THEIR FAINTEST HOUR:

Family and city now unite in their grief: In the end, perhaps from the beginning, nothing and no-one could save Ken Bigley. The aftermath finds his home town and his loved ones facing a staggering atrocity, and the West looking into a new abyss of ideological ruthlessness (Torcuil Crichton, 10/10/04, Sunday Herald)

Liverpool is an ecumenical model for other parts of the country. Prayers have been whispered for Ken Bigley in mosques, synagogues and cathedrals along the Mersey. Lord Mayor Frank Roderick, who led the silent tribute by hundreds of people in Exchange Flag square, emphasised that unity afterwards.

At Friday night’s requiem mass in the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Archbishop of Liverpool, the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, spoke of the killers as evil, and of unity in the face of death. He struggled onwards with the concept of forgiving the murderers. “Forgiveness means it was evil – I do not justify it at all. All we can do is this strange thing called forgiveness,” he said.

Forgiveness is a place a long way down the road from Liverpool or from Fallujah, where evil can be seen every day and still cannot be comprehended.

The enduring memory of Ken Bigley, the vulnerable image of a man pleading for his life on a videotape broadcast to taunt the West, will become the haunting symbol of Britain’s military ensnarement in Iraq. More than that, his brutal death at the hands of al-Qaeda hardman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi becomes part of an increasingly desperate entanglement with terrorism that spreads out beyond Mesopotamia to every city centre, every airport and every television set in the world.

Bigley was the first British hostage to be killed by terrorists in Iraq, and the first Briton beheaded in what may be, by the shortest measure, the beginning of three generations of grim conflict between Western governments and a cadre of terrorists fired by political injustice and perverted faith.

His death, after three weeks of terror chess on a worldwide stage, ensures his name will be permanently linked with the savage anarchy of post-war Iraq, a victory that was easily won as the peace was gratuitously lost.

Churchill must be spinning in his grave listening to this defeatist twaddle. The hard fact is no one will remember Mr. Bigley a few years from now anymore than they remember the names of anyone who died in the Blitz. The only thing that could possibly draw the war out--though nothing could make it last for three generations--is if nitwits like Mr. Crichton ran countries instead of their yaps and let such evil fester instead of tangling with it.

MORE:
It Will Be the Death of Liberalism (Raymond Kraft, October 10, 2004, Chron Watch)

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.

Bushido Japan had overrun most of Asia, beginning in 1928, killing millions of civilians throughout China, and impressing millions more as slave labor.

The United States was in an isolationist and pacifist mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us.

It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally, for the Vichy government of France aligned with its German occupiers. Germany was not an ally, for it was an enemy, and Hitler intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, for it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia. Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders, after they had settled control of Asia and Europe.

America's allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia, and that was about it. There were no other countries of any size or military significance with the will and ability to contribute much of anything to the effort to defeat Hitler's Germany and Japan, and prevent the global dominance of Nazism. And we had to send millions of tons of arms, munitions, and war supplies to Russia, England, and the Canadians, Aussies, Irish, and Scots, because none of them could produce all they needed for themselves.

All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was already under the Nazi heel.

Well, FDR himself declared war on Germany on the 8th, but Congress actually did wait until after Hitler's official declaration before it followed suit. Much of what follows is shaky as to the facts too, but the picture of an isolated America propping up its few allies is quite accurate. Less than four years later Nazism was in ashes--makes Mr. Crichton's despair look especially facile.

-The usual suspects (David Pryce-Jones, October 2004, New Criterion)

The Soviet Union is no more, and to a whole new generation it already seems unreal, preposterous, some sort of practical joke that the Russians played on themselves and the rest of the world. It didn’t come off, did it, so it could never have come off, right? That was not how it appeared when Stalin was conquering and killing at will, or when Nikita Khrushchev was promising to bury the West. In general terms, the statesmen of the West, their advisors and their military, analyzed and countered the Soviet threat realistically, as in the 1948 Berlin air lift or the Cuban missile crisis, finally encouraging Mikhail Gorbachev to bring about the Soviet Union’s peaceful auto-destruction, as strange an event as any in history.

Public opinion was something else. Here mixed motives were in play. In the face of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles and battle fleets, of existential danger in short, millions of people proclaimed that they would rather be red than dead. That putative nuclear mushroom cloud dominated their imagination, and their sincerity smelled of fear. Some others, mostly but not exclusively intellectuals, were convinced that Communism was the path to utopia.

Three such in Britain were Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess. Convinced Communists since their student days at Cambridge university, they were linked together in a network spying on their own country and betraying it in favor of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Well-connected, and educated in the best schools, they were able to take privilege for granted. Burgess and Maclean were thought in chic social circles to be amusingly louche, and many witnesses attest to Philby’s charm, and the stutter that went with it. All three rose to positions either in the British Secret Service or the Foreign Office with access to information valuable to the Soviet Union. In a position to know the facts about Stalinist terror and Gulag, they nonetheless made themselves willing accomplices in Communist crime. The charming Philby had much blood on his hands. He informed the Soviets of an impending high-level defector in Istanbul, and they caught the man and shot him. He gave away clandestine Allied operations in Albania, the Baltic, and Ukraine, leading to the deaths of scores of patriots and agents. Somewhere in the psychological depths where each of these traitors had to answer to himself, deception and self-deception were bewilderingly entangled.

Malcolm Muggeridge was someone who might have taken that same confused path, but the experience of being a newspaper correspondent in Moscow in the 1930s instead cured him of his youthful Communism. Service as an intelligence officer in the war heightened a conviction that the only valid response to mankind’s folly was satire. He liked to maintain that espionage is pointless, and spies and traitors achieve nothing. Burgess and Maclean proved him wrong when they disappeared in May 1951, only to turn up later in Moscow. The scandal was immense. Communists had evidently penetrated and undermined the establishment. Senator McCarthy might not have had very nice manners, but evidently there were reds not just under the bed but everywhere in the room. The defection of Burgess and Maclean forced the British to realize that they might have won the world war but looked like losing the peace. Cosy old assumptions of superiority were out of date.

Twelve years of demoralization and precipitous decline in international standing followed, and then in 1963 Philby defected too. Labelled the Third Man, he had evidently been collaborating with Burgess and Maclean, and perhaps others as well. Furtively fired as early as 1955 from MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA, Philby had been exonerated by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons. His secret-service friends and protectors found a job for him as a foreign correspondent in Beirut. Eventually a British agent confronted him there with the evidence of his treason. Had he betrayed the Soviets, they would have shot him out of hand. British gentlemanly manners suggested that the authorities had long known the truth about his part in the Burgess and Maclean fiasco but covered up, even encouraging him to slip unpunished out of sight. The British now finally lost confidence in themselves and those who represented them. Muggeridge in his ribald brilliance overlooked how traitors of this spectacular kind could push public opinion into thinking that the Soviets were always a step or two ahead, likely to win the Cold War, and therefore to be flattered and appeased. Mrs. Thatcher’s achievement in her years as prime minister was to reverse what had come to look like ingrained national defeatism.

Only Tony Blair stands between Britain and a resumption of that kind of corrosive defeatism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 10, 2004 12:00 AM