"War does not determine who is right - only who is left" (Bertrand Russell)
As the centenary of the First World War approaches this year, a blimpish brigade of British politicians and writers is mobilising for a full-scale assault on the view - thankfully well-established in Britain - that World War I was a meaningless bloodbath. In the mainstream media in recent weeks, for example, it has been difficult to avoid the Education Secretary Michael Gove's attempts to present the 'Great War' as an heroic struggle for democracy - a 'just war', no less. A cunning if not learned man (as Leszek Kołakowski once argued, the right needs only tactics, not ideas), Gove has struck a liberal pluralist pose for BBC Radio 4 listeners, arguing that no single view of the war should be allowed to prevail, and a more populist, jingoistic stance for the right-wing tabloids, in which readers are advised to ignore leftists who denigrate patriotism (in truth, however, Gove should have no great concern on this account, since Gove's opposite number in the Labour party, Tristram Hunt, has an equally patriotic perspective on the war).
Gove takes particular issue with the many British film and television representations of World War I that emphasize the corruption of the British ruling class and the sufferings of the soldiers (Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer, Blackadder Goes Forth - and we could add Days of Hope). Now, despite teaching a course about British television drama, I must confess that until I sat down with the DVD box set this week, I had never watched Alan Bleasdale's The Monocled Mutineer - which tells the story of the 1917 mutiny of British soldiers in Étaples - from beginning to end. Featuring an electrifying performance from Paul McGann in the title role, the BBC drama broadly presents a working class view of the war: as the soldiers experience the inhumanity of war, some of them come to realise that their real enemies are not the working class Germans facing them in the trenches - who are barely mentioned in the course of the four-part serial - but their own generals and military police.
As the centenary of the First World War approaches this year, a blimpish brigade of British politicians and writers is mobilising for a full-scale assault on the view - thankfully well-established in Britain - that World War I was a meaningless bloodbath. In the mainstream media in recent weeks, for example, it has been difficult to avoid the Education Secretary Michael Gove's attempts to present the 'Great War' as an heroic struggle for democracy - a 'just war', no less. A cunning if not learned man (as Leszek Kołakowski once argued, the right needs only tactics, not ideas), Gove has struck a liberal pluralist pose for BBC Radio 4 listeners, arguing that no single view of the war should be allowed to prevail, and a more populist, jingoistic stance for the right-wing tabloids, in which readers are advised to ignore leftists who denigrate patriotism (in truth, however, Gove should have no great concern on this account, since Gove's opposite number in the Labour party, Tristram Hunt, has an equally patriotic perspective on the war).
Gove takes particular issue with the many British film and television representations of World War I that emphasize the corruption of the British ruling class and the sufferings of the soldiers (Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer, Blackadder Goes Forth - and we could add Days of Hope). Now, despite teaching a course about British television drama, I must confess that until I sat down with the DVD box set this week, I had never watched Alan Bleasdale's The Monocled Mutineer - which tells the story of the 1917 mutiny of British soldiers in Étaples - from beginning to end. Featuring an electrifying performance from Paul McGann in the title role, the BBC drama broadly presents a working class view of the war: as the soldiers experience the inhumanity of war, some of them come to realise that their real enemies are not the working class Germans facing them in the trenches - who are barely mentioned in the course of the four-part serial - but their own generals and military police.
It is unsurprising that Gove dislikes the drama; and unsurprising, too, that the production got into hot political water in 1986, when the future of the BBC as a public service broadcaster hung in the Thatcherite balance (then again, political opprobrium is always the fate of contestatory docudrama, from The War Game and Death of a Princess to The Government Inspector). And it is certainly hard to imagine how such bold, proletarian perspectives on war could make their way into British television dramas today (good as they are, Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain and Jimmy McGovern's 'Frankie's Story', in his Accused anthology, only suggest that life in the British army isn't all that it's cracked up to be). That, surely, is part of the reason why it is important to keep the working class view of World War I alive in critical debate. Now that the last surviving veterans of the war have passed away, we must remember what the most clear sighted of these men, such as Britain's 'last Tommy' Harry Patch, understood only too well: that the conflict was a senseless shambles in which young, mostly working class men were turned into meat and bones to serve the ends of their rulers. In the words of the British Private D. J. Sweeney, this was 'murder, not war'.
