Time past and time present
The past few weeks have been daunting.
I have been speaking to friends on the Continent as well as in America: my dear friend, that very wise woman and ultimate Parisienne, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet of the Sunday Telegraph; Alessia Casoli, one of the Word Witches who are such material aid to me as editors; of course, to Markham Shaw Pyle; to Jeffrey Mora, my staunch and sensible American friend; to George Knight, one of our coming authors. The times seem out of joint; and so they are. Civilisation – and Paris surely represents civilisation in a very special way – clashes with Dark Age barbarism; as Mr Pyle rightly notes, American university students, to protest Woodrow Wilson’s having been a racist who re-segregated the US Government, demand … racial segregation, and ‘separate but equal’ facilities and amenities; Mr Corbyn – but I must not go on.
It was an admirable and laudable thing that the Rt Hon. Hilary Benn MP did yesterday, and I have written to tell him so. I said to him as I have said publicly that he has inherited the mantle of Arthur Greenwood. He ‘spoke for [Britain]’, as Mr Greenwood did in September of 1939. He saved from ignominy the Party of Major Attlee and Major Milner, Captain Alexander and Captain Bellenger and Mr Ernest Bevin: a party which matters immensely to and is a glory to Britain, for all that I, as a drily Thatcherite Conservative, often disagree with its views and aims.
And yet ... that is in its way part of what is so alarming. I do not say this lightly. But as the author of The Confidence of the House: May 1940 and one of the co-authors of When That Great Ship Went Down: The Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of RMS Titanic, of '37: The Year of Portent, and of the forthcoming volume on the July Crisis of 1914, I think I am in a position to say it.
The times are out of joint because, even as modern civilisation confronts pre-mediaeval barbarism, we in the civilised nations are plagued by the follies of 1914 re-enacted against the politic stupidities of the Thirties and the appeasement years: including shrieking fools, cowards, and quislings who pride themselves in declaring that they should not under any circumstances fight for Queen and country, or the local equivalents thereto.
There is a reason why, novels and rural rides aside, one writes history. There are reasons one ought to read history. And it is imperative that ignorance of history, or, worse, a credulous belief in false history, not be permitted to cause its bitter re-enactment, either as tragedy or as farce.
I have been speaking to friends on the Continent as well as in America: my dear friend, that very wise woman and ultimate Parisienne, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet of the Sunday Telegraph; Alessia Casoli, one of the Word Witches who are such material aid to me as editors; of course, to Markham Shaw Pyle; to Jeffrey Mora, my staunch and sensible American friend; to George Knight, one of our coming authors. The times seem out of joint; and so they are. Civilisation – and Paris surely represents civilisation in a very special way – clashes with Dark Age barbarism; as Mr Pyle rightly notes, American university students, to protest Woodrow Wilson’s having been a racist who re-segregated the US Government, demand … racial segregation, and ‘separate but equal’ facilities and amenities; Mr Corbyn – but I must not go on.
It was an admirable and laudable thing that the Rt Hon. Hilary Benn MP did yesterday, and I have written to tell him so. I said to him as I have said publicly that he has inherited the mantle of Arthur Greenwood. He ‘spoke for [Britain]’, as Mr Greenwood did in September of 1939. He saved from ignominy the Party of Major Attlee and Major Milner, Captain Alexander and Captain Bellenger and Mr Ernest Bevin: a party which matters immensely to and is a glory to Britain, for all that I, as a drily Thatcherite Conservative, often disagree with its views and aims.
And yet ... that is in its way part of what is so alarming. I do not say this lightly. But as the author of The Confidence of the House: May 1940 and one of the co-authors of When That Great Ship Went Down: The Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of RMS Titanic, of '37: The Year of Portent, and of the forthcoming volume on the July Crisis of 1914, I think I am in a position to say it.
The times are out of joint because, even as modern civilisation confronts pre-mediaeval barbarism, we in the civilised nations are plagued by the follies of 1914 re-enacted against the politic stupidities of the Thirties and the appeasement years: including shrieking fools, cowards, and quislings who pride themselves in declaring that they should not under any circumstances fight for Queen and country, or the local equivalents thereto.
There is a reason why, novels and rural rides aside, one writes history. There are reasons one ought to read history. And it is imperative that ignorance of history, or, worse, a credulous belief in false history, not be permitted to cause its bitter re-enactment, either as tragedy or as farce.
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