eurozone held steady. The euro is now the common currency of 19 countries and is used by 338 million people. Not bad for a basket-case currency. Now, I’m not saying its continuing survival is assured. That would be foolish. I’m observing only that it has lasted longer than many clever and well-informed people expected and today looks stronger and more secure than it did a few years ago.
Why do people make such confident and sweeping predictions? There are, I think, three principal reasons.
First, both journalists and experts—politicians too—are required to be interesting. A columnist who shrinks from giving a strong opinion and writes “this may happen; on the other hand, it may not,” is likely to be regarded as a bore. His words catch nobody’s attention, and his editor may soon replace him with somebody who has stronger opinions. Likewise, experts who shilly-shally find that TV producers have little further use for their services, while those with strong opinions are in demand. As for politicians, they often command media and public attention only when they take an extreme position.
Second, people have a tendency to believe that what they want to happen will happen, and, of course, conversely. People who backed the Iraq War expected victory; those who were against it looked for failure. Today those who voted for Brexit still prophesy a glorious future once we have taken back control. Anti-Brexiteers are certain things will turn out badly, even very badly. So both camps interpret everything in the light of the opinion they already hold.
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Twenty years or so ago I was doubtful about climate change and global warming. This was partly because I remembered that back in the 1970s we were being threatened with a new ice age. I recall an apocalyptic article in The Times, written, I think, by the editor, William Rees-Mogg himself, which told us how everything was going to freeze up with the direst of consequences. Well, I thought, the scientists seem to have got that wrong; why should they be right this time?
Even if they were, and the world indeed was warming dangerously, I wasn’t persuaded that the responsibility lay with us. Indeed the idea that the actions of human beings could bring about catastrophic climate change seemed an example of our arrogance. After all, in geological terms, we are fairly recent arrivals in the world, and before we came on the scene there had been extraordinary climatic changes. The island of Britain was once attached to the continent of Europe until climate change separated the two. There had been ice ages and warm periods long before our earliest ancestors took their first uncertain steps.
Moreover, even in our own brief history, there had also been climatic shifts. The medieval warm period in the northern hemisphere, a time when wine could be made by monks in Yorkshire, had been followed by what is known as “the Little Ice Age” when fairs could be held on the frozen Thames in London. Indeed in one’s own far shorter lifetime one had, in the generally benign climate of the British Isles, experienced a succession of very cold winters in which snow lay deep on the ground for weeks and even months, followed by a number of years when winters were mild, wet, and windy. Such variation seemed to be a law of nature; therefore nothing to be alarmed by.
“Ah,” said the scientists, “weather is one thing, climate another; you must look at the long term.” Fair enough, of course, but while one could look back with some certainty because there was measurable evidence, looking ahead by means of computer predictions could only be speculative.
So I was quite comfortable in my skepticism. However, as the years passed, the weight of scientific opinion and the credence given to this by governments began to tell. “Much water weareth away stone,” and, even if some of the evidence seemed to be contradictory, measurable changes in the Arctic and Antarctic, and in rising sea levels, seemed to indicate that dramatic changes were indeed taking place. Moreover the willingness of governments to take what was hailed a remedial action made it harder to stay skeptical. Air pollution was an evident, and undeniable, problem, recognized even by China and India, both late-developing countries. There was evidence that weather was becoming violently changeable, with storms of remarkable ferocity. Something was happening. The climate might not be changing, but it did begin to seem likely that it was.
Now governments almost everywhere have been persuaded that we must reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, indeed move from coal, gas, and oil to wind power and solar power, and in some countries, the U.K. among them, a date has been set, admittedly still some twenty years ahead, for the replacement of petrol- and diesel-powered cars by electrically powered nonpolluting ones. This is a remarkable development, and evidently it can’t be long before nonelectric cars, buses, and lorries are banned from cities.
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Writing about an international crisis a couple of days before publication risks making you look like a fool—okay, a bigger fool than usual. Politicians, of course, suffer likewise. In the first days of the Norway campaign in 1940, Neville Chamberlain said that Hitler had missed the bus. Well, it’s easy to get everything wrong. Less than a fortnight before Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, viewing the intensifying crisis, judged that, happily, the United Kingdom was unlikely to be involved. Neither Chamberlain nor Asquith was a fool; indeed both were men whose judgments were usually acute and sensible.
People talk of “the fog of war.” The fog of a developing international crisis is every bit as thick. I am just old enough to remember one of the last of the old London fogs when you couldn’t see a yard ahead and might try to make your way safely home by running your hand along the railings in the squares. Well, it’s a fog like that today. One would love to know just what is going on in President Trump’s mind.
Nobody, one guesses, wants war now. This is at least a reassuring thought, which makes the current crisis very different from the mood in Europe in 1914 and 1939. It’s more like the Cuba crisis of 1962 when nuclear war seemed possible but was averted because neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev dared risk it. So each recognized that he had to make concessions.
