This new year is the centenary of the start of the First World War, a totemic event in our history that the government has laudably provided an estimated £60 million in funding to commemorate. With no living veterans of the Great War left to tell the tale, it is vital that we keep current and future generations aware of the substantial and heroic sacrifices made in the war, one which took the lives of fifteen million people and was hoped by those at the time to be "the war to end all wars".
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| Some British Tommys shortly after capturing a German trench (courtesy of the National Library of Scotland on Flickr) |
However, late last week Education Secretary Michael Gove courted controversy with a piece in The Daily Mail, in which he stated that "it's important that we don't succumb to some of the myths that have grown up around the conflict". He went on to clarify that in his view, "the conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles - a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths". Over the weekend and during the course of this week, several critics have responded to Gove's article.
First of all, my small contribution the historical debate, which has taken on a uniquely political dimension over the past week or so. On raw knowledge, I admit I can't come close to competing with the history heavyweights who are having this debate - Gove, Labour's Tristram Hunt and Tony Robinson, Professor Richard Evans etc. However, I do know this much. With the exception of neo-Nazis and perhaps the most hardcore of pacifists, few appear to question that our participation in the Second World War was morally justifiable - we were a democracy under threat, Germany was an unambiguous aggressor (having started the war by invading Poland, after previous expansions into Austria, Czechoslovakia etc) and was being led by a genocidal, imperialistic dictatorship (Italy and especially Japan were similarly bad). Meanwhile, in the First World War, Germany went to war to defend Austria-Hungary (due to a treaty) after Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary, after Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, in response to a successful Serbian nationalist assassination of Austria's archduke Franz Ferdinand. France's alliance with Russia prompted war between Germany and France. Since German forces went through Belgium to get to France, this prompted Britain to declare war on Germany, in order to honour our defence treaty with Belgium. Further, as bad as the Kaiser regime was in many regards, by some accounts suffrage may have been broader in Germany in 1914 than in the UK. Additionally, Britain was at that time at the height of an empire built on often morally-dubious seizures of foreign territory, while the German empire was comparatively smaller.
However, my second objection of Gove's remarks is actually my bigger concern, because putting aside the debate about historical interpretations of World War 1, there is a contemporary implication to his remarks that is troubling. The common view of the WW1 critics tends to be that "the lions were led by donkeys", as the phrase commonly attributed to Alan Clark goes - i.e that the brave, courageous ordinary Tommys who fought the war for Britain are worthy of our praise, however moronic the politicians (and, at times, military officers) who led them may have been in their motives for the war or in their execution of it. Nevertheless, Gove appears to fail to recognise this distinction, saying that those advocating the critical view of the war do so out of "an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage". On Twitter on Sunday, I similarly saw a self-described Tory respond to Tristram Hunt's fairly nuanced critique of Gove, in which Hunt described Kaiser Willhelm II's views as "fascism" and highlighted strong trade union support for the war effort in 1914, by remarking that "Two sides in World War One and Labour have picked the Kaiser. I wish that was a surprise" (a contributing editor of The Spectator I follow then re-tweeted this post). The reason for my concern here is simple - these are views that recur today with regard to modern conflicts, and so there is direct and worrying relevance to current and future debates over matters of war and peace.
During the Iraq War, we saw some pro-war voices (especially in the US, but to some extent here as well) begin to characterise supporting the war itself and the politicians who launched it - as opposed to the troops in the field - as a "patriotic" duty. By extension, being anti-war could open someone to a charge of being unpatriotic, "anti-military" or a supporter of Saddam Hussein or the insurgency (I remember noticing that Charles Kennedy MP sometimes felt it necessary to directly rebut these sorts of ridiculous straw-men when setting out his principled opposition to the Iraq war). This sort of simplistic thinking completely neglects the possibility of a "lions v donkeys" distinction between our armed forces and the civilian politicians who give them their marching orders, and ignores the logic that criticising a war can just as easily signify concern for the wellbeing of the troops who will have to fight it or a fear that the war in question may ultimately harm our national interests. In the case of Iraq, such attitudes often poisoned the well of debate and prevented much-needed critical scrutiny of the war, especially in the US. Indeed, they're precisely the sort of arguments that those on the right normally claim to detest, effectively seeking to define anti-war views as "unacceptable" in the public sphere and "politically incorrect", due to the supposed insult they represent to our nation or our troops. As if to prove my point about this kind of censorship, on Monday the right's favourite free-speech defender Boris Johnson waded into the debate to accuse Tristram Hunt of "[sowing] political division" and imply that he should resign as shadow education secretary for his remarks. I much prefer what we saw when the Syria vote came up in parliament in August - a frank debate about the ins and outs of using force, in rightful acknowledgement of the weight of the decision we are making (even though the final decision reached by parliament was not one I agreed with in that particular case).
