It's
the double standards that gets me – no, cancel that, it's
the spineless me-tooism that's really so revolting. I don't 'blame'
the United States for being the number one nation, still less
for doing number one nation stuff, but what does get to me each
time is the degree and direction of the self-deception British
conservatives practice on themselves. Put bluntly: are we really
now such a nation of Quislings that we would suck up to whoever
the hegemon was, or is America, for the right in this country,
a 'special case'? If this madness is in some way value-based,
that is to say, there is something recognisably good in what the
United States gets up to, and that's why we're so pathetically
at their heels, then it should be easy to identify. And because
of its universal moral application, we should also be able to
see when other nations are adhering to it (and, on those rare
occasions, we should even be able to see when the US is not).
Yet every time one tries to apply this test to the discourse of
the British right, it always boils down to: America, wrong or
right. We even laugh at the misfortunes of France and Germany
when American disfavour falls on them. Well, whatever can be said
of the rights or wrongs of individual French or German policies
that annoy Washington, at least they have the guts to follow some
every now and again. We are evidently so whimperingly scared of
offending America that all we can do is utter ever shriller denunciations
of her foes.
Oh
that we could be more like the French, and of course, this doesn't
apply simply vis-à-vis bilateral or multi-lateral relations
with the United States, it also applies to our basic approach
to the EEC, to NATO, and to the whole mad Atlanticist nonsense
of the Cold War. One of the besetting sins of the Foreign Office
is 'chicken-littleism', which is to say, if we do any one
of a number of frightful things, then the sky will fall in our
heads, and that will be that. The 'how' or the 'why' in all of
this is rarely laid out in cold detail, but then it's such a given
that it doesn't, to any normal or rational person, need explaining.
Thus, if Britain had 'impeded' progress towards European integration
by, for instance, rejecting the Treaty of Maastricht a decade
ago, then . . . cripes, it wouldn't have been nice. Exactly what
the non-niceness would or could have amounted to is, you will
notice, a vague proposition, but that this was the driving force
behind the civil service advice which so enraptured poor John
Major is undeniable. However, if we take this schema and apply
it to the marvelous French, were they at the time tying themselves
up in worry-knots about what rejection of the Treaty might have
meant for France? Don't be silly – and, famously, they came
desperately close in their referendum.
This,
if you like, is just one more in a wearisomely long list of post-Suez
British inadequacies: we are scared of the dark. There was no
awful fate awaiting us if we had rejected Maastricht, any more
than there was for the French if they had. The difference between
the two governing classes was that theirs had the self-confidence
to know this. If you tried pinning a British civil servant down
with the query, 'quite what would happen to us if we didn't sign
up to European integration?' illusory chit-chat about 'isolation'
tends to predominate, and 'being left behind', and 'not influencing
events', that's another one they like. All tosh, but powerful,
mind altering tosh – and an ingrained habit of mind in the
FCO.
Let
us reflect some more on the post-war career of France: she, in
a fit of pique, withdrew from the military structure of NATO for
most of the Cold War, until, in fact, it had ceased being of military
consequence whether she was in or out. Let us further agree that
the Cold War was the bee's knees, the top issue, the big enchilada:
the sort of thing that democratic governments got overthrown for
if they didn't play ball. Of all the serious inter-state jobs
of work under way between 1947 and 1989, this was the thing. Now...had
at any point any British politician been mad enough to say that
we too could do whatever our 'Western' bit was, but that we'd
do it outside NATO's military structure, he'd have suffered pretty
much the public fate of early Amerosceptics like Enoch Powell.
Every single establishment-minded nonce who could have been found
would have said – as they did – that to contemplate
such a thing would be to risk the security of the West (Britain
being so much more central to that than France), and, worse even
than this, such an act would have left Britain 'irrelevant on
the world stage', not taken seriously by our allies [sic], all
that sort of rubbish.
