So, we haven't gone down that road after all.

We haven't thrown in our lot with the climate deniers, the bigots, the corporate fatcats. We didn't drink from the kool-aid, didn't join the march to oblivion. At the end of the day we proved that we are not all petty, vindictive, short-sighted and small minded. For once, better nature won out over base instinct.

Just to be clear, this relief is not due to the return of Justin Trudeau to the Canadian Parliament. I think he is a bit of a goof-ball, and the Liberal Party in turns insincere, opportunistic, wishy-washy, and inconsistent, the timorous party of  bland half measures. It's the failure of the Conservative Party to unseat him. Clumsy as the Liberals are, they are at least lurching down the right path.  The Conservatives, under Andrew Sheer, would have abandoned the path altogether. They have largely turned themselves into branches of Big Business in general and Big Oil in particular, advancing a platform of burning and shipping bitumen anytime anywhere, unhampered by even the feeblest environmental regulation. Basically, the Oil Fetish party, not surprisingly, popular in Alberta. They pursued tax-cuts with the single minded determination of the religiously converted, knowing full-well they only benefits those already well-off. They ran an ugly campaign, spreading falsehoods and personal attacks. They continue to be propped up by "social-conservatives", a group who define their own freedom as the ability to suppress other people's freedom. A victory for them would have been a conscious decision to go backwards, to put on blinders, to embrace all that is ugly in current world politics. It would have been a fatalistic decision to look the world's doom in the eye and do absolutely nothing.

Much of the world has made this decision. Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, the Five Stars. . . Here in Canada we seemed to doomed to go copycat, with Doug Frod and Jason Kenny.  With them, Scheer would have completed a hideous three-headed monster - I don't think I could have maintained any faith in a society that consciously embraced such a beast.

But we didn't. The Beast has been rejected, at least for now.

True, a lot of people did. Alberta (not surprisingly) and Saskatchewan ( a little surprisingly) went entirely conservative (and are now bitching and moaning about not being represented in Parliament). The Conservatives increased their seat count. The Liberals have been weakened. The NDP have been weakened. Progressives and middle-of-the-roaders are going to have to work together, and who knows if they can. Who knows how long this government will last, and who knows what'll go down NEXT TIME.

But for now, the Beast has been rejected. The culture of fear has been rejected. The Oil Fetishists have been rejected. Maxim Bernier's Far right project has been decisively rejected and is dead in the water - immigrant baiting on that scale didn't win a single seat. We Canadians showed ourselves just a little better than that. We've bought ourselves a bit of time. Maybe a year from now, I'll have to confront the Beast, but for now, the relief is tremendous.

I went to bed that night, to paraphrase Churchill, and slept the sleep of the saved. 

On Thuggish Little Men and the Toads Who Enable Them. . .

           By this time tomorrow, my country could be a very different place. I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic until the polls close, and then let reality do its dirty work.

           Looking around today’s world, it’s hard not to think about the 1930’s – thuggish little men winning power by appealing to the crowd’s baser instincts, promising simple solutions to complex problems and blaming everything on dehumanized scapegoats. It’s happening everywhere, and I can’t help noticing no one invokes Godwin’s Law anymore. Just as it’s impossible not to notice the historical parallels, it is important not to forget the historical lessons.  One of these must surely be not to overlook the spineless little men who enable the thuggish little men.

  

  

        Into this breach steps David Faber with his book Munich 1938, which will tell you everything you wanted to know about how Britain and France stabbed Czechoslovakia in the back and gift-wrapped the corpse for Hitler. I maintain it’s an important book, because if fighting a resurgent fascism is a complex issue, this will tell you most certainly how not to do it.    

  

          Don’t be Neville Chamberlain for a start.

