Once an idiot, always an idiot is the way to bet
also residing in the "when I get a minute" file, Messrs Ed Husain, Hasan Butt, and all the other born-again ex-terrorisses and providers of "edgy" Islamonazi conspiracy theories to the commentariat. My general theme is going to be that while the path from "sensible analyst of current affairs who is entirely worth listening to" to "self-aggrandising ideological halfwit" is a well-trodden one, those taking the opposite path are very few and far between. Hasan Butt, in particular, was such an obvious Walter Mitty and gobshite in 2005 that I find it very unlikely indeed that he has become a modern Cato now that he appears to have crossed over to our side.
Can any readers come up with counterexamples? I am beginning to think that "moron" is an absorbing state, and I am describing an actual null set here. Maybe Winston Churchill?
Liberal Americans might nominate David Brock.
ReplyDeleteDidn't Keynes think that Lloyd George went down something like this path? Maybe he just thought early Lloyd George was evil though, not moronic.
ReplyDeleteGiven the rubbish that Keynes wrote about Versailles, who's he to speak?
ReplyDeleteThat's an amusingly 1946 viewpoint. I thought it was now generally accepted by sane people (i.e. people who aren't French) that the Versailles treaty royally and unfairly screwed Germany to France's benefit, even though the fault behind WWI was fairly equally shared...
ReplyDeleteJohn B
I also think that the general view is that Keynes was pretty much exactly right about Versailles; I know Oliver Kamm thinks otherwise, but he really does over-represent the amount of support his view commands among historians.
ReplyDeletePerhaps not *entirely* worth listening to, but... Michael Portillo?
ReplyDeleteIf we're just thinking of reactionaries who became thoughtful critics of reaction, there's quite a few to choose from (I'd give you Gladstone and Cobbett to kick off with) but are we not looking for more stringent criteria, i.e. not just people on the loony right but loony people of the right? Like Simon Heffer suddenly becoming Gary Younge or Melanie Phillips turning into Naomi Klein.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure Splinteredsunrise will be along in a minute to set me right, but David Ervine might be a plausible candidate.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Fischer showed pretty clearly, decades ago, that WWI was principally the fault of the Kaiser's Reich. Rather more importantly, Keynes's arguments not only provided wonderful later propaganda for Hitler, they were plain wrong. The proposition that the reparations burden on Germany was intolerable was obviously bogus, given the price France had had to pay after the war of 1870. The scale of the looting of E Europe by the USSR after WWII emphasises the point. As for your reverse journey people: how about Lincoln? (That is a genuine question by the way - I haven't read much about him.)
ReplyDeleteThe proposition that the reparations burden on Germany was intolerable was obviously bogus, given the price France had had to pay after the war of 1870.
ReplyDeletealthough less obviously bogus when rather than France in 1870, one takes the example of Germany in 1920, which many would consider a closer comparison.
btw, I would make a tentative case for Malcolm X, although to be honest I'm not sure that a) he was all that bad to begin with or b) that the later windy Islamic mysticism was actually an improvement. As in the case of Ervine, I don't want to start regarding people as geniuses just because they've become less violent.
ReplyDeleteFisher's irrelevant. Keynes wasn't talking about whose fault it was. He was talking about what to do next. Ludendorff was indeed evil, and Brest-Litovsk made Versailles look like a mugging, but that's not the point. Keynes' point - that reparation payments would lead to economic and hence political disaster - is as good a first approximation of Verailles as you're likely to get.
ReplyDelete(Except possibly that letter from Smuts to Lloyd George of March 26th 1919, but hey.)
ObExLoon: Billy Hutchinson.
Chris Williams
Oh, I thought they just had to make the change to being "sensible analysts" - "genius" seems rather too demanding dd.
ReplyDelete(I'd been thinking Malcolm X too.)
You might as well argue that what went wrong after Versailles proved that it was too limp-wristed.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think that we're all raising examples of people who were actual soldiers in the cause of nuttery, rather than wannabes and self-publicists.
ReplyDeleteYes, I might. As would Macchiavelli. If you're going to do it, do it properly, or don't bother. Morgenthau or Adenauer; either salt the ground or reconstruct the state, but don't piss them off but leave them intact.
ReplyDeleteCW
CW - see also, the Helvetii.
ReplyDeleteCaesar didn't stand for insurgencies.
1. I don't think Malcolm X was remotely loony in the first place, though he did adhere to a religious group that did involve saying some loony things. He probably believed less junk than most political commentators (if I may use a rather odd phrase in the circumstances) did at the time. This becomes a lot more clear if one reads his speeches: there's a lot of rhetoric, of course, but even given all the Honourable Elijah Muhammed stuff you're clearly reading somebody with their head screwed on in a way that you are not with Simon Heffer or Melanie Phillips.
