The Twilight Years, Part VIII

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

This is the final post in our series on Britain during the Inter-War years, which interacts with Richard Overy's recent history of the period.

Overy concludes his work on Britain in the Inter-War years (Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars [New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009]) by focusing once again upon the gathering clouds of war, as 1939 approached. The chapter is entitled “Voyage of the 'Death Ship'”. He makes the point that the prevailing pessimism of the age made it seem as if another war-to-end-all-wars was inevitable. Ironically that belief made the matter itself far more likely.

The discourse on war defined the nature of future conflict not as limited police actions or small-scale intervention but always in millennial language. This meant that any crisis faced by the British public in the latter half of the decade would be interpreted in the most acute terms, and bound the idea of war indissolubly with the fate of the world rather than with short-term political or territorial readjustment.

The result was a complex and shifting relationship between ideas of peace, war and civilization which eventually locked both politicians and public into an existential dead end in which the civilized world was faced with the real prospect of a destructive war that no one wanted but everyone talked about. It is against this background that the international dramas of the last years of peace were played out.” (Overy, p. 319)

Note that the dominant apocalyptic “end of civilization and of the modern world” discourse paralyzed the nation, stopping it from prudent preparations for national defence. To take such serious steps would have been tantamount to willing participation in the destruction of the world, and had to be avoided at all costs. Only a madman would want to engage in such a thing--or so the dominant discourse ran.

It was this immobilising paralysis which fuelled the strong and popular pacifist movements of the period, and which ironically made war almost inevitable. Contrast this with the Swiss who had armed and trained to the point that they could deploy a marksman behind every tree. The Swiss avoided the war by implicit and explicit armed force, as the Second World War raged all around them; Britain, while being geographically far farther removed from the original seat of conflict, became ineluctably sucked in. Being militarily weak, it came to believe it had to join with allies against Hitler before it was too late for everyone. It was its prevailing apocalyptic pessimism which had made it so. Britain believed it was sailing on a death ship, and worked unconsciously to make its fears come true.

Ironically, in the end, as pacifism waned before the growing threat of a war to come, Britain decided that it had to enter the war because civilization itself was at risk. The perceived apocalyptic nature of the threat meant that non-participation was not an option. We note that the threat of the Soviet Union to “civilization” was not deemed equally serious at the time. Yet the reality is that the parallels between Hitler and Stalin are extraordinarily eerie, as Overy himself has demonstrated in his book, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

In the end, the British public capitulated and accepted war as inevitable.

This fatalism had much to do with Hitler who was demonized as the agent of destruction, but the sense of certainty that war was coming and the futility of opposing it any longer derived from a popular discourse that saw war for all its arbitrary destructiveness as a possible means to resolve not just narrow issues of foreign policy but other issues to do with the political future and the progress of European civilization . . . (Overy, p.348)

War was now deemed "worth it", because the stakes were so high.

These sentiments, mawkish as they now sound, were essential for many of those who made the passage to war because they could only accept it if the historical justification appeared sufficiently profound to transcend the terrible costs of the conflict (Ibid)

The account by Overy of a pervasive pessimism in Britain in the Inter-War years, leading to self-fulfilling prophecies of extreme “solutions” justified by an abiding view of a coming chiliastic war between light and darkness is a cautionary tale. With fulminations against climate change sceptics being morally equivalent to Holocaust deniers ringing in our ears, we realise that things have not changed much.

But it does serve to highlight the profound differences between Belief and Unbelief on these matters. Christians remain profoundly pessimistic about the future of Unbelief and the civilizations upon which it is built. But, at the same time, Christians are profoundly optimistic for the future, since the kingdoms of this world are being made the Kingdom and realm of the Christ.

Moreover, Christians are not naively simplistic. The evils of Unbelief's culture are not univocal, but legion—in every place, complex, interwoven, interlocking and mutually dependant. The culture of Unbelief, like all human culture, is not thin but thick. The changes which our Lord is bringing to pass are likewise complex, profound, interlocking, gradual, as yeast gradually insinuates into the dough and leavens the loaf. We do not look for “the one Ring” to solve all problems and make all changes by brute, radical instruments. That way is always the way of the Enemy. It speaks of its war(s) to save civilization; its war(s) on poverty; its war(s) against injustice; its war(s) upon ignorance; its war(s) against terrorism; and its war(s) to establish and defend human rights.

But as the Kingdom comes, His yoke ever remains gentle and His burden light. This is a divine imperialism which brings laughter as His Kingdom transpires in human history. It establishes the only civilization that will last forever. While it may experience reversals and declensions from time to time, nothing can bring it to an end, nor destroy it. For the Divine civiliser holds everything in His hands, and commands every atom, every quark and all other realities in creation. So gradually all His enemies are placed under His feet.