Harry’s Place

Madagascar: A land with no people for a people with no land. (Besides the people.)

A decade ago, it was hard-core conservative ‘realists’ like Alan Clark who were arguing that Britain should have secured a compromise peace with Nazi Germany. Now it’s members of the so-called ‘left’ who are advocating this case.

Can any rational, intelligent and reflective individual now dispute the fact that there is a serious moral sickness infecting the left-wing British intelligentsia?

Am I being conspiracist if I am uneasy as to why 2 such similar revisons of WWII and the Holocaust come along at once?
I refer to Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, which has been well received in the USA (The LA Times calls it meticulously researched, despite Baker proudly stating in an interview that he had checked his facts mainly via Wikipedia) Ceserani critiques it here
:http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/human-smoke-by-nicholson-baker-814963.html

And Andrew Roberts in the ES was even more scathing, hoping it would not get the easy ride in the UK it has got in the US.
Baker’s transparent agenda is to crowbar the facts of WWII into an anti Iraq war framework- is this true of Wilby?

Sorry that should read: This seems also to be true of Wilby.

you are assuming that the so-called “holocaust” is anything other than a neo-con zionist hoax to extort cash for jewish oppression of the palestinians

I refer to Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke

I assumed that this article found inspiration from baker’s book.

Am I being conspiracist if I am uneasy as to why 2 such similar revisons of WWII and the Holocaust come along at once?

Nah Ami you are just noting something which has happened at least once before this century in the late seventies when the great mass of survivors of WW1 were dying off up pooped revisionist historians to tell us the trenches were not really so bad and the first day of the Somme was a picnic. Now as Both the survivors of the holocaust and survivors amongst allied troops who fought Hitler die off and take their first-hand memories with them vested interests will try to reshape the narrative (with varying degrees of success.)

Funnily enough I have just been reading Malcolm Balen’s “A model victory - Waterloo and the battle for history” which I would reccomend to anybody who wants to see how both governments and other interests attempt to steal the truth.

Remarkably we are not asked to consider the situation of the Malagasy people;

a remarkable people speaking a malayo-polynesian language who arrived about 3,000 years ago and;

equally remarkably found a large unihabited island which they, remarkably, set about inhabiting without colonisation, displacement, or ethnic cleansing (though it hasn’t all been hugs and tickles for the native fauna)

Sorry but this is an absolutely outrageous distortion of what Hilsum said.

Hilsum, one of Britain’s finest correspondents, does not view the wars in SE Asia in a ‘rosy light’. In fact she explicitly says that Kissinger’s was a doctrine of expediency that disregarded moral imperatives; he will be remembered for bombing Cambodia, which many regard as a war crime She later in the piece even offers some qualified support for a Decentish worldview when she states:

Then came Bosnia and Kosovo, and the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention”. Suddenly the do-gooders were on the side of the warmongers and nothing would be the same again. The left was split between those who were willing to go along with Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and those who could never support anything made in Washington. The latter found themselves uncomfortably backing Slobodan Milosevic.

However she does point out correctly, that many on the ground see the situation in Iraq since the invasion as worse than that which preceded it. Obviously somebody pointing this out makes you uncomfortable.

As for the claim that Hilsum is part of the left that sees the Iraq War as the ‘Most Evil Thing That Ever Happened’ you have absolutely no proof for this and you should apologise.

You are aware that Hilsum was one of the very few journalists who remained in Rwanda during the genocide? She did this at great personal risk, producing some of the finest journalist which came out of the conflict.

If the currebt Iraq is now indeed much worse than the one that preceeded the invasion, would you be happy with the US forces initiating a Saddam style totalitarian state in order to bring peace?

Great analysis; particularly the point that highlighting what a cowardly cynical use of the “Madagascar” ’solution’ is for anyone who would claim any moral principles.

Sounds like you may have got Hilsum wrong though, amendment or clarification please.

“Hilsum, one of Britain’s finest correspondents, does not view the wars in SE Asia in a ‘rosy light”

Or is there a HUGE difference between a “rosy light” and a “certain appeal”? I don’t get your indignation.

Anyone who follows the politics of the ‘anti-war’ left will long ago have learned that the Iraq War is The Most Evil Thing That Ever Happened. The Nazi Holocaust; Stalin’s terror-famine and mass purges; Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution; the Rwandan and Darfurian genocides - all are viewed as fairly minor misdemeanors in comparison to the US’s invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein without UN Security Council authorisation.

What an absurd piece of hyperbole.

Marko,

Thankyou so much for doing this. I read Wilby’s article when it was first published last week and I nearly coughed up my Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. It’s right up there with Neil Clark’s worst, in my view. Utterly contemptible.

So thank you.