Now,
as you will recall, the French did do just about the worst thing
possible: they huffed, walked out, and stayed out until the Cold
War was over. What have been the long-term consequences for France
of this act? None, I would venture to say, which have been in
any way demonstrably harmful to her interests. Quite the reverse
– she struck out for a policy objective for reasons which may
not have been entirely creditable, but she stuck to her guns,
as it were, and accrued the diplomatic capital of being, what's
the word – independent. We shouldn't belabour the point, their
divisions may not have been integrated formally into the NATO
command structure in Germany, but they were there, they were well-armed,
and they knew full well what they would be doing in relation to
their peers if war came. Really, it wasn't about much more than
preserving some basic self-respect, and that's hardly a cause
obnoxious to conservative hearts. But it's unquestionably the
case that the collective wisdom of the British civil service is,
we'd have been finished if we'd tried the same thing. Why is there
this comprehensive lack of faith in Britain, by the British? That's
a book of an answer, but the nature of the problem can perhaps
be illustrated by looking at our behaviour towards our European
peers.
France
Today
Conrad's
man on the spot in France is Philip Delves Broughton, sometime
gossip columnist and rising Old Etonian hack. In other words,
a perfect cynosure of very piece of received wisdom on any subject
you are ever likely to encounter. Recently Mr
Delves Broughton reported back to us, a right wing British
audience, the failings of France, and guess what? 'Anti-Americanism'
tops a pretty heinous list. We've wondered before quite why some
of these things are so bad when other countries do them, but so
admirable for the Telegraph when the US gets up to anything
similar, but as it's all there, in depressing and familiar form,
we may as well go through this catechism one more time.
France
is suffering from (remember, in this context, this is bad)
a 'new isolationism', and 'a sure sign of this is...the anti-American
bile sloshing through French life'. Heaven forfend that public
debate in America should be larded with Francophobe sneering,
golly no, American conservatives are too big and sure of themselves
to descend to that level. Anyway, the French, the bastards, have
been (cover your ears gentle Yanqui readers) 'sneering' at the
US. You wonder how the place will ever recover. In one especially
outrageous piece of abuse, they've, uh, they've . . . actually
the evidence of France's great rhetorical crimes against (American)
humanity kinda dries up at this point, in as much as none is presented.
Unless, obviously, you count as expression of an intolerable opinion
– the UN equivalent of hate-speech – the fact that,
the thing is, you see, the French, they haven't agreed with
the Americans on every last thing they've done or said, now,
retrospectively or unconditionally into the future, the fiends.
That's it – no great examples of linguistic assaults on the
American war-mongering imperialist pigs are cited, still less
is any actual, well modulated, but infuriatingly snooty nonetheless,
French opposition to US foreign policy examined. As we
have said before, it is a measure of the unworthy hysteria attendant
on those who set themselves up as defenders of the current American
regime that they can't handle even the slightest lack of enthusiasm,
let alone criticism. The sad thing is that we are Hessian
hacks in this gruesome game.
To
show what a bad egg M. Chirac is, Mr Delves Broughton alludes
to the man's garlic-reeking, generalised air of shadiness. Imagine,
the idea that a Western democracy could have a blatant crook as
its head of state for, oh, eight years. That's the sort
of thing that could easily erode a country's moral authority.
And get this, in Africa the squalid French, do you know what they
do? They patronise awful little dictatorships. Could you conceive
of a civilised country doing such a thing? Moving on, what France
is doing that's so terribly wrong is that she is 'sticking' it
to the US. But as we have to keep repeating, all she's doing is
refusing to whoop and holler at the prescribed decibel level.
I suppose at one level it's understandable why British conservatives
should be keen to squeal and shout at France for doing this sort
of thing, since if we stayed silent and pondered it, we might
come to some shaming conclusions about ourselves.
In
standard, unthinking fashion, France – which has a higher standard
of living than Britain – is told that she has to sign up
to Thatcherism, because otherwise she's just being silly, and
honestly, who could pay attention to a state like that? Though,
it has to be said, in terms of attention that is being paid to
any country other than America over Iraq, understandably it's
the countries with concerns to express that are being listened
to. All Britain is doing is nodding, and frankly, we could do
that on our own. To end, we are presented with the fabulously
patronising little aperçu that:
France
is going to take some time cleaning up its own backyard before
it can return to polite society.
Somehow
I feel that France is going to be able to put this exclusion in
perspective. What the British Right needs to think on, is why
is the unconscious fear revealed here, that nothing could be worse
than being 'on the outside', so peculiarly terrifying for us?
