Robert E. Lee probably didn’t say ‘It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it’. But his great opponent, William Tecumseh Sherman, almost certainly did say: ’I am tired and sick of fighting –its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers. It is only those who have never heard a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.’

And a few years afterwards, to graduates of Michigan military academy: ‘I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here.

'Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!’

Sherman prosecuted war with merciless vigour and is nobody’s idea of a pacifist. I suspect him of believing (as Prussia’s elite military corps did) that the only mercy in war is a swift victory by one side or the other , an unpleasant truth especially hard to stomach if yours is the side that loses.

Almost all the people I have met who knew about war held opinions similar to Sherman’s. As a small boy, rather in love with war and its alleged glory, and as a callow youth, amoral about violence in what I thought was a good cause, I thought them soppy and foolish. And when, without meaning to , I blundered into the edges of a couple of war zones, and heard live firing for the first time, and saw corpses after bullets had passed through them, and dirty, overcrowded hospital wards full of wounded men, and buildings which had been hit by modern munitions, I very much took that view myself. I am not a pacifist. I believe war is sometimes necessary, mainly in self-defence - and I absolutely support the training and maintenance of strong and usable armed forces.

But if I by some chance I were an MP, and if I were asked to support a warlike policy, I would need to hear arguments far better than those advanced in Parliament yesterday. I am amazed at the strange enthusiasm which war still seems to produce in so many adults. I think it immature and naive. I suppose I must just be very lucky to have known the people I knew, and seen the things I have seen.

We’ve been over the arguments here quite thoroughly. Three things worth mentioning happened yesterday. One was the Prime Minister’s failed attempt to argue that Opposition to his policy was founded on disloyalty and so illegitimate.

Next was the pitiful parade of MPs who haltingly read out speeches which appeared to have been written for them by the Government whips, full of Whitehall jargon such as ‘ISIL’ (the later versions said ‘Daesh’) or talk of ‘degrading’ , used as a transitive verb, and containing the dud argument that , since we were already bombing Iraq, it was illogical not to bomb Syria. The problem with this supposed clincher is that there is still the irritating matter of national sovereignty. Iraq’s government, for all its faults, has invited us to bomb there. Syria’s government has not, and the legal basis for us to apply national armed force on someone else’s territory is non-existent, a simple point obscured by rhetoric and emotion.

One member, supporting war (I forget his name), had the nerve to quote Edmund Burke, making out that he owed a duty of consideration to his constituents, rather than a duty of obedience to them (they had written to him in overwhelming numbers, he admitted, urging him to oppose the action). He quoted the Dublin sage : ‘“Your representative…owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Quite so, but was this MP in fact acting in obedience to his own independent mind, or in obedience to the Executive? Contrast his action with that of the ever-thoughtful Tory Andrew Tyrie, as usual a beacon amid the gloom of third-rate rhetoric, who rejected an emotional reflex and pointed out that military action without a political strategy is folly.

There was much guff, too, about not being at the top table if we did not bomb. This was exploded by John Baron, one of the few Tories to distinguish himself (and an ex-soldier) who pointed out that China is at the top table on this issue, and has no intention of joining in any military action. If rash and silly bombing is our only ticket to this top table, then we are like the poor man trapped by pride into risking his home to stay at the roulette table in the casino. We shouldn’t be there in the first place.

I was interested to see what Dr Sarah Wollaston would have to say, since she is generally independent-minded, but fell into line rather early in the argument. Alas, she spoke much about atrocities, employing emotion rather than reason. She implied that bombing might reduce the risk of terror attacks in London, which I do not think is the government line. And then there was this : ’ This is the fascist war of our generation. We had to take action against fascism in Europe, and I think there is a compelling case for us to say that we have done everything we can today.’

The word ‘fascist, also popped up in the speech of the Barnsley Labour MP and former army officer, Dan Jarvis, who pronounced : ‘Daesh are the fascists of our time’. There was then some stuff about the War Cabinet of 1940 and labour’s role in the fight against Hitler.