The altruism versus self-interest dsicussion never ceases to amaze me. The dominant narrative of the unthinking left is that we - people like us - are dupes for believing that US has replaced its commitment to promoting self-interest with a commitment to spreading liberal democracy. What simply passes them by - and what lies at the very heart of Bush doctrine - is the post-9/11 realisation by the US that her self-interest is best served by the spread of democracy in regions that have never known it, rather than by acting as puppet-master to a network of corrupt client-states which subjugate their own populations whilst conducting US foreign policy by proxy.

Did Bush invade Iraq because he was moved by the plight of the Marsh Arabs? I very much doubt it. I suggest he did it at least in part because he thinks the best interests of the US are not served by the Middle East remaining a democratic wasteland. But I won’t oppose the removal of a megalomaniacal tyrant because the motives of the President of the US were impure. That’s called indulgence.

The expulsion options, for there were several including the swaps, such as trucks for thousands of children ‘holidaying’ at Terezin Camp, (and not forgetting the Philby-Saudi ransom offer) were dropped after some strong opposition. Notably from one man, and his cadre of followers, whom were residing quite comfortably just outside Berlin for the duration whilst running the Arabic Radio service and forming co-religionists recruits in Croatia into military units for the Third Reichs SS.

He later took up equally comfortable residence in Nassers Egypt before founding Fatah putting his nephew in charge. Now what was his name and what did he represent again?

The brave Ba’athist and AQ ‘Resistance’ that the StWC has consistantly supported and by slight-of-hand and one degree of removal helped to finance with its Islamist friends in the UK. Writing their names in stars with their machine-guns wasn’t it?

The cause of 2/3rds of all the casualities since 2003 and the determined resistance to the rebuilding of water pumps, power stations, oil-lines and medical infrastructure not forgetting preventing anyone praying in safety or voting, wasn’t it?

Hilsum’s words are:

“Uncomfortable as it is to agree with a man cast in the Kissinger mould, in these dangerous times I find realpolitik has a certain appeal. Henry Kissinger gave realpolitik a bad name. His was a doctrine of expediency that disregarded moral imperatives; he will be remembered for bombing Cambodia, which many regard as a war crime, as much as for shuttle diplomacy and detente between the Soviet Union and the US. Yet these days we might be grateful for a little more cynicism and a little less ideology.”

“many regard as a war crime ?” - what is the implication of this formulation ?

She ends her article with:

“Come back Kissinger, all is forgiven.”

I think this can fairly be described as viewing Kissinger and his intervention in Indochina ‘in a relatively rosy light’, as I said.

Her summary of supporters of humanitarian intervention in Bosnia:

“Suddenly the do-gooders were on the side of the warmongers.”

Not exactly a ‘Decent left’ position - us ‘do-gooders’ tend to believe that Milosevic and his supporters were the warmongers, not Clinton and Albright.

“You are aware that Hilsum was one of the very few journalists who remained in Rwanda during the genocide? She did this at great personal risk, producing some of the finest journalist which came out of the conflict.”

I find it rather shocking that anyone who has reported from Rwanda can praise realpolitik in this way - the US’s and UK’s failure to intervene in Rwanda, and their efforts to hush up the genocide, were presumably acts of realpolitik rather than neocon-style idealism, no ?

I agree that the motives for the invasion are not in themselves a reason for opposing it. Ultimately it is outcomes that are important and it would be equally wrong to support any such enterprise, however unwise, purely on the basis that it was well-intentioned. This is what makes Blair’s “I did what I thought was right” defence so pisspoor.

However, that does not mean that motivations are irrelevent. Any enterprise which is carried out in bad faith, as many of us believe the invasion of Iraq was, is always more likely to end badly. When it is carried out by bad people (Bush and his cronies I mean, not the troops on the ground) then it is doubly so.

Also, while we might accept that that in the real world a US president is always going to base his foreign policy decisions on the strategic interests of the US that does not make it acceptable for GWB to base those decisions on the strategic interests of GWB.

‘Nah Ami you are just noting something which has happened at least once before this century in the late seventies when the great mass of survivors of WW1 were dying off up pooped revisionist historians to tell us the trenches were not really so bad and the first day of the Somme was a picnic’.

Graham, can I just say that this is not actually a very good comparison. Revisionist historians of WWI challenge the ‘butchers and bunglers’ view of British command (as per ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’), which basically portray Generals as chateau-bound buffoons callously ordering tommies into mass slaughter. These scholars do not make light of Loos or the First Day of the Somme, but they do stress the constraints of technology (nascent air and armour, vehicles with limited cross-country capability, weak communications (dependent on field telephone and runner) and weapons systems - artillery, machine-guns etc - which favoured the defence). They also make the sensible point that no other army - French, German, Russian etc - was able to fight in such a way as to minimise casualties.