There are different ways of approaching a crisis. President Teddy Roosevelt said you should speak softly and carry a big stick. President Trump has a mighty big stick in reserve, but some of his language has been anything but soft. This may be wise; it may be foolish. We don’t know.
When the great Duke of Wellington was asked to account for his success in war, he said he had trained himself when riding in unfamiliar country always to guess or estimate what lay on the other side of the hill. This is surely good advice. Wars often break out when people fail to read the minds of likely adversaries.
Some would have us believe that Kim Jong-un is a mad dog. Perhaps he is, though he seems quite rational to me. Still, whether he is mad or not, we should remember that dogs are most likely to bite when they are frightened. More important, we should recognize that the world as seen from Pyongyang looks very different from the world as seen from Washington, D.C. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, says that North Korea is “begging for war.” Really? Since it’s generally recognized that any war would leave North Korea in ruins, the fat young man who runs that benighted country must really be off his head if he is sitting up and begging for war; either that, or he has a suicide wish.
So it might be wiser to suppose he is rational, and afraid of the USA, than to assume that he has looked at what happened to Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi, and concluded that there would have been no invasion of Iraq if Saddam had demonstrated that he had nuclear weapons and that Gaddafi would not have been overthrown and killed if he hadn’t abandoned his nuclear program when he was invited to come in from the cold.
Some years ago my old friend, the historian Andrew Roberts, chided another old friend, the very distinguished journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, for having apparently “forgotten the first principle of nuclear strategy, which is deterrence.” “The primary reason for retaining nuclear missiles is,” he wrote, “precisely so that we do not have to envisage any such thing as a murderous martial future.”
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The young man at the supermarket checkout asked me if I would be watching the fight. “No,” I said, “more a media event than sport.” He wasn’t convinced. He would be paying to watch it, and he was backing Conor McGregor to win. I didn’t say he hadn’t a chance. Strange things can happen in the boxing ring. How many thought Buster Douglas would beat Mike Tyson? Precious few, maybe not even Buster himself. Then again, McGregor might get lucky, catching Mayweather early with a big punch. Or there might be a fix—to promote an even more lucrative return.
Then again, Mayweather, though hailed as the outstanding champion of the present day, is now 40. The years might be catching up with him, as they have caught up with even the greatest champions in the past—Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, even. Still, there are cases of boxers older than Mayweather flourishing. George Foreman was in his middle 40s when he won a version of the world heavyweight title, and “ageless” Archie Moore may well have been pushing 50 when he gave Rocky Marciano one of the hardest fights of his career.
More to the point, Mayweather hadn’t fought for almost two years. He might be rusty. His reflexes, which have made him such a great defensive boxer, might have slowed. He almost certainly wasn’t quite the man he was five or six years ago. So, yes, defeat was just conceivable.
Just conceivable, but of course it didn’t happen. He won comfortably, as he was all but sure to do. McGregor isn’t a boxer—though, if he chooses, he may become one. He’s a UFC champion, and the no-holds-barred fight game is utterly different from boxing. I might have enlarged on this to my young friend at the checkout counter, but there were already people queuing behind me, doubtless impatiently. So I didn’t.
The fact is that even when there are superficial resemblances between sports, switching successfully from one to the other is very difficult. Take, for example, rugby union and rugby league. They stem from the same root and have much the same scoring system. In both games tries are scored by touching the ball down behind the opposition’s goal line. There are many examples of players who have been successful in both codes; the New Zealander Sonny Bill Williams is one such today. Union and league are certainly closer to each other than boxing and UFC.
Nevertheless, more than twenty years ago, shortly before rugby union went professional, there was considerable interest when it was announced that the two factions would play each other. At that time Bath were the outstanding union club in England, Wigan the outstanding league one. There would be two matches, one under league rules, the other under union ones. In the first, Wigan won very easily, by more than fifty points, as I recall. In the second, Bath won, though not by so wide a margin. The discrepancy may have been partly because the professional league players were then fitter than the amateur union ones, and partly because league defenses were then better organized than union ones. Yet the lesson was clear: It’s very hard to transfer your talents to a different sport, even when the two sports have much in common or are even superficially much the same.
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“History teaches us no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it.” That’s the first sentence of a Spectator review of John Bew’s admirable biography of Clement Attlee, Labour’s most successful prime minister.
It’s an extraordinary statement. Apply it to your own life. We all—almost all, anyway—have some successes and some failures. Don’t these offer opportunities to learn? Sometimes we take the opportunity, sometimes we don’t. Any sports coach will tell you that failure—defeat—can teach a valuable lesson that can make you perform better in the future. Or, to take a mundane example, suppose a crooked secondhand-car dealer sells you a dodgy car: Will you buy your next one from that man, or will history teach you to go somewhere else?