I suppose this use of the term ‘fascist’ is the left-wing person’s version of invoking Churchill. I will come in a moment to Hilary Benn’s overpraised speech, but first I must ( as I always do on these occasions) quote George Orwell’s irresistible dismissal of the use of the word ‘fascist’, made in his unanswerable essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, written in 1946 (which you may read in full here, and which all should read, at least once a year) https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

What Orwell says is : ‘The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." ’

How right he is. Communists and their fellow-travellers, embarrassed about the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939-41, disliked the use of the word ‘Nazi’ as a boo-word, as it tended to remind people of their long and happy alliance with the Nazis. So Soviet and Communist (Comintern and Cominform) propaganda, from 1941 until the end of Communism, used the word ‘fascist’, first to describe all three Axis powers, also the Falangist government of Franco in Spain, and later to smear anyone who resisted them, including Trotskyists, who became ‘Trotsky-fascists’. Earlier on, during the mad period when German Communists refused to ally with democratic socialism to fight Hitler, the Moscow-backed German CP even referred to the German Social Democratic Party as ‘Social fascists’. In more recent years, it is just a general term of abuse, designed to dismiss, destroy and silence. Once the left have called anyone or anything 'fascist', they can stop thinking about that person or thing.

In fact it is very hard to find a way in which ‘fascism’ can be made to mean anything specific, once it is separated from its origin, Italian Fascism, itself a rather vague mish-mash of corporatism , thuggery and bombast. Mussolini, for instance, was not anti-Semitic to start with, had to be persuaded into passing anti-Jewish laws and was lax and unenthusiastic about enforcing them. He was also decreasingly keen on going to war. It was said that a refugee Jew, trapped in Europe, was safer under Italian Fascist rule than under Vichy French government. Japan was also free of Judophobia. Fascism and Imperial Japan also retained monarchy, whereas National Socialism was aggressively anti-monarchist, and was in returned disliked by monarchist aristocrats. There are strong differences, too, in attitudes towards religion and the Church. Franco’s Spain (utterly religious, uninterested in anti-Semitism, more in the tradition of old-fashioned southern European despotism than of any popular movement) also fails to conform to any precise model. If you start looking for outward signs, militaristic youth groups, huge rallies, flags, rearmament, indoctrination of children, one-party state, secret police, homicidal prison camps for opponents, rape of the rule of law, people's courts, rigged votes, censorship, undermining of family life etc, you will find that Stalin’s USSR (by no means free of informal anti-Semitism) might fall within the classification.

It is very hard to see anything specific that either Islamic State or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq have in common with 1930s nationalist despotisms in Europe. But the new leftist neocons, such as Nick Cohen made a great deal of Saddam’s alleged ‘fascism’ at the time of that war. Maybe it helped Hilary Benn support the Iraq invasion in 2003 ( as he did). In 2007, Mr Benn told the Guardian that he did not regret his support for the Iraq war, using a standard evasive Blairite formulation ‘’I don’t regret that Saddam is no longer in power’.



is this still true? Saddam was of course a monster, as one must say to avoid being falsely accused of fascism, but under his rule Iraq was a largely secular country in which women were emancipated and Shia-Sunni sectarianism comparatively controlled, though any signs of revolt among the majority Shias were ( as we know) savagely crushed. Were he still in power, there would be no Islamic State. Mr Benn claims to regard Islamic state as fascist. Are they more fascist, or less fascist, than Saddam? Wouldn’t leaving things alone in 2003 have left a lot of people better off, and alive rather than dead? Should a proper modesty cause Mr Benn to wonder whether this part of the world is the right place to let his conscience out to go for a run?

And it’s not really a matter of ‘regret’ , is it? If you personally supported government action to overthrow him from a high position, so helping to launch an enormous, costly and bloody war whose consequences still reverberate throughout the world, ‘not regretting’ the biggest political decision in your life is probably a rather weak conclusion.

Say, in the course of trying to catch a burglar, you had accidentally set fire to and destroyed your neighbour’s house, and the burglar’s corpse was later found in the ruins, among several other dead bodies, many of them of innocent persons, would it really be enough to say that you ‘did not regret the death of the burglar'?

Mr Benn’s speech on Wednesday night was similarly tricky. He greatly overstated the authority of the recent Security Council resolution, as all the pro-war speakers have done. I am genuinely unsure what the legal position of our forces in Syria is. There were (true) atrocity stories. These are never a guide to action in themselves. Alas, there are many other places on the planet where there are atrocities, injustices and outrages of one kind or another, about which we choose to do nothing. Some would say that many of them take place in the territory of our ally, Saudi Arabia.



Mr Benn also asserts, without the conclusive evidence for which I often ask, that the murders of Russian airline passengers, and those in Paris , and those in Beirut, Ankara and Suruc, can be linked directly to the Islamic State. Maybe they can. Maybe they will be, but are we not inclined to assume this rather readily, and should a Shadow Foreign Secretary be so undemanding in the quest for evidence, before helping to commit this country to military intervention in a Sovereign State which has not invited our presence?

Shockingly, Mr Benn said : ’… the House should look at how Daesh’s forward march has been halted in Iraq.’

