Showing posts with label Second World War. Show all posts

Friday, 26 February 2016

Spiked, February 26, 2016

The EU is well past its sell-by date

We don’t need Brussels to stave off another World War.

Sunday, 13 September 2015

in Spiked, September 11, 2015

Refugee crisis: Germany’s Band Aid?
By embracing migrants, Germany is getting over its war guilt.

Tuesday, 10 September 2013

It's true, Brits now love ze Germans

Forget Fawlty Towers, it seems the old enemy has become our best friend.

Friday, 8 March 2013

in The Catholic Herald, March 8, 2013

Hitler and the Tsar's loss
was Britain's gain
Newcomers' Lives
edited by Peter Unwin
Bloomsbury, £16.99
review by Patrick West

When it recently emerged that Polish had become England’s second language, owing to immigration in the past 10 years, the Times published an article on famous Poles who had achieved success outside their homeland. They included, among others, Roman Polanski, Paul Newman and Karol Wojtyła. Surprisingly, as a letter in the newspaper consequently pointed out, the piece failed to mention a Pole called Conrad Korzeniowski, who after coming to England became Joseph Conrad.
   The omission of the author, who found acclaim – remarkably – by writing in a third language, was also striking in that Conrad features in a collection of Times obituaries of notable immigrants to Britain. From Lady Randolph Churchill to Freddy Mercury to Basil D'Oliveira, Newcomers’ Lives: The Story of Immigrants as Told In Obituaries from The Times reminds us that this island has long been a land of opportunity, a safe harbour, and that immigration to Britain, not least from other parts of Europe, has a long pedigree.
   Those of us who attended schools with a heavy proportion of Irish, Polish and Spanish pupils are aware of this story; indeed, most of us are part of it. And somewhat paradoxically, second-generation immigrants can be the most hostile to those who want to follow in their parents footsteps. An extensive Searchlight Educational Trust survey of 2011 showed that 39 per cent of Asian Britons wanted all immigration into Britain stopped permanently, compared to 34 per cent of white Britons and 21 per cent of black Britons. Many are today anxious about a potential influx of Romanians and Bulgarians, while the perceived Islamification of some inner-city areas is a worry to nearly everybody. Britain has never experienced such a radical demographic transition, but, immigration remains intrinsic to our island story.
   Newcomers’ Lives opens with the death of Prince Albert, a Bavarian. As a genre, the newspaper obituary was in its infancy in 1861, and the Times’s death notice tells us little about his life, and concentrates, in morbid detail typical of the period, on the Consort’s last painful hours: “He continued slowly to sink, so slowly that the wrists were pulseless long before the last moment had arrived, when at a few minutes before eleven he ceased to breathe, and all was over. An hour after and the solemn tones of the great bell of St Paul’s – a bell of evil omen – told all the citizens how irreparable has been the loss their beloved Queen, how great the loss to the country.”
   By contrast, the obituary of Karl Marx, “Prophet of the collapse of capitalism”, runs to only four paragraphs. Marx’s influence had yet to be realised fully in 1883, but it was often the case that Times obituaries in the Victorian era were either brief or incredibly long.
   Such stylistic quirks can be telling. We read from 1988 that Alec Issigonis, the Greco-German creator of the Mini Cooper, “remained a bachelor all of his life”. According to a biographer, Jonathan Wood, Issigonis was a “non-practising homosexual”, yet one rarely reads today “bachelor” or “remained unmarried” as euphemisms for “gay”. “He is survived by his partner, John” has become the norm, much in the way “cancer” has supplanted “died after a long illness”. But in areas in which stigma remains, “convivial” is still code for a drunk, while a deceased who “didn’t suffer fools gladly” was intolerable.
   The death notices thus reveal much of the era in which they were written. In 1951 it is stated: “We are still too close to Wittgenstein to form a just estimate of his work.” This was during an era less given to journalistic hyperbole in high-brow newspapers, and when writers believed that sufficient time needed to elapse before posterity could be achieved.
   Wittgenstein was but one of many bright minds to come to Britain from central Europe, including his cousin, Friedrich von Hayek. They met each other on the Italian front when both were serving in the Austrian army. The obituary of the famous monetarist is a highlight of the fascinating collection. Like Marx, Hayek was hopeless with his personal finances and he never made a penny in royalties from The Road to Serfdom. It is also heartening to read that, despite their differences, Hayek and Keynes enjoyed a good personal relationship, so much so that Keynes ensured his opposite was given rooms at King’s when the LSE was evacuated to Cambridge in the Second World War.
   Another brainy Austrian was Karl Popper, who, like so many to feature here, hailed from a Jewish background. Others of that faith include Sam Wanamaker, Isaiah Berlin, Yehudi Menuhin, the broadcaster Hugo Gryn, the philanthropist Paul Hamyln and those notoriously competitive Freud brothers, Clement and Lucian. This may or may not reinforce the old stereotype, favoured by philo-Semites and anti-Semites alike, of the innate intelligence of the Jewish people, but it certainly indicates that Tsarist Russia’s and Nazi’s Germany’s loss was our gain.
   Moreover, the compendium reminds us that the story of European immigration to Britain hasn’t solely concerned plumbers and decorators.

