The Myth of Benevolence – Milan Rai (1995)

From ‘The Raven: Anarchist Quarterly’, Spring 1995, London, UK, edited by Vernon Richards

One of the most important components of state propaganda — in any country — is the notion that the state is benevolent and is motivated by moral motives. Even the Nazis justified their atrocities on the grounds that they were defending the true values of a superior civilization. Here in Britain, the role of the British in the Second World War is a matter of great pride; it has been absorbed as central part of the national self-image. The fight against the Nazis thus becomes one of the most potent sources of state propaganda. The struggle against, and the defeat of, ultimate evil is taken as proof of Britain’s commitment to freedom, democracy and common decency.

Now, as a matter of simple logic, the fact that you are in conflict with a totalitarian state does not by itself make you committed to spreading democracy. To take a recent example, the fact that in 1991 Kuwait, Syria and Saudi Arabia contributed forces to the fight against Iraq, an extremely repressive dictatorship, did not prove that these countries were fighting to spread democracy and human rights.

During the war, Roosevelt declared that the aim of the United States was to defeat fascism and establish the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, and Freedom from fear. Later in 1941, Churchill joined Roosevelt in signing the ‘Atlantic Charter’, which promised among other things that all people would have the right to choose their own form of government after the war. I have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of people in Britain believe that, together with the aim of defeating fascism, these kinds of ideals were what the fighting was all about. The interesting thing is that no evidence is ever offered for this belief. It is unnecessary to prove that the state is good; it is enough merely to repeat that ‘the state is good’. As Noam Chomsky never tires of repeating in the context of the United States, we live in an extraordinarily conformist culture, where the doctrines of the state religion hold sway without any supporting evidence.

It is of course conceivable that the British state was in 1941 devoted to the ideals of the Atlantic Charter; it seems unlikely for a variety of reasons — one being the fact that Churchill did not immediately announce the dissolution of the British Empire upon signing the Charter — but it is possible. The critical question is the evidence. What do declassified documents and the public record show about the motives of the British government?

The internal record seems quite unambiguous. Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, sent a paper to the Cabinet in 1943:

I assume that the aim of British policy must be, first that we should continue to exercise the functions and bear the responsibilities of a world Power; and, secondly, that we should seek not only to free Europe, but to preserve her freedom. Here in Europe, after all, is the cradle, and until recently the home, of the civilisation which has spread to almost every corner of the globe. Here, too we have to live, a few miles from the Continent. We cannot afford a Europe unfriendly to our interests of antagonistic to our way of life. We cannot afford a Europe which is dominated by Germany.¹

There are a number of strands here. Top priority is given to maintaining Britain’s status as a ‘world Power’. What does this entail? Eden makes it clear: ‘We have to maintain our position as an Empire and a Commonwealth. If we fail to do so we cannot exist as a world Power’. The second priority is ‘freeing Europe’. Perhaps now we are approaching the noble ideals of the Atlantic Charter. But no, what is important apparently is that Europe is currently ‘unfriendly’ to British ‘interests’ and ‘antagonistic’ to Britain’s ‘way of life’. (The latter phrase should be taken as meaning much the same as ‘interests’, I suggest.) The problem in Europe is that it is ‘dominated by Germany’. Germany is unfriendly to our interests, so German dominance cannot be permitted, and Europe must be ‘freed’ from this dominance.

Now there is nothing here about ‘self-determination’ or ‘people choosing their own forms of government’ or other lofty sentiments expressed in public. The war is very bluntly described in terms of power. Britain’s aim is to retain power throughout the world. Germany is a danger to that power, therefore it must be prevented from attaining domination of the Continent. Note once again that Eden’s first priority is to preserve the Empire. ‘Freeing Europe’ comes second, and is in fact subordinated to this overriding objective.

It would be unwise to base such a far-reaching argument on a single document. But there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that this interpretation of Eden’s paper is an accurate depiction of the motives behind the British war effort. In 1993, Michael Dockrill, a noted mainstream historian with impeccable credentials, wrote an important essay, ‘Defending the Empire or defeating the enemy: British war aims 1938-47’, which furnishes some relevant evidence.² Dockrill points out that Britain entered the war with very limited war aims: the withdrawal of German troops from Poland, the re-creation of an independent Bohemia and a general agreement on disarmament. There was no mention of overthrowing Hitler, or opposing fascism.