They also point out that by the summer of 1918 the ‘donkeys’ in the British High Command did actually work out a doctrine of land operations which integrated armour, air, artillery and infantry, and which enabled the British to defeat the German Army in the field. The effects may not have been as spectacular as Normandy 1944, but the fact was that the British and the Allies did prevail on the Western Front in 1918, and that this is a fact often forgotten.

In this respect, comparing them to Holocaust deniers and those that argue about the ‘Madagascar option’ is unfair, because the WWI historians are producing their conclusions based on detailed and thorough academic research. The latter, however, are basing their arguments either on far-right racism and outright distortion of the historical evidence (in the case of the ‘deniers’) or shallow moral relativism and a superficial understanding of the historical record (in the case of Wilby, Baker et al).

Nonetheless, I think we can agree that the tripe produced in ‘Human Smoke’ and elsewhere should be thoroughly refuted and discredited at every possible opportunity.

Incidentally, if someone is spoofing Flanker can they stop? I have no time for him, I think he’s a dickhead, but I also think that he should be allowed to be a dickhead in his own words.

This is what makes Blair’s “I did what I thought was right” defence so pisspoor.

Oh come on, Andrew, you’re better than that. Do you think he is saying, “I did what I thought was right but expected it to fail”, or, “I did what I thought was right and honestly expected it to succeed”? It’s not as if this was his only comment on justification, was it?

Whatever you think of the revisionist historians of WW1 Sackcloth and I note that you do not mention the litany of “mistakes” made right from the start of the war such as allowing the Germans to choose higher ground (often on chalk) to dig much deeper trenches with much better shelter (although I am glad to hear that some modern historians of the conflict think that the general staff had managed to work out a functioning system by 1918) my main point (which is that those who wish to control the narrative of history must wait until the mass of survivors are dead) still stands.

And I really think that you are very hopeful if you think that all those writing about WW1 are producing their conclusions based on detailed and thorough academic research whether they are selling the “Blackadder” side of the story or the idea that Haig was no bungler!

Let’s send Wilby and his ilk to some desert island and see how they like it.

Thanks, Brownie.

I could also have mentioned that Hilsum’s preference for realpolitik guided by the ‘national interest’, over neocon-style idealism, is at variance with Wilby’s assumption that self-interest is the worst possible motive.

So yes, there are differences within the ‘anti-war’ camp :-)

Graham writes:

“Whatever you think of the revisionist historians of WW1 Sackcloth and I note that you do not mention the litany of “mistakes” made right from the start of the war such as allowing the Germans to choose higher ground (often on chalk) to dig much deeper trenches with much better shelter (although I am glad to hear that some modern historians of the conflict think that the general staff had managed to work out a functioning system by 1918) my main point (which is that those who wish to control the narrative of history must wait until the mass of survivors are dead) still stands.”

Disagree. Of course there were a lot of mistakes made, but look at the situation confronted by the British at the time: drawn into a large-scale land conflict in Europe, the very thing they had spent a century planning to avoid, and having to fight it with a brand new army. Haig did not want to attack in 1916; he wanted to delay for a year. By 1918, earlier failures notwithstanding, the new army had become the most powerful field army in the world - the _only_ time in the history of Britain when that could be said.

I cannot work out why the British are so familiar with the likes of Loos, Passchendale, Somme etc but not the defeat of Operation Michel and victories in the 100 days in 1918.

Incidentally the narrative you seem to assume as orthodox arose some time after the war, with the pacifist movement. It was not the received view in 1919. When the tide of opinion first turned against Haig, Gen. Pershing, holder of the highest rank in US army history (shared with a very few others) said ‘how can they do this to the man who won the World War?’

I have banged on about this at length if you’re interested here http://cricketandcivilisation.blogspot.com/2008/04/anzac-day-and-national-myths.html

Apologies for the diversion. As to the main argument about Madagascar et al, there is no doubt that Hitler would have invaded Russia if left alone by the Western Allies. Without having to bother with stationing so many troops in France, and more to the point, getting bombed by the RAF and 8th air force, or diverting resources to the battle of the Atlantic, there’s a strong chance he would have succeeded (at the least, the war would have taken years longer). Had he done so, the fate of the Jews in Europe would have been sealed, a few Madagascan refugees notwithstanding.

the very thing they had spent a century planning to avoid

Surely the very “balance of power” theory (unearthed above as the reason the British always fight wars in Europe) would go against that view. The powers were so “balanced” in 1914 that war was inevitable…

Incidentally the narrative you seem to assume as orthodox arose some time after the war, with the pacifist movement.

