“Germany’s postwar inoculation against far-right extremism has been on the wane for over a decade and, on Sunday [6th September], it finally gave up. Voters in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt embraced the Alternative for Germany to an unprecedented extent: it won 44 per cent support on a record turn out of 76 per cent”.
That was how the Irish Times (the British newspaper for Ireland which was installed as Ireland’s national newspaper by Fianna Fail) saw things on September 7th. Two weeks later, in another election, this time at Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the situation got so much more extreme that the Irish Times did not comment at all!
The ‘inoculating’ of the Germans against being German ended a long time ago!
Inoculation, as far as we can understand it, involves being given a mild dose of the disease in order to stimulate resistance to it. Leaving aside the question of whether that figure of speech was ever appropriate to the German situation, the inoculation was supplied by the Christian Social wing of the Christian Democratic Union [CDU]. It maintained a degree of continuity with the historic past—the past which ended in May 1945.
After May 1945 it became a past which was ruled out of order as a subject of thought. But for the next generation it was a forbidden past—but a past in which most Germans had lived.
The Christian Democratic movement, which was rooted in history and orientated by Papal Encyclicals, was the continuous social force, connecting past and present, which enabled an easy transition to be made from the past to the present. It had been a widespread force of passive resistance during the National Socialist period, having opposed both the ultra-democratic capitalist freedom of the Weimar democracy, and National Socialism—both before and after 1933.
The first newspaper to be shut down in 1933, and its Editor imprisoned, was a Catholic paper. Christian Democracy had been pioneered before 1933 by the first post-1945 Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, when he was Mayor of Cologne. Adenauer had refused to become Chancellor in that period because his policies could not be put into effect in the Weimar flux.
In 1945 he emerged from the monastery—or convent—in which he had taken refuge, and constructed the CDU as a party with democratic credentials which could construct a regime to take over from National Socialism without fostering revolutionary chaos.
His major object at the start was, in the interest of political stability, to prevent Britain from regaining the influence on German affairs that it had in 1919. He had seen British influence at work in the 1920s, generating disorder by means of Anglophile social democracy. In 1945, under the shelter of American dominance, he warded off British intervention and constructed a viable system that had enough in common with the system it was replacing to serve as what the Irish Times calls “inoculation”.
Britain was mystified by this development. Emerging from inoculating Puritanism into Economic Determinism, it could only see Christian Democracy as a relapse into mediaevalism. Europe, in its Christian Democratic form, escaped from the British spell, and formed itself into a unity against which the balance-of-power game could not be played.
Britain then applied itself to breaking up the European structure made by Adenauer, De Gasperi and De Gaulle. It gained entry into it for that purpose in 1972. Then, after about 20 years, it succeeded in breaking up Christian Democracy—depriving it of its vital organs, and leaving it nothing but a name.
Britain had withdrawn from Europe around 1530—and ever since then its action on Europe has been destructive. It has been a British national purpose to keep Europe divided against itself. Class and ideology have nothing to do with it. Tony Blair’s Labour Government had a Minister for freeing capitalism in Europe from mediaevalist local obstacles.
One of those obstacles was arrangements made by local banks with local industries. Premier Tony Blair’s Minister for free capitalist competition in Europe was Kim Howells, who was Minister For Trade And Competitiveness In Europe.
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Labour’s Andy Burnham, Britain’s new Prime Minister, in his Address to the United Nations (22.9.26), spoke of the rules-based world order, which had been destroyed by disinformation that fostered divisiveness. He promised that Britain would restore it, despite the efforts of its enemies to impose deception on the world.
The enemies who are poisoning the world with lies are Russia and Iran. Russia was rigging elections in the West in order to bring the far right to power.
The following morning, British Defence Minister Wes Streeting (who is arming for war with Russia in 2030) was questioned on the radio about how Russia was supporting the far-Right by means of a propaganda apparatus of world deception—a project for which it apparently has spare time and capacity in the midst of a War in which it has been engaged for four years, and in which it is being seriously damaged according to Western sources which invariably tell the truth—the truth being what Western media which are not poisoned by Russian dis-information say!
Wes Streeting was asked how the truth was to be defended against news media which were being poisoned by Russian lies. Was it the case, as the British far-Right claimed, that the Prime Minister’s speech was a preparation for the introduction of press censorship, to prevent lies being disseminated as news? His reply seemed to be that this suggestion was itself a lie!
So where does that leave that part of the world that follows the British lead? It leaves it just where it has been for some generations—in post-1945 Churchillian ideology. And Churchill said that the truth is too valuable to be allowed to travel without a bodyguard of lies.
Is there some rule in this wonderland for telling us which is which?
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The British Labour Party was prepared for power by Winston Churchill. He was made Prime Minister only when the War on Germany was lost but Britain was unwilling to make a settlement. When he came to power, he was insistent on having Labour in his War Coalition and giving it some of the most important Ministries. Labour contributed largely to the weaving of what became the Churchillian ideology in which post-War Britain—still in possession of its Empire—lived. That ideology was condoned by Churchill, but he himself did not believe it—judging by the sotto voice interjections with which he dotted his history, The Second World War (a six volume work published between 1948 and 1954), with the sub-title, The Unnecessary War.