  

          If anything, Munich shows that Chamberlain’s reputation as one of history’s biggest douche-bags is well-deserved, and probably generous. Reading this, many other descriptors will come to mind: Coward. Toady. Fool. Dim-wit. Weakling. Traitor. Adjectives may include gutless, naïve, dishonourable, spineless, authoritarian, shameless, and anti-Semitic. Yet these will only tell part of the story; the image of a fraidy-cat Chamberlain caving to Hitler is not just not new but something of a cliché. It’s not really accurate. It would appear more accurate to say that Chamberlain was, on the contrary, a strong-willed, determined, consistent, almost ruthless fighter for the fascist cause. Whether it was pushing the League of Nations to recognize the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, or pushing the English football team to give nazi salutes[i] in Berlin, or censoring anti-nazi news reports, or ignoring anti-Hitler dissidents in Germany, or ruthlessly pressuring Austria and Czechoslovakia to give into Hitler’s every demand, Neville Chamberlain bent over backwards to accommodate fascism at every turn. He was the best friend Hitler and Mussolini could have had.    

  

          After 437 exhausting pages of diplomatic minutiae, the dates and times of conferences and speeches to the House, meeting minutes, telegraphs, letters, newspaper headlines and memoires, backed up by sixty-six pages of notes, it’s difficult to know where to begin.  One gets a picture of a very stoic and strong man, who above all, wanted to work with Hitler. Not with France or Czechoslovakia, not with the anti-nazi elements within Germany, not with the US, nor with any democratic or freedom loving force, but with Hitler. We don’t get a picture of a coward who caved to Hitler, but a staunch advocate for Hitler’s interests. Not a fascist himself, as such, but one of those innumerable upper-class twerps so rife in the era, who thought fascism could be useful in preserving order. It’s grotesque.

    

        It’s not just the appeasement, but the apparent anxiousness to accommodate that is just so sickening. The infamous quotation “I go the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” must surely rank as one of the most laughable by any politician in history. Chamberlain was apparently in awe of Hitler, impressed, mesmerized and dominated by the Bohemian Corporal. He comes across as nothing so much as eager -to-please. Chamberlain swallowed German propaganda hook-line-and-sinker.  He ignored critics. He attacked domestic opponents more than foreign dictators. While willing to take Hitler on faith, he doubted people like the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, who had the nerve to request a loan from Britain to deal with his country’s dismemberment. “It’s impossible to accept every statement made by Mr. Masaryk,” said the man who felt Hitler could be trusted.

         

           His toadies in Parliament are no better: Sir John Simon apparently thought the Czechs ought to have been grateful for being sold down the river: 

            It was not the case that Czechoslovakia had any legitimate grievance against us. . .          

             on the contrary,the position was that a world war had been averted and thereby                                             Czechoslovakia had been saved.

          These shitheads were utterly shameless. When the Mayor of London, Harry Twyford, started a fund to help Czech refugees, Chamberlain said he was “rather afraid that the opening of a Fund might have a bad effect on public opinion in Germany.” (italics mine). That’s right folks, mustn’t offend the Germans.

     

       This was the guy responsible for dealing with Hitler.

        It’s not just Chamberlain that comes off badly. The French had a defense treaty with Czechoslovakia, which, when push-came-to shove, they simply ignored. We’ve got guys like Sir. John Simon above. There’s Nancy Astor, who claimed all the Czech refugees were just Communists anyway and should be sent to Russia (Astor really was a character. She was so utterly wrong about everything; she’d be a laughable caricature if she didn’t sound like every FOX News commentator ever). We’ve got Sir John Neville Henderson, British ambassador to Germany, who prevented a formal warning being given to Germany. We’ve got Lord Beaverbrook, a shameless pro-nazi. We’ve got Sir. Robert Vansittart, undersecretary of the Foreign Office, who bent over backwards to accommodate the Sudetenland Germans. We’ve got the captain of the English football team. The entire British establishment (with a few honourable exceptions) come across as a parade of dolts, doing every possible thing wrong.

      

      One episode in particular stands out for me. It’s complicated, so pay attention.