You know this is what you get from reading too much history (and too much Paul Fussel!) and not engaging with the people who lived through it (which is my overall point here.) Trust me, I talked to enough WW1 veterans who were still alive in the sixties and seventies to know very well that their “orthodox narrative” needed no help from Lloyd-George’s memoirs or “the pacifist movement.” They had seen the new horrors of WW1 up close and their recollections are to be found still in the Imperial war museum in diaries and on bits of paper continuing to make liars of those who would turn WW1 into some kind of necessary war.

Just one quote from the Belgian witness Gaston Boudry:

“I saw them tie a soldier to a cartwheel with his arms outstretched as a punishment as a punishment. I also know of men who did themselves in. British soldiers weary of the trenches who cut their own throats while on leave. If order had not been maintained they would have deserted. They were coerced.”

I never met a veteran who said any different to that.

Markko has said everything about Wilby’s madness and the Madagascar plan. Interestingly two parties fought over control of what (as Markko points out) would have been a colony under nazi control and governance. One was Adolf Eichmann and the other Franz Rademacher who was captured (and released) by the Americans in 1947 (despite his complicity in the murders of Serbian Jews and deportations from elsewhere.) Rademacher eventually turned up in Syria alongside Alois Brunner and Major Otto Ernst Remer - long the focus for neo-nazis in Europe- and many other escaped nazis. Although targetted by the Israeli secret service and sentenced to two periods in prison for war crimes he never served a day inside.

Graham, I’ve been through veterans memoirs and private papers in the Imperial War Museum in the past, and I will say that soldiers’ recollections not only focussed on the horrors of combat, but also (to a surprising degree) on the necessity of beating the ‘Boche’ (or the Turk, or the Bulgar, depending on which theatre they were sent to). 1914 Christmas Truces aside, there was far less of the ‘You know, the enemy are poor sods just like us’ sentiment that you find in ‘Oh What a Lovely War’.

Also, if you are going to indict the Army for it’s early mistakes, bear in mind that Britain went to war in 1914 with a small all-volunteer army of 160,000 regulars (not counting TA or Indian Army), with a record of fighting colonial adversaries (the most recent being the Boers), and had to adjust to high-intensity warfare against a mass conscript-based army geared to fight one war, and one war only. An army based on six infantry and one cavalry division is NOT going to be automatically able to fight Corps and Army-level battles on the scale of the early 20th century, and the evolution of doctine, tactics, staff-work etc takes time. That is why the British Army underperformed.*

As for the wave of ‘Kitchener Battalions’ and Territorials inducted into the front in 1914-1915 (all of whom were willing volunteers - conscription didn’t happen until 1916), these were not the professional regulars who blooded the Germans at Mons and Ypres - they did not have the years of experience and training that characterised the ‘old’ army from Private to General. These soldiers were going to take time to adjust to the conditions of combat that existed at the time - and the realities of warfare in 1914-1918 meant that they would take heavy losses. Large numbers of soldiers (from all armies) died not because all their generals were fools, but because the technological conditions of the time influenced this.

This is not to deny the horrors of trench combat, and the ‘revisionists’ from John Terraine to Paddy Griffiths, Brian Bond and Gary Sheffield don’t do this, but to point out that there was a learning curve by which the British adapted to fighting the German Army on the Western front. The regular BEF performed well in 1914 but was worn down by sheer attrition. The enlarged army performed poorly in 1915 (Neuve Chapelle and Loos) and 1916 (Somme), its record was mixed in 1917 (Passchendaele was a disaster because of General Gough’s incompetence, but Messines and Cambrai were tactical successes) but was vastly improved in 1918 (withstanding the German ‘Michael’ Offensive of March 1918, winning Amiens in August, then rolling back the Germans beyond the Hindenburg line to the border in the hundred days offensive prior to 11th November 1918).

Above all, the British Army* of Haig played a crucial role in the winning of the war. The French had been exhausted (having borne much of the burden of losses until 1917), the Americans had not arrived in sufficient numbers to make a difference. It was the ‘lions led by donkeys’ who made a difference, and much of this was because they learned how to do combined arms operations by the crucial stage of the war. It is easy to overlook how difficult this was in hindsight, but for confirmation of this achievement, one only has to read Heinz Guderian’s ‘Achtung Panzer’. He admitted that the Germans had been decisively beaten on the Western front, and he based his concept of mechanised warfare on what the British had done to his Army in the summer of 1918.

The following are worth reading, Graham. Their conclusions should make you think again:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-Victory-First-World-Realities/dp/0747264600/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209742147&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Fighting-Methods-Political-Violence/dp/0714644684/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209742165&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Killing-Ground-Emergence-1900-1918-Emergency/dp/0850529646/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209742186&sr=1-2

*This applies to the Canadian, ANZAC, South African and Indian formations that also contributed to the war effort.

