Remember the Maine! Remember Joseph Kony!

I wrote an article a few years ago, a comment on a ‘trending’ campaign on Twitter directed against an English journalist. I opened as follows;

I love old horror movies, really old ones, the old black and white flicks with people like Boris Karloff. I’m sure people will have seen some of the original Frankenstein movies. Quite often there are scenes of indignant mobs out with flaming torches, hunting down the monster. But that’s so old-fashioned, don’t you agree? The mob is still with us of course, but it has long since lost the torches. Now it expresses its righteous indignation on the internet, haunting down the creatures that have happened to offend, hunting in a mood of outrage; hunting like a pack.

It’s true; the mass expression of a two-minute hate (yes, the analogy is appropriate) against Joseph Kony, head of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is the latest example. Angelina Jolie has joined in, saying that she does not know anyone who does not hate Joseph Kony. All this flaming passion and outrage was sparked by Kony2012, a YouTube video broadcast last Thursday, one sponsored by a charity called Invisible Children.

The aim was to make Kony ‘famous’. This man carried out a war of terror in northern Uganda for decades, with an army made up in part of kidnapped children, an army responsible for the most nauseating atrocities. No need to make him famous, because he was already infamous. But ‘famous’ he has become in the lights of Kony2012, with over fifty million views of the video. People in the States were encouraged to put up posters in cities across the nation, thus making the fight against Kony and the LRA a matter of ‘national interest’ in Washington. That, so the film makers believe, will ensure that US military ‘advisors’ are sent to Africa to aid in the hunt for Kony.

I wonder if these people understand the potential damage they have done; I wonder if they understand anything at all about the present political situation in Uganda? Ugandan bloggers and journalists, outraged by this moral imperialism, are saying that the film may very well serve to resurrect Kony and the LRA from a long decline. Javie Ssozi, a leading Ugandan blogger, has said that suggesting that the answer is more military action is wrong.

Have they thought of the consequences? Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger. Arguing for more US troops could make him scared, and make him abduct more children, or go on the offensive.

The other thing worth pointing out is that the picture painted of Kony and Uganda by the film is six or seven years out of date. Kony is no longer in the country but hiding away in the jungles of neighbouring states. Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to tell the truth as honestly as they can; otherwise they risk sinking into the mire of propaganda. Kony2012, with its inaccuracies and patronising view of Ugandans and Uganda, has done nothing more than whip up mass hysteria, the sort of thing that would have been understood by the yellow press of old. Remember the Maine! Remember Joseph Kony! – what’s the difference?

Do not misunderstand me; I think Kony is a boil on the backside of humanity, but this campaign is all surface and no substance; it rose quickly and it will die just as quickly, when the mob turns to some other fashionable trend. There have been people highlighting the Kony problem for years, with a lot more sobriety and a lot more effect. Sending in US troops would be like setting an elephant off in pursuit of the ants, and we surely all know the outcome with that.

Who are these Invisible Children people; what’s their motivation? Is it altruism, a concern for suffering humanity? No, the organisation seems to be a money-spinning operation feeding off pure emotion. I read in the Telegraph that of over $9million it spent in 2001 less than half went on helping people on the ground. The rest apparently went on “awareness programmes and products”, as well as management and media; in other words, a lot of self-promotion.

A spokesman for the Ugandan government, also pointing out that the war is no longer in the country, said that Kony2012 (it really should be Kony2006) is creating a wholly misleading impression, allowing Invisible Children to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda. It’s clearly been a great success, playing on emotions rather than reason. But it really is time for the hate fest to end.

An English Faust

I’m completely beguiled by witchcraft and magic, by the search for deeper, sometimes darker, forms of knowledge and understanding. I’ve read deeply into lots of sources, including the infamous Malleus Maleficarum – the Hammer of the Witches, a medieval treatise based on misconception and misunderstanding, but one that was to have dire consequences for so many people, particularly women. I’m captivated also by the Faust legend, another dangerous quest.

