COVER -> DAY ONE
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It is difficult in hindsight to imagine how relieved Great Britain and its allies were when Neville Chamberlain signed his supposed peace accord with Hitler at Munich in 1938.
Not only was there an understandable reluctance, after the First World War, to participate in another conflict, it was also recognised that the longer it could be delayed the better chance there was that Germany would not get all its own way. There was, however, another set of entwined factors, in Britain at least.
For a combination of reasons stretching back to the Norman 'conquest' of Britain, its people were more inclined to like the Germans and dislike the French, using "like" in that vague sense of adopting a prejudice out of the intellectual and social atmosphere without having any good reason for it.
There had been 500 years of dynastic and feudal entanglement with France which reached a crisis in the Hundred Years War. England had become Protestant as had parts of Germany while the French, for all their ingrained anti-clericalism, were nominally Catholic. Shakespeare reinterpreted history through such popular speeches as: "Once more unto the breach". Although Britain spasmodically fought with the Dutch we much more regularly fought with the French between the Reformation and the accession to the English and Scottish thrones of first a Dutch couple and then a line of Hanoverians. The clincher was Queen Victoria's Prince Albert.
The British establishment, particularly the courtly and aristocratic parts of it, did not want to fight with France against Germany in 1914 but were left with no choice. By 1938 to this historical catalogue was to be added the admiration of much of the British aristocracy for Hitler's mode of government and a general dislike, sometimes amounting to hatred, of Jews.
What happened in Germany might have happened in the France of the Dreyfus affair and might, had Edward VIII come to the throne, have happened in Britain. To give them their due, when the inevitable happened the upper classes worked with the same will to win in the Second World War as they had done in the first.
For many years after the War, up until Martin Gilbert's superb accounts of it, the fiction had been maintained that the British knew nothing of the Shoah.
Churchill, who was not fundamentally anti-Semitic, having inherited a certain measure of unstuffiness from his American mother, nonetheless got his history in first and did not want to be seen culpable of ignoring the problem of the concentration camps. We may never know why he attached so little importance to this issue or why he thought attaching such to it might in some way hinder the general war effort but, then, we don't know enough about the anti-Semitism of Stalin, nor, for that matter, the WASPs of Washington, DC, who became increasingly central to the War effort as accounts of the camps became more widespread.
During this period, from 1945 to the mid 1980s, the history of the War was one long adventure film with our lads standing up to the Germans:
- Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain; the Desert Rats;
- the Atlantic convoys; D-Day;
- escapes from Colditz;
This year, for the first time, January 27 was declared "Holocaust Day", an attempt to restore some balance to our recollections and to stir us to a little penitence as well as to self congratulation. May be it was Spielberg's "Schindler's List" more than Gilbert which alerted us to what we had sadly overlooked. but it seems to me ironic that what made the myth and what brought home the reality was the cinema --- the art form which could best have inter-cut the heroics of pilots with the humiliation of Jews --- which could have made an intelligent connection between the sacrifices of the military and the squalid sacrifice (which explains my preference for Shoah over Holocaust) of millions of Jews and other Entartete.
On that day absolutely nothing public happened in our village which, on the other hand, is extremely punctilious in remembering those who made a pointless sacrifice in the First World War and a much more purposeful one in the Second.
We have learned nothing. To remember our own personal and communal glory at the expense of the recognition of the heroism of others is the manifestation of the kind of nationalism which is the root cause of wars.
Another such cause is the failure to exercise a degree of self restraint. The saddest form which this took on the allotted day was the claim of other communities that their victimhood was at least as painful as that of the Jews.
No doubt in many ways that is true and every death is real to those who know of it but survive it. From Armenia in 1915 to Rwanda today, there is more racially motivated slaughter than a planet of our fragile moral resources can readily handle. But the Jewish suffering should be highlighted, in Britain at least, over and above other disasters with similar outcomes for four very special reasons.
- First, in the sense that we ignored the evidence in the 1930s, we have some blame for allowing the slaughter to begin and pick up momentum.
- Secondly, in spite of Hitlerian paganism, European anti-Semitism grew out of Christianity.
- Thirdly, it flourished in a 'high culture' of Beethoven and Mann, Schubert and Schiller. For no reason other than that, we ought to ponder the place of culture as a humanising influence.
- Finally, however, we should remember our omission by inactivity, so well expressed in Burke's maxim that for evil to flourish it only requires good men to remain silent. To which I would add that once that silence has been secured the only other necessary precondition is hubris.
I hope that in other parts of the world individuals, communities and whole countries feel moved to collective penitence for their silence and their hubris. For us all to observe a single day of agglomerative remorse is to miss the point. There are enough tables of moral and legal precepts from the tablets of Hamurapi at Ur to the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights but what we learn from is the particular, from our individual act of cowardice which results in visible harm to another, from the pain we cause when we over-reach ourselves at a committee table or a cocktail party. Where I live there may be a respectable academic interest in Armenia and deep concern for the contemporary slaughter of Africa but victory over Hitler did not mend the broad rents in the tapestry of our culture.
