DEUS ERGO SUMUS

Category: History

  • ‘le débarquement américain, juin 1944’ – history, impression and Oxford today

    A friend came to tea last Sunday afternoon. He had been away on holiday in Jonzac. There he had discovered that two resistance fighters were killed helping the allied invasion in June 1944. In relating his story, he made reference to ‘le débarquement américain’. ‘Le Débarquement américain ?’, I asked. Yes, he said, June 1944. I asked again, ‘le débarquement américain?’. He repeated the affirmation. So a history lesson ensued.

    I pointed out that the Normandy Landings of 6th June 1944 were an Allied assault, not just an American enterprise. Ah yes, he said, as recollection of certain details began to permeate the received French notion that the Americans set them free in 1944.

    Having witnessed the 75th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings courtesy of French media and French State stage management, I anticipate the usual distortions of the historical record come the 80th anniversary of the Allied Assault on Normandy on June 6th 2024.

    Let me explain what French television reporting and commentary did with the 75th anniversary commemoration, before I outline my history lesson from last Sunday.

    President Macron and President Trump shared the platform at the American D Day cemetary at Colleville-sur-Mer. French television covered the event most of the day, following every move of the two Presidents. Colleville-sur-Mer was the only media setting for the 75th anniversary celebrations.  It was very clear that this was a Franco-American commemoration. After all, it was the Americans who saved France – virtually all the video footage which you ever see on French television concerning D Day and its consequences portrays American soldiers being hailed by joyful French people.

    By contrast, the British Imperial contribution is a footnote in French consciousness, and this was reflected in French media treatment of the 75th anniversary. The television reporting of another commemoration at a British cemetary that day was limited, for example to a brief insertion in the evening news – a footnote to the main event of the day at the American Cemetary.

    Now, let’s put that French impression in perspective with some raw statistics. One source says that 132,700 soldiers were involved in the primary assault: the Americans constituted 43.3% and the British and Canadians 56.7%. There were 2 British, 1 Canadian and 2 American landing beaches.

    I pointed out to my retired teacher friend that the operational commander for Overlord was General Bernard Montgomery, the British architect and commander of the El Alamein victory. Montgomery also determined the strategy for the battle of Normandy, and was in command before, during and 6 weeks after the landing.

    Operation Overlord was an extremely difficult operation which entailed great risk – it was by far the largest amphibious assault ever undertaken. Montgomery executed his strategy brilliantly.

    What was his strategy ?

    The Canadians and British were positioned on the left flank of the attack, the Americans on the right. Each flank had its task. The left flank was to meet the inevitable German counter-attack around Caen, and hold it off, pinning down vital German forces while the right flank gained strategic ground, sweeping in a great arc around the back of the Germans from the right. In doing so, the Americans were to secure the vital seaports of Cherbourg and Brest. Montgomery used the metaphor of a door on a hinge: the left flank was the hinge and the right flank was the door intended to swing wide open to the right and rear of the German defences. This was precisely how the operation unfolded …

    But of course, this strategy was designed to win a strategic military campaign; it was not concerned with writing history.

    What goes into the public consciousness of such events, however, are certain aspects of what actually happened, NOT how and why the whole strategy played out. So the French collective memory of the invasion of Normandy tends to revolve in my experience around 3 aspects of what happened, and not the entire record and its explanation.

    One aspect of French collective memory is the British bombardment of Caen, seen as gratuitous destruction. That military tactic  feeds into the underlying general, historical distrust of “les Anglais”. Another aspect is the suffering and death endured by the Americans pinned down at Omaha beach. And the third aspect arises from the fact that the Americans were charged with the big sweeping movements to outflank the Germans. That meant that the Americans were highly visible as they sped through France towards Paris, liberating town after town.

    That was all part of the plan. But the public impression was that the Americans were doing the liberating while the useless and perfidious British failed to take Caen. The plan, however, required Canadian and British imperial troops to take the main weight of the German counter-attack so that the Americans on the right flank could establish the Allied hold on terrain well beyond the initial bridgehead. The failure to break out of the bridgehead at Anzio in early 1944 could not be repeated in this critical and strategic operation in Normandy.

    So, to this day, the Americans remain the real heroes of the hour in the French collective memory. That is understandable, but it is not the whole story, it is not the whole truth. As such it is not history but impression or legend selected according to the predispostions of the French: in their eyes, the Americans are fellow Republicans and defenders of the rights of the people; whereas the British are monarchists and the historic foe which cannot be trusted – perfidious Albion. Impressions based on aspects of the whole truth and which reinforce received prejudice are legend or propaganda, they are not history.