There is an odd ambiguity in the medieval and early modern understanding of witchcraft and magic. Witchcraft was disapproved of as malevolent magic, though magic, in the form of alchemy, was a reasonably respectable if occasionally risky occupation. It would have been lethal for a woman to set herself up as an alchemist or a magus, for the simple reason that accusations of witchcraft and demonology would quickly follow. Men were on slightly more certain territory, though they, too, were in danger of slipping over boundaries. It was all a matter, you see, of perception…and politics!

Dr Faustus is the stuff of legend; but Dr John Dee is the stuff of English history. His is a fascinating story, one that embraces science and magic, high politics and low comedy. It’s a story long waiting to be told in full. Now it has, admirably, by Glynn Parry in The Arch-Conjurer of England: John Dee.

Conventionally Dee was a scientist living in Tudor England, a man with a brilliant scholarly mind who set off in pursuit of some rather dubious notions. He really stands on the cusp of a great change, a time when superstition, giving way to reason, was still fighting a determined rearguard action. In a profession like his one really needed powerful protectors to avoid accusations of black magic, and as Glynn shows, Dee’s protectors included some of the most powerful in Elizabethan England. His patrons went as high as the Queen herself, taking along William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, her chief minister, and Francis Walsingham, her spy master, on the way.

Dee claimed to be able to foretell the future, a skill particularly desired by those in power. He also had a practical political use as a kind of counter-magus! In 1558 when Elizabeth came to the throne in succession to her Catholic sister, Mary, there were many dangers for the nascent Protestant queen. In France Nostradamus, the court magician of Catherine de Medici, predicted all sorts of dire things for England. Dee was hired to give a different spin and cast a better horoscope!

Dee was clearly a reasonably astute politician himself, at least on occasion. His best ‘prophecies’, in other words, were tailored to support policy drifts, which included casting positive auspices on Robert Dudley’s campaign in support of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish, and Cecil’s campaign against the perceived Catholic threat. This was wizardry as a handmaiden to statecraft!

Alas, poor Doctor Dee, astute but not astute enough. He slipped and slipped badly - he made one political contact, one magical contact and one prediction too far. The political contact was a disreputable Polish nobleman by the name of Albrecht Laski. Believing that this man was favoured by the Queen, Dee then hired one Edmund Kelley, a ‘scryer’ who claimed to be able to talk to angels, to back up his prophecy that Laski would be king of Poland. Here Dee took his eye off the political ball; for the player to watch was not Elizabeth but Burleigh, who had no intention of advancing the Catholic Laski’s political ambitions. Down came the house, magic and all.

Now on Continental exile, Dee’s story slips from Faustian tragedy to Rabelaisian comedy. The fraudulent Kelley persuaded him that the only way for him to retain his magical powers was for the two to indulge in a spot of wife swapping. Dee agreed, sufficient proof, if any is needed, that even the most sophisticated minds are not free from risible forms of folly.

Parry has done splendid work in placing Dee, the man, the myth and the magic, in the wider stage of Elizabethan court politics. It explains why his little vessel was subject to such vagaries, moved along in one direction or another by changes in the wind. He also proves one thing that I’ve long believed – that innocence often goes hand in hind with scholarly curiosity, and, goodness, what an innocent Dee was.

There was one nugget of information which I fount wholly delightful. It was Dee who coined the term ‘British Empire’, though with all of his other prophecies this showed no great prescience on his part. His British Empire grew from the spurious contention that King Arthur, no less, had once planted colonies in the Americas. I can just see it - an Elizabethan Englishman in the Colonial Court of King Arthur!

Parry has brought our home-grown Faust out of the shadows. His scholarly efforts are commendable, and weighty. I could only wish that he had carried them a tad more lightly; the long passages from Dee’s own writings are crushingly dull. Still, if you are interested in the occult and the place of prediction in politics, if you are interested in the highs and the lows of an Elizabethan life, then I think you will enjoy this book. I did.