In fact, before the war, there had been considerable discussion in elite circles whether Nazi Germany could be permitted a certain amount of lebensraum in the east. Lord Chatfield, the First Sea Lord, was more concerned with Britain’s predicament in the Mediterranean, threatened by growing Italian power. He suggested in 1937 that if Germany expanded to the south east, ‘we must, in my opinion, accept it’. On the other hand, ‘If we are convinced that by German success in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania and Danzig, she would eventually dominate Europe, and so threaten us at our front door or in the Near East, it would be conceivably better to fight her to prevent such an outcome…’ (emphasis added). Lord Chatfield’s prime concern is, again, the preservation of the Empire, and he judges that a certain amount of German expansionism can be consistent with this. So much for anti-fascism or the independence of small countries.

As Dockrill points out, there were different points of view in 1937 — some were quite complacent at the idea of German domination on the Continent, others were not. The crucial factor was the problem of Three Enemies. Dockrill comments:

The Japanese threat, the rise of National Socialist Germany after 1933 and Britain’s alienation of Fascist Italy during the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935-6, threatened Britain with a three front war in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Far East should these three powers manage to combine against her. Hence the desire for a settlement with Germany, rather than confrontation: An Anglo-German agreement would deny Italy and Japan the opportunity of taking advantage of tension and conflict between the two countries to attack Britain’s extra-European possessions.

Let us turn for a moment to a study of the ‘Far Eastern Influences upon British Strategy towards the Great Powers 1937-1939’, by Robert John Pritchard. Pritchard notes that, ‘Notwithstanding the popular misconception that imperial defence policy in the years before the European war turned exclusively upon European affairs, British policy-makers took their Far Eastern commitments and responsibilities as seriously as they took developments in European affairs’.³ In 1933 and 1935, the Annual Reviews of Imperial Defence put the Far East as the top priority, followed by European commitments and then India. In 1937, the Annual Review placed East Asia first in significance, followed by the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Pritchard’s detailed study concludes with the following words:

War in Europe had to be side-stepped unless there seemed no unacceptable danger to Britain’s position in the Far East. It followed that if conditions in the Far East grew particularly heated, Germany and Italy had to be contained by peaceful means; if war drew near in Europe, then Japan must be neutralized. The survival of the British Empire was at issue.⁴

So, the deepest roots of ‘appeasement’ lie not in the character faults of any individual politician or party, but in the needs of the British Empire.

In the early years of the war, there was in Dockrill’s words, a ‘frenzied debate’ at the highest levels of the British government concerning the possibility of negotiating a peace settlement with Germany. ‘While even Churchill wavered on one occasion and thought that Britain might examine a German offer, his general line was that any public revelation of peace negotiations would totally destroy British morale, that the United States would eventually join the war on the side of the Entente and that if Britain survived an initial German onslaught, she would then be in a position to obtain better terms from Germany.’ This ‘wait and see’ policy prevailed. It is difficult to characterise this as very elevated thinking or devotion to any particular moral principles.

The point here is that as the overriding aim was to preserve the Empire, peace with a Greater Germany — a fascist empire — was a conceivable option for British policy-makers, if only the Empire could be safeguarded. It can be argued that the focus on the Empire affected the conduct of the war. Dockrill points out that many US military and civilian leaders thought that Churchill’s insistence on a North African campaign in 1942, rather than a cross-Channel invasion, was a diversionary tactic designed to restore British power in the Mediterranean. A much more important example is Greece.

Greece was one of the few countries in Europe not liberated by Allied armies. German troops began their evacuation in October 1944 before British soldiers entered the country, though there were a few harrying operations as the Nazis withdrew. There was, then, no need for extensive British operations in Greece, and troops committed to the liberation could have been kept with the invasion force ploughing through Italy. In fact, 10,000 British troops were sent to Greece immediately, building up to 75,000 by mid-January 1945. The country was to be liberated not from the Nazis, but from the Resistance. An SOE [Special Operations Executive] officer reporting from Greece in mid-1943 summed up the British dilemma:

As I understand it, the aims of the British Government in Greece are two-fold: First, to obtain the greatest military effort in the fight against the Axis and, second, to have in post-war Greece a stable government friendly to Great Britain, if possible a Constitutional Monarchy. Unfortunately, the present state of affairs in Greece makes the prosecution of the two aims almost incompatible…

Colonel Stevens concluded that ‘There is no question that the most efficient organization for fighting the Axis in Greece to-day is the EAM [Ethnikó Apeleftherotikó Métopo / National Liberation Front] and that every effort should be made in the interests of military efficiency to combine in that organization all other patriotic organizations.’⁵ At the same time, Stevens commented, ‘What is quite certain is that we do not want the EAM leaders in power after the war’.⁶