Wednesday, 17 October 2012

in Culture Wars, October 17, 2012

‘It was either us or them’

Review of 'Unpatriotic History of The Second World War, by James Heartfield' (Zero Books, 2012)

Thursday, 11 November 2010

From The Catholic Herald, November 5, 2010

A demonic scheme to destroy the Dutch Jews

Reprinted from The Catholic Herald

Ashes in The Wind, The Destruction of Dutch Jewry
By Dr Jacob Presser
Souvenir Press, £15

In the popular imagination, when one thinks of the fate of Dutch Jewry in the Second World War, the lives of Anne Frank, Edith Stein and Charlotte Saloman spring to mind. More recently, Paul Verhoeven's 2006 film Zwartboek (Black Book) has raised consciousness as to the miserable fate of Jews in Holland during that conflict.

Although Zwartboek received many awards and accolades internationally, reaction to it in The Netherlands was decidedly mixed. This owed to the fact that the movie was a tale of ambivalence, in which not all Germans were portrayed as evil, many Dutchmen were showed as being complicit with the Nazis, and in which some Jews were depicted as collaborating against their own people to save themselves. By eschewing a Manichaean narrative, Verhoven's film proved difficult to digest among compatriots who wanted to believe that their grandparents had behaved better.

Ashes in the Wind, first published in 1965 and released in a new edition, had a similar effect on the reading public. Its central theme is that war can make good people do bad things, and how ideology can make good people behave with appalling inhumanity - and not just the perpetrators of an ideology, but sometimes its victims, too.

In a world where the boundaries between good and evil are perennially questioned and doubted, the Holocaust is often invoked as an ethical reference point, to affirm that morality is not perspectival and provisional. This is one reason why discussing the Holocaust has become problematic. But long before postmodern historians and far-right anti-semites came to be accused of belittling the Holocaust, Dr Presser - a Dutch Jew who survived the ordeal - reminded us that we cannot comprehend this catastrophe with childlike simplicity.

The Jew/German Nazi dichotomy collapses here on many fronts. It was not only Nazified Germans who were responsible for effecting the Holocaust, such as the concentration camp Kommandant who gave his son fifty Jews for target practice as a birthday present, but ordinary Germans who sank to levels of barbarity. In the Amsterdam house raids of July 1942 "German female employees hung out of the windows taking snaps for their albums and, judging by their screams of laughter, were having a highly enjoyable time; several German police officers joined in the merriment, which increased to hilarity when a young Jewish women, suddenly wrenched away from her pram and child, had a fit of hysteria".

Elsewhere, there are tales of German remorse (or at least displays of it): the Commander of German Security Police and Head of Zentralstelle consulting a rabbi, cursing "the fate that had put him in this predicament", or of a German soldier "who got drunk every night to forget his part in gassing Jewish children in trains. He could not put it out of his mind and kept thinking of his own five children."

Additionally, the Germans did not regard "the Jews" as a coherent ethno-religious group. They showed little interest in monitoring and rounding up the "Portuguese Jews" (presumably, Sephardi), which adds weight to the argument that Nazi anti-semitism was racially, rather than religiously, inspired. Indeed, the Christian churches mostly conducted themselves courageously. The Catholic hierarchy constantly spoke out against the incremental measures taken against Dutch Jews. The Lutheran Church was somewhat less forthcoming. But the real heroes of the appalling episode were the Calvinist Dutch, who, the Nazis complained, sided with Dutch Jews at every opportunity for " 'so-called' reasons of conscience". (Many Gentile Dutch men and woman were as brave as to display solidarity by wearing yellow stars; still, Holland had the highest collaboration rate of all the German-occupied European countries). Perhaps this denomination's resistance can be partly explained culturally, in that Calvinists, who traditionally shunned idolatry and ritual, may have been immune to Nazism's seductive use of icons and lavish ceremony.

There was cleavage within the Jewish community, too. In the transit camps antagonism arose between Dutch Jews and German Jews, the latter accused by the former of "behaving like a caste, an oligarchy... and [who] far too often showed a 'German' predilection for bossing people about". There were even Jews who remained members of the Nationall-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland, a Dutch political party that may have not have began as anti-semitic, but by 1940 certainly had become so.

In this essential work, Dr Presser directed his most concentrated opprobrium towards the Jewish Council of Holland itself. German Nazis were objectively the villains here, of course; but he intimates that the Jewish Council's betrayal of its own people was ethically even less defensible.

The Nazis sought to get rid of the Jews by stages, with little disruption as possible. To do this they need co-operation from the victims themselves. The invaders followed threats and instructions with concessions, and the Jewish Council duly appeased, hoping that by sacrificing a few the majority could be saved. This ingoing game of cat and mouse had a salami-slice effect on the community, which withered. The Nazis had established a daemonic scheme which had chilling consequences, and that "by granting temporary privileges to a minority, they succeeded in liquidating the rest without too much fuss or bother." Every Dutch Jew who survived the death camps, Dr Presser relates, was forced to betray someone, to leave another to his sorry destiny. It was the fate of the survivors to have to live with their consciences thereafter.

Ashes To The Wind reminds us that while, today, we are prone to invoke the Holocaust as a morality tale, it was an event blemished sometimes by ambiguity and amorality.

Patrick West