If we accept that we can, and often do, learn from experience—which is history—in our personal life, it’s surely absurd to argue that in public life, or affairs of state, history has no valuable lessons to teach us.
Field Marshal Montgomery had no doubt about it. What’s the first rule of war? “Don’t invade Russia,” he replied. If Hitler hadn’t been too conceited to learn lessons from history, he might have taken a close look at Napoleon’s 1812 campaign and canceled Operation Barbarossa. Napoleon’s “Grande Armée” was much stronger than any Russian army, but Russia defeated him. Hitler suffered the same experience because he thought there was no lesson to be learned from history.
So what might be another rule taught by history? I’d suggest “Keep out of Afghanistan.” We British eventually learned this, painfully and embarrassingly, in the days of our Indian Empire. Afghan wars were a bad mistake. The Soviet Union paid no heed to history and dispatched a large army, backed by tanks and planes, to prop up its Communist stooge. Big mistake. The Soviets’ Afghan War was a disaster, contributing to the demoralization and loss of nerve that led a few years later to the disintegration of the Soviet Empire and indeed of the Soviet Union itself. The Taliban, originally encouraged and armed by the USA and its Western allies to fight the Russians, took over and established an Islamic theocracy.
Then came 9/11. The Taliban had been hosting Osama bin Laden and his small al-Qaeda organization. 9/11 was planned there. Alarmed, the Taliban offered to send bin Laden to a neutral country. Not good enough. The Afghan War was launched. At first it went well, conforming to the pattern of invasions of the country. There’s always an easy victory at first. This time, in 2001, with the enthusiastic support of Afghan roughnecks—a.k.a. “warlords”—who had been given a hard time by the Taliban zealots, everything went swimmingly. The Taliban were routed. An elected Afghan government took their place. This was sixteen years ago; the Taliban recovered and regrouped, and the Afghan War drags on. The Taliban resemble the Hydra of Greek mythology; every time you cut a head off, another sprouts. Refusal to learn from history dooms you to repeating it.
President Trump may not read much history—the word is that he doesn’t read much of anything—but his instinct, he tells us, was to pull American troops out of Afghanistan and leave it to the Afghans to manage as best they can. But his instinct hasn’t, it seems, been a match for the Pentagon, still committed to a war that has now lasted more than twice as long as the wars against Nazi Germany and Japan. So more troops will be committed to Afghanistan yet again, treading the old vicious circle.
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Few people will speak in favor of slavery now. It’s illegal in every country with any claim to being civilized. I doubt if even the white supremacists who brought violence to Charlottesville, Va., last weekend would wish to reintroduce what was once known as the “peculiar institution.” Indeed their words and acts suggest that they see themselves as being now the deprived underdogs.
It requires an effort of the imagination to recognize that throughout the history of civilizations, slavery has been the norm, not the exception. Athens and other Greek cities, Rome, and the monarchies and empires of the Middle East and Asia were all slave states, their economies dependent on slave labor. There were slaves in indigenous African kingdoms, and the Arab slave trade in Africa was centuries old when Europeans first transported Africans as slaves to their new colonies on the American continent. Europeans and Americans alike found biblical authority for slavery, and as late as the middle of the 18th century, Samuel Johnson was unusual in his detestation of slavery and in proposing a toast to “the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies.”
In the new republic, the United States of America, “the shining city on the hill,” slavery became the dividing line between North and South. It wasn’t an absolutely clear-cut line, and the institution wasn’t the cause of the Civil War. There were other reasons the Southern states chose to secede from the Union: resentment of the growing power of the federal government in Washington, which infringed on “states’ rights”; resentment of the high tariff policy that protected the nascent Northern industries and damaged the Southern agrarian economy. When the Southern states elected to secede from the Union, as they believed was their constitutional right, the federal government in Washington went to war to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation didn’t come till late in the war and indeed did not apply to slaves in those states that had adhered to the Union. Lincoln indeed was in favor of repatriating freed slaves to Africa, or perhaps establishing them in free communities in the West Indies; both impractical ideas. After the brief period of Reconstruction, Southern (white) elites reestablished their position, finding means to deny black Americans political and civil rights for almost a hundred years.
Meanwhile, it was natural that the myth of the Old South and nostalgia for the Confederacy took root, fostered by song and legend. The North might have won the war, but the defeated South had most of the best tunes. And through novels, plays, and eventually films—such as D.W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and then Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind—many great artistic successes were derived from looking backward to the South. It was natural, too, that statues of the heroes of the Confederacy should be raised in Southern cities and towns, and that the Confederate flag should be flown on public buildings.
