Blood, Class and Empire Read online

  It was in reaction to British and French perfidy in such instances as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which clearly revealed the First World War to be an imperialist war, that President Woodrow Wilson was compelled to announce his “Fourteen Points” concerning national self-determination. It was actually the Bolshevik Revolution that caused the publication of these “secret treaties” and which dispelled forever the aura of lofty and disinterested diplomacy. The Wilsonian moment, and its successor moments in the campaign for the League of Nations, the Atlantic Charter, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, has long attracted the scorn of those—beginning with Rudyard Kipling (see pages 78-80)—who see a pharisaic veil being draped over the ugly figure of superpower ambition. Not just the element of hypocrisy, but also the element of hubris, is obviously present at these deliberations. Great powers are not altruists, to begin with. And even Professor Kennedy might wonder if he had overstated his revised case, at a time when even official circles in Washington are wondering aloud if the forces of the American empire are not being stretched too tightly and too thin, in lands where they have more military than cultural influence. Has it not also become obvious that thermonuclear weapons, once a central pillar of the “special relationship,” are more than ever obsolete as well as hateful, while the “war on drugs” is merely another name for the colonialism that once waged Opium Wars? Now more than ever is a time to be selective and discriminating about resources as well as methods.

  I closed the original version of this book, at a time when I hoped the long Cold War might also be closing, with the pious thought of “a world without conquerors.” I was aware even then that this was a slightly sanctimonious ending. Anglo-Americanism has some attainments to its credit. The English language has become a lingua franca, in India and Africa and elsewhere, not because of its association with empire, but because of its flexibility and capacity for assimilation (and because of the extraordinary literature, more and more of it written by Asians and other former “subjects,” with which it is associated). It is the tongue both of the Internet and of air-traffic control. One of Nelson Mandela’s first actions as President of a liberated South Africa was to reattach his martyred country to the British Commonwealth. English is also the language of the English Revolution and of its descendant, the American Revolution of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and of the documents in which the doctrine of human rights has become, at least on paper, universalized. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the atrophy or discredit of the Chinese and Cuban ones, the ideas of this revolution are the only valid ones remaining. In other words, one aspires to conquests made by ideas and values, not nations. The fight to make these ideas and values symmetrical with the demands of combat, in a clash not of civilizations but about civilization, will be the great task of those who hope to learn anything from history.

  CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  Washington, D.C.

  October 21, 2003 (Trafalgar Day)

  BLOOD, CLASS AND EMPIRE

  Introduction

  In the United States, it is considered extremely insulting to say of somebody that he or she is “history.” To be told “You’re history” is to be condemned as a has-been. I know of no other country that has this everyday dismissal in its idiom. But then, I know of no other country that has such a great weakness for things that originate in England—the has-been country par excellence. (A British person, seeking to be extremely self-deprecating about something in his or her own past, might say modestly and dismissively, “But that’s all ancient history.” I trust the distinction is plain.)

  In fact, no nation can quite do without a stock of historical and mythical and semi-literary reference, and the United States is anything but an exception. It has a powerful need for evocations of grandeur, which makes it the more noticeable that, when reaching for such necessary evocations, it so often ignores its own past and letters. On a surprising number of occasions, the preferred imagery is derived from England, and from the British Empire. Often, those who deal in this rhetoric are public figures who dare not risk an obscure or a confusing allusion, and who presumably have reason to think (if only because their advisers tell them so) that these points of reference are familiar and customary. Even as I was writing this book, on these themes, my attention was caught by a bizarre little exchange in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. On December 9, 1986, I was following the first public appearance made by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who was in the process of igniting a huge national debate about secret government, overseas intervention, American will, and—descending abruptly to bathos—his own decision to plead the Fifth Amendment. Two California congressmen, Robert Dornan and Mervyn Dymally, had a verbal exchange as North was completing his bombastic and contradictory testimony. His own voice almost as gravid with emotion as North’s had been, Congressman Dornan hailed the errant soldier:

  Then I have just one observation. Almost a century ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote a rather tragic poem about the ingratitude of all peoples toward their military forces in time of peacetime, and I will just paraphrase the first of six lines: “He is Ollie this and he is Ollie that. Get him out of here, the brute. But he is the savior of his country when the guns begin to shoot.” Thank you for your service, Colonel North.

  MR. DYMALLY: Will the gentleman yield?

  MR. DORNAN: I will be glad to yield.

  MR. DYMALLY: There is another line: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow the night, the day thou canst be false to any man.”

  The fascinating thing about both these impromptu West Coast interjections (Representative Dornan, a farouche Orange County right-winger, may have polished his a little beforehand) was not the mangling of the quotations but the relative accuracy with which they were rendered. True,~Kipling’s “Tommy”—though no tragedy—is one of his better-known doggerels, and not even Allan Bloom would claim that Polonius is no longer taught in schools. But it seemed automatic for these two legislators to reach for these tags when debating about matters of empire, war, and destiny. This is a supreme, if oblique, compliment to the depth at which the so-called special relationship between the two countries and cultures operates and obtains.