    Yet this is the sloppy approach by leading academics in history, and other disciplines in the University of Oxford concerning analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine since February 2022. Such predisposition and consequent editing of evidence are worthy of political protagonists, not academics in a great University. See The Faculty of History, for example, in my previous post titled: “Will incoming Vice Chancellor Irene Tracey investigate the evidence of aberration at Oxford and take corrective action ?”

     

  • Does brain research corroborate “Dominus illuminatio mea” ?

    On 7th February 2024 more than 200 people crowded into the Chapel at Pusey House, Oxford to listen to a lecture by researcher psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist who spoke on the theme: “Dominus Illuminatio Mea: our brains, our delusions and the future of the University”. I commend it to you. The video can be accessed via Dr McGilchrist’s own website at

    Iain McGilchrist: Dominus Illuminatio Mea: Our Brains, Our Delusions, & the Future of the University

    in view of the above, and the thesis it postulates, I am minded to publish below a blog post drafted in  November 2022 but not actually posted at that time. It was titled:

    “Thomas Paine-us Illuminatio mea”:

    I have great admiration for Thomas Paine: he was indisputably a man of principle and conviction, fearless and articulate in expressing the Enlightenment message. He was an apostle of the Materialist, rationalist faith in the superiority of Man, taking the message to America, Britain and France.

    To read Paine’s work is to be carried along by a religious fervour of justice for all. Today Paine’s philosophy of the Material Man has many influential adherents in western institutions.

    Institutions like the University of Oxford are a good barometer of the ruling intellectual climate of the day. The animating spirit of contemporary Oxford exudes the same Materialistic faith proclaimed with such evangelistic zeal by Paine.

    At Oxford,  Paine’s principles appear to be

    Axiomatic Dogma

    So, Oxford today is Republican and anti Monarchist. Therefore official reaction to the death of Elizabeth II was terse and factual; an acknowledgement of a lady widely respected. Elizabeth was a wonderful human being, but this had nothing to do with her Christian faith, nor her role as Governor of the archaic Church of England.

    The consequent accession of Charles to the throne is an unfortunate event in an age when Reason should have dismissed such undemocratic nonsense to the ‘trash-can’ of the past. Therefore Charles accession will only be mentioned when unavoidable.

    Two pillars of the traditional English Establishment and Constitution are thereby being edited from the record in a campaign to reframe public consciousness according to the new faith.  It matters not that the systematic conservation of the totality of knowledge and understanding of our existence is the business of a “University”.

    Clearly contemporary Oxford does not see things this way. Like the adherents of all proselytising beliefs, Paine~ian Oxford is concerned to protect the young, the impressionable and the un-enlightened from ignorance and from their own mistaken ideas. Like Paine they know far better. Just as Paine condemned Edmund Burke’s insightful “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, so Oxonian experts see today’s reactionaries as advocates of “horrid principles” which are “poison”. Accordingly, their behaviour “cannot be pardoned”.

    Oxford was therefore embarrassed by the Roger Scruton Memorial lectures held in its celebrated Sheldonian Theatre this term. Scruton  may have been one of the most significant Philosophers of recent times, but he was the principal British apologist of the Right.  Worse still, the lectures were given by Britain’s most strident right-wing commentators.

    They included Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, Nigel Biggar  – the scholar who trashed the Apostle Paine’s Rights Idealism with his 2020 book, “What’s Wrong with Rights  ?”

    Worse still, they included Peter Hitchens the rabble rousing, death penalty advocating, Trotskyist turncoat who betrayed the Cause in his youth and has spent his entire career casting doubt upon the triumphant Materialist Revolution.

    Hence there could be no promotion, recognition, or even mention of the Scruton Memorial lectures by the University Establishment.

    Edmund Burke diagnosed this censorious mindset as “the spirit of atheistical fanaticism“. And in the same 1790 treatise he warned us that such Enlightened persons, “…. had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety.”

    Such zeal is evident at Exeter College in the University of Oxford. The College was founded by the Bishop of Exeter in 1314 to prepare men for Church ministry. In 1565 the College was given a critical financial endowment by Sir William Petre. That endowment was made for the “increase of sound learning, and for the common profit of the Church of Christ and of this realm and of the subjects of the same“.

    Last year, however, the Enlightened Fellows of the College obtained the blessing of the Vice Chancellor and Council of the University to update the Statutes of the College to conform with today’s reality. Exeter College now promotes the crypto-communist, American ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign with Paine inspired wisdom and zeal.