Graham I could name many an anecdotal conversation to counter yours but don’t think that would get us very far. It might be worth recounting that the British army was the only one involved in the war from the beginning which did not collapse at any point, which does not square with your images of self-harming to escape the front. Certainly there was no mutiny on the lines of the French.

I’ve set out my views on my own blog, which you can reach on the link if you’re interested, but would recommend in addition to sackcloth’s books Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock, Richard Holmes’ The Western Front, and John Keegan’s The First World War.

Graham I could name many an anecdotal conversation to counter yours but don’t think that would get us very far.

It certainly wouldn’t - but I doubt you could find much to back up yours outside the Biggles-style bravado of subalterns who knew they would be dead within the week whilst I would be quite happy to take you to the Imperial war Museum for a look at the letters and diaries ordinary soldiers were writing at the time.

My “image” is of an eyewitness. Why would the fact that the British army “did not collapse” mean that soldiers did not self-harm? Are you really trying to tell us that the pension-records are wrong? (and even then shall we mention what happened at Etaples with the new Zealanders?) At Boulogne on Sept 5th 1917? And at le Havre with the Royal Artillary on Dec 9th 1918? No collapse perhaps but only because of soldiers self-discipline. Not because of officers skill.

Corrigan’s book is the worst kind of dreadful revisionist nonsense: he cannot even see reasons why any of the men shot at dawn shouldn’t have been executed.

there was far less of the ‘You know, the enemy are poor sods just like us’ sentiment that you find in ‘Oh What a Lovely War’.

Could that possibly have been because in many sectors the Germans were sitting pretty in purpose-built deep entrenchments (some with all the comforts of home) which the blatant incompetence of british generals allowed them to build (often in by far the best strategic positions) in 1914?

Also, if you are going to indict the Army for it’s early mistakes, bear in mind that Britain went to war in 1914 with a small all-volunteer army of 160,000 regulars (not counting TA or Indian Army), with a record of fighting colonial adversaries (the most recent being the Boers),

Yes. At the time of the Boer war the average army recruit was found to have shrunk from the time of Waterloo. Haig and co stuck to the tactics they had used in the Boer war as well.

The following are worth reading, Graham. Their conclusions should make you think again:

What am I rethinking? That old men’s experiences have been rationalised out of existence just as now I see those of concentration camp survivors being challenged? This is where I came in!

And yes I know there has to be at least an attempt at writing an objective history, the regimental historians thought they were writing one at the time - would you blindly trust those histories now to give a true account of how a gas attack felt?

The British army has always been a very divided force, with officer’s memoirs nearly always being more positive than ordinary soldiers - but I defy anybody to write a history (and by that I mean an account of the doings of people in the world) of WW1 and make it a positive thing for the ordinary soldier. We forget how what they personally had lost hung like a cloud over the 1960s, and it will be even more of a tragedy if we forget the voices of the people who Hitler persecuted because people like Wilby want to “streamline” the discussion. One of his most offensive attitudes here is what is beyond the stupid and offensive idea that no war=no holocaust-implying that all Hitler’s victims up to 1939 - the thousands already in concentration camps, the mentally handicapped about to test the gas chambers in Aktion T4, the political prisoners would not have been worth fighting a war for either.

Could someone send a link to this discussion to the wretched Wilby? I was deeply depressed to see his article –even in the Media Guardian. Worse, I shall be meeting Nicholson Baker later this year and I shan’t be mentioning the war, or his book.

I can’t understand why anybody here is amazed at Peter Wilby. As an editor of New Statesman, he excelled himself by publishing an issue with a cover of which Der Sturmer would have been proud. An explicit antisemitic imagery, if there ever was one.

I don’t extrapolate from him to anybody else. Don’t claim that, say, members of StWC are antisemites, this will be ridiculous. All I am saying is that this particular individual is clearly tainted with egregious antisemitism. And thus his nonchalant view of the mass murder of European Jewry is completely understandable.

S.O.Muffin: thank you. I had forgotten that dreadful cover, of which Wilby was actually proud. He is a striking exmaple of that well-known phenomenon, left-wing antisemitism.

dectora:Worse, I shall be meeting Nicholson Baker later this year and I shan’t be mentioning the war, or his book.

Intriguing: Family wedding? Whatever the occasion, it will be one huge elephant to skirt around.

‘why stoppers and other ‘anti-war’ types are so repetitive in making the point that Western leaders are motivated by self-interest rather than altruism.

I think it has something to do with the moral legacy of Protestantism, whereby what matters is purity of inner belief rather than outwardly appearing to do good: salvation through faith alone, rather than salvation through good works.’

Spot on MAH.

It is a secularised puritan ethic that informs a large part of the ‘theo-politics’ of the fundamentalist doctrinal left.

