Anthony Coleman
Published 4 Nov 2016From the History Channel DVD series Great Blunders of WWII.
This is of interest for many reasons, but particularly because my late father-in-law served in the Royal Navy on the Arctic convoys and spent a full winter in the Soviet Union when his convoy couldn’t return before the ice closed the convoy route.
Theodore Dalrymple reviews a recent book by Paul Corthorn on Powell’s career and the concerns that animated him:
Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.
It does not pretend to be a biography, or even an intellectual biography. Rather, it chronicles, scrupulously but somewhat drily, Powell’s varying attitudes toward the main subjects of his political concerns: international relations, economics, immigration, Britain’s relations with Europe, and the status of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. Powell’s wider intellectual interests and religious views are scarcely touched upon, though it is mentioned that he went from being a believer to being (under the influence of Nietzsche) an atheist, to then returning to Christian belief. There is no description of his character in this book, not even by implication, and with this book as a guide, one would not recognise him if one met him. It is not possible to tell whether the author admires or detests his subject. This neutrality creates confidence in the accuracy of his scholarship, but also makes his book less than a pleasurable or exciting read. Perhaps it is the sign of a frivolous mind, but I prefer even histories of ideas to be spiced with a little biography (or, more truthfully, gossip).
The author does, however, offer a unifying interpretation of Powell’s various political concerns, namely that they were all responses to Britain’s precipitous national decline, the steepest part of which occurred in his lifetime, but which is continuing apace to the extent that Britain might even cease to be a nation at all. Powell was born in a great power and died in an enfeebled country with no industrial or military might, with precious little patriotism, and with no sense either of grandeur or collective purpose.
That this decline – relative rather than absolute, except in such fields as the maintenance of law and order — was inevitable given the conjunctures of the age, was evident to Powell (though not at first). This relative decline was already implicit in Disraeli’s dictum that “the Continent [of Europe] will not suffer England to be the workshop of the world.”
Powell’s concerns, then, were how to manage Britain’s decline and how to find it a new place in the world. He had not always been perceptive about the scale of its decline. He clung, for example, to the illusion that the Empire might still count for something even after the Second World War. Thereafter, however, he became a devotee of a kind of Realpolitik, to the extent of wanting a rapprochement or even alliance with the Soviet Union to balance the power of the United States, whose aims he had long distrusted. He discounted ideology, including communism, as a force in international politics, which is odd in a man who was by far the most intellectual and intellectually accomplished of all British politicians of the 20th century, being both a classical scholar and a brilliant linguist. He seemed to think that Soviet ambition was merely that of any large power in the great game. Those countries that fell into its grip knew otherwise.
On economics, Powell was an early devotee of the superiority of the market over state planning at a time when the intellectual tide was running the other way. There was one important subject, however, on which he was a confirmed statist, namely that of health care. He was for a time Minister of Health in the British government, during which he fiercely defended the NHS. He believed that the government had an ethical duty to provide health care for its citizenry, and it never seemed to occur to him that the centralised NHS was not the only possible way of doing so. He was often highly suspicious of international comparison, but it is difficult to see how judgment of the merits of a system could be made without it. It was clear, moreover, that in this, as in other fields, Britain was at best very mediocre. Perhaps Powell was blind to the NHS’s mediocre performance because of the benevolence of its stated intentions (an occupational hazard among intellectuals, even — or perhaps especially — among brilliant ones). At any rate, he never satisfactorily explained why health care should be different from other spheres of service provision in the superiority of private over public organization.
TheHitchensArchive
Published 24 Apr 2013October 21, 2002. Christopher Hitchens giving a speech based on his book about George Orwell at The Commonwealth Club.
Barbara Kay on the long-promised yet still (unsurprisingly) unfulfilled plan to have 25% of the Canadian Army’s infantry be staffed by women:
A WW2-era recruiting poster for the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. You’d be surprised how few modern photos of women in combat roles are available online, given the Canadian government’s desire to recruit more women in those areas.
In 1997, when women comprised 14 per cent of the Canadian Forces, Gen. Maurice Baril argued that a robust recruitment campaign was all that was necessary to boost female membership to 28 per cent by 2009, when, he predicted, women would comprise a full 25 per cent of front-line infantry troops, up from 0.6 per cent at the time.
Since there wasn’t a shred of evidence from Canada or anywhere else to support such a projection — women in Russia and Israel have performed combat roles under extreme duress for national survival, but their participation never lasted past the crisis — it came as no surprise to skeptics that the recruitment campaign fell far short of its goal. Women presently comprise 15.9 per cent of Canadian Forces members, the great majority of whom are serving in support roles (the number is 14 per cent in the United States).
A realist would draw the obvious conclusion that women and men are different. Women just aren’t into combat, and so what. But gender realism hasn’t governed the Canadian Forces for decades. So its honchos are doubling down, determined to ensure that by 2026, females fill 25 per cent of the ranks. This time, they’ve assigned a “Tiger Team” to circumvent the “systemic barriers” that make the military a “less than desirable choice” for the majority of young Canadian women.
Apparently, they have chosen to ignore their own recruitment analysts, who informed them that women feel “discomfort with a profession that involves combat,” because it has the “potential of killing people (especially innocent people).” If the military’s main “systemic barrier” to recruiting women is their inherent distaste for the profession’s existential purpose, how can that barrier be overcome?
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 21 Mar 2015I’m back, baby!
For this week’s venture into literature, we take a broad look at The Inferno. Hold onto your butts.
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In addition to inflating our confidence in overseas interventions, the war era fueled belief that government could be a major force for good at home, capable of solving every domestic problem. Franklin Roosevelt’s superb wartime management boosted the popular opinion of government and encouraged Americans to adopt war as a metaphor for government action in general. The war seemed to fulfill Teddy Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s earlier progressive dreams that big government, acting in concert with big business and big labor, could solve any problem that it chose to tackle. Just as warfare was re-envisioned to fit the total-war model of World War II, governing became understood as a matter of trained professionals applying management methods to public policy.
This belief in the military-like efficiency of government inspired the ambitious welfare-state policies of the postwar era, especially Johnson’s War on Poverty. When, in 1972, Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs, and when, in 1977, Jimmy Carter described the energy crisis as the “moral equivalent of war,” the model they had in mind was, again, World War II. Today, newspapers and scientific journals still proclaim the need for ambitious government action to fix enormously complex problems — for example, calling repeatedly for a “new Manhattan Project” to solve the problem of climate change.
War, as conservatives figured out early on, is a poor metaphor for government doing socially useful things. We can’t fight and win a “war” on poverty, or drugs, or cancer, because these things are nothing like war. The last heroic big-government project run along World War II lines was the Apollo program, which put Americans on the moon. This was a tremendous achievement, but here a military mindset was directly relevant: like the design of war machines a quarter-century earlier, the Saturn rockets were a discrete engineering challenge, one whose basic parameters were well understood.
E. M. Oblomov, “The Greatest Generation and the Greatest Illusion: Success in World War II led Americans to put too much faith in government — and we still do.”, City Journal, 2017-12-28.
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