Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (68 page)

No one since Napoleon had thought in such audacious terms. In its gigantic scope the concept was Alexandrine. Yet until he was engulfed by the war he made, Hitler was always pragmatic. Like Lenin he was a superb opportunist, always ready to seize openings and modify his theory accordingly. This has led some historians to conclude he had no master-programme. In fact, while always adjusting the tactics to suit the moment, he pursued his long-term strategy with a brutal determination which has seldom been equalled in the history of human ambition. Unlike most tyrants, he was never tempted to relax by a surfeit of autocratic power. Quite the contrary. He was always raising the stakes on the table and seeking to hasten
the pace of history. He feared his revolution would lose its dynamism. He thought himself indispensable, and at least four of his phases must be accomplished while he was still not only alive but at the height of his powers. It was his impatience which made him so dangerous in the short term and so ineffectual in the long term (the very reverse of the Soviet strategists). In a secret speech to German newspaper editors in November 1938, after his great Munich triumph, he deplored the fact that his need to talk about peace had led the German nation to relax too much. He argued that for Germany to accept peace, and thus stability, as a permanent fact of international life was to accept the very spirit of defeatism. Violence was a necessity, and the public must be prepared for it.
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With such a monster at large, and in unfettered control of the world’s second strongest economy – the first and indeed the only one to emerge fully from the Great Depression – what possibility was there of maintaining the old European system? The greatest of the legitimate powers, the United States, virtually cut itself off from Europe. It chose Protection in 1930 and the choice was reinforced after Roosevelt took power and made it clear, in breaking up the proposed world economic conference in July 1933, that his New Deal was incompatible with a negotiated world trading system: he stood for ‘Capitalism in One Country’ just as Stalin stood for ‘Socialism in One Country’. This isolation was formalized in 1935 when a Democratic Congress passed the Neutrality Act. The same year, the young writer Herbert Agar epitomized the mood of many American intellectuals, repelled by what was happening in Europe, by bidding his countrymen to forget their European roots and be true to their own emergent culture. During six years living in Europe, he wrote, ‘I learned that the best traits in American life are not the traits we have copied faithfully from Europe but the traits we have freely adapted or else originated – the traits which are our own.’
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Roosevelt saw himself, in some moods, as a citizen of the world, but his internationalism was essentially verbal – indeed rhetorical – rather than practical. He was not to blame for the state of unilateral disarmament in which he found America in 1933; but he did nothing to remedy matters in his first term and very little in the earlier part of his second. As George Kennan, one of the ablest of the younger diplomats, noted, Roosevelt’s statements were made for their internal political effect rather than their impact on world events.
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Surrounded by his young New Dealers, whose intentions towards Europe were benevolent but who were ignorant and hopelessly amateurish in foreign affairs and in any case obsessed by America’s internal problems, Roosevelt was keen to appear high-minded and ‘progressive’. But his high-mindedness expressed itself chiefly in
demanding that Britain stand firm for international order, and his progressiveness rated Soviet Russia, one of the totalitarian predators, as a bigger factor for world peace than Britain.

Right up to his death in 1945, there was an incorrigible element of frivolity in Roosevelt’s handling of foreign policy. It was characteristic that one of his principal sources of information about Britain, and on European events generally, in the later 1930s was
The Week
, the ultra-Left conspiracy-theory bulletin put out by the
Daily Worker
journalist Claud Cockburn.
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Some of Roosevelt’s ambassadorial appointments were exceptionally ill-judged. He sent the violently anti-British Joseph Kennedy to London, and the corrupt and gullible Joseph Davies to Moscow. The latter move was particularly destructive because the US Moscow embassy was well-staffed and superbly informed, backed by a highly professional division of Eastern European affairs in the State Department. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Litvinov, admitted that this division had better records on Soviet foreign policy than the Soviet government itself.
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Five months after Davies became ambassador in 1936, with instructions to win Stalin’s friendship at all costs, the division was abolished, its library dispersed and its files destroyed. Kennan, in the Moscow embassy, thought this indicated ‘the smell of Soviet influence … somewhere in the higher reaches of the government’. It certainly reflected a bitter power-struggle between the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and the Assistant-Secretary, the saturnine homosexual Sumner Welles.
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Both men were anti-British, Hull believing that Britain’s new system of imperial preference, itself a response to the avalanche of trade restrictions precipitated by the Smoot—Hawley tariff, was a bigger threat to world peace than any of the dictators.