  Although it is expressed in idealistic terms and based upon a carefully cleansed reading of “history,” this relationship is really at bottom a transmission belt by which British conservative ideas have infected America, the better to be retransmitted to England. The process of transmission has been made easier, admittedly, by those Americans who are themselves receptive to the temptations of thinking with the blood, or the temptations of empire, or the temptations of class and caste superiority. But it was always in the British mind to press these ideas upon them. If you want to know what, and how, people really think, then catch them talking in private during wartime. Here is what British Security Coordination, the special organ of Winston Churchill and Sir William Stephenson (“The Man Called Intrepid”), wrote in its secret history of the campaign to mold American thinking between 1939 and 1945:

  In planning its campaign, it was necessary for BSC to remember the simple truth that the United States, a sovereign entity of comparatively recent birth, is inhabited by people of many conflicting races, interests and creeds. These people, though fully conscious of their wealth and power in the aggregate, are still unsure of themselves individually, still basically on the defensive and still striving, as yet unavailingly but very defiantly, after national unity and indeed after some logical grounds for considering themselves a nation in the racial sense.

  British self-confidence about American vulnerability on these scores was based on a careful appreciation of “history” and upon the old and trusted verities of blood—the very tie they had been exploiting since Kipling. With the advantage of ethnic solidarity and homogeneity, and with an instinct for social hierarchy and “the right people,” the British Establishment was enabled to fight at far beyond its own weight, and to behave for some time as if it controlled a much larger country
than it really did.

  But, having inculcated imperial habits and disciplines into their larger, clumsier cousin, the British had in time to accept that they, too, could be manipulated. The self-congratulatory tone of BSC in the 1940s is matched if not surpassed by another secret memorandum, this one from the 1960s. It is Richard Neustadt’s report to President Lyndon Johnson, written in July 1964, about the possibility of taming and domesticating an incoming British Labor government. Neustadt had been talking to the right people in London, and knew his Harold Wilson. He proposed some intensive ego-stroking on a forthcoming Washington visit that Wilson was to pay:

  Numbers of things can be done on the cheap to avoid shocking his sensibilities. For one, the President might ask for his advice on a short list of replacements for David Bruce. For another, Averell Harriman might figure prominently among his hosts. . . . It will be worth our while to ease the path for Wilson, pay him a good price.

  It is amusing and ironic to see an American plan to use the embrace of American aristocracy—the Bruce-Harriman Georgetown network—to captivate an untutored British politician. But such is the nature of the special relationship. Nor was this all. Emulating the British tactic with America, Neustadt proposed to his President that use be made of domestic British sympathizers. As he boasted:

  What follows has been drawn from conversations with politicians (mainly Wilson, Gordon Walker, Healey, Brown, Mulley, Jenkins—and Heath), with officials (mainly Hardman, Cary, Palliser, Armstrong, Bligh) and with spectators (mainly Gwynne-Jones, Buchan, Beedham, Duchene). Before I left, I swapped appraisals at our Embassy with Bruce, Irving and Newman.

  Neustadt here demonstrated a very shrewd knowledge of the inside track that runs between the Foreign Office, The Economist, the stately home think-tank at Ditchley Park, and Grosvenor Square. Since the central matter was the securing of continued British conformity with American nuclear policy, it was essential for Neustadt to be exact. In fact, he was well equipped by these conversations to be prescient. Noting that Wilson wanted to be viewed in his own Cabinet as “first brains-truster on the model, he says, of JFK,” he minuted:

  When officials get their hands on the new Ministers, Foreign Office briefs presumably will urge affirmative response to us (assuming we stand firm) and then hard bargaining about terms and conditions. Assuming Gordon Walker is the Foreign Secretary (he almost certainly will be) I expect he will submit with little struggle. . . . Assuming Denis Healey is Defense Secretary (he seems confident he will be), his own interest in a mission East of Suez (and in sales of British aircraft), his mistrust of continentals, his disdain for MLF, comport well with the bulk of these official views.

  Seeking to massage British pride over the loss of sovereignty in nuclear matters, Neustadt first stressed the main point, which was that there could be talk of Atlantic consultation on strategy and policy “up to the final decision on the trigger, which is yours and must remain so.” Having thus reassured LBJ, he suggested some easy reassurance to the Brits: “some symbols both for public satisfaction and for Gordon Walker’s amour propre (to say nothing of Wilson’s). Symbolically, if there are British colonels now at Omaha, could we have them ostentatiously replaced by generals?”