Syrian Pawns

I visited Egypt last November, though I had originally planned to go to Syria. There are some wonderful places there, particularly the remains of Palmyra, who’s Queen Zenobia, a figure of endless fascination for me, once took on the power of Rome. There is also Krak de Chevaliers, the most magnificent Crusader castle in the whole of the East.

I didn’t go, for obvious reasons. After my initial planning last spring the political situation began to spiral downwards in successive stages. It was too volatile, I was advised, too dangerous, so best to look elsewhere. I had a marvellous time in Egypt but I still think of Syria, still hope that one day soon I will, like Saint Paul, take the road to Damascus.

I’m certainly keeping an eye on developments in the country, just as I did last year on Libya, when Sarkozy and Cameron went on muddle-headed humanitarian ‘crusade’, one that has had wholly predictable results, results that I predicted at the time. All the right sounds are being made about Syria, how awful Bashar al-Assad is, how dreadful the massacres of the people, and on and on, but so far the two twits have done nothing but tweet. So, too, has Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, fuming at Russia and China for blocking an anti-Assad resolution at the United Nations.

I despair of our politicians, our leaders, forever incapable of looking below the surface. Look below the surface in Syria and what do you see, the huddled, pro-democracy masses yearning to breathe free, perhaps? No, that’s not what I see. Oh, yes, there is plenty of footage from Homs, the scene, supposedly, of the worst outrages by the Syrian army. But the majority of the country, including the cities of Damascus and Aleppo, is peaceful and unaffected. Sorry, that’s not quite true. As Rod Liddle writes in the Spectator, there have been occasional attacks by the operatives of the so-called ‘Free Syrian Army’ on civilian targets in the capital.

Even the benighted Dame Clinton (I can just picture her in pantomime) admits that, unlike Libya, large parts of Syria are peaceful, that there is no massive anti-Assad movement as there was anti-Gaddafi. What she can’t see, seemingly, is that the opposition, encouraged by the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas and Saudi Arabia, is dominated not by democrats but by fundamentalists. Not content with allowing the Islamists to take charge in Tripoli she also wants them in Damascus.

“Democracy and human rights” the early demonstrators against Assad chanted. Oh, no, they did not; they were heard to shout “Send the Christians to Beirut and the Alawites to coffins.” Syria has a large Christian minority going right back to the days of Queen Zenobia. It’s now the largest the Middle East, given that the previously flourishing community in Iraq has all but been destroyed by the Bush-Blair ‘crusade.’ The secular Assad regime has long protected the community, just as it has protected the moderate Alawites and other Shia minorities. Now they all face an uncertain future if the rebellion is not contained.

The Free Syrian Army, whose NATO-sponsored ‘government-in-exile’ is dominated by the most reactionary elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, is fighting a proxy war on behalf of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. President Assad describes them as ‘foreign terrorists’ with some justification, for a great many are, coming from Iraq and Libya. The weapons are supplied by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, countries that could not give a damn about the suffering of the Syrian people. No, in the bigger game of politics they just want to replace the region’s last secular ruler, all the more contemptible to them because he is an ally of Iran. In this game the ordinary people of Syria are no better than pawns.

Don’t mistake my position here; I am no friend of Assad, as unscrupulous and as bloody a dictator as they come. But a backward Wahhibi theocracy would be so much worse; worse for the majority, worse for the minorities, worse for women, worse for those who desire even a modicum of personal freedom.

It’s the hypocrisy that angers me most. Western leaders pontificate about the abuse of ‘human rights’ in Syria while conveniently ignoring those same abuses in Saudi Arabia. Britain and France intervened in Libya in support of ‘freedom’, only to see ‘freedom’ crushed in Bahrain without comment. With no appetite in the West for fresh interventions, the Saudis and Qataris are urging us to arm the rebels, a more cowardly course of action I find difficult to contemplate, one that will only prolong the suffering of the pawns of Syria into an indefinite future.

The Rise of the Morlocks

Sociology is not my subject. More than that, it seemed to me to be one of more tendentious academic disciplines, the happy hunting ground for all sorts of lefties. Bogus theories compounded by bogus politics that, for me, is sociology.