Has it? Not really, except by the Kurds, who have of course been able to work alongside the US military in the choosing of targets. The Iraqi army remains a shambles and if it were not for the Shia militias, with whom we will not co-operate, Baghdad would be much more at risk. In Syria, where US airstrikes(and French airstrikes) have been taking place for some months, Islamic State is not in retreat, but has captured Palmyra. Could this have something to do with the fact that US and French forces, in Syria, refuse to co-operate with the Syrian Army which is fighting IS much harder than the Iraqi Army is fighting it in Iraq, and so lacks the information necessary to make its strikes effective. As far as I know, the RAF fliers over Syria will suffer the same problem. The recent reversals suffered by various anti-Assad groups in Syria (moderates to a man!) have, by contrast, followed close co-operation between the Syrian Army and the Russian Air Force.

Now we come to Mr Benn’s peroration;

Mr Benn again: ‘As a party we have always been defined by our internationalism. We believe we have a responsibility one to another. We never have and we never should walk by on the other side of the road.’

I am not sure exactly what this means. Keir Hardie and Ramsay Macdonald fiercely opposed entry into the Great War, though others ( as now) took the other view) . I do not know (does anyone?) if Labour in 1917 and 1918 opposed any intervention in Russia to crush the Bolsheviks, the Islamic state of their day. Many in the unions were certainly against such intervention, and halted ships intended to support such an intervention. Despite the careful cultivation of a myth to the contrary, Labour in the 1930s was largely a pacifist party, led until 1935 by an actual pacifist, George Lansbury, and voting against rearmament until 1939 because of fears that the weapons would be used against Moscow.

The Spanish Civil War, as Orwell rightly pointed out, rapidly solidified into a proxy war between Germany and the USSR, with the Communists committing atrocities and suppressing opponents in ways horribly similar to those of Franco’s Nazi and Fascist-backed troops. I have always had the impression that International Brigades were dominated by the Communist Party and its front organisations, not by democratic socialists such as the Labour Party. The British battalion was originally named after the Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala, though this never caught on, and one company was later named after Major Clement Attlee. I recall hearing years ago that he was rather embarrassed about this, yet he can be seen in this film welcoming the survivors home in 1938, and there is a glimpse of his name on a banner. But there is also film of Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist party of Great Britain, addressing the soldiers. Note the Red Front clenched fist salutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr4EMeSWLfg

It was Mr Benn who brought this up. I think it’s interesting that it was more complicated than those who rushed to join it thought at the time, and ended differently from the way most people thought or hoped it would. Interesting, by the way, to wonder what would have happened to Gibraltar after 1939 if Franco had lost and the pro-Soviet Popular Front had won, when Hitler and Stalin sealed their pact.

Labour successfully and rightly kept Britain out of the Vietnam war in the 1960s, which was walking by on the other side of the road, and ignoring the pleas of a close ally, if you like.

Mr Benn continued : ‘We are faced by fascists’

Not in any technical sense we aren’t. Islamic State, a straightforward theocracy, is not in any way the inheritor of National Socialism, which was pagan, and made frequent assaults on the Churches, or Italian fascism, which was on pretty good terms with Roman Catholicism but asserted state power when challenged. It originates in the Sharia law world in which Mosque and State are already intertwined. It does not directly threaten our rule over our own islands, our economy, our trade, our military or political integrity. It is an enemy, but it is not the same kind of enemy as Nazi Germany was, and the historical and military parallels are emotional, not rational.

‘—not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this Chamber tonight and all the people we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy—the means by which we will make our decision tonight—in contempt.’

This is probably true, though our democracy is not working especially well, given the great mismatch between the Commons vote last night and the known views of the electorate. Given the views of the people Mr Benn and his colleagues represent, were Mr Benn and his colleagues perhaps a little contemptuous of their voters last night? If he is going to use this sort of exalted language, I think Mr Benn has to measure himself by the same high standards with which he measures others. Maybe Parliament has no duty to follow the wishes of its electors. But in that case don't go on about how democratic you are.

Then there is : ‘What we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated’

And yet, how many regimes with which the government to which Mr Benn belonged, and the Coalition and the current Tory government do business might be regarded as ‘fascist’ according to the vague definition we can extract from the word, as Mr Benn uses it? Have all such regimes been ‘defeated’? Has the ‘fascism’ (quite arguable) of the Provisional IRA been defeated? Is our policy in the Middle East or Central Asia or the Far East to bomb, defeat or boycott every despotism? Not a bit of it. Once again we are in the land of claptrap, which as readers will know, means verbiage designed to trigger applause in a gullible audience.









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