It was all these three things at once: a specifically British amalgamation, that stems from a peculiar, defensive articulation of England’s global role. In the nineteenth century as the world’s foremost power it carried the burden of civilization to darker, ‘more excitable’ parts, did it not? To be dominant in so many places meant being almost always under attack. That was part of the ‘burden’, the heavy duty that accompanied keeping the peace. At the same time, although Britain ruled the waves it did not rule Europe. It called its Empire the Pax Britannica, the Latin suggested that London was the new Rome. Yet this world power, far greater in extent and population than the Roman Empire at its height, never established direct control over continental Europe. The actual boundaries of the Roman Empire were outside London’s grasp except for England itself. The British Empire was a Third World one whose home country remained vulnerable to the re-creation of a ‘Roman’ Empire in Europe whether by Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany. An element of self-defence remained a powerful component of British imperialism, not so much because its outposts were attacked or its natives ‘mutinied’, but because between what was ‘ours’ out there and here at home lay ‘the continent’, always threatening to come between us and our possessions. Even worse, a forceful, united Europe would inevitably lay claim to England and reduce it ‘once more’ to the subaltern outpost it was at the time of Rome. Finally, in the last years of the Empire itself, just before it became dust, fact and fancy merged as a Europe unified by Fascism really did pose a direct threat to Britain. In response, Churchillism recuperated the loyalty of all strata in an amalgam that fused together patriotic defence of country and belief in empire through a defiant, nationalist anti-fascism.
To resurrect this Churchillian patriotism now is indeed the action of scoundrels, except that the word is too archaic to carry sufficient opprobrium. Britain itself is not under attack or threat of invasion. It no longer has an Empire to ‘defend’. The themes of Churchillism have been tapped, but for quite other purposes than those for which it was created. The way that Thatcher has usurped the ideals of World War Two has been as obnoxious as the way Michael Foot served them up to her on a plate. It has brought dishonour to the war against Fascism, to see it compared to the Falklands dispute. Ever since 1945, the political Right has attempted to wrest all the credit for the popular mobilization of 1940, in which the Left and liberals played, as we have seen, a decisive part. It has been tragic and pathetic for socialists to witness the trust with which Labour finally capitulated, and handed over that wartime legacy to Thatcherism. There was not a word from the opposition front bench that the price of patriotism in 1940 was full employment. Should it be sold cheaper now? ‘Yes’, was the unanimous reply of the enfeebled successors of Attlee; who was hardly more than a mouse from all accounts but who presumably would have known better than to have entrusted a Conservative Cabinet to preserve the ‘way of life’ of 1,800 people with an Armada, when the same Tories were destroying the way of life of millions just down the road.
In 1949 Michael Foot co-authored a booklet that was, in effect, an election screed for Labour. It condemned the Conservatives for their record in the 1930s and was titled, Who Are The Patriots? Today we know the answer. Dr Johnson’s phrase has rolled through two centuries to find its triumphant justification in the House of Commons. Yet something had changed. There was no need for the war-party to clamour for a fight over the Falklands in 1982. Even to suggest reluctance over the dangers of the conflict was sufficient to be howled down and have charges of ‘traitor’ levelled against one. It was those who were not scoundrels who were in need of refuge, as a torrent of patriotic hyperbole was unleashed.
For Parliament did not stand alone when it called for war. On the contrary, the peculiarly ‘un-British’ sentiments of the House and the Prime Minister were kept up to the mark by a continuous invective from the press. In particular, the pace was set by the Australian-owned stable of newspapers controlled by Rupert Murdoch. He had made his first beach-head with the News of the World, (a Sunday paper that on April 25 headlined one editorial, WHY WE MUST GO TO WAR). Murdoch had gone on to capture the Sun (a paper for the lumpen) and The Times. The latter two together conducted a daily pincer movement on opinion. They were only a part of the media chorus yet they both managed to do something new in terms of nationalist extremism, and they may signal the future direction of English ‘patriotism’. Certainly they reinforced the novel, inflexible nationalist element in Thatcherism. While others will doubtless provide an overall examination of the media coverage on the Falklands, here only the contribution of the two Murdoch dailies will be discussed.
Who would wish to suggest that their dual approach was coordinated? Each editorial commander surely took all the tactical decisions according to his own lights. After all, although both the Sun and The Times have the same owner, he might be many thousands of miles away. Yet it is difficult not to consider that the very ‘distance’ of Murdoch from Britain contributed to the hysterical artifice displayed by both papers. The Sun ran as a daily slogan from its masthead ‘The Paper That Supports Our Boys’. It was not just that it seemed to cash in on the war for circulation purposes; it struck the posture of someone who needed to prove his nationalism by extra zealotry. Similarly, The Times was so overcome by Churchillism that it took the analogy with the Second World War literally. Twice its editorials compared the fight for the Falklands with the declaration of war over Poland in 1939. (It took Neal Ascherson to point out, ‘If Britain stands by the Falklands as she stood by Poland in 1939, a fifth of the islanders will die, Port Stanley will be razed and the islanders will end up under the hegemony of a foreign power.’10 )
Preposterous, flag-waving insistence that only the zealous are real patriots and that those who do not agree are ‘traitors’, a fixation on past battles as if they are being fought-out still at this very moment, have been frequently observed in the United Kingdom – in Ulster. It is not without reason that those removed from England, yet feeling the necessity to be attached to it, become the most vociferous nationalists. Already a Thatcherite and under attack for the cavalier treatment of his editors, Murdoch would have been less than human if he had not felt any need to prove the loyalty of his papers to the nation. Global corporations are always inclined to pay the local Ceasar in national currency; it is a corporate form of attachment and insurance. Both for settlers removed from the ‘mother’ country—from Ulster and Gibraltar to the Kelpers themselves—and also for antipodean proprietors of organs of opinion, perhaps we should call this intense yet dislocated national sentiment expatriotism. At any rate, international tit-and-bum-capitalism rose to the occasion.