It was equally natural that black Americans—black Southerners, especially—should resent this. The statues and the flag inevitably serve as a daily reminder of slavery, of the brutality and humiliation to which their ancestors were subjected. Their desire to be rid of these memorials to the oppressors of black Americans is understandable; and it is also understandable that this desire is shared by millions of liberally minded white Americans, too.
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Robert Harris’ new novel, Munich, will be published in September. It’s too early to review it, but I’ve read a proof copy and can say it’s as intelligent and gripping as one has come to expect from Harris, while the depictions of Chamberlain and Hitler are brilliant. The novel also raises the question of army resistance to Hitler, something that critics of the Munich Agreement and elements in the German Foreign Office made much of after the war.
Was there indeed an army plot to arrest or even murder Hitler, and was this thwarted by the Munich Agreement?
Certainly some in the upper ranks of the army were very nervous in the autumn of 1938. They feared that Britain and France would stand by the Czechs; that this would make war inevitable (which was probably what Hitler wanted then); and that Germany would be defeated. So, the theory goes, they were ready to act against Hitler, but then the agreement made in Munich cut the ground from their feet by averting war that autumn.
It’s a tenable theory, but is it persuasive?
The Army commander-in chief, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, interrogated after the war when he was being held in a British internment camp in Wales, would have none of it. “Why do people go on about this?” he said. “I knew nothing about it. Hitler was hugely popular. There is no way the Army would have acted against him.”
The field marshal was already a sick man; he would die a few months later. He was awaiting his trial on charges of war crimes. It might have been in his interest to claim there had been a plot, which the “success” of Munich and the avoidance of war that year rendered unnecessary. But “there is no way the army would have acted against him” sounds pretty conclusive.
There were reasons for not doing so, the first being the likely consequences if any plot misfired. Second, all the officers in the High Command had taken an oath of loyalty to the Führer, and this oath mattered to them. Third, “Prussian generals don’t mutiny.”
One can’t be certain, but there is one interesting scenario that, to my knowledge, has been insufficiently explored.
Suppose there was indeed a plot, and Hitler had been arrested—even shot. What then? The Nazi penetration of the state, the army, and society had gone deep, very deep, by 1938. There would surely have been resistance to any army coup—for a coup is what it would have been – resistance from the party and from the SS. Moreover, given that Hitler was indeed “hugely popular,” the public reaction would have been shock, disapproval, and the denunciation of the leaders of the coup as traitors. One should remember that even in 1944, when Germany was doomed to lose the war, those engaged in the July Plot were seen as traitors and continued to be branded as such by millions for years after the war. Hitler, if shot in 1938, would have been a martyr; if held in prison, there would have been a counterplot to free him and restore him to power.
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What I take to be a very well-oiled revolving door has ejected Mr. Scaramucci from the White House before he had properly got in. I’m not, for the moment anyway, concerned with the rapidly changing cast list of the Trump administration, even though one feels that only Groucho, Harpo, and Chico could do justice to the comings and goings. More interesting and even more depressing is the coarsening of language, as evidenced in Mr. Scaramucci’s on-the-record telephone conversation with a New Yorker journalist. There have always been people, of course, who suppose that foulmouthed abuse makes them tough guys, and I have known newspaper editors who spoke in the office as they mightn’t have dared to speak to their mother or indeed mother-in-law. Sometimes this may alarm timid souls, but not always. People who speak as Mr. Scaramucci spoke sound stupid. “Would you buy a used car from this guy?”
I was brought up to believe that foul language was ill-mannered and indeed a sign of ill breeding. My parents didn’t swear, though my father may have done so when he was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp. Even so, I never heard him apply any word stronger than “bastards” when speaking of the camp guards. I don’t recall any of my schoolmasters swearing, though doubtless they had provocation enough. Most of my parents’ friends were farmers in the northeast of Scotland. They didn’t swear either, at least not in the presence of women and children. They minded their language because there was a code of manners that they respected.
Even comedians didn’t swear in my youth. Neither the BBC nor theater managements would have allowed them to do so. Swearing was forbidden in movies in the days when the big studios ran Hollywood. This wasn’t because the moguls were nice men—some of them were unquestionably horrors; it was because cinemas wouldn’t have shown films full of foul language, and, if they had done so, audiences would have been offended. There was the odd exception—Clark Gable’s last line in Gone With the Wind, for example. But mostly the convention held good, and movie scripts were the better and wittier for it. Likewise publishers, even of hard-boiled novels, required authors to find alternatives for common swearwords. A different age.
Now anything goes, almost everywhere. What is sometimes called macho language can be heard almost everywhere. Does this make for a better society? Or is it a sign of decadence? If the Nixon Watergate tapes were to be published now, would the expletives be deleted? I guess not.