It is tempting to see in this absolutist Puritanism the source of a part of the anti-war lefts attraction to the totalitarian theo-politics of Islamism.

The relentless drive for such public and highly personal displays of rhetorical purity also invokes Calvinist logic of predestination.

Such declarations of the purity of inaction, of being absolutely right, over the ambiguities of attempting to do right, serve merely to reassure themselves, and everyone else that they are, already and unassailably, among God’s elect.

‘The British army has always been a very divided force, with officer’s memoirs nearly always being more positive than ordinary soldiers - but I defy anybody to write a history (and by that I mean an account of the doings of people in the world) of WW1 and make it a positive thing for the ordinary soldier.’

No Graham. That is bollocks. That is utter balls. I am saying that as someone who studies history as part of his job. And can I just say that I am basing what I have to say from recollections of veterans from the rank of Private upwards. Not just Ruperts.

Bear in mind also that Company level (Major) and Battalion level (Lt-Colonel) officers shared the conditions of their men. They were front-line soldiers too, and the links between commanders and those they led were closer than people think (otherwise the British Army would have collapsed the same way that the Tsarist Russian Army did).

As for your comment that ‘old men’s experiences have been rationalised out of existence’, this is utterly flawed. The WWI historians I refer to looked at the archives, they interviewed the survivors that survived, and they went through the private papers and memoirs of all ranks - and the lower ranks left a surprising amount of memoir material behind. The story they tell is of an army of men who suffered a great deal, who took heavy casualties, but who stuck with what they saw as a just cause, and who ultimately won a war. In many respects, their story was not too different from that of those who fought in 1939-1945.

I’ve got a lot of time for you, Graham. You’re an intelligent bloke, but you do know bog-all about military history. And in this respect, comparing the WWI revisionist debate with those who are denying the Holocaust is just plain wrong.

Can you read the sources I recommend, before you comment on this again?

‘it will be even more of a tragedy if we forget the voices of the people who Hitler persecuted because people like Wilby want to “streamline” the discussion. One of his most offensive attitudes here is what is beyond the stupid and offensive idea that no war=no holocaust-implying that all Hitler’s victims up to 1939 - the thousands already in concentration camps, the mentally handicapped about to test the gas chambers in Aktion T4, the political prisoners would not have been worth fighting a war for either’.

I am fully, 110% in agreement with you in this argument. But can you appreciate that there is a world of a difference between millions of people rounded up to be killed by the Nazis, and hundreds of thousands of British soldiers - a large number of whom volunteered to fight of their own free will - who fought from 1914-1918 (bearing in mind that the Irish, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders and the Indians who fought alongside them were not conscripted at all).

I’ve got a lot of time for you, Graham. You’re an intelligent bloke, but you do know bog-all about military history.

Stop right there. I know enough about military history to know that it considers itself THE ONLY branch of history (and for centuries of course it was.) And you are not the only person who “studies history as part of his job.” by the way. Indeed I have read the Sheffield book and was not impressed.

Nowadays it has to compete with social histories (along with many others.) If we are just talking about military history then of course it is possible to write the kind of history where everything has the grand sweep of a “War and Peace” but in general such history has been left back in the 19th century (and there are good historiographical reasons for that!) Nowadays people want to know more about how people actually lived and once again I defy you to find me a book making out that Trench life was “positive” for the average British soldier. Have you read the primary sources such as Capt Dunn’s “The War the infantry knew?”

comparing the WWI revisionist debate with those who are denying the Holocaust is just plain wrong.

The entirety of my comparison was that some historians awaited the mass of both witness groups to die before their revisions started in earnest. Are any of you revisionary books above from before 1980?

so quite why I am being asked:

But can you appreciate that there is a world of a difference between millions of people rounded up to be killed by the Nazis, and hundreds of thousands of British soldiers - a large number of whom volunteered to fight of their own free will - who fought from 1914-1918

I have no idea. Of course there is a difference (have I said anywhere that there wasn’t?) Or that there was anything in my answer to Ami’s question:

Am I being conspiracist if I am uneasy as to why 2 such similar revisons of WWII and the Holocaust come along at once?

(To which I answered that the precedent was the glut of books on WW1 which emerged just as the last survivors died off?) Which implied that I thought there was no difference between WW1 and the Nazi regime?

Very weird!

Bear in mind also that Company level (Major) and Battalion level (Lt-Colonel) officers shared the conditions of their men. They were front-line soldiers too, and the links between commanders and those they led were closer than people think

Nevertheless if pressed for time I would start with the primary sources written by Sgt majors if I were you!

