What did they fight for?

11/11

Antifa footsoldiers?

I have been writing for years that the mythology surrounding the European wars of the first half of the twentieth century is pernicious.

The notion that these wars were fought for ‘freedom’ and ‘peace’, and thus that the global institutions and the global Americanism left in their wake are good and necessary to modern civilization, is simply false.

This past week as we drew closer to the 107th anniversay of Armistice Day, it has been poignant to hear similar sentiments from actual veterans of these wars.

First, in Britain:

From the US:

Great writers, mostly ignored by the modern intelligentsia, have been trying to say this for years.

Ezra Pound wrote of World War I in his epic poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:

Died some, pro patria,
                            non “dulce” non “et decor”. . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Many pay lip service to this idea, of fighting for a lie, but few reckon with the ramifications:

There was no ‘good war’ of the twentieth century. Britain, her colonies, and the US fought a filthy brother-war from 1914-1918, fought for money interests and deceitful politicians.

And from 1939 to 1945 a war was fought whose chief beneficiary was Josef Stalin, a man whose body-count and systematic ethnic cleansing, particularly of Christians, was never even approximately matched by Adolf Hitler.

Two other fine English writers have refused to propagate the mythology.

In his war epic, Sword of Honour, Evelyn Waugh’s protagonist, Guy Crouchback, leaves his self-imposed exile in Italy to attempt to join the British war effort, on the day Hitler and Stalin announce their Non-Aggression Pact. Here was a chance to find some kind of heroism, by taking up the sword against both communism and fascism, in homage to the crusaders of old.

He is quickly very disillusioned when he wonders why Russia is so quickly given a pass by Britain:

Russia invaded Poland. Guy found no sympathy among these old soldiers for his own hot indignation.

‘My dear fellow, we’ve quite enough on our hands as it is. We can’t go to war with the whole world.’

‘Then why go to war at all? If all we want is prosperity, the hardest bargain Hitler made would be preferable to victory. If we are concerned with justice the Russians are as guilty as the Germans.’

‘Justice?’ said the old soldiers. ‘Justice?’

‘Besides,’ said Box-Bender when Guy spoke to him of the matter which seemed in no one’s mind but his, ‘the country would never stand for it. The socialists have been crying blue murder against the Nazis for five years but they are all pacifists at heart. So far as they have any feeling of patriotism it’s for Russia. You’d have a general strike and the whole country in collapse if you set up to be just.’

‘Then what are we fighting for?’

‘Oh we had to do that, you know. The socialists always thought we were pro-Hitler, God knows why. It was quite a job keeping neutral over Spain. You missed all that excitement living abroad. It was quite ticklish, I assure you. If we sat tight now there’d be chaos. What we have to do now is to limit and localize the war, not extend it.’

Is Waugh suggesting that the war effort had nothing to do with justice, but rather some kind of internal communist sympathy?

Yes, he is.

JRR Tolkien was often asked if Lord of the Rings was an allegory of the heroism of hobbit-like Britain during the darkest days of World War II. He flatly rejected the idea:

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-Dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

Is Tolkien suggesting that everyday men and women, represented by hobbits, are held in contempt and hatred in today’s world, following World War II?

Yes, he is.

I am not sure I can express myself on this matter better than the eccentric Jonathan Bowden:

The truth is that those men who stormed Normandy, who went up over the trenches, all had political views and beliefs that would have them denounced for ‘hate speech’ were they still alive today.

If they were told that ‘anti-fascism’ meant open borders, same-sex marriage, off-shoring of basic jobs, the ceding of half the globe to Communism, how many of them would still have signed up, how many of them would have walked brother-in-arm to violent death and danger of the highest order?

I think the veterans above have stated the case.

And people of my generation need to pick up that baton,

We need to see through this mythology.

To this day, we are constantly warned by Boomers and their spiritual allies, former hippies and trendy technocrats, that ‘fascism’ is on the rise, that opposing rainbowism, reading the harder parts of the Bible, et al, is all Nazi-stuff.

Remember, you were a Nazi if you opposed masking kids and locking people up like criminals!

If this is the case, World War II was then a civil war of National Socialists because I can tell you with absolute certainty that the men who fought and died in those wars were all ‘far-right’ maniacs by today’s standards, apart, maybe, from the actual Communists who did the bulk of the fighting.

Fascism and German National Socialism, two distinct militant movements in opposition to capitalism, democracy, and communism in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression, are both as dead as Marxist-Leninism.

This mythological spectre of ‘fascism’ is therefore entirely an ideological weapon used to maintain regime legitimacy.

‘Democracy’ today means nothing but the pre-determined outcomes as decided by modern elites. DEI, health and safety, multiculturalism - none of these are ever threatened by the actual wishes of ‘voters’. Because to oppose these outcomes is to be ‘fascist’ and thus, somehow, ‘anti-democratic’. The only thing that cannot be tolerated is intolerance. (And preference for your own culture and faith is always intolerant and discriminatory.)

As Herbert Marcuse, the postwar CIA-funded philosopher of the Frankfurt School, taught, “The realization of the objective of tolerance [requires] intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions..”

And by prevailing, he meant the policies, attitudes, opinions of the men who had just fought the war on the side of the Allies.

It is time we truly honour those men, by dismantling the lies that cost them so much.

---

Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work.

You will receive access to all posts as well as a free copy of my book, Rage and Love: A Memoir of White South Africa in an Age of Destruction. The book can also be found on Amazon and Takealot.