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, the former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, is remembered as the first man to say “f—-“ on British television. I can’t remember the context, but I expect he was just showing off and being consciously naughty. It wasn’t his usual way of speaking. I wrote for him sometimes and he once gave me a very agreeable dinner at the Garrick Club. I don’t remember him swearing in conversation.
Of course, there are times when swearing is a relief, an expression of justified exasperation. I swear at my computer quite often when it declines to accede to my requests. There’s no one else in the room and I don’t think my computer cares. (Though one can’t tell about such things these days; how do the robots that operate in care homes react to bad language?)
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In the first chapter of Shadows of Empire, a novel I wrote twenty years ago, an old shipbuilder and shipping magnate, in conversation with his grandson, my narrator, speaks up in 1906 for Free Trade. “Glasgow,” he says, “was built on Free Trade. So was the Empire. Protection””then being advocated by Joseph Chamberlain”is “wrong in principle and wrong in practice. We depend for our prosperity on the Free Market in goods, with no restrictions and no tariffs.” Free Trade, he says “enriches everyone.”
Free Trade did indeed work very well for Britain in the 19th century. As the first industrialized economy, Britain enjoyed a competitive advantage, especially since the removal of tariffs on imported food enabled employers to keep wages down. Nevertheless by the end of the 19th century, things were less rosy; Britain had already been overtaken by the USA and Germany, competitors who built up their industrial might behind tariff walls. Moreover while the opening of the American prairies and the development of refrigerated meat-transporting ships provided Britain with cheap food, British agriculture suffered. One-third of arable land in England went out of cultivation between 1870 and 1914. If the dreams of global Britain are realized, this might happen again.
It’s not too difficult”in theory, anyway”to get rid of tariffs, but that’s only a first step toward Free Trade, though one that will always be bitterly resented by those sectors of an economy that benefit from tariff Protection, and there are always some. In any case tariff-free trade isn”t necessarily fair trade. It may indeed be decidedly unfair, if it permits and enables countries with an undervalued currency to dump production in excess of their own domestic needs on other markets. Hence, for example, the resentment provoked, and the damage done to native producers, by China’s cheap export-steel policy. Here you have to weigh the balance between the benefit of cheap steel to the American or British construction industry against the severe damage done to home producers, some of whom, unable to compete on price, are hounded into bankruptcy. Free Trade may overall enrich a country, as my veteran Glasgow shipbuilder asserted, but there are always losers. There are enough losers in the USA from NAFTA to make that deal very unpopular in some quarters.
Tariffs, however, are only one part of any Free Trade deal, and these days on account of the low tariffs ordained by the World Trade Organization not the most important part, though probably the easiest to negotiate. There are other, more difficult aspects: questions of intellectual property, of ensuring standards of production and acceptable labor practices, fair pricing, competition rules, the permissible level of Government support for sectors of the economy. All these are matters”and there are other ones”that require some degree of regulation and the creation of an acceptable judicial authority powerful enough to outlaw certain practices and punish those who transgress them. Much progress has been made in these areas within the Single Market of the European Union, in which the European Court of Justice acts as an effective protection against breaches of the rules. When Brexit has become a reality”as it surely will”the United Kingdom will find itself for years engaged in making bilateral deals with other countries and trading blocs, deals requiring the settlement of such matters in a manner agreeable to both parties in the negotiation.
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John Lodwick was a British author”Anglo-Irish, really”who had an adventurous war, to put it mildly, wrote a dozen or so novels, and was killed in a car crash in Spain when he was only 43. A good biography by Geoffrey Elliott has just been published with the title A Forgotten Man. Fair enough”like most dead authors he has slipped out of sight and almost of memory. I read a couple of his books when I was young, enjoyed them, and have forgotten them. For a number of elderly people his name may still tinkle like a distant bell. This is as much as most writers may hope for.
To say that Lodwick had an adventurous war is an understatement. Self-willed, truculent, insubordinate, he would never have made a good regimental officer, but he was well suited to the Special Services. Actually he began by enlisting in the French Foreign Legion, as the quickest way to get some action, and indeed he saw some in a hopelessly ill-equipped battalion in the last days of the disastrous Battle of France. Making his way to England, he was recruited by the Special Boat Service (though there were doubts about his character and suitability). His first mission to occupied France was a flop, but later he was transferred to the Commandos, and fought in Crete, mainland Greece, Bulgaria, and finally Yugoslavia. He was taken prisoner more than once, beaten up and tortured, but came through”having acquired lots of material for the novels he would write.
Later in an uncompleted autobiography he wrote that he had never thought he would be as brave as his father, a naval officer, or his great-grandfather, an East India Company general, but “I trusted that I would be adequately brave, and in the first year this hope was realised, but later rather less than realised and at the last not realised at all. I began my war as a young fire-eater of conventional rather than Homeric proportions. I finished it six years later as a coward sustained only by fragments of pride.”