Unfortunately for Britain, the EAM, or National Liberation Front, was a six-party coalition committed to republicanism and nationalism. A return to the pre-war system of British hegemony over Greece via a malleable king was not what the Resistance was fighting for. In order to prevent the EAM — which everyone accepted was the overwhelmingly the most popular force in Greece — from assuming power in the aftermath of the war, the War Cabinet in August 1944 authorised the diversion of a 10,000-strong invasion force for Greece. In October, as the German occupation was ending, the British Ambassador to Greece commented that if Greece was to be liberated from the EAM, there would probably have to be a much larger British expeditionary force.⁷

Greece was to be liberated from its own people, liberated from democracy. The twists and turns of the so-called ‘Civil War’ cannot be traced here. Suffice it to say that despite being excluded from a public security role by the Caserta Agreement of 26 September 1944, British troops were used to maintain a succession of puppet governments in Athens without any regard to the wishes of the Greek people. And this while the war continued! Tens of thousands of soldiers were diverted from the war against Italy and Germany to ensure British control of Greece after the war.

So, of the two war aims of defeating the Axis and buttressing the Empire, the former gave way to the latter. It goes without saying that the British intervention in Greece — which lasted until 1947 — was a violation of virtually all the principles enunciated in the Atlantic Charter. Similar violations were implemented throughout the world, for example in South East Asia, where Britain helped to restore French imperialism in Indochina and Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, while reconstructing its own system of control, most notably in Malaya, also denied the opportunity to exercise national self-determination.

In fact, it is child’s play to prove that British policy-makers were not really concerned with spreading freedom and democracy through the Second World War. The evidence is equally abundant that fascism itself was not the issue. In North Africa, General Eisenhower reached an agreement in 1942 with Admiral Jean Darlan, commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Vichy France. Darlan ordered the French forces in North Africa to lay down their arms and in return was made Governor General of all French North Africa by the Allies. Darlan was bitterly anti-British, author of Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws, and had been a willing collaborator with the Germans. Stephen Ambrose, the noted US historian, comments:

The result was that in its first major foreign-policy venture in World War II, the United States gave its support to a man who stood against everything Roosevelt and Churchill had spoken out against. As much as Göring or Goebbels, Darlan was the antithesis of the principles the Allies were defending.⁸

One might argue that this was a US initiative. The next instalment was however entirely a joint affair. In 1943, during the invasion of Italy, the Allies chose to maintain the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, and even allowed his administration to declare war on Germany and be classed as a co-belligerent, despite the fact that Badoglio had been selected to lead the country by the Fascist Grand Council as a replacement for Mussolini.

The true test of the Allies’ anti-fascism comes in their behaviour in the core fascist countries themselves. Little attention is paid to the question of Italy, perhaps because no serious action was taken against the fascists by the occupation authorities (though the Resistance killed perhaps 20,000 fascists and alleged collaborators).

In Japan, Japanese politicians expressed gratitude for the leniency showed to the ruling class. The limited purges that were initiated immediately after the war were soon reversed. By 1949, 10,090 people previously purged had been cleared by review bodies. By 1951, 177,000 people had been de-purged. The bulk of those who remained purged — banned from influential occupations and posts — were now past retirement age in any case.⁹ The ‘reverse course’ continued until in 1952 even members of [Hideki] Tojo‘s Cabinet were restored to full rights. In 1952 Ichiro Hatoyama, who had been purged in 1946 for praising Hitler and Mussolini before the war, among other things, became Prime Minister of Japan. Harry Emerson Wildes, who had worked in the US Occupation Government, summed up the situation in 1954:

Little remained of the highly lauded innovations and reforms. Launched amid fanfares of publicity and promises, most of them had been repealed or, if remaining on the books, had been distorted or ignored. The Emperor was as popular as ever in the past, perhaps more so; except in mere lip service none seriously upheld the fumbling Diet [Parliament] as the highest organ of the state. The purge had been abandoned and forgotten, except by victims who resented its unfairness; police and bureaucrats regained their old control if, indeed, they ever really had loosed their hold. Zaibatsu firms revived under their once proscribed names; political and gang bosses flourished; decentralization of schools and local government reversed itself and old-line thought and methods reappeared in editorial offices, movie studios, and courts of law. Americans who had hailed Japan’s constitutional renunciation of armed force were offering as gifts large fleets of warships, munitions in huge quantities, money to rebuild an army, and skilled instructors to teach Japan to fight. Army pride had been revived, crowds thrilled to the Navy March, and Japan’s Wild Eagles were returning to the skies.¹⁰

Japanese war criminals were recruited by US intelligence, including experts in chemical and biological warfare, who had experimented on Chinese POWs and others. They were all given immunity from prosecution.

