Darwin and Bertie
Allen Esterson takes a hard look at some tendentious biographical interpretation of Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.
…they achieve their aims by a highly selective use of evidence, and by insinuating connections between Darwin’s evolutionary writings and concurrent political events for which there is no documentary warrant.
Well perhaps they were doing postmodern history.
It appears that The King’s Speech is another example of postmodern history. Christopher Hitchens tells us how.
The King’s Speech also part-whitewashes and part-airbrushes the consistent support of Buckingham Palace for Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and their unceasing attempt to make an agreement with Hitler that would allow him a free hand in Europe while preserving the British Empire.
Oh well, that was then. It’s so much pleasanter to think of them as lifelong anti-fascists, don’t you think?
Isaac Chotiner in The New Republic doesn’t think so.
The King’s Speech is historically inaccurate, entirely misleading, and, in its own small way, morally dubious…What the film never mentions is that Edward VIII was an ardent admirer of Hitler and of fascism, and a proponent of appeasement long after Germany moved onto Polish soil and hostilities began in earnest…Bertie himself is also romanticized. He is seen presciently raising the question of German aggression before the invasion of the Sudetenland.
Dude, lighten up, it’s a movie. Movies don’t have to get the history right. Come on – movies tell stories, and they can’t do that if they have to get the history right. Have some champagne, step on a peasant, relax.
Isaac Chotiner gves Edward VIII an easy ride. He ended up a traitor and if he’d been a commoner would have been hanged.
“…step on a peasant, relax” needs to be the Notes and Comment t-shirt.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa and Wayne de Villiers, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Darwin and Bertie http://dlvr.it/HChJH […]
That windbag Hitchens again! Regardless of how pro-Nazi or generally unsavory members of the British political elite might have been, one fact was clear to the Establishment, Britain’s chances of defeating Nazi Germany in a total war without US help, were rather slim. Germany was far superior to the UK in technology and industrial production, so the British, at first, tried to deal with the devil in order to save themselves, what moral degenerates. With that 20/20 hindsight that Hitchens seems to disdain, we all know the barbarous nature of the Nazi regime, now.
Wasn’t Mr Hitchens a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, if so, he should check his own moral compass very carefully and not become agitated about Hollywood fantasy.
Christopher Hitchens writes:
Hitchens is, I fear, falling harking back to his old Marxist-style simplicities. I don’t know much about Baldwin, but to describe Chamberlain’s motives without mentioning the shadow that the terrible casualty figures of the First World War played in his efforts to avoid another tragedy of a European war is one-sided, to put it mildly. It wasn’t only the Palace who supported the policy of appeasement, a majority of the public were desperate to avoid another war and thought that his policy was the best way. Up to 1937 the Labour Party even opposed rearmament, in spite of Churchill’s (and others’) efforts to rouse the country about the menace of Hitler.
I’m not, of course, defending the appeasement policy, only asking for a more considered view, especially not one that imputs to politicians whose policies one opposes only dubious motives.
Russel W. does provide a more considered view of the situation faced by Britain in the late 1930s, but one comment on this:
Of course one can identify a few individuals who fit this picture, but the notion that any appreciable number of members of the British political elite were pro-Nazi is not accurate.
That should, of course, have been “imputes”, not “imputs”!
I appreciate that most contributors to Butterflies and Wheels have a strong interest in politics, but isn’t anyone exercised by the first part of Ophelia’s post? Desmond and Moore’s portrayal of Darwin has become virtually received history, yet it is a travesty. This is not just my view, but as my article indicates, it is the view of Darwin specialists such as Frank Sulloway, John van Wyhe and Helena Cronin. There is an interesting contrast between the almost unformly laudatory reviews of Desmond and Moore’s biography when it appeared and the more considered ones of historians in scholarly reviews. It shows how even relatively well informed reviewers can fall for disingenuous methods of persuasion if they are happy to acquiesce with the conclusions. As Helena Cronin wrote in her review for the Times Educational Supplement:
A postscript to my post on Christopher Hitchens. He writes of Baldwin and Chamberlain’s “unceasing attempt to make an agreement with Hitler that would allow him a free hand in Europe”. That’s just nonsense, and shows what happens when someone gets carried away by their own rhetoric. British European foreign policly for hundreds of years had been based on precisely not allowing any country (Spain, France, Germany) to have a free hand in Europe. The speedy reversal of British government policy when Hitler broke the Munich agreement was in line with this policy.