His biographer suggests that from what we know of the records, he was being unfair to himself, and this is probably true. To some extent he was striking an attitude; there’s defiant courage in proclaiming yourself a coward. Yet it’s also surely fair to accept that he meant what he said, and that he believed that after years of danger and hardship his well of courage was running dry. The supply is not inexhaustible. Actually, of course, even those of us who would never claim to be particularly brave know from experience that courage ebbs and flows. One day on the football field you may tackle bravely, the next find yourself funking a tackle. There are plenty of examples of boxers who find their courage deserting them. Lots of those who went into the ring against formidable opponents like Sonny Liston or Mike Tyson were brave men who nevertheless were then ready to chicken out.
Nowadays we are”rightly, I think”reluctant to brand anyone a coward, either physical or moral. In war we have learned to recognize “battle fatigue,” and I doubt if any general today would call a nerve-shattered soldier a coward and slap his face. Indeed there is only one set of people who are regularly branded as cowards by politicians and the press, and these are terrorists. It’s satisfying, even comforting, to call them cowards, but this is principally, as I think John Lodwick would have recognized, of our moral disapproval of their acts.
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In War and Peace Tolstoy has Russian generals urging the commander in chief Marshal Kutuzov to stand and fight Napoleon instead of continuing to retreat. He refuses. “Patience and Time,” he says. “Patience and Time will save Russia.” It was better in effect to do nothing than to do something rash. Of course, you may say, with some justice, that to do nothing is actually to do something, and this is true, up to a point anyway. Nevertheless Kutuzov proved to be right. His negative policy of masterly inactivity was successful. Napoleon never recovered from the Russian campaign.
I thought of this when I picked up an old copy of The Spectator the other day. It was dated 26 January, 2008, and it reported a debate in which the motion was “It’s better to bomb Iran than risk Iran getting the bomb.” Almost ten years have passed and an agreement that has at least seen a halt, or slowdown, in Iran’s development of nuclear weapons has been reached. Now the same sort of debate is being conducted with regard to North Korea.
The debate is not identical because Iran and North Korea are very different countries. Iran may be a repressive theocracy, but the regime is notably cautious. Iran, as one Iranian academic remarked in the debate, hasn”t invaded anyone for 250 years”not something that could be said of the USA, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Italy. At that time the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was notably aggressive”in speech anyway”calling for the eradication of Israel. But Israel is still there, and Ahmadinejad is nowhere.
In the debate a French Middle East analyst, Dr. Bruno Tertrais, suggested that the response of Iran to an “act of war” would be “manageable.” Bombing would result in “a great leap backward” and deliver a more compliant Iranian regime. Meanwhile a former CIA analyst, Reuel Marc Gerecht, was in favor of bombing because Iran had sponsored terrorism for decades”which is more or less what Donald Trump pleased his Saudi Arab hosts by saying a few weeks ago, politely ignoring the Saudis” own sponsorship of terrorism.
Well, as we know, we chose not to bomb Iran, instead choosing to rely, like Marshal Kutuzov, on patience and time. The Israelis, who sometimes spoke threateningly of taking independent military action themselves, have also held off. The milder policy of imposing sanctions has proved at least partly effective, and, for the moment anyway, bombing Iran is off the agenda.
What then of North Korea, which is pushing on fast with its program of developing nuclear weapons, and which now has missiles that threaten South Korea and Japan, and can even, we are told, reach Alaska. The issue is livelier and apparently more urgent than it was in the case of Iran, all the more so because while there was good reason to believe that the Iranian regime was more cautious than its language sometimes suggested, this is not the case with North Korea, where the young dictator Kim Jong-un threatens to match his words with action.
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It’s probable that few of us in the West have much time for either Saudi Arabia or Qatar. There are exceptions, of course. Our governments treat them as useful allies in the disturbed Middle East, Saudi Arabia especially because of its hostility to Iran, Qatar for providing the USA with a huge military base. Our defense industries love them, for there are few better customers for the planes and weapons they produce; it’s been like that for ages. The now discredited chaps who ran FIFA did very well out of the bungs and other goodies the Qataris offered in order to be granted the right to stage the 2022 World Cup. Actually, lots of people have done very well out of these theocratic dictatorships, far too well to care about human rights issues, the persecution of dissidents, the subjugation of women, and so on. No doubt we should care more, but governments reckon that Saudi Arabia at least is a force for stability; its extensive royal family may be bastards, but, as used to be said of Latin American and African dictatorships, they are at least “our bastards.”
The present row between Saudi Arabia, backed by Egypt and most of the Gulf States, and Qatar took many by surprise. One cause is Qatar’s cozy relationship with Iran. For this reason the row plays well with those in the U.S. administration who regard Iran as enemy No. 1 in the Middle East and consider the nuclear deal brokered by Russia and negotiated by the USA and the E.U. as one of the worst blots on Barack Obama’s record. This being so, Washington, London, and (perhaps) Paris are not at all unhappy to see the Qataris given a smack in the chops.