The legacy of Iraq War is still unclear almost 11 years after the original invasion, though the fall of Fallujah to Al-Qaeda-linked elements last weekend shows how fraught the situation still is there. The result of our inaction in Syria will similarly only become clearer as time goes on. I'm sure historians and others will debate such matters for decades to come, just as they are still doing one hundred years later with the First World War, and I hope their debates will be robust. But whenever we discuss war, whether it be a past conflict that lives only in our history or another unfolding decision-point where we must once again decide whether to put our forces into harm's way, I hope we will remember Alan Clark's dictum and allow ourselves to focus purely on whether the politicians of our day are being responsible statesmen, misguided donkeys or anything in-between. If not - if we succumb to the uncritical, jingoistic view of war legitimised by Gove and Johnson today and by far too many pro-war US Republicans in the Bush era - then we run a higher risk of future Iraqs. That is far too high a price to pay for sloppy debate.
First of all, my small contribution the historical debate, which has taken on a uniquely political dimension over the past week or so. On raw knowledge, I admit I can't come close to competing with the history heavyweights who are having this debate - Gove, Labour's Tristram Hunt and Tony Robinson, Professor Richard Evans etc. However, I do know this much. With the exception of neo-Nazis and perhaps the most hardcore of pacifists, few appear to question that our participation in the Second World War was morally justifiable - we were a democracy under threat, Germany was an unambiguous aggressor (having started the war by invading Poland, after previous expansions into Austria, Czechoslovakia etc) and was being led by a genocidal, imperialistic dictatorship (Italy and especially Japan were similarly bad). Meanwhile, in the First World War, Germany went to war to defend Austria-Hungary (due to a treaty) after Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary, after Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, in response to a successful Serbian nationalist assassination of Austria's archduke Franz Ferdinand. France's alliance with Russia prompted war between Germany and France. Since German forces went through Belgium to get to France, this prompted Britain to declare war on Germany, in order to honour our defence treaty with Belgium. Further, as bad as the Kaiser regime was in many regards, by some accounts suffrage may have been broader in Germany in 1914 than in the UK. Additionally, Britain was at that time at the height of an empire built on often morally-dubious seizures of foreign territory, while the German empire was comparatively smaller.
To be clear, I'm not saying I necessarily agree whole-heartedly with the critical account of our role in the war. To be perfectly honest, I don't yet know enough to have a strong view either way and I hope that the centenary events will educate me (and others) further about the war and allow me to reflect. But what I am saying is that it doesn't take much open-minded intellectual honesty to at least grasp why historians are legitimately more divided on the ethical basis on which we fought the First World War than they would be on the Second. But nevertheless, Gove goes ahead and misses the mark, accusing all those who disagree with his particular interpretation of history of being "left-wing" (even though Alan Clark, writer of the critical account The Donkeys, was a Tory minister), peddling "myths" and hating the troops. To be fair, towards the end of his article Gove did say that "there is, of course, no unchallenged consensus. That is why it matters that we encourage an open debate on the war and its significance", but this call for a grand debate clashes with much of the rest of what preceded it in the article. And if he is implying that those who propagate the opposite to view have some how suppressed or shut down debate until now, what is his proof of this insinuation, anyway?
The legacy of Iraq War is still unclear almost 11 years after the original invasion, though the fall of Fallujah to Al-Qaeda-linked elements last weekend shows how fraught the situation still is there. The result of our inaction in Syria will similarly only become clearer as time goes on. I'm sure historians and others will debate such matters for decades to come, just as they are still doing one hundred years later with the First World War, and I hope their debates will be robust. But whenever we discuss war, whether it be a past conflict that lives only in our history or another unfolding decision-point where we must once again decide whether to put our forces into harm's way, I hope we will remember Alan Clark's dictum and allow ourselves to focus purely on whether the politicians of our day are being responsible statesmen, misguided donkeys or anything in-between. If not - if we succumb to the uncritical, jingoistic view of war legitimised by Gove and Johnson today and by far too many pro-war US Republicans in the Bush era - then we run a higher risk of future Iraqs. That is far too high a price to pay for sloppy debate.
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