Forgetting the lessons of 1945

But nationalism and its attendant beliefs have other subtler and more insidious ways of entering the political bloodstream, so that now, in Britain, these beliefs constitute the most fundamental divide in our political culture: between those who feel and think in terms of a rigidly-defined and unchanging “nation” and those who do not; between those who can accept difference, and those who cannot; between those who deploy hatred as a political tool, and those who find such a tactic repulsive; between those who have forgotten the lessons of the twentieth century and those who have not. 

To begin this process of forgetting requires a particular psychological shift, a move away from the settled confidence of patriotism and towards a more alarmed, uncertain feeling that the nation is somehow under threat. This new instinct brings with it the idea that the nation’s identity, its essence, is in danger and in need of urgent protection. 

That danger can take on any number of forms. Consider, for example, the absurd attempt by the previous Conservative administration to start a confrontation with the National Trust over the written material on display at its country houses. It was a ridiculous episode, but then the nationalist impulse often leads people to do and say ridiculous things. 

The argument started when the National Trust began emphasising the links between certain large English country estates and the slave trade, an association regarded as unacceptable by certain members of the government, even though it was true. But the question of truth was irrelevant in this case. More relevant was the willingness of elected politicians to defend a nebulous, undefined idea of the nation out of a sense that something important was under threat. 

And once that idea lodges itself in the political mind, it leads to a further, much darker question: if the nation is under threat, if it is somehow being twisted out of shape, then someone out there must be doing the twisting. Who?

The three previous Tory prime ministers and their media supporters put the blame firmly on the “woke” phenomenon, a new ideology that was framed as a threat to Britain but, like so many of the ideas and fixations that pave the way to disaster, one with no singular accepted definition. But that didn’t prevent “woke”, along with that other undefined term “cultural marxism”, from becoming a catch-all phrase to throw at the people who were trying to undermine the nation: who were tearing down statues and dumping them in Bristol harbour, who were trying to abolish gender, who were trying to defund the police, who were taking the knee, who were asking tricky questions about race – all of these things were bundled up in a single, grammatically off-kilter word – woke. 

The “woke” term became a way of differentiating between good, worthy, real members of society, and others who are bad, degenerate and somehow phoney. This second group, who according to the Daily Telegraph had become infected by a “woke mind virus”, are deluded, dangerous and their views therefore must be derided and crushed. They are the enemy within. They are, to borrow a notorious headline, “Enemies of the people”. 

In a democratic system, you can’t get rid of people you regard as dangerous, or degenerate. But if they happen to be foreign or foreign-born and particularly if they are immigrants then things become very different. 

In that case, nationalists can produce posters showing lines of refugees, warning that the nation is at “Breaking Point” due to immigration. They can create a “hostile environment” for immigrants, and run general election campaigns promising to “stop the boats”. 

As the anti-immigrant sentiment becomes even more extreme, nationalist governments can simply lock up foreign people whose presence they regard as not in the national interest. The last No.10 administration did precisely this, interning refugees on a prison barge called the Bibby Stockholm, moored off Portland, on the Dorset coast. 

And so a fixation with defending the essence of the nation leads to attacks on the enemy within, an uncompromising attitude towards people who do not belong, and to the ultimate political horror of depriving people of their liberty for ideological reasons. Twenty-first century nationalism has just the same consequences as its twentieth century forebear. 

And stirred into this ugly political stew is a foul dose of racism. Anti-semitic hate crime is on the increase in Britain. At the same time a stream of poisonous media commentary and political signalling has led the issue of immigration to become merged with a well-established fear and visceral hatred of Muslims.

Take for example the Tory party leadership contender Robert Jenrick, who recently suggested that people who use the Muslim utterance, “Allahu Akbar” in public should face arrest. He has made no equivalent or even comparable suggestions about any other religions, or any other use of language – his remarks concerned Muslims alone. 

As for the islamophobe commentariat, the right wing press contains a host of writers who have produced books on the threat posed to Britain by Islam. An especially dangerous racial idea gaining traction on the right is “replacement theory”, the suggestion that white British people will eventually become a minority in a Muslim-dominated Britain. 

It is no surprise that the riots were triggered by an online rumour that the murder of three children in Southport had been committed by a Muslim immigrant. This turned out to be a lie, but it was a lie that fed directly into a pre-existing morass of immigrant hatred, and the sense that Britain has reached a “Breaking Point”. Whoever came up with that lie knew what they were doing. 

The political end point of this nationalistic fixation on difference, race and immigration was the Rwanda plan, a project so disgraceful that it turned out to be illegal under international law. But the very idea of international law – or of any kind of transnational consensus – is unacceptable to the nationalist as it inhibits the nation’s capacity to act, and is therefore a threat to sovereignty. And in a choice between sovereignty and international law, international law has to go.

This led to an attempt by the British hard right to get Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights, a body set up after the second world war, when a consortium of nations including Britain, horrified by the degradations of war, aimed to reach an agreement on how civilised societies should behave. 