  At one level, this is ordinary Washington “bottom line” talk. At another, though, it is the distilled essence of a “special relationship” that has been built up in an ad hoc fashion to suit the needs— sometimes contrasting, sometimes harmonious—of two elites. The hypocrisies of this marriage of convenience have often been occluded, at least partially, by an apparent cultural and linguistic familiarity. (Even Neustadt employed Kipling’s famous phrase “East of Suez” as if it were natural to him.) This is evident whether one is considering—as I shall be—the relationship in its thermonuclear, its racial, its imperial, its espionage, or its poetic aspects. The rituals of Anglo-Americanism and Anglo-Saxondom, so often unexamined, reveal the subtext of this mutual manipulation, and suggest that the English connection has been used to seduce and corrupt America, the better to suborn itself. This is “history,” and not all that ancient either.

  On a smoggy evening in the spring of 1989, I found myself standing under the palms of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, outside the ornate ugliness of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. This was one of many incongruous locations where I had pondered the question: What is it that explains the special place occupied by Englishness in the American imagination? That evening, Ronald Reagan was due to receive the Winston Churchill Award at the hands of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and the consort to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The master of ceremonies was to be Bob Hope, assisted by Rosemary Clooney. In this labyrinth of clashing images, I hoped to find a few intelligible threads.

  The Beverly Hilton is owned by Merv Griffin, and its ballroom was for years the setting of the Academy Awards dinner. At first, the evening looks like any other tuxedoed rally of California show biz, with the paparazzi shouting questions at celebrities from behind a police line. But tonight, when these celebrities reply automatically that they are “excited,” they are replying to a different question. Here comes Marvin Davis, head of 20th Century-Fox and, if not a big noise in the oil industry, certainly a very loud report. When he tells the boys he’s “wild about it,” it’s because they have asked him: “How does it feel to be dining with Royalty?” Of course, by “Royalty” the celebrity-hardened Los Angeles reporters could mean Princess Caroline of Monaco, or some princeling of the Gulf whose tankers bear the American flag, or King Juan Carlos of Spain. But there is an unspoken capital R which comes with British Royalty; the cachet of the real thing. Combine this with the evergreen and potent name of Churchill, and you have blue-chip Anglo-Americanism on its highest deportment.

  There is a deal of received wisdom about this blue-chip status, which derives itself from solemn and sound observations about the common blood, common language, shared history, and recognizably similar institutions that span the Atlantic and the years. This, preeminently, is to be an evening of reaffirmed speechifying along such well-established lines. The Churchill Foundation, a coalition of American businessmen which is hosting this weighty soirée, is only one part of a nexus of scholarships, trusts, foundations, and institutions devoted to the care and feeding of what the British— but no longer the Americans—are still given to calling the “special relationship.” An educated American knows, when prompted, that his country’s “oldest ally” is France. Many Americans, if given a word-association test for “special relationship,” would probably reply “Israel.” Yet there is something to the texture of mixed affections and impressions, summarized in the frequent use of the phrase “the Old Country,” or even, in sentimental moments, “the Mother Country,” that reserves the British a singular place.

  For one of the many mutations of this Anglo-Americanism, one need search no further than the Beverly Hilton’s bar. On a ground floor, only a few yards from the neon and deco of Wilshire Boulevard, and wisely screened from all natural light, one discovers the Red Lion. Here, the simulacrum of an English country pub or “snug” has been lovingly faked. In the bogus grate burns a phony, heatless log fire. Beer pumps draw up franchised, tasteless American lagers with German names. Unconvincing paneling combines with rounded and “aged” wooden tables and chairs to sham the dingy atmosphere of a “Dickensian” alehouse as shown off to willing American tourists. (Eight time-zone hours ahead, in London, any pub with a trace of Sam Weller or Mr. Pickwick is being hurriedly converted into an L.A.-style cocktail bar.)

  There are pubs like this, often in airport terminals for some reason, that demonstrate the strength of British traditional imagery all over America. The word “tradition” is in fact the key to an appreciation of Brit kitsch. Evelyn Waugh, on an earlier exploration of the special relationship and its Los Angeles dimension, did very well with the Church of St. Peter-Without-the-Walls, created by the visionary Dr. Kenworthy to lend tone to his Whispering Glades burial plaza:

  For this is more than a replica, it is
a reconstruction. A building-again of what those old craftsmen sought to do with their rude implements of by-gone ages. Time has worked its mischief on the beautiful original. Here you see it as the first builders dreamed of it long ago.

  Later dreamers have improved on Dr. Kenworthy, by importing the Queen Mary and London Bridge to American climes.

  Quitting the Red Lion for the ballroom is exchanging a poor microcosm of Anglo-American fellowship for the full-dress reproduction of all its most distinctive features. The ceremonial part of the dinner begins with Walter Annenberg, former Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and formerly indicted newspaper tycoon, giving the toast to the House of Windsor. With unusual unction and deference, he insists on giving it the full title of “The Loyal Toast”; a mark of etiquette which would make him appear ostentatious even among English royalists. In reply, Prince Philip proposes the health of the President of the United States.