As the diplomatic papers abundantly testify, the Roosevelt administration was never prepared to discuss specific military and diplomatic backing for Britain and France against Germany. Roosevelt’s condemnatory speeches, such as his ‘quarantine’ oration of October 1937 or his absurd demand in April 1939 that Hitler give ten-year non-aggression guarantees to thirty-one named countries, were worse than useless. The second convinced Hitler that in no circumstances would Roosevelt actually intervene militarily, and he replied to it on 28 April, in what turned out to be his last public speech in the Reichstag, with unconcealed contempt and derision.
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Britain and France, even without America, might conceivably have contained Hitler in 1933–4, had both been resolute and willing to act in concert. For a short time France actually possessed the physical means to do so. But after the departure of Poincaré in 1929 there was never much chance of France carrying through a pre-emptive strike. Roosevelt’s policy was bitterly anti-French, not merely in seeking to
force her to disarm unilaterally but, after Roosevelt took America off the gold standard, in bringing pressure economically to break up France’s pathetic attempt to create a ‘gold block’, which occupied her energies in 1933. Meanwhile, Hitler was consolidating himself and speeding up the secret rearmament which had been a feature of the last years of Weimar. The British were also anxious to emasculate the French army. Nothing was more likely to provoke a future war, the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, told the Commons on 13 May 1932, than a ‘well-armed France’ facing a disarmed Germany. Even after Hitler took over, it remained British policy to bring pressure on France to cut her army. The same afternoon Hitler’s Enabling Bill went through the Reichstag, Anthony Eden, for the government, announced that it was British policy to get the French army cut from 694,000 to 400,000, and rebuked Churchill for protesting against measures to ‘secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed’. ‘The House was enraged and in an ugly mood – towards Mr Churchill’, noted the
Daily Dispatch.
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While terrified German socialists were being hunted through the streets by Goering’s Gestapo squads, their British comrades sought to howl down Churchill’s warning that Hitler had specifically stated in
Mein Kampf
that he would destroy France by securing British neutrality – but even the
Führer
had not counted on Britain seeking to prevent the French from defending themselves. In France, Léon Blum’s socialists were equally abject, campaigning desperately to prevent conscription from being extended from one to two years. On the French Right, anti-Semitism was reviving under the Nazi stimulus, and the new slogan was ‘Rather Hitler than Blum’. So far as France was concerned, Hitler was probably through his ‘danger zone’ by the end of 1933; that was the view of the Poles, who the next month wrote off France as an effective ally and signed – for what it was worth – a bilateral non-aggression treaty with Hitler.

Britain was not as demoralized as France in the 1930s. But there were ominous signs of decadence. Britain’s weight in world affairs depended essentially on her Empire, and the Empire revolved round India. By 1931 the process set in motion by the Montagu reforms and the Amritsar débâcle had gathered pace. The British Raj was palpably breaking up. Lord Birkenhead, the Secretary of State, had warned in 1925 that concessions to the Hindus would merely provoke the Muslims to demand separation (he saw the Muslims as the Ulstermen, the Hindus as the Irish Nationalists) and predicted: ‘All the conferences in the world cannot bridge over the unbridgeable, and between those two countries lies a chasm which cannot be crossed by the resources of modern political engineering.’
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On 26 January 1931 Churchill told the Commons there were now ‘60,000
Indians in prison for political agitation’. Two months later, over 1,000 Muslims were massacred by Hindus in Cawnpore, followed by communal riots all over the sub-continent. It was the pattern of the 1930s. With no certain future, good British candidates no longer presented themselves for the Indian civil service, and Indians took the top places in the entrance examinations.
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British investment was declining, and India’s economic value to Britain fell steadily.
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Churchill, who loved India and probably felt more passionately about this issue than any other in his life, feared that weak British policy would lead India into a repetition of China’s tragedy: disintegration and dismemberment, with the deaths of countless millions, the scores of millions of ‘untouchables’ being the first victims. ‘Greedy appetites’, he noted on 18 March 1931, had already been ‘excited’, and ‘many itching fingers were stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict empire’. Britain, too, would be the loser. He thought the world was ‘entering a period when the struggle for self-preservation is going to present itself with great intentness to thickly populated industrial countries’. Britain would soon be ‘fighting for its life’ and it would be essential to retain India (May 1933).
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Churchill conducted the most concentrated and intense political campaign of his life against the 1935 India bill, ‘a monstrous monument of shame built by pygmies’, which gave India Federal Home Rule, of a type which benefited chiefly the professional Brahmin politicians, and which in practice proved unworkable. But despite his titanic efforts, he could arouse no mass public support in Britain. All his oratory was in vain. Indeed, he could not even arouse the British community in India: they had already written off the Empire. The Conservative backbenchers were apathetic and resigned to a gradual British withdrawal. Churchill was never able to persuade more than eighty-nine of them to vote against the bill, which passed by the huge majority of 264. The truth is, though the British Empire still occupied a quarter of the earth’s surface, by 1935 imperialism was dead in Britain, merely awaiting the obsequies. Churchill turned from India in despair to concentrate on rearming Britain for self-survival.

