SHARED OPINION
Why I'll sit out this anniversary waltz
FRANK JOHNSON
You can't beat news in a newspaper. Lord Beaverbrook is credited with having said that. Probably a lot of other people said it too, it being not particularly original. But a rider can be added. You can't beat old news in a newspaper; or on television.
My authority for saying so are the news- papers and television themselves. They are full of old news; only they call it anniver- saries. And we must like reading about, or viewing, articles and programmes about anniversaries; otherwise papers and televi- sion would not have so many of them. We are always contemplating the 100th, 50th or tenth anniversary of this or that prime min- ister, war, battle, scandal, earthquake, fash- ion, symphony, musical, rock band or indeed newspaper or television channel.
It is hard to exaggerate how important anniversaries are to politics. Anniversaries provide people who write, talk about or practise politics with their myths.
We tend to mock those Balkan agitators who invest national significance in some mediaeval battle which took place long before the idea of the nation came into being. But we too, here in Britain, are just as susceptible.
A certain anniversary falls in the autumn of this year. It is that of 'Munich'. Here is our British equivalent of some Irish or Balkan battle long ago. Ever since I became interested in politics in my late teens, and started reading about the immediately pre- ceding 100 years, especially about the caus- es and course of the second world war, I was never persuaded by the way politicians and publicists used 'Munich'.
It was not just that, once I became inter- ested in politics, I discovered that I was by nature a Conservative. Admittedly, in the first general election at which I had a vote, I voted Labour. But that was because my father was a manual worker and, even more to the point, I wanted to become an intel- lectual. The latter aspiration was important in determining my vote, because I had only just started looking into this politics busi- ness, and I was under the impression that all intellectuals voted Labour before going on to accuse Labour governments of 'selling out'. I was not to know that there were Con- servative intellectuals. No one had told me about, say, Michael Oakeshott. Intellectuals like him did not seem to get into the Sunday papers or weeklies of the time, and those publication were all I had to gone on. Even The Spectator was then liberal — sort of. There was this Burke, but he was a long time ago, and seemed to have nothing to do with the 'issues' in 1964. They, if I remem- ber correctly, were all about whether the prime minister should be a gritty northern- er or a 14th earl, and whether the prime minister should be a former 'man of Munich'. Alec Douglas-Home, it will be remembered, had been Chamberlain's par- liamentary private secretary at the time of the fateful meeting with Hitler.
I therefore looked into this Munich business. The standard version was imme- diately unconvincing. There was no evi- dence that Britain or France, had they gone to war, could have prevented Czechoslovakia from being overrun. They went to war a year later, and that did not prevent Poland from being overrun. Nor would the Poles have been appreciative had we opposed Munich's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Poland joined in that dismemberment. The Munich agreement resulted in Poland being given a portion of Czechoslovakia.
Nor did there seem much evidence that `the German generals' would have over- thrown Hitler had we opposed him at Munich. Some generals said so later, but we all say afterwards that we would have done this or that in our lives if only our cowardly editor, party leader, wife, husband or sales manager had encouraged us.
The Dominions — Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, so important to us when war actually broke out seemed no more willing than we were to go to war over the German-speaking Sudeten- land. They did so, as we did, once Hitler attacked non-German-speaking lands, as he did the following year. Certainly, it would have been better for humanity had we stopped Hitler at Munich. But we had already allowed him to take the Rhineland and Austria. Why oppose his absorption of the last remaining large German-speaking region outside his Reich — the Sudeten- land? Ah, say the Munich-mongers, we should have stopped him in the Rhineland. But it is not in the nature of politicians in pacific democracies to oppose aggressors at their first transgression. They hope for the best. Our present leaders hope for the best from Saddam at the moment; and this is not his first transgression.
Why, then, has 'Munich' become the worst term of abuse in the discussion of for- eign policy? Perhaps because it suits both Left and Right. Normally, it is the Left who do best out of anniversaries. Most political anniversaries commemorate some aspects of mankind's fallen nature: a scandal, an injustice, an avoidable war. The Left exists to claim that, if we reorganise our econom- ic, political and social arrangements, we can overcome our fallen nature.
But Munich's most renowned opponent was Churchill. By 1938, as a result of what he had thought about the General Strike and India, he was a man of the Right. He was to replace the Munich prime minister and preside over being on the winning side in the war. Conservatives can therefore be beneficiaries of any condemnation of Munich. In the anniversary wars, Left and Right together are an unbeatable combina- tion. For today's propaganda about Munich, it does not matter that Churchill was unclear, when Chamberlain returned from Munich, as to what Britain should do instead. It does not matter that Labour in Parliament voted against conscription and rearmament throughout the 1930s, nor that Kingsley Martin's New Statesman, just before Munich, advocated a settlement lit- tle different from the one Chamberlain reached. This autumn, hardly anyone will defend Chamberlain.
There is one consolation. The Soviet Union no longer exists to join in the anniversary. It will not be there to repeat the old communist line that Moscow stood willing to go to war over the Sudetenland if only Britain and France had done so. The Hitler of History, the latest book, published in the United States, by an historian whom I much admire, John Lukacs, observes that Hitler's view of Russia is 'perhaps the most interesting question about Munich . . . it is amazing how little consideration Hitler gave to Russia during the crisis . . . Stalin was as loath to go to war for Czechoslo- vakia in 1938 as were Chamberlain or Dal- adier — or even more so . . . Was Hitler's dismissal of the Russian danger in 1938 simply due to instinct? Or did he have other information about Stalin's plans beyond the fragments of reports from the German embassy in Moscow or from assumptions of routine intelligence sources? We do not know.'
Not that I would wish to give the impres- sion that what I think will have any effect on what most other people will be invited to think about the anniversary which falls this autumn.
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