I seem to have left out a reference to Harry Elmer Barnes above. No doubt you will know that he was the first historian to be called “revisionist” and that his original revisions were about WW1. You possibly also know that Deborah Lippstadt has called him one of the originators of holocaust denial and suggested that his work on WW1 paved the way for both his own later blatant holocaust denial and that of other historians. Of course one of the major sources of revisionism about WW1 were the nazis themselves.

Anyone who’s ever read up on the subject know that this was intended by the Nazis as a slow extermination plan as opposed to the “quick” one they eventually ran with. I think there is an explicit quote by a leading Nazi (Himmler?) stating that it would be no holiday camp. Jews would have been starved and worked to death, easily falling prey to tropical diseases.

At the risk of being accused of seeing my adopted country through rose-tinted spectacles, while my compatriots laugh behind my back - may I suggest that although the UK may not have faught WW2 wholly out of altruism, the USA had little self-interested reason to fight the war in Europe, and that it did so, at substantial cost, primarily because it was viewed as the right thing to do.

Any US self-interest could easily have been served through lend-lease, Murmansk convoys, etc - without the commitment of a single GI. That so many Americans chose to sacrifice the lives of their fathers, brothers and sons in such numbers in the pursuit of what was right, rather than mere expedienecy or the furtherance of some fanciful neo-imperialist project, and at a time when American had it’s hands full dealing with an enemy who very clearly did threaten both American self-interest soil, should serve to once and for all refute the absurd charicature of America that seems to be so unquestioningly accepted across so much of the mainstream Eurpoean left.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that what really troubles the adherents of conventional euro-left anti-Americansim is not any of the less worthy things done in America’s name over the years, but a petty unwillingness to recognize their subconscious knowledge that their own liberty exists primarily thanks to the substantially altruistic American participation in a theater of war in which it had little self-interest.

“What would have become of Holland and its neighbours if Britain had signed a peace treaty with Germany, as it’s had ample opportunity to do? Holland would have become German and that would have been the end of that!”

Anne Frank, June 1944.

Field: “Anyone who’s ever read up on the subject know that this was intended by the Nazis as a slow extermination plan as opposed to the “quick” one they eventually ran with. I think there is an explicit quote by a leading Nazi (Himmler?) stating that it would be no holiday camp. Jews would have been starved and worked to death, easily falling prey to tropical diseases.”

But, Field, don’t you see the attractiveness of this option for a certain type of “anti-racist”? Jews are removed from Europe for ever. Something happens to them in a far-away land, far enough to ignore and disregard. And there are no comebacks, they just wither away in the mist of time and space! No angry local population complaining that its land has been taken over by ZioNazis…

If all this sounds too far fetched and a fruit of fevered imagination, all I can say is that I’ve heard once a guy that, I am sure, will classify himself as a committed anti-racist activist, stating with completely straight face and seriously that “Had only Adolph Hitler been more diligent, we would have been spared the Palestinian Nakba”.

You might mention on that subject SO that Hitler’s minions who were responsible for the Madagascar plan had already decided that East-European Jews would be kept in Eastern Europe (as they were the main source of intellectual trouble) according to the nazis while it would have been western European jews who would have been removed to Madagascar where they could have been slowly exterminated without upsetting their former neighbours …

It is a fair point, Graham. However, you have to look at this from the point of view of types like Whilby. Do you really believe that he took the care to examine historical material before writing that execrable article? In that milieu, if facts come in the way of prejudice, disregard the facts. However, if you are ignorant of facts, that’s even better.

Oh I totally agree - and the idea that fighting WW2 was in some way a mistake has been in the minds of some left-wing “intellectuals” since Iraq. I have little doubt that weighing up the fact that those who fought and experienced the war are now dying off is a bonus to those who want to “seize the narrative” (which is why I mentioned WW1 and what I saw happening to the memories of those who fought it in the hands of the traditionalist military historians.)

Of course doesn’t want to read historical material - he wants ownership of it: an impossible thing to demand as historians do not reconstruct the past but only attempt to interpret it. Just as the nazis issued their own historical textbooks Wilby would like the dominant narrative about WW2 to be his own simplistic one. No historian worth his salt thinks there could be any such thing as a single view - well except military historians maybe! Whatever, one judges a society by how it treats its historians and their differing views (as long as they don’t differ outside the boundaries of agreed knowledge!)

I don’t really want to argue the facts about WW1 by the way but I think it a given that there are as many historians who think the generals were blunderers as those who think them justified. Almost as many as there are functionalists and intentionalists on the subject of Hitler. Any other

Whoops - I really am not used to this new thing yet (and God knows if you can change comments once written) that should have ended with: “Any other view is on the way to Wilbydom.”

Hamas on the Holocaust, via Engage

Yep, it is pretty sick

see http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1861 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WG02QqRYf0

http://www2.nysun.com/article/72723

Good review of Baker’s book here.