    I am wondering, however, when the College or the University will find time and resources to mount campaigns for

    • black African Christians routinely murdered by literalist, politicised Islamic extremists; or
    • for European school teachers and journalists so badly persecuted by said religious extremists that they now live under constant police protection …

    The answer to this paradox was provided by the University itself in the November 4th 2022 Romanes lecture given by the Irish Taoiseach, Micheal Martin.  He spoke with deep concern for liberty and democracy, for diversity, equality and inclusion. But when it came to specific elaborations, Mr Martin’s understanding of those words appeared to be at odds with their inherent meaning.

    Brexit and the phenomenon of electing right-wing governments generally are “authoritarian” and “populist”. In fact they constitute a “very direct threat to liberal democracy”. It is clearly Mr Martin’s view that a democratic vote can only be legitimate when it endorses the agenda and worldview of liberal democratic Centrists. All other perspectives are “extremism”. Given that the existence of the European Union is axiomatic, hallowed Truth,  no normal, rational and civilised person could possibly disagree.

    Vaccination against the Covid pandemic has been an indisputable success. People who question this must be dangerous extremists.

    EU immigration policy is also a success – even though member States still fail to agree a policy of distributing illegal immigrants among them, after more than two decades. As I write, in November 2022, France and Italy are yet again at loggerheads on this very issue.

    “Populism encourages active distrust of government”, says Mr Martin. But his speech does not address the root issues behind ‘populist’ appeal. Why ? Because such problems exist only in the minds of the populists and their ignorant or duped electorate.

    “Active distrust of government” ?

    The 13th century Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights were the institutionalised, constitutional “distrust of government” and the very basis of the traditional English conception of liberty. And the separation of powers in French and US constitutions ?

  • Biggar, Empire and Academia

    Nigel Biggar is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford. However, many fellow academics regard him as a wicked reactionary. That is reason enough to read his latest book, Colonialism: a moral reckoning. I have just finished it;  I thoroughly recommend it.

    The dust jacket cites commendations from historians like Professor Robert Tombs and Dr Zareer Masani, while Times Columnist, Matthew Parris states this:

    As a not un-critical child of empire, I think his assessment is fair and accurate

    “Fair and accurate” – words in desperate need of revival today.

    Professor Biggar earns such praise by his impressive demonstration of courage and intellectual prowess in Colonialism a moral reckoning. There, he tackles head on the indictments of Empire made by progressive ideologues in academia. Biggar rehearses and analyses the evidence from both sides to paint a more realistic picture of the past than that promoted by today’s Ideologues with a political agenda.  In my view, there are leading figures in the faculty of history at Oxford today who should learn from Professor Biggar’s approach and honest realism …

    For one thing, Professor Biggar starts with the perspective of the past as seen through the eyes of the players involved; he does not start with contemporary political prejudice against the concept and practice of empire. He therefore starts with reality, not today’s Manichaean, simplistic, absolutist moral rectitude. He is manifestly concerned for what actually happened and why; he is not looking to find evidence to support his preconceived view of the world – witness his clear avowal of horrors like Amritsar and Mau-Mau Kenya.

    What also stands out for me is that Biggar can take the broad sweep of the historical evidence and explain that diverse evidence coherently. He achieves this because he takes his line from the evidence, not from contemporary fashions in ideology. To take just one simple but serious example, the British Empire exploited slavery and yet it also actively sought to destroy slavery: quite simply the second 150 years contrasts with the first 150 years.  And it contrasts because British government  insisted on the primacy of moral imperative in imperial affairs – so the Royal Navy actively and systematically put down the slave trade. This strategic fact is wilfully ignored in the world of woke today because it contradicts the pre-set moral mindset derived from anti-academic techniques like critical race theory.

    I find Professor Biggar’s prose style to be in the best tradition of Oxford dons – precise, logical, fluent, clear and simple; it is  not pretentious, contorted, or convoluted like much that is written in academia today.

    And I like his personal touch; he opens the book with his own painful experiences, and he reveals that a major publishing company cancelled its contract to publish Colonialism. I like too that he is up front and crystal clear about his own personal beliefs and values. He is not afraid to own his position; nor indeed is he afraid to tackle the shallow and illogical thinking of his opponents. Note I say tackle their thinking; he does not attack the person ! This contrasts with many opponents who default to the sly and sloppy device of insulting the man sooner than engage with the evidence and argument; of course, to engage with him would be to accept a paradigm which they reject out of hand. Or, perhaps, because they cannot answer him ! Where he takes them on, he demolishes their view for the simple reason that their thinking and their evidence do not stand up to serious scrutiny.