For The Times, an ageing pensioner, it was primarily a matter of emotions and inaccuracy. It stated in its massive editorial of April 5, ‘Emotion is no sound basis for successful strategic thinking’. It is always a danger sign when such a proviso is made; only those in the grip of emotion feel the need to reassure themselves that they are ‘cool’. So, having strived to gain control of its senses, The Times continued:
There can be—there must be—no doubt about our strategic objective. As the Prime Minister said in the Commons on Saturday, the Falkland Islands are British territory, inhabited by British citizens. They have been invaded by enemy forces. Those forces must be removed. The authority of Britain must be reasserted over the Islands.
There can be, there must be … The Prime Minister did not—no she did not—say that the Falklands are inhabited by British citizens. She said that they ‘are British in stock’, ‘British in allegiance’, but not citizens, for her own administration had denied them that title less than two years before, in its Nationality Act. The same editorial emphasized that ‘we must have the wisdom to identify’ our ‘political objectives’, ‘if we are to prevail’. Wisdom as distinct from emotion. Once one has declared oneself wise, who would be so small minded as to carp about inaccuracies when what mattered was the heart of strategy:
As in 1939, so today; the sa
me principles apply to the Falklands. We have given our word, and we must, where we can, prevent the expansionist policies of a dictatorship affecting our interests. But there is a more important dimension now. The Poles were Poles; the Falklanders are our people. They are British citizens. The Falkland Islands are British territory. When British territory is invaded, it is not just an invasion of our land, but of our whole spirit. We are all Falklanders now.
And so the editorial, spread over most of an entire page, was called, WE ARE ALL FALKLANDERS NOW. We can leave aside the fact that the Falkland Islands are not ‘our land’, in the sense that no one who conjures up the word ‘Britain’ imagines the Falklands to be included. (This is not a question of their small size and distance, one can now think of America as including Hawaii.) All that one needs to do is to re-write this supposed zenith of strategic thinking in a way that is factually accurate for its atmospheric assertions to collapse. For example,
But there is a more important dimension now. The Poles were Poles but the Falklanders are our people. Two years ago we denied them British citizenship. Nonetheless ….
It does not work. And for a highly entertaining reason. Racialism. The same racialist rejection of nationality rights for the Falkland Islanders (basicly because of the example it might set for Hong Kong11 ) also lies behind the attitude of The Times editorial; how else is one to explain the suggestion that 1,800 of ‘our people’ are ‘more important’ than the fate of Poland on the brink of the Second World War? Indeed, this is how the editorial waxed in its penultimate section:
The national will to defend itself has to be cherished and be replenished if it is to mean something real in a dangerous and unpredictable world. Mr Enoch Powell told the Commons that the next few weeks would see whether the ‘Iron Lady’ was truly of that metal. It is not just a time to test her resolve but that of all the British people.
We are an island race, and the focus of attack is one of our islands, inhabited by our islanders.
The elision between the people who live on the Falklands and London’s sovereign pride could hardly be more evident. The way the two are intermingled here is drawn from the Parliamentary debate and given a final stamp. The islanders are pressed into the opportunity to ‘replenish’ the ‘national will’. What matters is not their lives but that the islanders themselves are us and ours: part of our ‘Island Race’.
The Times recognized that, ‘There may have to be a fight about it, in which people will get hurt.’ Given its analogy with World War Two, this was a decent admission. The whole piece, then, was wierdly unbalanced. On 20 May another, particularly astonishing example of its disturbance appeared, headed, THE STILL SMALL VOICE OF TRUTH. This was a reference by The Times to itself. Parliament should return to ‘simplicity’ at the ‘sombre’ moment when it was going to debate the Falklands crisis for the last time before the by then inevitable escalation to full scale ground attack. How should this be done?
An individual becomes more complete within himself by a conscious act of understanding the forces of disorder which rage within him, and by reference to some constant source of morality, an evaluation of the immense power of evil in the world, and the fact that mankind as a whole – nations, societies, and groups – are all capable of becoming merely instruments of that evil, is part of that understanding; and part of that morality.
What raging force lay behind the composition of this sentence?
