[lit-ideas] The Pro-Nazi Tories
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 10:06:58 -0700
I've been reading a collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens, Love,
Poverty, and War. In "The Medals of his Defeat," Hitchens writes, "The
historian David Dutton seeks to rehabilitate Chamberlain and to write about
Churchill as if he were, at least, approachable as a mere mortal. But in
doing so he understates the way in which the Tory establishment of the time
was subjectively, as well as objectively, pro-Nazi.
"'On closer examination the image of Churchill as the resolute and
unwavering opponent of the 1930s' dictators -- a reasonable basis from with
to launch an assault upon Neville Chamberlain -- begins to dissolve. His
contemporary criticism of the aggression of totalitarian regimes other than
Hitler's Germany was at best muted. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931
Churchill declared that there would be a general unwillingness to fight or
to "make any special exertions in defence of the present government in
China." Similarly, his record over Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War
failed in reality to place him in a distinctly different camp from
Chamberlain and the National Government. Nor did Churchill rush to denounce
the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935. As late as 1937 he even seemed
willing to give Hitler the possible benefit of the doubt. Accepting that
history was full of examples of men who had risen to power by "wicked and
even frightful methods" but who had gone on to become great figures,
enriching the "story of mankind", he held out the possibility that "so it
may be with Hitler" . . . '"
"The word 'appeasement' . . . was a vague term chosen by the Tories
themselves to mask a collaboration with fascism and also their candid hope
that the ambitions of Hitler could be directed against Stalin. It is . . .
easy to imagine the RAF helping the Wehrmacht in the Caucasus -- had things
occurred in a slightly different order . . . . In their neglected book In
Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (to which I should confess I
wrote the introduction). Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel deploy an
arsenal of documents to argue that sympathy for the Nazi Party prevailed in
the highest British circles even after the declaration of war in September
of 1939. It wasn't at all that the British Rightists were vacillating and
pacifistic -- an absurd notion to begin with. It was that they thought they
could save their empire by a tactical alliance with Berlin."
This, if true, renders impossible Bevin Alexander's counterfactual on page
211 of The Future of Warfare: "Hitler might never have brought the world to
chaos if the United States had joined with Britain and France and threatened
war when Germany's army was still feeble and Hitler undertook his first
aggressive move, the reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936. .
. ." Of course Alexander adds that the US was militarily weak in 1936 and
could not have preempted Hitler. And his concern was that the US would
never again be so weak rather than a serious exploration of the viability of
his counterfactual, but it is interesting that had the US been strong and
suggested such a thing in 1936, it would have (according to the above
authors) been resisted by the pro-Nazi ruling Tories.
Lawrence
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