‘Anti-Hitchens’ commenators above could be correct in their statements about his historical analysis. They seem to ignore the point of the post that the film itself is an inaccurate, ‘whitewashed’, portrayal of reality.
As to Hitchens’ support for the invasion of Iraq. He wanted the yoke of a murderous dictator removed from the Iraqi people with whom he was much more familiar than anyone here. I was against the war, however I think his position was a valid one and the appalling ineptness of the invasion and post-invasion planning can not be laid at his door.
Allen Esterson,
I wasn’t trying to suggest that an ‘appreciable’ number of members the British political elite were pro-Nazi but rather that there were sound economic and strategic reasons for Britain’s initial reluctance to engage Nazi Germany. Hitchens seems to have an inflated idea of Britain’s relative resources at the time as he interprets the country’s early failure to resist Hitler as a result of some Machiavellian master plan rather than a sober assessment of economic and military reality. I’d certainly agree that the British were still trying to play ‘the game’, although they needed US help to win and that certainly wasn’t guaranteed in 1939.
Felix,
Yes,but why that particular murderous dictator?
Russell W: Thanks for the clarification.
Thanks also for your (valid) point, Felix, though that’s no reason why commenters should not take issue with a quote in Ophelia’s post. I really don’t want to get caught up in a discussion of a film I haven’t seen — I’d much rather people were bothered by Desmond and Moore’s demeaning portrait of Darwin that was treated as historical fact in some recent BBC TV documentaries on Darwin, and is very widely accepted. :-)
I try quite hard to get my students to understand that there is an important difference between documentary film-making and cinematic fiction. Mostly they get it. Would anyone be so exercised by a historical novel that ‘whitewashed’ the royal family? Would anyone, indeed, give a flying sh1t?
Are we over-valuing the impact of the visual medium, or succumbing to the inevitable prominence of moving pictures in a post-literate society?
There may have been imperial reasons for Britain to make peace with Nazi Germany, but it should be remembered that Britain, by the mid-thirties, was already well on its way to granting Indian independence. So it was not only imperial affairs that were important. Surely, just as important, as Esterson points out, was the experience of the First World War, and the League of Nations hope that it was still possible to preserve peace. While the British elite may have been cozier with Hitler than we would like, it is very doubtful that Britain, the great advocate and upholder of the European balance of power, would ever have given Germany a free hand in Europe, whatever the economic chances of winning a war might have been. Indeed, given the size of the French army, there is no reason that the balance of power argument should not have been compelling. That the quality and morale of that army was not up to the challenge is not something that became clear until war was joined. I’m not an historian, but surely there is a bit too much potted history here. And to suggest to someone who supported a preventative war in Iraq that he should check his moral compass before commenting on the relationship between Britain and Nazi Germany is just silly, for it was precisely the failure to intervene in some preventative way in Europe that contributed to the likelihood if not inevitability of the Second World War. Perhaps Hitchens’ moral compass is more reliable than Russell W’s on this point. And to call Hitchens a windbag is really off the wall. He may be giving way to Marxist simplicities, but it is hard to credit Russell W’s shallow criticism.
We now know the consequences of the war which resulting from GW Bush’s desire to take on Saddam Hussein. A civil war ensued in Iraq in which somewhere between 100,000 and about 1 million people died. A small minority of these casualties can be put down to CoW direct military action.