Or, rather, was sociology. I’m pleased to say that my view here was far too partial! I delight in serendipity, the art of discovering things by chance. Charles Murray is a new discovery for me, a sociologist of unique and refreshing vision. Presently working for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington, he is best known for a book called The Bell Curve. In this he was rash enough to discuss the IQ levels of different ethnic groups, attracting a rush of liberal hatred.

But it’s his views on poverty that I find most compelling, his argument that state action in this area, the so-called ‘war on poverty’, has the reverse effect from that intended – it increases the number of poor people. More than that, it’s corrosive of personal responsibility and independence. This is my own view exactly. In an article I published here at the beginning of last year (The Dead Hand of Welfare, January 11) I opened in combative style;

The one certain consequence of aid, of any kind of welfare, is poverty. Look at this country, look at the dreadful Dependency State, a financial burden that has crippled us for years and resulted in a form of entrenched, institutionalised socialism, almost impossible to shift, no matter the political complexion of any given government. Billions of pounds have been spent and we are not a step closer to ending poverty.

In his work as a number cruncher Murray has added substance to this assertion in an American context. Like Britain, billions have been spent on antipoverty programmes but poverty remains stubbornly entrenched. Worse still, those targeted, the recipients of benefits, have lost the incentive to work hard and raise children within the context of a stable relationship.

Murray is also, I’m delighted to say, a libertarian, very much of my own kidney. He explained himself in What it Means to be a Libertarian, a book published in the late 1990s. In this he calls himself a ‘lower-case’ libertarian, too fond of the “indispensible role of tradition and classic virtues” to go along with the likes of Ayn Rand. Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, his heroes are my heroes!

In 1989 he was asked by the Sunday Times to investigate if we have an ‘underclass’ a term he popularised that same year, in this country. He used three measures in his investigation: drop-out from the labour force among young males, violent crime and births to unmarried women. These, he concluded, were associated with the growth of a class of “violent, unsocialised people who, if they become sufficiently numerous, will fundamentally degrade the life of society.”

He returned to the same theme, again at the behest of the Times, ten years later, saying that Britain had become “just another high-crime industrialised country”, and that the underclass was “driven by the breakdown in socialisation of the young, which in turn is driven by the breakdown of the family.” Last year’s London riots are sufficient proof of his claims, if any proof is needed.

He has now published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 in which he discusses the growing fractures in American society and the dangers presented by an underclass, cut off from a common set of values. His fears are my fears; for, in the end, I suspect the Morlocks will consume us all.

Sensational Writer, Unsensational Life

Poor William Wilkie Collins, destined forever to fall under the shadow of Charles Dickens, his contemporary and his friend. Poor William Wilkie Collins, a man who wrote two great novels and a lot of middling ones. But, oh, how captivating this master of Victorian melodrama could be, how mesmerising, how compelling. I read The Woman in White in less than a day, horribly fascinated by the dastardly deeds of Sir Percival Gylde and Count Fosco, two of the most delightfully dark villains in all of Victorian literature! The Moonstone, which I also devoured in a fever, is, as T. S. Eliot once said, the first and best detective novel in the English literary canon.

Collins was a Londoner, born and bred. Like Dickens he is a chronicler of the city in a time of great transition. It’s as well that we remember him in this year when his mentor is being so lavishly celebrated. Peter Ackroyd has in Wilkie Collins, not so much a biography as a literary pot-boiler.

It’s a pity, really, because if I were a publisher thinking of commissioning a work on Collins Ackroyd would be the first writer to come to mind. After all, who could be better? Who could be better than a man who wrote masterly biographies of Dickens and of London? But Wilkie Collins is oddly two-dimensional, almost as if the author was bored with the subject, the occasional flashes of brilliance notwithstanding.