The fact that the Rwanda plan fell short of standards created in the aftermath of 1945 didn’t seem to worry those arguing in its favour. The thing that outraged them was that the inhumanity of their proposal was being pointed out by an international body. 

This aversion to internationalism was a manifestation of the same instinct that led to Brexit. So much has already been written about our departure from the EU, about its causes and its consequences. But in its ideological character, the idea of Brexit was a nationalist fiction to rival any of the great lies of the 20th century. It promised voters that with a single leap Britain could free itself from all constraints, return to its former imperial glory and win the global race.

Even though no such leap has ever been achieved in the history of humankind, a scrum of politicians, intellectuals and commentators from the right were convinced that it could be done. Some of them remain convinced that victory is near, and are still saying so in the comment pages of the right wing press. Like the Soviet communists who insisted their system would have worked if only it had been done properly, the nationalists who imposed Brexit on Britain will never acknowledge its failure – even as the disaster unfolds around them. 

The eight years since Brexit have been politically exhausting, in large part because successive governments have spent so long attacking their ideological enemies, many of whom fall outside the world of politics. Somewhere among all this hectoring, the nationalists and Brexit radicals forgot something fundamental: that the nation is there to serve the individual – not the other way round. 

Individuals are not there to have politics done to them, at least not in a democracy. Neither are they there to be slotted into a picture that matches the aesthetic vision of their political overseers. Leaders who forget this inevitably come up against the problem of people who can not be neatly slotted in. 

What do you do with them? Where can we put them? And if you can’t put them anywhere, how can we get rid of them? When you reach this final question, as the 20th century showed, you have taken a decisive step into the nightmare.

Britain has stepped back – thank god. For now, at least. Lisa Nandy’s remark that “the era of culture wars is over”, was a moment of such huge relief as it signalled that the new government was calling off its fight with the people. 

But in a grim irony, the coming of the Labour government was perhaps also a stimulus for the recent wave of racist rioting. When nationalists and other extremists see their goals slipping further into the distance it is little surprise that the result is rage. The January 6 riot in Washington DC’s Capitol made that all too clear.

The anger comes so easily because the nationalist worldview is essentially instinctual. It is based on feeling and intuition, on the sense that of course something is wrong with the country, and of course there’s a threat from migrants, and anyone who can’t see it just “isn’t living in the real world”. And such strong feelings, when rebuked by the ballot box, turn quickly to anger.

Another consequence of adopting a political mindset based mainly on instinct is that those instincts become a substitute for ideas – and it is a characteristic of the nationalists that they offer no real ideas. Between them, Johnson, Truss and Sunak dealt entirely in the negative. They told us what they did not want – the EU, taxes and HS2 – but nothing about what they did want. 

There were no new ideas, instead only a descent into a chilly kind of political nihilism. Johnson’s only legacy was the notion of “cakeism”, which is nothing more than a jollied-up synonym for bullshit.

The same is true of Trump, who communicates almost exclusively in terms of political hatred, and who presents no new ideas – nothing, in fact, other than himself. But perhaps the most extreme version of the political blankness of the extreme nationalist is Vladimir Putin. 

As the historian Tim Snyder has pointed out, Putin offers no ideology, no new political system or ideas. His only interest is power, and his invasion of Ukraine is an expression of that single interest. But despite the enormity of Putin’s barbaric act of war, despite his torture chambers and his filtration camps, he represents nothing. 

There is no philosophy underpinning his regime. His explanations for the invasion veer from wanting to fight “Ukrainian Nazis” to rambling, historically illiterate screeds about Greater Russia. But if you look hard enough at Putin, you will see there’s nothing there. 

Putin represents an endpoint, the inevitable logical conclusion of nationalism, and though he may be way out at the fascistic end of the spectrum, all other nationalists are also on that spectrum, even if they don’t like admitting it. It’s why Farage called Putin the world leader he most admired, remarks he’s since disowned. 

It’s also why, in response to the recent US-Russia prisoner swap, Trump remarked: “I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal”. He made no mention of the man on the other side of that deal, the current US president Joe Biden. 

For liberals watching all this in dismay, a consoling thought is that populist nationalism has a single great central weakness – it doesn’t work. That’s because the benefits it promises are entirely abstract: sovereignty, freedom, control. 

These are campaigning, propaganda words, and often very effective – but they are not governing words. When asked “what are you actually going to do?”, the nationalist invariably has nothing constructive to say. What, really, are Farage’s policies? Trump’s? Putin’s?

Like all nationalists, what they really offer is a chance to repeat the mistakes of the 20th century, to resurrect the old paranoiac idea that the nation is threatened and, in order to become a true and worthy version of itself, the nation – the people – must confront their internal and external threats and enemies. That political outlook fed into the logic of the Holocaust. It nearly led to the annihilation of western civilisation – twice. 

And yet there are people who believe it now, in Westminster, across the capitals of Europe, in the US, in Moscow and in the streets of England. These people have learned nothing. And they are dangerous.