On September 5, 1938, one of Chamberlain’s advisors, Sir. Horace Wilson, was visited by Thomas Kordt, counsellor at the German embassy. Kordt apparently told Henderson that there was a significant Opposition group within Germany, that there was

                          sufficient opposition to Hitler’s plans within the German Foreign Ministry and among 

                          senior generals, that ‘all was required of Britain and France was to remain firm and not 

                          give ground before the fury of Hitler’s diatribes’.

While all this nonsense was going on in Britain, things were afoot in Germany as well. No one (besides  hard-core nazis) was happy with Hitler’s plans for Czechoslovakia, and more than a few generals believed Germany wasn’t ready. General Beck wrote:

                   I feel it my duty to urgently ask that the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces call                          off his preparations for war, and abandon the inention of solving the Czech question by                       force until the military situation is fundamentally changed. For the present I                                             consider it hopeless.

General Wilhelm Adam worried that Germany would be vulnerable to French attack if Czechoslovakia was invaded. “With the bulk of the army concentrated against Czechoslovakia, he would have only five active divisions at his disposal, and would be quickly overrun by the French.”

Taken together, what does this mean? Consider:

             1) German foreign ministers assure British authorities that Hitler’s full of shit.

             2) German generals think the French can take them out.

That is to say, there is evidence that the British and French were stronger than they thought, the Germans weaker, and that if stood firm, the Germans might have caved to them. What do we get instead? According to Faber:

“[Kordt’s] suggestion was so out of step with British policy at the time, no further action was 

                       taken or advice sought”.

In other words, nothing was done. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Now, it’s possible that nothing would have come of it anyway – the aggravating part is that no one even tried to do anything with it. Chamberlain and his gang seemed to want Hitler to have his way. It is tantalizing in the extreme to wonder what would have happened if someone else had been in charge at that time.

It has been said that Britain wasn’t ready for war in 1938. But, as we see here, neither was Germany. In 1938, Germany did not have Czechoslovakia’s splendid factories at its disposal. The Czechs were ready and willing to fight. The Germans would have had to contend with the French before even starting on Poland. Who knows how things might have gone?

Of course, a lot of this actually depends on French as well as British willingness to go to war. The French could have overwelmed the Germans if they had been ready and willing to do so. But they weren’t. They’d already had one nasty war, they were in no mood for another thankyou very much.

There’s the rub. While the lesson of this whole episode might seem to be “never ever give in to fascism”, the implication seems to be that readiness for war is a necessary precondition for standing up to fascism. I confess, I am disturbed by this possibility. Appeasement at Munich was a huge justification for subsequent military adventures, from Vietnam to Iraq. I have to ask the horrible question: what if the war-mongers were correct?

  Before you start screaming and yelling, do remember that this is not my conclusion – only a thought, a what-if. I don’t think it’s ever wrong to ask a question. To this one, I might respond that every situation is different, and must be looked at on its own realities. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Libya, Syria are not just recreations of Czechoslovakia, they are their own places with their own histories and their own politics and their own needs which are unique in history, and cannot be treated the same.

I might also throw in that our own condemnation of Chamberlain comes from hindsight, from knowing what it was impossible to have known back then. That most people’s experience of war had been the First World War, which had just happened, and was an absolutely unjust meat-grinder of a war. People could be forgiven if they were in no hurry to repeat it. And how were they to know that the Germans, who’d suffered just as badly, actually wanted to do it all over again? They wanted to avoid war - was it wrong to try?

No. I’d argue it wasn’t wrong to try for peace – it was wrong to trust Hitler. Chamberlain was not wrong to seek peace. He was wrong to cow-tow to Hitler, wrong to recognize Italian Abyssinia, wrong to make decisions on another country’s behalf. He didn’t have to be so sensitive to German public opinion. He could have considered Kordt’s advice. He didn’t have to go to war – he just needed to be ready to.

To take the analogy into the school yard, the solution to bullying isn’t to punch everyone you see. But stand firm when they come after you. The jellyfish approach never works, and neither does befriending the bully.

The a lesson for today in there somewhere.   

---

[i] To be fair, this was the Foreign Office, rather than him per se. But it was his foreign office.

