Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
THE year 1963 has more in common with 1936 than a re-arrangement of digits. Both of them mark a milestone of eighteen years after the ending of a war to end wars. Despite the clouds of gloom and despondency that hover like a swarm of invisible bees over almost every head, 1963 has been reached without calling down the thunder-strokes which scarred the period up to 1936. There. was no general strike in 1953 and no stock market crash in 1956. Soviet Com- munism has bitten deep into Eastern Europe and Stalin's successor shows no sign of being laid low by indigestion. But no Italian mounte- bank seized power in 1949 and no German maniac destroyed democracy in 1960. Franco is enthroned in Spain, but he is now a dictator on the defensive. Japanese militarism, no longer threatens Asia and the Chinese version of the Manchurian Incident has been rebuffed and con- tained by a free and independent India. On balance, and despite the H-bomb, an historical audit would probably show the average British citizen today firmly in the black rather than the red.
The trouble with such comparisons is that few of us realise how subjective our opinions and judgments are or how glibly we rewrite the past to make sense of the present. Who would have thought in 1945 that Major Attlee, the diminutive nonentity nervously cowering beneath the table as his wild revolutionary colleagues roared for more controls over a terrified nation, would become Lord Attlee, the gallant little lion-tamer who broke opposition with the crack of a platitude and stunned rivals with a loaded compromise? That Aneurin Bevan, the Robes- pierre of the Ritz, the Flit-gun pointed at the heads of Tory vermin, the power-hungry plotter and apostle of class-hatred, would be trans- formed into the Red Cross knight who opened the gates of the Castle Medicine, the patriot who
kept a British finger on the nuclear button, the loyal colleague. who abdicated his claim to the leadership? That Hugh Gaitskell, the desiccated calculating machine, the donnish civil servant, the Hampstead suburbanite, would turn into a warm-hearted statesman and selfless reformer whose death dismayed a nation? We have suppressed all memory of the jokes about the empty car which drew up at 10 Downing Street to let Attlee out, the official Conservative posters which blazoned 'Fite End of the Gov- ernment• is Nye,' the saloon-bar vigilantes who formed their Vermin Clubs, the endless cartoons of a weakling Gaitskell falling to the daggers of the conspiratorial left. Who would have thought that the Tory Party would mutate into a fissiparous animal, dropping its lost leaders and ex-future Prime Ministers at every tremor of danger?
Attlee, Bevan and Gaitskell have been beati- fied under that British ,canon law which lays down that any public man who dies suddenly, or passes the age of eighty, is automatically laid to rest with the angels. Other ogre figures live on and yet also find themselves gradually edged into the Pantheon. Who would have thought that Jomo Kenyatta, once condemned as the witch-king of a .stone-age murder cult, would be praised this week in the House of Lords for his `constructk c statesmanship' since he became' Prime Minister of Kenya? It cannot be long before he is entertained to dinner at Bucking- ham Palace. and it is unlikely that the League of Empire Loyalists, or even the League Against Blood Sports, ,% ill boo his triumphal progress. Archbishop Makarios no more appears a bogus prelate' providing a saintly chasuble to cover assassins. It has been pointed out that the British left who backed the Cypriot campaign for enasis with Greece . are now, illogically, campaigning against Greece as a police State. Equally, of course, the British right, seem to have forgotten that they once denounced. Greece as an unstable dictatorship in danger of collapsing to Com- munist sappers and now hail Greece as a stable democracy which holds the fort against the Red tide. (Who w ould have thought that we should have seen the Queen of England
kissing an ex-member of the Nazi Youth'?)
The rule seems to • be that any enemy of British imperialism can absorb some of our holy unction and sacred strength by wrestling with us
and w inning. If our path is guided by Destiny, then any successful ambush on that path must also have been ordained by the same higher power..
De Valera and Smuts once had our price on their head. By putting. the price in their pocket, they became honorary Britishers pointed out with pride as prodigal sons who were smart enough to put one over on Father. America still seems to Britons provincial rather than foreign because it once burned our apron-strings, If the United States had been a former colony of Ger- many or France, we would long ago have ceased to feel a paternal glow at its achievements.
Since 1945, the mass prejudices of Britain have changed beyond recognition. Then almost all the diffused feelings of aggression were concen- trated into one beam of hatred against the Ger- mans. Here the instinctive Labourites among the working classes and the instinctive Conserva- tives among the middles and tippers were united in wishing to sec the entire nation flattened, humiliated and castrated. Who now remembers the great wave of jubilation that followed the news that the Russians had reached Berlin first? Who cared it' the Red Army •raped and robbed, so long as the Germans suffered? Only a small section of the intellectual left, against the racial propaganda of Lord Vansittart and his like.
held' to the optimistic,. and largely illu- sory, belief that it was possible to separate the German people from the Nazi machine. Anti- Hunnery is now almost extinct, in its place blossoms anti-niggery. Who would have thought that Panzer divisions would be cheered in Wales and West Indians beaten up in Notting Hill? That the majority of British emigrants to Aus- tralia would give as their reason the desire to leave a land overrun by blacks?
Anti-Semitism now exists only in isolated pockets of the expense-account belt. Before the war, it was part of the -working-class way of life. Their world was full of exploiters, and a foreign name, a peculiar accent. an alien gesture
made it easy to identify the Jewish shopkepeer or small employer as the scapegoat for all .the boss class. 'You never see a poor Jew' is one of the classic ploys of anti-Semitism. (Who would ha ye thought, by the way, that Governor Wal- lace of Alabama dare say to a Senate Com- mittee this week, 'Some of my closest and best friends tire Negroes''?) But in the North-East, you almost never did, and some of the most prosperous Jews made a habit of looking poor. -1.01.1:1■. the working class is politically and in- dustrially armed against exploitation. They know that no party dare allow mass unemployment. They no longer need scapegoats when they have the great ram itself' by the throat. Discrimination now occurs mainly in golf clubs and country clubs where the self-made businessmen have discovered 'exclusiveness' as a status symbol, or in the expensive prep schools where the newly- :diluent seek to fence oil their children from those of the almost-prosperous. It is now a sub- diviSion of snobbery rather than a major branch of bigotry.
Anti-Catholicism is also dead on an inter- national scale, though it still twitches in Catholic countries. Who would have thought that a Catholic President would be running for a second term with a quarter-Jewish opponent training to challenge him? Or that 53 per cent of Angli- cans and Nonconformists in Britain would approve of negotiations for unity with the Roman Catholic Church?
Colour prejudice is new in this country, though it is old in the human unconscious. Black has been the colour of evil ever since the first primitive men shuddered and huddled to- gether as the sun went down. Black is the colour of night, of •mourning, of the Devil, of the pit, of the thunder-cloud, of dead blood in myth and religion throughout the centuries. Fear of blackness, however verbalised and justified, is the most childish and irrational of nightmares. It is the last of our terrors. It will take time to die. but, when it is dead, humanity will have come of age. Change is always faster than we think. It may not be so long before we say --who would have thought in 1963 that there would he a Negro President of Earth?
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