Labour took up Office in its own right in 1945 as the already-existing Government within Churchill’s War Cabinet in which it had the leading voice in domestic affairs.
(Labour had taken its initial step towards power in a similar way in the first World War, 1914-18. When Lloyd George was breaking the somewhat pacifistic Liberal Party in order to become Prime Minister in 1916, he gave the novice Labour MPs definite Parliamentary Party existence by including them in his War Cabinet. The umbilical cord between Labour and Liberal was cut. And, with the Liberal Party split into two antagonistic Parties, Labour slipped into the position of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition n 1918, when the Election came.)
The Churchillian mythology of the Second World War was largely created by Parliamentary Socialists, such as Michael Foot and Aneurin Bevan. The practical work of domestic government during the War, in which the foundations of the British post-War Welfare State were laid, was done by Ernest Bevin, boss of the mass Transport And General Workers’ Union, in his capacity of Churchill’s Minister for Labour.
Bevin, as a practical reformer in alliance with a very weak Tory Party, was not eager to end the Coalition when the War ended, but the Parliamentary Socialists insisted that there must be an immediate return to Party government.
The 1945 Election brought Parliamentary Socialism to power with a large majority. Bevin was removed from British politics and sidelined to the Foreign Office to deal with the crumbling Empire, and his place was taken by upper class socialist, Hugh Dalton.
The domestic reforms for which Bevin had laid the groundwork during the War were quickly implemented by the Parliamentary Socialists, but when that was done they did not quite know what to do next, because what they had done was not the fruit of their own work. Their power was dissipated by the end of their first term. They barely won the 1950 Election and were defeated when they held another election in 1951 in the hope of winning an effective majority.
In the meantime, the business of imposing a Jewish State on Palestine—set in motion by the Lloyd George Coalition in 1917—came to a head. The Jewish population, built up in Palestine between the Wars by Britain, declared war on the British administration by terrorist action, and demanded independence.
But the real issue was not whether the Jews could have their independent state in “a land without people” (in the Zionist narrative). Britain had given guarantees that its project of establishing a Jewish State in Palestine would be balanced with the establishment of a Palestinian State. The least that this required of Britain, the master of Palestine, in 1945-1948 was that it should hold the Jewish nation to the deal it had made in 1917—compelling it by force to do so if necessary. And force was necessary in view of the Zionist War on the British administration of Palestine which started in the closing stages of the Second World War.
Conceding independence to Jewish nationalist terrorism would mean handing over the Palestinian population to destruction. (Palestinian resistance to mass Jewish colonisation in the 1930s had been broken by British military action in 1936, and the native population had no means of resisting Jewish assault if Britain abandoned them after 1945).
Ernest Bevin, as Foreign Minister, tried to ward off the catastrophe by policing Jewish terrorism. He was branded an anti-Semite. His position was subverted by the Parliamentary Socialists. His assistant at the Foreign Office, Richard Crossman, who became an active Zionist, was of the opinion that Britain should clear the Palestinian population out of Palestine, so that it would not be necessary for the Jews to do it.
The restoration of Palestine to the status of a Jewish State was an ideal of the British Left then. Any backtracking from the implementation of that ideal would be a fundamental betrayal, comparable to the Munich Agreement with Hitler in their eyes.
In the face of all of this, Foreign Minister Bevin declared that Britain no longer accepted responsibility for carrying through to a civilised conclusion the project it had set in motion in 1917. The Cabinet washed its hands of responsibility for the consequences of what it had done until then.
That act by the Labour Party, in full Parliamentary power in 1947/8, is the particular cause of what happened then, and has been happening ever since, in the Middle East.
And its “Unnecessary War” is the central cause of the general condition of the world.
At the present time Britain is quietly fomenting another ‘Unnecessary War’, hoping to pit Europe against Russia in the Ukraine: using the pretext of Russia defending its minority in a divided society. So far, the Europeans have avoided military engagement, while gradually being sucked in to a dispute which can be of concern to it only if it has dedicated itself to the break-up of Russia.
It fostered the 2014 coup d’etat—with Ireland’s Pat Cox to the fore—in order to subvert a two-way Ukrainian trade deal with both the EU and the Russian Federation, insisting that the Ukraine must have an exclusive relationship with the EU.
The major achievement of “disinformation” which we are aware of is the erasure of the 2014 EU/US anti-Russian coup d’etat from the Western news media (in which it was frankly reported in 2014) when ‘explaining’ how the War in Ukraine came about.
Britain had its moment of Supreme Power in the world. It might be that the consequences of what it did with that power are finally being shaken off, and that an order of things to which Britain would be marginal is in the process of being constructed.
For that to happen Germany must be restored to a condition of normality as a nation-state, and Europe must be restored to the order it had made for itself before letting Britain join it in 1972.