Why do we think that we would be so less capable of handling this
than the French so patently, and easily, can?
The
lesson from France should be that Britain should put the phantoms
of American disapproval behind her; indeed, prolonged study of
what the 'special relationship' gives us surely shows that it's
nothing more than a relatively painless neutering mechanism?
'Swines,
Sewers, Filthy Boche!'
Were
I foreign secretary, what, obviously, we'd be doing, is selling
arms to those countries that are in urgent need of them –
you know, because they're about to be bombed by, ah, the country
that likes to bomb other countries a lot. Mind you, that'll have
to wait till after my immediate project which is to see (and I'm
not sure if I know enough Germans to make this a viable
project) the insatiably blood thirsty Victor David Hanson
suffer a stroke. An extreme objective, tasteless even? Sure, but
I'm sorely tired of having to read all these neocon turds casually
calling for nameless thousands to be slaughtered without there
being any fight back.
Prof.
Hanson has as his first intimation of heavy blackness, and suddenly
limp limbs the fact that the Krauts have [duck! take cover! turn
over your school table and paint it white against the flash!]
criticised Dubya. Before we swiftly proceed to the full,
near-unimaginable horror of all this, we must be happy to acknowledge
that, 'Germany is a sovereign nation and can and must do as it
sees fit. It has a perfect right to express its foreboding forcefully'
– though, 'VD' classlessly avers, anyway 'no one, here or
there, has ever envisioned concrete German help in freeing Iraq
from Saddam Hussein'. In other words, it's not that the Hun is
arming the enemy, or supplying them with mercenaries, or generally
getting in the way: they're just mouthing off, and this is what
cannot be allowed to stand.
It's
all utterly dishonest of course. For when Germany dares to act
on this permission to be a sovereign state, that turns out to
be 'creepy rhetoric':
Schröder
promised that Germans would not simply 'click their heels'. He
talked of the 'German way' (deutscher Weg), stressing that Germany
was a 'modern' country (with autobahns no less?), where decisions
will 'be made in Berlin – and only in Berlin'. Based on that eerie
verbiage, a Mel Brooks movie could not have offered a better caricature
of repressed nostalgia for the 1930s.
Possibly
it was just bad luck? Maybe Germany is allowed to say what
she wants, it's just that in this instance she simply said the
wrong thing? Uh huh. That's indeed what it is, but clearly it's
beyond the likes of Vic to see why it looks as if all that the
United States has granted Germany is permission 'to say the right
thing'.
The
substance of Prof Hanson's article is all the usual rubbish –
incontinent, unfounded allegations of anti-semitism, queenly sneering
because some bitch dared sneer first, and boasting about a war,
sixty years ago, which America had to be bombed into (thereby
negating, ever so slightly, the idea that this was an irresistible
crusade they jumped into at the earliest opportunity) – with
the bonus ingredient that, if the sausage-munching shower don't
come into line, and pronto, then crikey, Uncle Sam's off back
home, or at least, off to 'a number of neighbouring countries
eager to open replacement bases'. As if. Or as we would have said
in my childhood: go on, I dare ya. Bluster, balls and baloney:
the quintessential recipe cooked up by a man less intellectually
flexible than Lenin, c. 1922, scrub that, chemically-pickled Lenin
c.2002 is more imaginative and curious than Victor David Hanson
is.
You'd
never guess when reading Germany's catalogue of crimes that all
they ever do is talk, when it comes to serious action, it's
always the Americans you have to turn to. Whatever offence
against all that's right and sweet, whatever it is we're (about
to be) fighting for in the Middle East, the salient point to remember
is: the milksop latter-day Prussians have sat on their hands for
half a century and haven't a worldly sin to their name, conversely,
the Americans – the Americans are better off forgetting quite
what all's in the ledger.
Why
Britain is so especially wet in comparison to Germany and France
is that, even less than them, there's no effective US sanction
available to apply to us, and yet we do it willingly. It's going
to be a long, long time before our beloved European partners stop
sneering at us, and who's to gainsay them their sport?
–
Christopher Montgomery
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