Benford_The Berlin Project

             

                As an armchair historian, you’d think I’d gravitate more often to alternative history. I mean, with all the million little what-ifs that come up, the possibilities would seem endless. Trouble is, the what-ifs that interest me are of interest only to me, and maybe some other equally nerdy arm-chair historians. What we often get instead are flights of fancy more didactic than historical, or doomgloom scenarios, more masochistic than speculative.  I for one don’t need another “Hitler wins the war” book – not only is that too depressing to think about, but it requires no great feat of imagination. I mean, we know what that world would look like, why waste time there?

            So, when a book like Gregory Benford’s The Berlin Project comes out, I find it irresistible. I mean, what would happen if the Manhattan Project was ready a year early? Tell me, from an educated and informed perspective. My curiosity is aroused. Alas, having lured me in with the scenario, I find myself utterly unconvinced by Benford’s projections.

            Before we even get into Benford’s historical analysis, I gotta mention its length. It goes on for four-hundred and forty-eight fucking pages, four hundred sixty-four if you include the afterward. It’s two hundred and eighty pages before they get around to dropping the bomb, and another hundred sixty-eight to deal with the aftermath. Benford is a physicist, not a historian (he certainly knows more physics than history) and the physics of it are his focus. These pages painstakingly detail how scientists opt for centrifugal separation of isotopes rather than the historical gaseous diffusion method, complete with diagrams. I’m sure this is fascinating stuff for physicists; for mere civilians like me, eyes will glaze over after pages and pages and pages of this stuff. Subplots, character development and drama aren’t permitted to interfere with the lectures, nothing really happens in between them – spies do not try to steal the plans, commandos do not have to raid Heavy Water plants in Norway, there are no explosions or radioactive leaks in the lab. Not even an extra-marital affair. Nothing in short to break up the monotony.

            There’s not even any moral conflict about building superbombs. No doubts of any kind are permitted to interfere with the righteousness of the central characters. They take it for granted the Bomb will shorten the war, and that’s that.  Those who might have qualms about slaughtering millions of people and potentially destroying the world, only make fleeting appearances, and are largely dismissed as naïve. Perhaps Benford is right: when it comes to Nazis, maybe there is only one moral decision one can make. But more soul searching would not have gone amiss. A novel about the impossibly awful decisions one has to make in war, and the toll they take on the soul, would have made for an infinitely more interesting book than the technocratic wish-fulfillment we get here.

            So, we’re more than halfway through the book before we get around to dropping the damn thing. What happens next?

            Well, it erases Berlin. No surprises there. To the consternation of everyone involved, Hitler was out of town, and the war goes on. In fact, the Nazis develop their own radioactive “Death Dust”, and start spraying it on allied lines from their Messerschmitts.

            Now this part got my attention. Hitler survives, gets a superweapon of his own, and the allied advance grinds to a halt. Could Benford be suggesting that nuking Germany would actually have lengthened the war? It’s not impossible – the allies spent five years pulverizing German cities to debatable effect, so might an A-Bomb just been more of the same? Might the Germans been able to learn from it and develop their own weapons? A “Death Dust” like the one suggested here would have decimated allied armies. It’s a nightmare scenario that would have turned this into a cautionary tale, far bolder and more original than what we eventually get.

            Alas. What happens instead is:

·         The Bomb convinces Werner Heisenberg to give the allies the co-ordinates to Hitler’s hideout.

·         With Hitler dead, the Wehrmacht High Command sue for peace

·         The Germans unwittingly blow the lid on Kim Philby, who spills the beans. 

·         Pissed off at Philby, Churchill and Roosevelt agree to a separate peace, throwing the Russians under the bus.

·         The Germans take all their troops from Western Europe, and, with their V-2s, Messerchmitts and Death Dust, stop the Soviets at the Polish border.

·         Fighting stops in the Winter of 1945, ending in stalemate.

