The American Spectator : Lesser Britain

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Lesser Britain

By James Bowman on 8.13.09 @ 6:07AM

Is the "Great" in Britain lost for good?

Every so often for the last half-century or so, we have seen some American arriving, breathless and sweating, with the latest post from the old country. And his news is always the same. It is that Britain is finished. All washed up. No more to be seen on the world stage -- except, perhaps, as "the sick man of Europe." This Anglo-Jeremiah is sure to quote Dean Acheson's stunning aperçu of 1962 that "Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role" -- which, if it means anything, simply means that the world-historical drama is short of roles, these days, for traditional imperial powers, and that Britain wouldn't want to play it anymore even if there were such a role.

The latest such prophet of doom is Stryker McGuire in Newsweek, who was the journalist who coined the expression "Cool Britannia" in the early days of the now-unlamented Blair government. "Forget the Great in Britain," his article is headed.

Even in the decades after it lost its empire, Britain strode the world like a pocket superpower. Its economic strength and cultural heft, its nuclear-backed military might, its extraordinary relationship with America -- all these things helped this small island nation to punch well above its weight class. Now all that is changing as the bills come due on Britain's role in last year's financial meltdown, the rescue of the banks, and the ensuing recession. Suddenly, the sun that once never set on the British Empire is casting long shadows over what's left of Britain's imperial ambitions, and the country is having to rethink its role in the world -- perhaps as Little Britain, certainly as a lesser Britain.

Of course, there is no shortage of those in the British press who have fired back. Gerald Warner in the Daily Telegraph wrote that

The problem, in the end, is that McGuire has mistaken Britain's cyclical problems -- in particular, the policies and composition of this Government -- for structural flaws. Yes, we have problems, but many of them are eminently fixable. After all, this is hardly the first time our valedictory as a great nation has been delivered, only to be discredited by national resurgence. "Britain is a tragedy," claimed Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. "It has sunk to borrowing, begging, stealing until North Sea oil comes in." The Wall Street Journal concurred: "Goodbye, Great Britain: it was nice knowing you." Over-eager obituarists on the far side of the Atlantic should not be surprised if this country once again disproves their terminal diagnosis.

My own sympathies are by nature and experience more with Mr. Warner than with Mr. McGuire, but sometimes I wonder. One thing that makes me wonder is the way that the British press covered the funeral last week of Harry Patch, "the last fighting Tommy" of the First World War, the last veteran of the trenches, who was laid to rest not with solemn and patriotic music but with the sappy anti-war "folk" ditty, "Where Have all the Flowers Gone," which was said to have been played "to show Mr. Patch's antipathy to violent conflict." For, as it happens, Harry in extreme old age had finally broken his silence about his war-time experiences, now nearly a century distant in the rear-view mirror, and pronounced that "It wasn't worth it." In fact, not only was his war not "worth it," no war was. "War," he said, taking the generic view of the thing, "isn't worth one life."

It would be unfair to expect a man of 111 to show a bit more respect to his now-dead comrades-in-arms who thought otherwise. He has earned the right to his own pacifism, even though those who supposed the victory over Germany "worth it" enough to have given up their own lives are a mute but powerful testimony to the contrary view. Yet the media were virtually unanimous in finding in the old boy an affirmation of a cultural pacifism which has obviously grown stronger since I lived in Britain 20 years ago. Perhaps having been told for 80 years by enlightened and progressive opinion that he was a pitiable victim of the war, rather than an honorable victor, the idea finally went to his head. But even if it hadn't, the enlightened and progressive would have seen in his demise a justification of their victim-mongering and their self-congratulation for being wise enough to make such a mistake "never again." In the Times of London, Roy Hattersley -- a former deputy leader of the Labour Party -- saw the large crowds who turned out to honor Mr. Patch as "a sign that we believe that the world should have grown out of the waste of war." Yeah. Should have. But in fact it never has and, pace John Horgan in a recent number of the British magazine, New Scientist, never will grow out of it. Mr. Hattersley is extravagant in his praise of the returning veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, both the living and the dead, and speaks of the debt we owe them, but if he thinks that war is a waste it's hard to see what he supposes that debt to be. Weren't these men, rather, mere fools for having thrown their lives away for nothing? If the sacrifice of the First World War was "pointless," as he suggests it was, what makes the sacrifice of these wars any different?

One answer is supplied by the former poet laureate, Andrew Motion, in the Daily Telegraph, who recalled meeting Mr. Patch and "the modesty and wisdom of the last authentic voice of the First World War." That war, he says, "changed the world for ever; in its crucible of catastrophes a world was lost, and the modern period was born. The way we now take extended suffrage for granted, assume a sceptical view of authority, demand individual rights: all these things derive from the suffering and sacrifice in Flanders." Ah, so then it wasn't pointless. It's point was the loss of that other world which allowed these blessings of ours, of "the modern period," to come into being. But that other world was also the world of Britain's greatness. Let's just hope that she doesn't need it anymore.

About the Author

James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (26) | Leave a comment

KyMouse| 8.13.09 @ 11:00AM

Thanks for your insights, Mr. Bowman. Perhaps it's easy for England and European nations to adopt "cultural pacifism" in light of the fact that it has been U.S. servicemen and -women who have rescued them again and again over the past 100 years or so, and given up quite a bit of blood and treasure in the process. I suppose it's easy to be against war when others are willing to do much of the fighting on your behalf. Most of those countries have put proportionately little of either resource into their own military forces during recent decades. But with Obama as commander in chief, they may have to rescue themselves in the future.