Turning to Germany, denazification in the Western zones was judged a failure by many of those involved, and this judgement has been confirmed by subsequent scholars. In the US zone, which implemented a much more rigorous purge than the French or British, the Chief of the Special and Denazification Branch of the Occupation Government wrote in 1950 that the programme had ‘failed to achieve any objective, German or American, and in particular [failed to realize] the American effort to construct democratic foundations from German society and thus to prevent a recrystallization of its traditional authoritarian social structure’.¹¹ Formerly a British member of the Allied Control Commission, Noel Annan described denazification as ‘a process which failed to achieve its object, lost us friends and credibility and got us the worst of both worlds’.¹²

In an authoritative and popular history of Germany, Bark and Gress sum up the scholarly consensus. They suggest that the effect of the US programme was that proportionately far more of the “smaller fry”, most of whom would not have been re-employed anyway, were fined, while categories I and II [serious offenders] escaped more lightly because OMGUS [the Office of Military Government United States] abandoned the whole enterprise before their cases could be processed.’

‘What began as a grandiose plan to purge all Nazis from leading roles in public life and to punish severely persons who had held responsible positions in the Third Reich was, in practice, transformed into a procedure by which major offenders were slapped on the wrist and minor offenders exonerated.’¹³ This is a description of the US programme. Note that the British were much less enthusiastic in denazification, in part because of their ‘concern about the results of dismissing most of the country’s trained personnel’, according to the Daily Telegraph‘s correspondent in postwar Germany.¹⁴

We come back to Eden’s description of British war aims. The problem was not German — or Italian or Japanese — fascism, it was that Germany — and the other Axis powers — were ‘unfriendly to our interests’. Friendly fascists were quite acceptable. If torturers and war criminals and genocidal racists were useful for some purpose, and were willing to obey orders, and were unable to threaten the Empire, they could remain in place. The Empire came first. Pious rhetoric about freedom and democracy was fine for wartime propaganda, but what counted was power.

When we examine the evidence, the myth of British benevolence in World War II cannot stand up. It is so far from the truth, it is astonishing that it is almost universally believed. It is a testimony to the extraordinary power of the British propaganda system. As we celebrate the end of the war, it might be as well to remember the judgement of a liberal capitalist Third World politician. As Juan José Arevalo, the democratically-elected president of Guatemala, left office in 1951, he recalled Roosevelt’s noble wartime rhetoric and commented sadly, ‘Roosevelt lost the war. The real winner was Hitler.’

Notes

1. Cited in David Dilks ‘Introduction’ to David Dilks, Retreat from Power: Studies in Britain’s Foreign Policy of the Twentieth Century, volume II, After 1939, London,
Macmillan, 1981, page 9.

2. Dockrill’s essay appears in Peter Catterall and C.J. Morris (editors) Britain and the Threat to Stability in Europe 1918-45, London , Leicester University Press, 1993.

3. Robert John Pritchard, Far Eastern Influences upon British Strategy towards the Great Powers 1937-1939, New York, Garland Publishing Inc., 1987, page 205.

4. ibid., page 206.

5. ‘Report of Lt. Col. J.M. Stevens on Present Conditions in Central Greece: Secret’ in Lars Bærentzen (editor) British Reports on Greece 1943-44 by J.M. Stevens, C.M. Woodhouse and D.J. Wallace, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1982, page 41.

6. ibid., page 44.

7. Paraphrase of Leeper’s comment made in G.M. Alexander, Prelude to the Truman Doctrine: British Policy in Greece 1944-1947, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, page 59.

8. Stephen Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, London, Penguin, fourth revised edition 1986, page 24.

9. Robert Harvey, The Undefeated: The Rise, Fall and Rise of Greater Japan, London, Macmillan , 1994 , page 301.

10. Harry Emerson Wildes, Typhoon in Tokyo: The Occupation and its Aftermath, New York, Macmillan, 1954, page 337.

11. Cited in William E. Griffith, ‘Denazification Revisited’ in Michael Ermarth (editor) America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945-55, Oxford, Berg, 1993, page 164. Griffith did change his mind about this many years later though.

12. Cited in Richard Mayne, Postwar: The Dawn of Today’s Europe, London, Thames & Hudson, 1983, page 56.

13. Dennis Bark and David Gress, From Shadow to Substance 1945-1963, Oxford, Blackwell, 2nd edition 1993, pages 76 and 79.

14. Anthony Mann, Comeback: Germany 1945-1952, London, Macmillan, 1980, page 65.