·         The allies nuke Okinawa “near the top of the mountain, killing the army inside, without too many of the villagers”  

·         Erwin Rommel becomes German Chancellor, uses Marshal Aid money to build a Jewish state in historical Israel (the Arabs “fold”)

·         Eisenhower and Khrushchev decide not to build a Hydrogen bomb.

·         Allied blockade of USSR prevents aid from reaching Mao, who is defeated by Republican forces. China is democratic and prosperous.

·         As of 1965, nuclear reactors are being built everywhere, and everyone’s just loving all the cheap electricity.

·         The threat of nukes hold everyone in check.  

            Where do I start with all this?

            Well, you will notice that in this world, there is no V-E day. For all Benford’s rose-tinted projections, the Germans are not defeated in this timeline. I’m not sure Benford himself realizes this. He appears to take it for granted that ending the war in 44/45 would have led to a hyper-prosperous, peaceful, democratic, denazified, virtually de-Stalinized utopia as a matter of course. Yet, even as he presented the physics of it all in excruciating detail, he’s maddeningly vague about what the peace settlement actually looked like. He puts the western cease-fire on September 26, 1944. In the real world this would be one day after the liberation of Paris. But in Benford’s world, the liberation doesn’t happen – the allies have been bogged down by Death Dust, remember? Which would leave the Germans still in control of most of western Europe at this point. And if they stop the Germans at Poland, it would give them Eastern Europe as well. In Benford’s world, the war ends with the Germans still occupying most of Europe. How is this a victory for us? That’s a bloody stalemate at best. Is this what Benford intentioned? He doesn’t say. He does not tell us what the Germans and the allies agree to. It’s a weird omission for a book this ambitious (to say nothing of presumptuous).  

    

        I gather we are meant to take certain things for granted. That the Wehrmacht willingly agree to abandon their conquests, willingly agree to de-nazify and put up their remaining nazis on trial for crimes Against Humanity (were there any Nuremberg trials in this world? Benford doesn’t say), willingly shut down their concentration camps and let their inmates out, willingly rewrite nazi race laws, and willingly adopt liberal democracy. We are left to assume that Erwin Rommel would make an enlightened statesman.  “In 1939 we did not foresee the death trains, gas chambers and crematoria,” Benford has him say in 1965. “The National Socialists spoke of such, but we did not believe it would be. . .” Sure you didn’t. All I know is that even with the unconditional surrender and dismemberment of Germany, a lot of nazis got off the hook. Now imagine if Germany wasn’t occupied. . .

            And even if you do buy all this, what’s it got to do with China?

            Make a long story short, I don’t buy any of it. I’m just not convinced this is how it would work out. It depends way too much on happenstance, on too many pieces magically falling into place. It presumes too much. It doesn’t seem to understand its own implications. It doesn’t answer the most important questions. It’s altogether too neat, too rosy, to convenient.

            I for one wanted to know what happened in Poland. From what I can gather, the Germans keep it. How is this a happy ending? Nor is there any mention of widespread radiation sickness or cancer arising from all that Death Dust. Are we to understand that widespread use of a radioactive weapon all over Europe would have no long-term consequences? How about all those SS men who weren’t killed or captured because Germany wasn’t occupied? What happened to them? Benford doesn’t say.

            In his afterward, Benford writes: “Karl Cohen made the centrifugal method should have prevailed. As I argue here, that could have well have (sic) yielded a better world.” Indeed, he could have subtitled the book How I was Never Really Worried and Always Loved the Bomb. Not for Benford the nightmare of humanity obliterating itself with the touch of a button. There are even a few jabs at hippie peace protestors, communist stooges all. No, in his world, overwhelming nuclear superiority is the ultimate peacekeeper. As it indeed it might have been if all those ifs in his book transpired the way he seems to think they would.

            If I’ve learned one thing from history, it is that nothing is neat, nothing is predictable, and almost nothing goes according to plan. So I tend to take a very dim view of any argument that the Second World War could have ended more cleanly or less bloodily. It just wasn’t going to happen, whatever road we took. Fictions arguing otherwise tend to be more wistful than thoughtful.