What we do not know (and it is inherently unknowable) are the consequences of leaving Saddam alone. Given his invasions of Iran and Kuwait, his WMD programs and his various messages that he already had WMD, it is I think foolhardy to claim (yes Russell W, this could possibly mean you) that leaving him in power would have been better all round than terminating his regime with prejudice.
Influential and thoughtful commentators such as Hitchens and Norman Geras supported the invasion. But what persuaded me to support Bush was not so much their position as that taken by enthusiastic Iraqi refugees, who organised demonstrations of support for Bush and held rallies in Sydney.
It was a moral decision presented as easy by opponents of the war. But anything is easy if one’s blinkers are thick enough.
In my case, at least, mostly the latter. Movie versions of history, especially (of course) very popular ones, do get imprinted (so to speak).
Which were lies. Why do western governments spend so much money on intelligence and yet have no idea what is actually happening?
Michael, even Saddam’s own generals were surprised by the revelation that there were no WMD. Why should any western intelligence bureaucracy be any different?
Now that I’ve had the chance to read Allen’s critique of Desmond and Moore — thank you, Allen for that lively evisceration — why is this sort of thing considered history at all? — one can’t talk about what someone was thinking (and certainly not feeling) unless there is documentary evidence for it, and all the quaint “filling-in” won’t do the trick — and D & M’s “biography” (that’s stretching the language, surely?) seems to be full of this sort of pseudo-history. It’s one thing in a movie. You won’t win prizes by dragging the Royals through the mud I’m afraid, but in a book that makes some claim to objectivity the same kind of “whitewashing” (or at least “some-kind-of-washing”) simply won’t do. I haven’t read Hitchens’ piece yet — though I had already read TNR review some time ago — but one simply has to give some prizes for that wonderful opening sentence:
Yes isn’t that a great first line? I used most of it for the teaser in News.
And isn’t Allen’s 3-part critique brilliant? Tell all your friends!
Ian Mac Dougall, Eric Mac Donald.
Before each of you take the moral high ground I’d suggest that you consider the 100,000 to 1 million Iraqi dead( the Allies really couldn’t be bothered to give an accurate figure)as a consequence of the US invasion,what do you think their opinions of the intervention might have been, or their relatives and friends? Who were the agents of Iraq’s destabilization, so who are responsible for that tragic aftermath? Some individuals might have been sanguine in regard to the destruction of a society in order to ‘rebuild’ it however I find that attitude morally repugnant and just plain hubristic. The US has a particularly egregious record of these kind of war crimes, I suggest you refer to the history of the Vietnam war and its catastrophic consequences for all Indo-China,you would find that the Americans made a desert and called it ‘democracy, there, as well.
Ian MacDougall, I was extremely skeptical as to the existence of Saddam’s ‘WMD arsenal’. If the US and its allies had really believed that Iraq possessed such weapons they would never have invaded in the first place. I was amazed that the US didn’t ‘find’ WMD somewhere in Iraq, what incompetent propagandists. The fact is that Saddam was, for years, America’s ‘son-of-a -bitch’ in the ME, he was the same brutal dictator during the Iran-Iraq war as during the Gulf wars, I heard a rumour that he received intel from the US. The reason he fell out of favor is that he failed in the main game, the ‘containment’ of Iran. So who’s wearing the blinkers? I’ll ask the question again, why Saddam? Why not Mubarak or any of the other numerous tyrants supported by America?
History is a continuum,not a series of discrete events.
Russell: In my experience it has been the reflexively anti-US Left (and inescapably in the context pro-Saddam) ‘antiwar’ crowd who have attempted to claim the moral high ground, and who attempted to argue that as Iraq was a soverign country, whatever Saddam did within it and however deplorable, was nobody else’s business in an interventionary sense. Either that, or they argued a minimalist line that Saddam was on the skids and about to fall anyway, and so no harm would likely result from leaving him there. (Vide J Pilger.)