Nishant| 12.11.10 @ 10:20PM

That comment is so wrong. In World War 1, the US took 225,000 casualties. The Brits(not including their empire) took 2.5 million. France took almost 6 million casualties. In World War 2, the US lost 418,000 dead(military deaths). France took 218,000. The UK lost 383,000. Both the UK and France were only fighting in one major theatre; the US was fighting in both. Russia lost 8-10 million. In World War 1, the US troops did not have much effect until the very end of the war. In World War 2, Russia sustained more military losses than the other major allies combined.

Jim| 8.13.09 @ 11:40AM

"War," he said, taking the generic view of the thing, "isn't worth one life."

Well, perhaps Mr. Patch, but those who would, without pause, take your life and/or your freedom to have you bend in totality to their will might disagree with your assessment. So, what then? Should we, in the ever so pacifist-wise-words of that old Beatles tune just, "Let It Be."

William of OC| 8.13.09 @ 12:03PM

Britain, like the US, is in steep decline and the reason is demographic change. The Anglosphere has succumbed to multiracial and multicultural ideologies and mass immigration from the third world is the motor. In the end it's all about demographics.

Cuffs| 8.13.09 @ 1:19PM

What looks like failure to some is
actually succes to others.

David Govett| 8.13.09 @ 4:59PM

Fratricidal wars, toxic ideologies, and emigration of the fittest have drained Europe's gene and meme pools. The residue believes it ascends on a downhill slope, which would be tragedic were it not self-inflicted.

Bankers Fraud kills USA&UK;| 8.13.09 @ 6:58PM

On Oct 12, 1915, Edith Cavell, 50, a British nurse and head of a teaching hospital in Belgium, was shot by a German firing squad. Her death inflamed anti-German feeling in the US and caused enlistment in England to double.

She had helped some British POW's escape. Normally her crime was punished by three months imprisonment. Why was she killed?

According to Eustace Mullins, Edith Cavell had stumbled upon some damaging information. On April 15, 1915, The Nursing Mirror in London published her letter revealing that the Allied "Belgian Relief Commission" (charged with feeding Belgium) was in fact channelling thousands of tons of supplies to Germany.

Sir William Wiseman, head of British Intelligence and a partner in the bankers Kuhn Loeb, demanded the Germans execute Cavell as a spy. Wiseman believed that "the continuance of the war was at stake." The Germans reluctantly agreed, thus creating "one of the principal martyrs of the First World War." (The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, pp. 72-73)

Pretty cynical you say? No more cynical than demolishing the World Trade Center, murdering over 3000 Americans to start a "War on Terror."

This example of cooperation between belligerents was accomplished because Wiseman worked closely with the head of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Warburg . Warburg's brother Max was Chief of German Intelligence and a close friend of Kaiser Wilhelm.

The London-based central bankers use wars to weaken nations and colonize the world (incl. UK, US Israel etc.). The difficulty executing WWI was that they had already bankrupted the European states by selling them battleships and other armaments. Europe couldn't afford a war!

The introduction of the US Federal Reserve and the Income Tax Act in 1913 solved this problem. US government loans financed World War One. The American people were on the hook for both sides of the conflict.

This is how it works: The banksters created money from thin air based on the credit of the US government. Every dollar they "loaned" the US government was a new dollar in their pocket.

No nation is free if it cannot control its own credit, i.e. print its own currency at will. We are not free. The central banking cartel controls us by threatening to withdraw our credit i.e. currency causing economic turmoil

Randy| 6.25.10 @ 8:58AM

Well said. Debt is our enslavement. And despite what the media tells you, it is not personal debt that is doing it. It is money spent foolishly on pork barrel projects and foreign entanglements that is hanging us and will allow foreigners to own our farms, factories and cities.

tyler| 8.14.09 @ 2:22AM

I think one of the things that shows how crappy britain has become is there banning of Michael Savage. A true conservative and a jew he was banned for speaking his mind. Funny how one of the leading conservatives in the country gets no attention from the msm and the conservative media. Its a joke, Savage solved the health care issue on his show in ten minutes and no one picks up on it. Its pathetic. Fox news is pathetic and so is this website for not covering this story.

Mike from Kansas| 8.14.09 @ 5:31PM

Any particular reason that the American Spectator editors chose to illustrate this article with a photo of Oswald Mosely, the British fascist?

Kevin Riley O'Keeffe| 8.16.09 @ 8:54AM

World War One was a tragic waste, and a pathetic joke on Western civilization. I find it amusing the author can't see the wisdom in the old soldier's remarks.

Roy Smith| 8.17.09 @ 3:41AM

It's more than a pity that the only political hope for Britain to unravel itself from the depths of its multicultural nosedive is to vote in the BNP (British National Party). To most blindfolded British this would be like voting in Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler. Yet further and further they descend into the barren depths of the political left. Ushered on its way by the BBC, the most blatant publicly owned left wing nurturer of Dhimmocracy ever to bless this earth. It's as if the British have a death wish and no longer want to propagate their kind, wanting only to hand themselves and their beautiful but decaying Islands into the hands of Islam. Beware America.

Levin Sheridan| 8.21.09 @ 7:04PM

Check out my latest article on the theft of the British Empire... It might add some info to this story. Levin

http://cotocrew.wordpress.com/.....sh-empire/

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