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HAVE WE FORGOTTEN WHY WE FOUGHT IN WORLD WAR TWO?
August 27,2009
By Leo McKinstry
ON the eve of the Battle of Britain in 1940, when the fate of our nation hung in balance, Spit- fire pilot Bill Millington wrote to his parents, “Being British, I am proud of my country and its peoples, proud to serve under the Union Jack and regard it as an Englishman’s privilege to fight for all those things that make life worth living: freedom, honour and fair play.”
Like so many in the RAF, Millington made the ultimate sacrifice in the heroic, victorious struggle against the Luftwaffe, as his plane was shot down over the southern coast. Yet his words beautifully encapsulate the spirit of patriotism that galvanised the British people during the Second World War.
It was the same deep love of our island home which inspired the soaring rhetoric of Winston Churchill, drove men to fight on the beaches of normandy and the deserts of north Africa, compelled exhausted bomber crews to fly on missions for night after night over Germany, and enabled the British public to survive the Blitz so stoically.
Patriotism is one of man-kind’s most noble ideals, an extension of the natural loyalty we feel to our families, friends and neighbourhood. In its highest form, it requires us to lay down our lives to protect others, just as a devoted husband might risk all to defend his wife or children.
Patriotism is one of man-kind’s most noble ideals, an extension of the natural loyalty we feel to our families, friends and neighbourhood. In its highest form, it requires us to lay down our lives to protect others, just as a devoted husband might risk all to defend his wife or children.
But in our modern age, patriotism is despised rather than admired. For the Marxist ideologues who now run Britain, love of country is a vice, not a virtue. As a result we are now encouraged to learn entirely the wrong lessons from the Second World War. Instead of being presented as a magnificent defence of our native land against a savage aggressor, the conflict is now portrayed as a triumph for the forces of political correctness against right-wing extremism.
In this warped narrative the Second World War has been transformed into a gigantic crusade against xenophobia, while our soldiers, sailors and airmen are regarded as armed outreach workers in a vast anti- racism project. It is a bizarre paradox of our times that, thanks to the predominance of multi-cultural dogma, the patriotic instinct that led to national salvation in 1945 is now treated as a thought crime.
The sense of unifying national identity that once motivated millions of Britons to defend their homeland is held to be suspect by a political elite obsessed with cultural diversity. We are told that opposition to mass immigration is the equivalent of siding with the Nazis.
Next month marks the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, which sparked the Second World War. In fact, Adolf Hitler had originally planned to begin the inva- sion on August 26, 1939, but at the last minute had hesitated, partly because of British and French guarantees to support the integrity of Poland, and partly because of the decision of Mussolini’s Italian fascist regime to remain neutral.
As it turned out, when Germany attacked on Septem- ber 1, Britain did precious little to come to Poland’s aid. It was only after the nazis advanced through western Europe in May 1940 that Britain, under the new leadership of Winston Churchill, began to fight in earnest. But the vigour of 1940, compared to the lassitude of 1939, proves that the war was really about national defence, not an ideological campaign.
It is impossible to imagine the Britain of 2009 enjoying the same sense of patriotic cohesion that existed in 1940 if our very existence came under threat. In official circles, the concept of Britishness is a source of embarrassment and shame. We are a nation whose sovereignty has been surrendered to Brussels and whose unity has been destroyed by the collapse of our borders.
The Second World War has been dragooned into service by the political zealots as a battering ram against our national identity. The Government’s own educational quango, the Qualifica- tions and Curriculum Authority, boasts that history teaching should be a tool for “valuing diversity and challenging racism” by gaining insights “into issues around human rights, equality and migration.”
Every museum related to the Second World War focuses obsessively on the role of ethnic minorities in the conflict, every EU bureaucrat stresses the importance of the European integration as a means of overcoming dangerous nationalist sentiments. One perverse aspect of this modern rewriting of history is the reluctance to blame Germany for the Second World War. All the blame is heaped on Hitler and the Nazis, while the German nation is exonerated.
In this warped narrative the Second World War has been transformed into a gigantic crusade against xenophobia, while our soldiers, sailors and airmen are regarded as armed outreach workers in a vast anti- racism project. It is a bizarre paradox of our times that, thanks to the predominance of multi-cultural dogma, the patriotic instinct that led to national salvation in 1945 is now treated as a thought crime.
The sense of unifying national identity that once motivated millions of Britons to defend their homeland is held to be suspect by a political elite obsessed with cultural diversity. We are told that opposition to mass immigration is the equivalent of siding with the Nazis.
Next month marks the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, which sparked the Second World War. In fact, Adolf Hitler had originally planned to begin the inva- sion on August 26, 1939, but at the last minute had hesitated, partly because of British and French guarantees to support the integrity of Poland, and partly because of the decision of Mussolini’s Italian fascist regime to remain neutral.
As it turned out, when Germany attacked on Septem- ber 1, Britain did precious little to come to Poland’s aid. It was only after the nazis advanced through western Europe in May 1940 that Britain, under the new leadership of Winston Churchill, began to fight in earnest. But the vigour of 1940, compared to the lassitude of 1939, proves that the war was really about national defence, not an ideological campaign.
It is impossible to imagine the Britain of 2009 enjoying the same sense of patriotic cohesion that existed in 1940 if our very existence came under threat. In official circles, the concept of Britishness is a source of embarrassment and shame. We are a nation whose sovereignty has been surrendered to Brussels and whose unity has been destroyed by the collapse of our borders.
The Second World War has been dragooned into service by the political zealots as a battering ram against our national identity. The Government’s own educational quango, the Qualifica- tions and Curriculum Authority, boasts that history teaching should be a tool for “valuing diversity and challenging racism” by gaining insights “into issues around human rights, equality and migration.”
Every museum related to the Second World War focuses obsessively on the role of ethnic minorities in the conflict, every EU bureaucrat stresses the importance of the European integration as a means of overcoming dangerous nationalist sentiments. One perverse aspect of this modern rewriting of history is the reluctance to blame Germany for the Second World War. All the blame is heaped on Hitler and the Nazis, while the German nation is exonerated.
In truth, it was the Germans who voted Hitler into power, who eagerly supported the war in its early years, and who ferociously resisted the Allies right until May 1945. Nazism could never have flourished without German enthusiasm for this vile creed, something that is now airbrushed from history in the drive to create a United States of Europe. The supreme irony is that we fought in 1940 to defend our national independence from German aggression, yet almost 70 years later we are now sub-sumed within a German-dominated continental bureaucracy.
I recently spoke to a D-Day veteran from the West Mid- lands. With anger and regret, he told me that he did not fight in order to end up as an alien in his own country. Even more insulting, he said, was being told by politicians that the destruction of his society was the ideal for which he had gone into battle. His despair shows how deep has been the betrayal of his brave generation of patriots.