One hesitates to consider its psychopathology and rather dismisses such nonsense as the result of a hangover. Yet there is something important here, that is being tapped and exploited by a newspaper that has just helped to lead a country into war. The idea of evil and good—of right and wrong at a deeper level than correct behaviour—is profoundly important. Without it we cannot judge wars: when to fight in them and when not. But to write about evil today, it is necessary to remove the notion from its religious context and to give it a non-mystical existence in the relations between people. Ironically, it is in many cases priests who have pioneered this secularization. (They are not embarrassed by the vocabulary and many of those who work in the Third World especially have rejected the repressive role of the Church.) Of course, I am not suggesting that The Times be taken seriously on the subject of evil; the notion needs to be rescued from the clammy hands of its leader writers. Their fundamental incapacity when confronted with the issue is evident in their attempt to utilize it for an improper purpose. One way of spotting when such things occur is the endless repetition of the word, like some incantation. Thus the 20 May editorial in The Times opened with a statement that Argentina’s aggression was ‘an evil thing’. A united Britain, the paper claimed, had apparently recognized that the invasion of the Falklands—in which it should be recalled the invaders took no lives—was,
an incontrovertably evil act. Obviously there have been disagreements about the methods of coping with that evil, but there should be recognition that to compromise with evil—to appease it—is to run the risk of having to share responsibility for it. How we react to evil must therefore be conditioned by the need to compromise with it as little as possible, while taking care to see that our reaction to it does not compound the original evil. Parliament will today again discuss the affair. (My emphasis.)
What then of the killings and maimings that will follow? The Times, true to its demand for unemotional weighing of strategy, would not duck the issue. ‘There may be unpleasantness in the course of that combat, which can only be endured with a vision of some greater good beyond it.’ (My emphasis.)
What is the ‘greater good’ beyond the battlefield and its ‘unpleasantness’? What is it really that the British are fighting for, when they seek to ‘replenish’ their national character? By a stroke of good fortune, the day of the 20 May editorial was also the day after Winchester, the doyen of Public Schools, celebrated its 600th anniversary. This too was the subject of a Times editorial. It came just below the ‘Still Small Voice of Truth’ (see illustration). ‘We honour Winchester today for its hardened and shameless elitism … you could say that government ministers are Old Etonians, their permanent secretaries are Old Wykehamists.’ Could this be what ‘we’ are fighting for? Is such an arrangement to be the perpetual reality of ‘self-determination’ in Britain, that Ministers are schooled at Eton while policy is controlled by those who have been to Winchester?
It would be optimistic perhaps to suggest that Winchester has now entered its final century. Yet the evidence of The Times itself, and its tremulous repetition of ‘evil’ points to a terminal decline however slow. Imagine, for example, that one is canvassing for votes or opinions and one meets an old lady. She is evidently an Irish Catholic who lives by herself. There is a good chance that she too will start telling you about evil. Hers, she may tell you, is only a ‘still small voice’. There are so many ‘evil things’ about, so much ‘power of evil’, so much need to ‘combat evil’, she too is likely to say, with utter conviction. Perhaps she really has been mugged, or some ruthless landlord from the antipodes has just taken over her premises and is evicting life-long tenants, and what could be more evil than that? It would be tasteless to argue with the old lady. How she feels is quite understandable as she slips, lonely and insecure, into her final years.
The moment of dying nerve can hardly have gone down well with the landlord. The Sun outshone The Times, it may be said, even though they were celestial twins. Whenever a country goes to war, it will often disclaim its actual aims. The statements of the great powers especially should always be read in their opposite form, to help fill out the picture: that which they denounce, they may well be about to commit. So too with the Murdoch empire. The Times of 5 April sent out the instruction:
Editorials in THE TIMES, 20 May 1982
There must be no nonsense of burning effiges, irrelevant spite or public hysteria. The public imagination can so quickly and so easily be gripped by propaganda which can only distort and aggravate the issue.
The statement should be read as incit
ement as much as warning: The public can be easily gripped by propaganda, in that respect ‘we’ are still its masters. The Sun, whose task is precisely to grip the public imagination on as wide a scale as possible, got to work.
It cashed in on the pornography of missiles. It dehumanized both British and Argentinian soldiers just as it dehumanizes women: PARAS WADE INTO ARGIES was the celebration on one front page, in two-inch letters (28 May). It accused the Daily Mirror of ‘treason’ for not expressing joy at the whole affair. The Mirror replied with a demonstration of factual inaccuracy in the Sun’s reporting. Keith Waterhouse, a Mirror columnist, tried to finesse Dr Johnson. Some people, he said, had, ‘hoisted their skull and crossbones over the English dictionary and laid claim to the word PATRIOTISM. Until this etymological junta commenced to exercise its squatting rights a patriot was one who loved his country’.12 But as we have suggested, ‘patriotism’ was never as easy as that: it was always open to being usurped by those who wanted a Great Britain in world terms. Similarly, the Mirror responded with a splendid editorial that said the Murdoch paper had fallen from the gutter into the sewer. Yet even this, like Keith Waterhouse’s, was a defensive response. The Sun was able to take the initiative. The paper to its left had no equivalent language with which it could assert in its own time and energy, the more realistic nationalism it seemed to desire.
Iron Britannia Page 18