However, one of the demands made of the Qataris should itself be slapped down. Saudi Arabia is determined that Qatar should close its Al Jazeera television network. They hate it because Al Jazeera has been a critic of the Saudi regime, highlighting some of its iniquities. Egypt feels the same way about Al Jazeera, accusing it of giving favorable coverage to the Muslim Brotherhood. The brutal Egyptian dictatorship of President Sisi has arrested and imprisoned Al Jazeera journalists.
But Al Jazeera is not like RT (formerly Russia Today) or Iran TV”a mere propaganda outlet. On the contrary, its English-language news and comment service comes closer than anything else in the Arab world to providing what we traditionally expect of a free press or free TV and radio media. I watch it quite often, and find it both informative and”generally”fair. The Saudi demand that Al Jazeera should be closed down shows just why it must be defended. All authoritarian regimes hate a free press because, first, they hate and are afraid of criticism, and second, they are determined to control news and opinion. A free press and a dictatorship are incompatible.
Of course, there is much wrong with the media in our Western democracies. Any honest journalist will admit that. We make mistakes, sometimes of fact. We make hasty judgments. Our comment is often partisan, and partisanship leads to bias, even sometimes to slanted news coverage. President Trump may be right to say he hasn”t been given fair treatment from establishment newspapers and TV channels; certainly few have been willing to give him the benefit of any doubt. But I don”t think he has been worse treated than many previous presidents, and, as he has shown, he is ready and able to hit back, seeking support in the wider realm of public opinion. I don”t mind that. In truth I rather enjoy his tweeting. It adds to the gaiety of the morning news. But he should accept that it’s the duty of the media to hold politicians to account, not to give them an easy ride or uncritical support. Politics is a rough old game, a contact sport, and anyone who enters the political arena should know this and be prepared. I think it was Harry Truman who said, “If you don”t like the heat, stay out of the kitchen”; and Truman himself was on the receiving end of fierce and fiery criticism. He too was quite happy to sock it to his critics in robust manner.
Public criticism of power is resented and hated by almost all governments in the Middle East. Only Israel is a sufficiently mature democracy for its politicians to accept that they must accept such criticism, no matter how much they dislike it or may think it unfair. Elsewhere journalists are viewed with suspicion, dislike, even hatred and fear by the men in power. In Turkey, President Erdogan, in his progress toward establishing a dictatorship, has been throwing them in jail and even closing newspapers.
Al Jazeera, like every newspaper or media company, has its faults, but it is a force for good in the Arab world, and a rare one. That is why it must be defended and why the American administration should tell Saudi Arabia, clearly and unequivocally, to drop its demand for the TV network’s suppression. In many areas we can do little”though perhaps more than we attempt”to prevent abuses of human rights in the Middle East, but this is not the case here. So it’s a test of the West’s willingness”especially of Washington’s willingness”to stand up for the liberty of free expression, a liberty without which talk of advancing freedom is no more than empty words.
]]>The word “sovereignty” was bandied about during our E.U. referendum last year, and there were many who said that Edward Heath, the prime minister who took us into what was then the European Economic Community, had lied when he said that this involved no loss of sovereignty. In fact he hadn”t. The referendum itself was proof that the United Kingdom remained a sovereign state. The U.K. government didn”t require the approval of the E.U. to hold the referendum, and the result, whether you liked it or not, gave the government the authority to begin the process of withdrawal.
It’s instructive to compare it with the Scottish referendum two years previously. The question put then was similar to the question in the E.U. referendum. The Scottish electorate was asked to vote on the proposition that Scotland should be an independent country”that is, whether it should leave the United Kingdom. But there was a significant difference. The devolved Scottish government had no legal authority to hold such a referendum, for the act of the U.K. Parliament that established devolved government in Scotland reserved constitutional questions for Westminster. Therefore the Scottish government had to get the approval of the U.K. government and Parliament in order to hold the referendum.
The difference is clear. The U.K., being a sovereign state, could hold a referendum on the question of leaving the E.U. without requesting permission to do so. Scotland, not being a sovereign state, required permission from the sovereign U.K. state that the Scottish government wanted to leave. The E.U. could not legally have prevented the U.K. government from holding an in-out referendum; the U.K. government could legally have prevented the devolved Scottish government and Parliament from staging such a referendum, though doubtless a decision to do so would have been politically unwise.