There is much to fascinate in the life of Collins, a man in so many ways wholly untypical of his times. He had none of Dickens bourgeois respectability. He never married. Instead he had two long-term mistresses, one of whom bore him three children. Two mistresses, both of whom knew of the other, meant two households and lots of imaginative juggling. There is an interesting parallel here with his fiction, where doppelgangers abound. I’m thinking specifically of Laura Farlie and Anne Catherick in The Woman in White, shadows, perhaps, of Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd, the women in Marylebone!

Like Thomas de Quincy, Collins was an English opium eater. Suffering from ‘rheumatic gout’, a Victorian portmanteau covering a variety of sins (the ‘sin’ in Collins’ case may have been venereal), he took increasing quantities of laudanum, a tincture of alcohol and opium freely available at the time. By his mid-thirties he was drinking to levels that would have killed those not habituated. There were consequences, of course, terrifying hallucinations, the sort of demon that pursued de Quincy, except his pursuer wasn’t a Chinaman (read Confessions of an English Opium Eater!) but yet another doppelganger, another Wilkie Collins.

Ill-health, addiction and domestic complexity did not stop him working, though by his own admission he had no recollection at all of writing large parts of The Moonstone. As a novelist he came at just the right time. Paper taxes had been abolished in the 1820s; there had been important breakthroughs in printing technology and a mass market was developing with the improvement in elementary education.

This was all helped along by the expansion of the railway, with travellers able to buy ‘Shilling Shockers’ at the new stations. The Woman in White was an immediate sensation, the first edition selling out within a short space of time. It also caused what we would now call product placement, with Woman in White bonnets Woman in White perfume and even a Woman in White waltz.

Collins knew his public. He liked to travel around on the new London omnibuses, picking up snatches of conversation, then colouring his fiction. He was really the first modern sensationalist, and how sensational he could be, touching on the lowest recesses of human behaviour – murder, fraud, adultery and blackmail. And, yes, sex! It’s quite rightly said that there is more sex in Collins’ books than there is anywhere else in the fiction of the time, outside underground pornography. In Basil the eponymous hero discovers he has been cuckolded when he listens through a thin wall while his young bride does the wild thing - noisily- with the book’s villain!

Hardly surprising, given his unusual domestic arrangements, he was critical of what he called ‘clap trap morality’. He was particularly critical of the way that women were treated at the time. To compensate for this, as Ackroyd points out, he created in his books fiercely independent women who defied the conventions of nineteenth century femininity.

So, then, there is lots to be going on with about a writer, about his public and about his times. But Ackroyd seems to have taken his own somnambulant trip through Wilkie Collins. It’s a brief life, a mere two hundred pages compared with the thousand or so of the magisterial Dickens. That may not have been so bad – there is far less original material for a life of Collins than there is for Dickens – but the subject does not seem to engage him. His pedestrian treatment certainly won’t gain Collins many new readers. The problem is, in the end, he makes the author sound like a bit of a bore, a measure, I suspect of his own boredom, or, sad to say, declining power as a writer.

I don’t want to be completely unfair. As I said above, there are occasional flashes of brilliance, of the old Ackroyd. He still has a penetrating eye for detail, picking up on the future significance of the magnifying glass in detective fiction from Sergeant Cuff’s use of it in The Moonstone. The prose shines at points but mostly it’s a picture painted in dull monotones. It gives me the appearance of a book written in a hurry. There are far too many crutches, ‘must have’, ‘seems’, ‘is likely’, the sort of authorial interventions to cover lacunae, words and phrases that simply madden me with their silly imprecision, proof that the writer is not the master of his subject. Collins deserves better. At one time Ackroyd could have done better.

Robin of the Right

I’d never heard of Andrew Breitbart, the American conservative activist, author and blogger. I’d never heard of him until last Thursday, when news of his death was announced in a post on Blog Catalogue.