ReplyDelete2. Talking of Caesar, it's apparently the case that during the period of the Gallic Wars something like a quarter of the population of Gaul died (around a million people, I believe). It's odd how many people know a lot about the Romans without having any conception of the scale of the slaughter involved.
3. The "Germany responsible for WW1 stuff" just makes me laugh. In what way did Germany behave substantially differently to any of the other great European powers of the time? If we're going to declare them "responsible" (and I'm aware it's not at unusual to hear this said in English historiographical circles) are we not going to play the game of "isolating those elements in the run-up to the war that suit us and ignoring those that do not"? Perhaps somebody might care to show me otherwise.
(Incidentally, my internet access for the next week or so is probably limited to half an hour a day in a small town in the Spanish Pyrenees - I'm at a chess tournament - so forgive me if I'm unable to keep up with any replies. Ta.)
There are several arguments that can be made in favor of the "Germany was responsible for WWI" thesis. The weakest argument does, as you note, rely on a double standard, and pings the Germans for trying to muscle their way into the same perks of great power status that Britain and France enjoyed. (Alternatively, you could note that the rise of Germany threw off the balance of power politics that had kept things fairly stable through the 19th century. Which is true, but isn't really something you can blame Germany for.)
ReplyDeleteA stronger argument relies on the fact that their war plan in 1914 made mobilization equiavlent to invading Belgium and France. They couldn't do one without the other, and so there was no possibility for a diplomatic drawdown. Once tensions got the point where they wanted to mobilize, it meant war.
Which gets to the third argument, which is that the Germans were the ones who did, in fact, kick off the larger war by invading France. Maybe you think war was inevitable, but it was still the Germans that were the aggressors at the beginning of hostility.
I think Austria-Hungary gets off too easy in most of these arguments, since their intransigence vs. Serbia (and their decision to hold the entire country responsible for the assassination in the first place) was what really started things, and is the obvious point where a diplomatic solution could have easily averted the war.
I'd accept your arguments, but they are short-term arguments that neglect the wider picture, aren't they? Maybe of value historigraphically but the questions "who started it?" and "who was responsible" do always tend to have longer-term answers which are more muddled and less simple.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's necessary to think war was "inevitable" (it's not like it can be proven one way or the other, anyway) to be deeply sceptical or arguments that cast Germany as the bad guy.
Incidentally, is there any current thinking on the question "why didn't they negotiate a peace when it was obvious that hundres of thousands were being slaughtered", or is more effort still going into the atempt to rehabilitate Haig?
I know someone who set out to write a revisionist biography of Hague, and he hadn't got very far when he realised that there was no reputable revisionist case to make - the man was a monster.
ReplyDeleteWhere to start . . .
ReplyDeleteIt's possible to think that WW1 was a vicious imperialist crime, but also that _given this_ Haig and the other relevant generals fought it to the best of their ability, which was pretty high. Me, I think that the myth of army incompetence (for it is a myth) is largely there to cover up the nature of the war itself. Orwell wrote somewhere that the big question is whether or not the British ruling class is evil or stupid. The myth of the Somme implies stupid: the alternative, that they are evil, is rather less pleasant to contemplate.
That's why I did this:
http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/WorldWarOne.html
This view is not popular among left-wing circles. Both the stupid:
http://www.londonsocialisthistorians.org/newsletter/articles.pl/read/131
and the clever:
http://trenchfever.wordpress.com/2006/12/06/radio-gaga/ [comment 10]
tend to conflate the morality of the war and the way that it was fought. It's a fundamental attribution error thing, I think
Chris Williams
Ferguson is interesting on all this. He accepts that the war was Germany's doing, but argues that what made it a World War was Britain coming to France's aid. He blames that on Asquith and Lloyd George and says that their motive was to dish the Tories.
ReplyDeleteLike my own view of 1914, Ferguson's is a prisoner of his politics. The difference is that he pretends it's not.
ReplyDeleteChris Williams
John Gray perhaps?
ReplyDeleteQuentin Davies perhaps not?
Chris - there is, surely the question I ask, which is that why did they make so little effort to stop it when they could see what an enormous slaughter it was? Why did they just carry on in much the same way for so long? I think we can conflate the morality of the war and the way it was fought a little, can't we?
ReplyDeleteQuentin Davies was actually always one of the more intellectually impressive Tories - he was visibly the only one on the Treasury Select committee that Eddie George had any time for.
ReplyDelete