Maurice Cowling: 1926 - 2005

Posted by friedrich braun on August 26, 2005, 10:08 AM | #

Geoff,

I you like WW II history and the (British) political intrigues that led to it, you could hardly do better than read:

Churchill: the End of Glory by Prof. John Charmley

The Forced War by Prof. David Leslie Hoggan

http://www.revisionists.com/revisionists/hoggan.html

The Forced War in particular is worth its weight in gold.

Britain decision to be the self-proclaimed arbiter of Germany’s Eastern borders is one of the strangest decisions of the 20th Century, insofar as British meddling signaled a break with Britain’s traditionally cool and levelheaded foreign policy.

Posted by Guessedworker on August 26, 2005, 11:30 AM | #

Friedrich,

Our policy was always to maintain the European balance of power, which meant siding with whichever of the two principle European powers was the weaker.  The guarantees provided against German expansion eastward were entirely in accord with that.  The pity is that Hitler never sought an alliance with France and Britain against westward expansion by the Soviet Union, which would have provided him with elbow room to pursue action against Jewish communist subversion at home. But Nazism was always fixated by the deadly confabulation of living space and German destiny to the east.

For the triumph of that myth we are denied recourse to our fathers’ loyalty to kin - essentially, we are denied kinship to our children and their children in all matters of nation, race and politics.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on August 26, 2005, 12:09 PM | #

I hadn’t seen the Cowling article before; it looks spot on to me.  In fairness, 1930s diplomacy was tricky, there weren’t a lot of good alternatives (other than not alienating Musso in 1935-6.)

The real disaster was British foreign policy in 1900-14, which allied us with crazed Franch revanchism, and fed the Kaiser’s paranoid nightmare about encirclement—after 1907 he WAS encircled.

The pre-1914 world had a lot of very pleasant geopolitical characteristics that we’ve totally lost today, and a 20th Century without WWI would have put us in a very different and much pleasanter place. Britain would have given India independence, for example, but not just have handed it to the Congress party, while Africa would be moving to independence only about now, on the basis of sound economies and conservative local leaderships.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on August 26, 2005, 04:14 PM | #

I agree with Martin:  had World War I not happened—and specifically, had Woodrow Wilson kept out of the war, out of Versailles, and out of the League of Nations, the Twentieth Century wouldn’t have happened.  La Belle Époque would’ve continued on its merry way without “the lights going out all over Europe and not being lit again in anyone’s lifetime.” 

Question:  Why exactly did Woodrow Wilson’s government demand the abdication of the Kaiser and the transformation Germany into a republic?  Just what or who, exactly, was behind that unbelievably atrocious bit of “statecraft”?  I don’t mean the official version—“To make the world safe for democracy” and all that swill.  I mean the real behind-the-scenes motivation for it.

Posted by Geoff Beck on August 26, 2005, 04:16 PM | #

Martin,

I grew up learning the area now called the UK was named Great Britain.

Was there a name change at some place in time?

Posted by Geoff Beck on August 26, 2005, 04:24 PM | #

Fred,

I highly recommend reading Thomas Fleming’s The Illusion of Victory and Paris 1919 : Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan.

The Motivations of Woodrow Wilson are in some respects very simple: he was a progressive ideologue with a unshakable sense of self-righteousness, and he swallowed whole the idea that Democracy is a deterministic force destined to replace the order established at the Concert of Vienna.

What is not talked about in either book is the financial and banking interests that lobbied Wilson to get into the war. In many ways the cabal behind Bush is the same cabal behind Wilson back in 1917.

Posted by Geoff Beck on August 26, 2005, 05:12 PM | #

Another obit from the Telegraph:

Cowling argued that liberalism as a political creed was not about freedom and choice, but about intolerance and priggery. He regarded it as his life’s work to subvert what he called the “rancid solemnities” of the post-war liberal consensus and its intellectual antecedents.

In Mill and Liberalism (1963) he argued that the true intention of the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill was to impose a secular religion to replace Christianity and that, far from his being an apostle of liberty, Mill’s real aim was totalitarian - to use the state to force-feed everyone with the dictates of an elitist secular morality.

Cowling’s analysis provoked outrage among Mill’s defenders and among liberal intellectuals…

Posted by friedrich braun on August 27, 2005, 05:35 AM | #

“Our policy was always to maintain the European balance of power, which meant siding with whichever of the two principle European powers was the weaker.  The guarantees provided against German expansion eastward were entirely in accord with that.”

The so-called British “balance of power” policy was even completely obsolete by the 1930’s. What made it obsolete, among other things, was the triumph of Judeo-Bolshevism in the East.

“The pity is that Hitler never sought an alliance with France and Britain against westward expansion by the Soviet Union, which would have provided him with elbow room to pursue action against Jewish communist subversion at home.”

This isn’t historically accurate. Hitler sought an alliance with the West (especially with Britain) against the Soviet Union on numerous occasions, always to no avail. In this instance, it’s rather difficult to lay the blame on Hitler. Britain erroneously viewed Germany as a greater threat to her interests than the Soviet Union.

“But Nazism was always fixated by the deadly confabulation of living space and German destiny to the east.”

While I agree that Hitler should’ve stopped after reclaiming the Sudetenland. I don’t see what’s wrong with wanting to acquire “Living Space” for your folk per se. The British were always very good at precisely doing that all over the world. Unfortunately, the Germans never had Britons’ expertise and finesse in that sort of enterprise.

Posted by friedrich braun on August 27, 2005, 05:58 AM | #

GW,

Here’s another little review written by Dr. Sean Gabb that makes several good points. Although he doesn’t have a clue about the nature of National Socialist (really Dr. Hjalmar Schacht’s) economics. I have to smile when I read a Libertarian dubbing anyone else’s economic policies as “insane.”

Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War
Frank McDonagh

http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc099.htm

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on August 27, 2005, 08:41 AM | #

The Gabb piece is also pretty good.  For one thing it comes close to recognizing the remarkable achievement of Neville Chamberlain in restoring the British economy and keeping Keynes well away from the levers of power.

Posted by JB on August 29, 2005, 11:03 PM | #

GuessedWorker:
“The pity is that Hitler never sought an alliance with France and Britain against westward expansion by the Soviet Union”

but why do you think Britain didn’t declare war on the USSR when it invaded the other half of Poland ?

Posted by friedrich braun on August 31, 2005, 09:46 AM | #

“but why do you think Britain didn’t declare war on the USSR when it invaded the other half of Poland ?”

Britain’s blank cheque to the Polish colonels-thugs (Poland was a military dictatorship in the 20’s and 30’s, so much for the pious rhetoric that the war was fough for “freedom” and “democracy”) in the form of guarantees was given only against a German attack - this was done even though Poles regarded the Soviet Union as a greater threat to her indepence. In sum, the British didn’t seem to mind so much a Bolshevik expansion into Central Europe.