I took exception to the early tone being set, one of minor celebration. Considering that he died at a relatively early age, considering that he leaves a wife and four young children, I described it as despicable and distasteful. There are times when political differences are irrelevant. In response I was given a link to another blog and asked, once I read it, if I would feel the same way. This is part of what I read;

Let’s face facts here; the man was an asshole, fashioned after the many conservative assholes who are currently residing in our media. He was a racist, misogynistic, homophobic elitist bastard, who gleefully attacked the character of anybody who didn’t share his hateful, narrow minded views. He was the model of today’s Republican as featured in our present day media.

What is there to say? If that’s the level to which criticism and discourse has sunk in the States then things really are in a bad way. It seems the justification for this kind of venom was Breitbart’s own invective. Soon after the death of Senator Edward Kennedy he described him as “villain”, a “duplicitous bastard”, a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement.” The favour has now been returned, with one Kenneth J Bernstein greeting Breitbart’s death using the same terms in a diary entry on the Daily Kos, seemingly an American political blog that publishes ‘progressive’ (how I loath that word) views.

I actually wrote my own obituary on Edward Kennedy, published at the time of his death on the Daily Telegraph readers’ website. It took the form of some musing by Sir Mordred, the rebel knight at the court of King Arthur (Sir Mordred Reflects on the End of Camelot). Here is part of his, sorry, my reflection;

So on to Ted, the last of the ‘great’ senators and the clan’s weakest link. I suppose he deserves the accolade of greatness simply for being around long enough, the Methuselah of the upper house. And what a variety of super liberal and semi-socialist causes he embraced, making lots of sound and fury in the process that signified nothing. Was it enough to wipe away the shame of Chappaquiddick, the shame of leaving a nineteen-year-old woman to drown while he made his escape, the shame of failing to report the incident for hours after? For some it seems to have been, for Super Obama it seems to have been, but not for Mordred; no, never.

There is other evidence of Ted’s turpitude beyond Chappaquiddick. The older Kennedys’ extra-marital exploits escaped press scrutiny a little in the same fashion as royals did at the time, but Ted lived long enough to see the emergence of a much less deferential age. His exploits were a dream for his Republican opponents. In 1988 in a speech on the Regan administration’s secret deal to sell arms to Iran he asked rhetorically “Where was George Bush?” The reply was made on bumper stickers across the land, “Dry, Sober and Home with his Wife.”

Am I speaking ill of the dead? I suppose I must be, but so much ill was directed at me by poets down the ages; so please allow me some return. Even so, while I welcome no one’s death I do welcome the end of a shabby modern Camelot, a tawdry illusion so much worse in every way than the original; an illusion that served to poison America with the lie of liberalism and the lie of socialism.

In other words he was a villain, a duplicitous bastard, a prick and a special pile of human excrement! But I’m not American; I don’t express myself in such earthy terms. Breitbart did, though his faults are nothing compared with those of the tawdry Kennedy.

On the basis of some very brief research I’ve concluded that there was so much to admire in his approach to life and politics. He wasn’t a knight at Camelot; no he was Robin Hood, fighting against the barons who dominate American life.

Time Magazine referred to him as the internet’s “most combative conservative impresario”, which seems to have been a well-deserved accolade, one I feel sure that made him proud. A champion of the Tea Party and baiter of Obama (he described him as Marxist in an interview with the New York Times), he set up conservative websites like Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood, the three areas of American life which he considered to be dominated by a liberal elite, unreflective of the views of ordinary people.

In an interview with Time he said “Most conservatives are individualists. For years, they have been pummelled by the collectivists who run the American media, Hollywood and Washington. The underground conservative movement that is now awakening is the ecosystem I’ve designed my sites to tap into.”

As I said, a modern Robin Hood of the right, fighting against the vested interests that would silence any view but their own. Yes, he was brave guerrilla, tackling the awful orthodoxies that dominate so much of our life, not just in the States but in Europe also, where the ghastly and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels smothers dissent with silence.

