the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I recently went to  Battel. It was great. There was a properly loud firework display in front of the Abbey, a huge bonfire, so huge that it was still smouldering the next day and hordes of people that had reclaimed the streets to better enjoy it all

One of the other things that made Battel so great was the amount of poppies on display. Not just on people, but largerones, seemingly on every other lamp-post and more shops than not having some display in their window. An acknowledgement, some recognition, that in the 1940’s countless numbers of British youths gave their tomorrow so that we might have our today.

The deaths of British soldiers in every war Britain has fought before or since the Second World War may well have been just as heroic or just as selfless, but they had nowhere near as impactful on the world, or as consequential. Because as far as I’m concerned, those deaths saved Western Civilisation. Were it not for them, our world would be very different. This needs to be loudly championed,, to be afforded the respect it so rightfully deserves. Not just on one day every year, but throughout the year and not only Britain either.

It’s incomparable benefit to world history demands to be acknowledged by the world that it saved. Its the one part of Britains historical legacy that renders every other imagined blame, every other monetised grievance and every other supposed injustice a triviality when compared against it.

Because in the midst of the constant reappraisal of our past which makes up so much of British life now and that constructs increasingly newer ways to make us feel guilty about it, the people promoting these nonsenses have forgotten the most basic of truths.

A truth that is as obvious as it is seemingly impossible for them to admit and equally, one that is  as self-evident as it is irrefutable. Namely, that that they only enjoy the freedoms needed to constantly lecture us on how bad our distant ancestors behaved only because our not so distant ancestors made it possible.

Long before any of the horrors that were suffered upon the world came to pass, the Nazi’s could’ve been stopped. There existed a democracy in Germany up until 1933 and the German people could’ve voted the them into obscurity. There were five federal elections between 1920 and 1933 and had the German people bothered to look, the signs were all there. But the because the violence and the brutality of the Nazi’s was happening to others, most Germans choose to ignore this and voted for them. Until the Nazi’s came to power in 1933 and we all know how that turned out.

If there has ever been a war when the forces of good and evil were so clearly identifiable, then WW2 was that war. Because the aggressor went on aggressing and European statesman failed to display any statesmanship. and it was only when enough countries had been invaded, countless peoples had been killed and all excuses had been exhausted, that the Britain reluctantly declared war.

And cometh the hour, cometh the man and what a man he proved himself to be. For me, Winston Churchill is the greatest person to have ever lived. He is the one man about whom it can be truly said he was the right man at the right time.  Not for him the vacillations, the appeasements and accommodations that blinded the rest of the British political class. He been telling them about the dangers Hitler posed for years, but to no avail. When the results of this folly were laid bare, he was called forth. Only he had the unimpeachable moral authority needed to insist upon never surrendering.

I don’t care what he did do before 1939, nor do I really care what he did after 1946. It’s what he did in between those years that matter. May 19th 1940, the day he became PM is by my reckoning easily most important date in world history. People now forget how close we came to extermination; the extermination of the idea that freedom isn’t the freedom to do what others compel you to do, rather it’s the freedom to say no.

There’d also be no me. My Mum wouldn’t have come here from Ireland in 1947. She’d gone to America and would have never met my Dad here in London. Many of my friends would not have been born either, because their parents would not been born, some of the many millions murdered in the gas chambers.

So when people witter on about this country’s legacy, they never mention that one. Of defeating Nazism. Saving the world from totalitarianism. Because make no mistake, there were Fifth Columnists and fellow travellers all around the world who would have been enthusiastic supporters of Nazism if it gave them power. Instead we have a world in which people have the freedom to reappraise, to reevaluate or to decontextualise our history.

But not, sadly, one able to properly acknowledge the sacrifices that made that world possible.