That, too, looked a lost cause at times. The influence of Bloomsbury had reached upwards and downwards by the 1930s to embrace almost the entire political nation. Among the Left intelligentsia, the patriotism which Strachey had sought so successfully to destroy had been replaced by a primary loyalty to Stalin. In the 1930s the Apostles ceased to be a centre of political scepticism and became an active recruiting-ground for Soviet espionage.
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While some Apostles like Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Leo Long were encouraged to
penetrate British agencies to transmit information to Moscow, the Left as a whole, led by the Communists, sought to keep Britain disarmed, a policy Stalin maintained until Hitler actually attacked him in June 1941. In the 1920s, the British Communist Party had been working class, innovatory and independent-minded. Early in the 1930s, the middle-class intellectuals moved in, and the
CP
rapidly became cringingly servile to Soviet foreign policy interests.
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British Marxists, who included political thinkers like G.D.H.Cole and Harold Laski, and scientists like Joseph Needham, J.B.S.Haldane and J.D.Bernal, accepted uncritically the crude and wholly mistaken reasoning that ‘capitalist Britain’ and ‘fascist Germany’ were ruled by the same international interests and that rearmament was merely designed to perpetuate imperialism and destroy socialism. The Labour Party took the same line in diluted form. In June 1933, at the East Fulham by-election, the Labour candidate received a message from the Labour Party leader, George Lansbury: ‘I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world “do your worst”.’
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Clement Attlee, who was to succeed him as leader, told the Commons, 21 December 1933: ‘We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.’ Labour consistently voted, spoke and campaigned against rearmament right up to the outbreak of war.

Equally opposed to any policy of preparedness or firmness was the whole spectrum of British benevolence, what Shaw (who belonged to it) called ‘the stage-army of the Good’. ‘On every side’, Trotsky wrote of it with venom, ‘the slug humanitarianism leaves its slimy trail, obscuring the function of intelligence and atrophying emotion.’ ‘They want an outward system of nullity,’ echoed D.H.Lawrence before his death, ‘which they call peace and good will, so that in their own souls they can be independent little gods … little Moral Absolutes, secure from questions …. It stinks. It is the will of a louse.’
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The actual arguments used to justify a policy of quasi-pacifist inactivity were intellectually flimsy at the time and seem in retrospect pitiful. Hitler’s savage persecution of the Jews was largely ignored. This was not so much because Britain was anti-Semitic. Unlike France, Jew-baiters like William Joyce, Henry Hamilton Beamish and Arnold Spencer Leese – who advocated mass extermination and used the term ‘final solution’ – were in a tiny minority.
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It was, rather, that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was rationalized into the overall ‘Versailles is to blame’ explanation. As Lord Lothian, a key anti-rearmer of the ‘soft’ Right, put it, the murder of Jews was ‘largely the reflex of the external persecution to which Germans have been subjected since the war’.
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