Even if his weapons are not my weapons, his words not my words, I can recognise a fellow rebel. I regret not knowing of him when he was alive. John Donne’s poem For Whom the Bell Tolls comes to mind. We are, indeed, diminished by our loss. But the words I want to conclude with are those of the first respondent on the Telegraph article reporting Breitbart’s death;

Now, we shall see the CLASS of friends and foes. I wish I could say that I expect to witness respectable decorum. But I know, as Andrew would, it simply won't be. The left has divided our people into warring camps. They will rejoice at our loss. So be it. This is a body blow to conservatives, no doubt about it. Time to offer prayers to friends family and to remember him for energy, brilliance and focus. Time to pick up the flag and soldier on.

Scoundrels

In a recent article in the Spectator (Enemies within, 11 February) Jonathan Freedland rightly challenges some of the myths of 1940, Britain’s ‘finest hour’, when the country stood alone against the power of Nazi Germany. Contrary to the received perception, Britain was not fully united behind the war effort; there were fissures and dissenters even after the high noon of appeasement had passed.

There is the obvious example of the British Union of Fascists, whose leader, Oswald Mosley, was interned that same year as a threat to national security. Oddly enough Freedland does not mention this directly. Instead he alights on the Right Club, a secretive organisation founded by Archibald Maule Ramsay, a Scottish Conservative Member of Parliament, which functioned well into the first year of the war, hoping for an accommodation with Germany

Included in its ranks were a number of influential people from the aristocracy downwards. Even so, its political impact was minimal, restricted to the more eccentric fringes of national life, drawing in ideological crackpots like Lord Lymington, an exponent of blood and soil mysticism. Beyond a lot of talk, nothing practical was done to hinder the war effort, though Churchill, ignoring Parliamentary privilege, had Ramsay sent to Brixton prison, where he was to remain until 1944.

As I say, it’s odd that the author does not mention Mosley and the BUF directly. But the even odder omission is the opposition of the far left, with the Communists, at the behest of Stalin, denouncing the conflict as an ‘imperialist war’. After all, this was the balmy days of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Unlike the Right Club, all jaw jaw, hostility on the left took a practical form, something that’s been rather submerged in the heroic accounts of 1940.

The Communist Party, through its trade union contacts, attempted to disrupt production. There were even strikes in aircraft factories during the Battle of Britain, as a respondent to Freedland made clear in the in the letters page of the ensuing edition of the magazine. The disruption was compounded by the attitude of the Labour Party, in charge of industrial policy under the wartime coalition. Refusing to apply the Defence Regulations, which would have subjected strikers to martial law, a new pattern of industrial appeasement was established, which was to continue well after the war.

There is also the so-called People’s Convention, which was supposedly set up by the Hammersmith Trades Council to fight for better conditions. In reality it was an initiative directly sponsored by the Kremlin. I’ve written before about this fraudulent organisation, though some of the political innocents who joined were not immediately aware just how fraudulent.

It was all quite subtle in the usual Communist style. People were encouraged to join in support of initiatives like higher living standards or better bomb shelters. Once safely enrolled they discovered that the 'real enemy' was not Germany but Winston Churchill and those members of the Labour party who joined the coalition. The best denunciation of the whole phoney front came from George Orwell, Harold Laski and Victor Gollancz, who in 1940, under the auspices of the Left Book Club, published Betrayal of the Left. In this Gollancz asked;

Can anyone carry self-delusion to the point of being able to read through the file of the Daily Worker [The Communist Party Newspaper] and still believe that this motive was any other than to weaken the will to resist? When, at the same time, you tell people that this is an unjust war, fought for no purpose but to increase the profits of the rich: when you jeer at any comment about the morale and heroism of the public and call it 'sunshine talk'; what possible purpose can you have but to stir up hatred of the government and hatred of the war, with the object of undermining the country's determination to stand up to Hitler?

The Convention, shameful as it was, attracted the support of some prominent intellectuals, including reptilian figures like Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote a pamphlet defending the Soviet aggression against Finland, because Stalin was only seeking to defend Russia against an attack by 'British imperialists'!

It was all quite different when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Then these sophists, traitors and moral cowards served to prove the point once made by Samuel Johnson. Yes, in some cases patriotism really is the last refuge of a scoundrel.