I have never attempted to claim any moral high ground. Please show me where I have if you disagree. I have only pointed out that the moral choice over Gulf War 2 was a difficult one, because both alternatives involved death and destruction on an intrinsically unknowable scale. Saddam had form, and was claiming he had WMD. He was one of the worst tyrants in all human history, and won himself a place on that basis in Nigel Cawthorne’s 2004 catalogue of the 100 all-time worst.
The war of course was about oil. By invading Iran and Kuwait, Saddam had attempted to corner a major part of the world’s stock of it, and had the intervention not occurred he would probably have had another go. But the moral choice was clear: when Bush for whatever reason takes on Saddam, who do you support? Bush or Saddam?
You obviously preferred Saddam in that situation. Fair enough. The choice was not easy. But those who did prefer him never argued before the Iraqis executed him that he should have been reinstated as President. That clearly would have been a step too far. So they disapproved of the action to topple him, but once he was gone approved of it. Thus the easy moral choice.
My stats on the number of deaths are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Really? Really? Hussein was a known torturer and liar for decades, but he was the US’s torturer and liar so it was fine. He met with Rumsfield in the 80s – you do remember Iran in the 70s or Iran and in the 50s. US intelligence had to know he was lying or they had to be the most inept organization on the planet. I choose the former – it fits their modus. Killing millions of people is clearly the preferred moral choice – it is what I always pick. You’re not dead Ian and neither are your relatives so the killing millions of civilians must be just fine and dandy. Stick with that one my friend. This was not entirely Bush’s fault US foreign policy has been a disaster for the last 50 years – overthrowing democracy for puppets, but war is never the answer.
I have no wish to get involved with what tends to become an interminable debate on this topic, with endless claims and counterclaims, but a lot of rewriting of history goes on. I recall that for much of the “reign” of Saddam Hussein up to the 1980s, Iraq was regarded as a client state of the USSR. This is borne out by the arms sales to Iraq 1973-1990, overwhelmingly from the Soviet Union at first, then when Saddam wanted to feel more independent of the Soviets, increasing amounts from France, and (starting in the 1980s) China.
Some time ago I saved figures issued by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The links are now unavailable, but here is a summary of a small part of the table showing Iraqi arms imports 1973-1990
USSR + Warsaw Pact countries: $25,261 million
US: $200 million
In other words, in the period of nearly two decades leading up to the first Gulf war, the ratio of US arms supplied to Iraq compared to those by the Eastern bloc was 0.008.
The supply of arms to Iraq by the UK was less than that of the US, and negligible compared with those for the Eastern bloc, France and China.
Some later figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)
Weapons imports to Iraq 1973-2002:
USSR 57.26%
France: 12.74%
China: 11.82%
US: 0.46%
UK: 0.18%
Alan: Thanks for those stats. Quite interesting.
Quite understandable. But the interminable debate goes on; it’s only the topics that change.
Michael:
Presumably because it kills people. Therefore presumably not going to war is always the answer. Presumably because it either never kills people, or kills far less of them.
This is an appropriate discussion in a thread called ‘Darwin and Bertie’.
I would assume that “but war is never the answer” was suggested to Churchill and his supporters on a few occasions in 1939, but fortunately, if that’s the case, they took no notice.
I have never suggested that the US has a clean record. I spent a great deal of my youth organising, participating in and getting arrested over the war in Vietnam. But tell me Michael, when GW Bush decided to take on S Hussein, whom should one have supported? That is, on an either/or basis; there being no third way, and ‘a pox on both your houses’ being a cop-out?
To oppose Bush was to support Saddam Hussein. Unavoidably. So the opposition to the war was not like the antiwar movement over Vietnam, which just kept on growing. The movement against Iraq War 2 was quite the reverse: it got off to an impressive start, then proceeded to fizzle out. As did that against Iraq War 1; I would assume because the moral issues were in no way as clear cut as they were over Vietnam, even in the face of the shocking incompetence displayed over the way the war was actually handled on the CoW side.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 sums it up pretty neatly, IMHO.
http://www.worldprayers.org/archive/prayers/adorations/to_everything_there_is.html