The ability to hold the in-out E.U. referendum demonstrated that membership in the E.U. didn”t compromise the U.K.’s sovereign status. Many other things obviously demonstrated this. Membership in the United Nations is open only to sovereign states. The E.U., not being sovereign, is therefore not a member of the U.N., but all the individual member states of the E.U. have a seat in the U.N. Assembly. They are there because they possess sovereignty. The United Kingdom and France are two of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council; they could not continue in that position if they had surrendered their sovereignty to the E.U.
A sovereign state can make war. In the almost forty years of British membership in what is now the European Union, the United Kingdom has engaged in war in the South Atlantic (the Falklands), Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Serbia, and Libya. In some of these wars it was joined by other member states of the E.U. (and, of course, the USA), in others not. In none, however, did it require the authority of the E.U. Actually there is no E.U. body that could have given such authority, none that could have denied the sovereign member states” entitlement to go to war, and of course, unlike sovereign states, the E.U. has no army, air force, or navy.
If the E.U. were indeed a sovereign state, it would be a very strange one, with a budget that depends on the approval of its constituent member states. That budget, incidentally, is tiny compared with the budget of individual member states. It would be a sovereign state that levies no direct taxation on its subjects, leaving that right or responsibility to the member states. The E.U. does make laws, and the number of these laws has been a cause for complaint. But few citizens of the E.U. can name many of these laws, which are indeed mostly administrative regulations concerning the working of the single market. In any case, most of the bad laws here in Britain are made by the sovereign U.K. Parliament in Westminster, not Brussels, or by the devolved Scottish Parliament or the Welsh or Northern Ireland Assembly.
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Drinking was great fun when we were young. There were few things that I enjoyed more. Like Terry Lennox in Raymond Chandler’s most booze-sodden”and that’s saying something”novel, The Long Goodbye, I loved to be in a bar at opening time when everything was still fresh and full of promise. But that was a long time ago. A good many of the friends of my youth are dead, killed by booze, far too young. I came close to going that way myself but stopped short, giving up alcohol more than twenty years ago. Though there are occasional days when I think a beer would be fine, or feel a stab of regret as I pass the wine bottle round the table without filling my own glass, I known that one beer or glass wouldn”t be enough, so it would be absurd to feel deprived.
Many manage to stop when they are told that addiction to alcohol or drugs is an illness, that they are not bad people gone wrong, but ill people seeking recovery. This is a persuasive argument whether it’s true or not. Some skeptically reply that it’s a strange sort of illness that you can cure simply by not lifting a glass. Though I accept that thinking of alcoholism as an illness rather than simply as something that makes you ill the following morning may be an effective way of getting you to kick the destructive habit, I don”t now find the illness theory compelling. That said, there is an evident difference between the heavy drinker and the alcoholic. The former finds it easier to say no to the next drink. For the latter there are times”too many times”when the next drink is imperative. At that moment nothing else matters, or at least there is nothing more important.
There’s another attraction to the illness theory. It frees, or may free, you from guilt. You”re in the grips of an addiction; therefore, bad behavior isn”t your fault. You can”t be blamed for it. You are not responsible for what you do or say. This is comforting, but, not surprisingly, those on the receiving end of your bad behavior or unkind, even brutal, words may be less convinced, regarding it as a cop-out. Nevertheless, even if guilt resurfaces when you have temporarily sobered up, it is easier to live with yourself if you come to believe that you are ill, not bad, not even weak-willed.
The question of will, or willpower, is a vexed one. “You know you can”t control your drinking; so why are you so weak-willed?” AA insists that you can”t escape from addiction by an exercise of the will. Instead you have to surrender your will “to a Higher Power.” Undoubtedly this surrender works for some”for those who can believe in the existence of such a power. For those who can”t, it may be a meaningless piece of advice.
Where AA undoubtedly has it right is in the insistence that it’s the first drink that matters”or, more precisely, not taking that first drink. If you don”t take it, then you can”t get drunk; but once you have taken it, you have lost, or are in imminent danger of losing, control. Common sense and experience back this up. Yet it’s equally true that when the possibility of that first drink presents itself enticingly to you, with a voice in your ear saying, “One will be okay, I”ll stop at one,” it’s an exercise of the will that allows you to say no.
I myself was once all but persuaded that alcoholism was indeed an illness and, being all but persuaded, found it possible to reconcile myself to the idea that I couldn”t drink with impunity. Perhaps it was easier to believe this because I had long ago moved from being a heavy daily drinker to being someone who had”even enjoyed”quite long periods, passing months or even a year, of not drinking before falling very heavily off the wagon and embarking on a binge that lasted for days, even weeks, a binge in which I was almost completely out of control even while going through the motions of being an apparently sane person who had just had one or two too many. I had toyed with AA several times, but it had never quite taken. The one side of the AA program that seemed to work was its offer of mutual support, and with that the evidence that people who had been in every bit as bad way as I was had emerged”they would have said “recovered””to lead normal and contented lives.
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