But while we are at it, we should also challenge nationalistic and patriotic understandings of the Second World War. This is, of course, much harder to do, since the myth that World War II was a 'Good War' fought for 'democracy' is deeply entrenched institutionally, politically and culturally. One struggles to name many popular films, novels or television dramas that question the purpose of the war. Popular culture has thoroughly heroised the allied 'war effort', registering only the atrocities of the axis powers, as though the terror bombings of Hamburg and Dresden, the manufacture of the Bengal famine, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened. To take only the most recent example, Jonathan Teplitzy's Second World War-themed The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth, depicts the Japanese guards and Kempeitai who harass and torture their British prisoners as witless and bestial, while the Australians who finally rescue the British from captivity are 'civilised' (the adjective is emphasised by an Australian officer in an address to his new Japanese captives).
In reality, however, the allied treatment of the Japanese in World War II was rather different: as James Heartfield notes in his Unpatriotic History of the Second World War, for example, US forces made no accommodation for Japanese prisoners; rather, they often simply slaughtered them, a practice consistent with the propaganda message that the Japanese were subhuman. Heartfield points to the description of the Pacific war given by the British serviceman and Atlantic Monthly correspondent Edgar L. Jones in 1946:
"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers"
The racial thinking underpinning such barbarism, which allowed the Western public to accept the vaporization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been a staple of US military propaganda, as Nick Turse's recent book on the American war in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, makes all too clear. By presenting a one-sided narrative of white victimhood and Japanese brutality, The Railway Man participates in this racist imaginary.
But while we are at it, we should also challenge nationalistic and patriotic understandings of the Second World War. This is, of course, much harder to do, since the myth that World War II was a 'Good War' fought for 'democracy' is deeply entrenched institutionally, politically and culturally. One struggles to name many popular films, novels or television dramas that question the purpose of the war. Popular culture has thoroughly heroised the allied 'war effort', registering only the atrocities of the axis powers, as though the terror bombings of Hamburg and Dresden, the manufacture of the Bengal famine, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened. To take only the most recent example, Jonathan Teplitzy's Second World War-themed The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth, depicts the Japanese guards and Kempeitai who harass and torture their British prisoners as witless and bestial, while the Australians who finally rescue the British from captivity are 'civilised' (the adjective is emphasised by an Australian officer in an address to his new Japanese captives).
In reality, however, the allied treatment of the Japanese in World War II was rather different: as James Heartfield notes in his Unpatriotic History of the Second World War, for example, US forces made no accommodation for Japanese prisoners; rather, they often simply slaughtered them, a practice consistent with the propaganda message that the Japanese were subhuman. Heartfield points to the description of the Pacific war given by the British serviceman and Atlantic Monthly correspondent Edgar L. Jones in 1946:
"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers"
The racial thinking underpinning such barbarism, which allowed the Western public to accept the vaporization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been a staple of US military propaganda, as Nick Turse's recent book on the American war in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, makes all too clear. By presenting a one-sided narrative of white victimhood and Japanese brutality, The Railway Man participates in this racist imaginary.
The Second World War was, like its forerunner, a war fought between rival, and equally brutal, imperialist powers - a truth almost totally obscured by the Manichean narratives of popular culture, which continually reinforce the comforting myth that 'we' - the 'democratic powers' - were the good guys. Nevertheless, books such as Jacques Pauwels's The Myth of the Good War and Heartfield's Unpatriotic History point the way out of this labyrinth of lies, providing counter-hegemonic narratives of the conflict and exploding the myth that the mass slaughter of soldiers and civilians was 'just' and necessary to the defence of civilisation. I recommend both books to Michael Gove, whose understanding of the Second World War is doubtless as chauvinistic as his view of the First.
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