“A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take “Human Smoke” at all seriously. The problem is that people who don’t know enough, and who enjoy the spectacle of a writer of apparent authority turning the myth of “the good war” upside down, will think “Human Smoke” is a brave book. Already a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times has praised it for “demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.” That people who think this way about the past will apply the same self-righteous ignorance to the politics of the present and future makes “Human Smoke” not just a stupid book, but a scary one.”

Guardian review is here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2277589,00.html

Baker prefers to note Goebbels’s comment on a photograph of Churchill: “This man walks over dead bodies to satisfy his blind and presumptuous personal ambition.” Baker also includes cameos which suggest, incorrectly, that Churchill was antisemitic. For example, he quotes from an essay in Churchill’s 1937 book Great Contemporaries which identified the malign Trotsky by his race: “‘He was a Jew,’ wrote Churchill with finality. ‘He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that.’” But Baker omits the context. Churchill was explaining that Trotsky’s Jewishness was an obstacle to his becoming autocrat of Communist Russia, and he criticised “so narrow-minded a reason”.

Now there is no reason why Goebbel’s views of Churchill should not be used in a history book, but to use a nazi’s view as (the only) evidence of the character of a man he never met and to miss out the context of a quote is pure David Irving.

Baker is a novelist and we have talked many times before about the difference between artistic writing and history. There is no reason why a novelist shouldn’t invent character motivations, fantastic scenarios and even invert morality. A historian should never be doing these things. Baker knows this and his book is part of the postmodern project to blur the boundaries and problematise the writing of history.

Dangerous stuff.

The democratic west made their indifference to the fate of the Jews clear ,post Christalnacht,by turning up ( without exception !)at the 1936 olympic games in Berlin. Hitler took that universal attendance as a green light acceptance of, or indifference to, what he had been doing ,till then ,to the Jews. He was famously relieved when he said “they all came”. How much brighter would that green light have seemed to him had Britain and America allowed him a free hand to pursue his dreams of conquest ? How much earlier and more complete would the annihilation have been had Britain and America not intervened?

SO Muffin -

Yes I can see that. That’s why I said what I did.

I think if the Nazis had a free choice between Madagascar and Poland in a non-war setting they would have chosen Madagascar. As you say the extermination would have happened almost unnoticed and unremarked.

I think it’s a good reminder also that people should not be so quick to dismiss those people of African descent of who talk of a holocaust among their people taken into slavery. It would have been much the same with Madagascar - a huge casualty rate on the outgoing passage, huge death rate from tropical diseases, and the rest wasting away through Japanese POW-style overwork. And through it all “German honour” would have been maintained.

Graham:

“in many sectors the Germans were sitting pretty in purpose-built deep entrenchments (some with all the comforts of home) which the blatant incompetence of british generals allowed them to build (often in by far the best strategic positions) in 1914?”

1. So why did the Germans lose?

2. How did the Generals manage to take the new army of 1916 and turn it into the strongest in the world (again, the only time in Britain’s history its army has held that status) in 1918 if they were ‘incompetent’?

3. You keep referring to Corrigan et al as revisionists. In fact your Blackadder IV style history is the true revisionism, in that it was not the received view after the war at all, only with the rise of pacifism from the 30s.

4. “I doubt you could find much to back up yours outside the Biggles-style bravado of subalterns who knew they would be dead within the week whilst I would be quite happy to take you to the Imperial war Museum for a look at the letters and diaries ordinary soldiers were writing at the time.”

Bollocks. There are many letters etc going the other way too.

I didn’t think I could still be shocked by the blindness and anti-semitism of those who are siding with war-mongering jihadists, supposedly in the name of peace, but this truly shocked me. I guess it goes to show that once you decide to stand against democracy, on the side of genocidaires, ultimately you end up, literally, as a fascist supporting Hitler. Even to say that feels inadequate, I fear, because those words are bandied about so freely (”fascist!” “Hitler!), by the very people who most admire fascists, and thus I am left without words to describe my revulsion at this plunge into amorality.

If people like this oppose the Iraq war, it must indeed have been a noble undertaking, and one can only be honored by their disapproval.

Incidentally one further point Graham misunderstands is when he writes:

“the very thing they had spent a century planning to avoid

Surely the very “balance of power” theory (unearthed above as the reason the British always fight wars in Europe) would go against that view. The powers were so “balanced” in 1914 that war was inevitable…”

Indeed, the point I was making though was that Britain was trying to avoid being sucked into a large scale land war in Europe; the planning was to make any contribution largely maritime and economic, where Britain held sway. She would then be able to withdraw if it suited and hold the whip hand in any peace negotiation. http://cricketandcivilisation.blogspot.com/2007/11/great-war-ii-why-trenches.html