    I especially like Biggar’s clear and straightforward grasp of what history is. It is traditional and simple: it treats history as the narrative of past events leading to the present – the chronological narrative. On page 17 he states that Colonialism is not a history because “the book is not ordered chronologically”. Instead, he says, the book is “a moral evaluation”.

    Yes, the book does indeed make “a moral reckoning”.  But in order to make a moral reckoning of historical events and evidence, and in order to make a moral reckoning of the assertions of academics and historians about a historical phenomenon like the British Empire, Biggar necessarily examines the historical record and the historiography. Indeed, he provides a very effective “framework of a bare chronology” in section VII of the Introduction. He appears in fact to be writing a history of the British Empire because recent historiography is just so bad !

    I suspect such coyness about behaving like a historian has something to do with the treatment he has received from dozens of the More Enlightened professional historians at the University of Oxford in letters to the London Times. From that platform, they have criticised Professor Biggar for trespassing on their patch of academic study, asserting from their own sense of moral and intellectual superiority that historians don’t make moral judgements on the past … Well, evidently they do because a moral theologian has had to take many of them to task for doing just that with the history of the British Empire. Indeed Professor Biggar examines this very question of moral viewpoint in historiography in section IV of his Introduction.

    I also question the title of the book. Colonialism is not in fact a book assessing all empires and colonisation throughout history; it is specifically about the British Empire over some 3 centuries. Again, this has something to do with today’s context: Biggar is using the British Empire and its historiography to counter-attack the dangerous assaults on the historical record by progressive minded intellectuals. He is taking on the anti-colonial lobby. That presumably explains the less than 100% accuracy of the title. Indeed, he himself explains that there is a distinction between empire and colonisation in section V of his Introduction.

    I must raise too the question of Biggar’s assumptions. He accurately analyses and exposes the failure of the anti-colonial lobby to examine their axiomatic assertions – there is a notable example in section VI of chapter 8, where he tackles the view of Dan Hicks, professor of contemporary archaeology in the University of Oxford and curator of the prestigious Pitt Rivers Museum. There Biggar exposes Hick’s use of abstractions like “militarism”, “racism” and “proto-fascism” to define colonialism. Biggar observes: “None are explained or justified. They are taken as axiomatic”.

    But Nigel Biggar doesn’t really examine and explain his own political and moral assumptions about the moral superiority of the western world’s liberal values, either. He assumes their superiority. In his defence I will say that he implictly explains by reference to specifics like the suppression of sati in India and of slavery. Indeed, most people reading his book will broadly agree his assumptions about the western world’s liberal, rules based order because they understand what those terms mean. All the same, there is a certain deficit here which I identify in order to make my main criticism now.

    Professor Biggar is deploying this much needed thesis, perspective and analysis because he is an apologist for today’s Western dominance of the global world order. He wants to bolster morale for the battle against Russian authoritarianism and Chinese totalitarianism. He is concerned, too, about the disintegration of the United Kingdom – see section 2 of the Introduction.

    But the threat to our western civilisation today does not come primarily from Russia or China. It comes from within – it comes from the corruption engendered by greed at the highest levels of the most powerful western corporations and governments; it comes from the corruption of public life by the assault on public values and morals by hyper libertarianism and crass consumerism; it comes from a religious fanaticism which believes in heaven on earth courtesy of a new world order of woke. It is the fruit of the very “Liberal Democracy” Professor Biggar is concerned to preserve. It comes from what Edmund Burke described as “the spirit of atheistical fanaticism”. As an expert on Burke, Professor Biggar knows this. ##

    Our problems in the West today arise from the “liberal democracy” which Professor Biggar wants to defend against authoritarianism and totalitarianism. That “liberal democracy” has spawned a woke variant of totalitarianism and illiberal intolerance. Today’s West espouses demeaning Materialism and its associated aggressive, Godless Atheism. We have eradicated the Christian culture which distinguished western civilsation. We have lost the “Christian democracy” which obtained in the later stages of the British Empire.

    Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, Yoram Hazony explains this cultural revolution in chapter 6 of his “Conservatism: a Rediscovery“. The first section of the chapter is titled: From Christian Democracy to Liberal Democracy.  There Hazony explains the critical distinction between pre Second World War Christian democracy and post Second World War Liberal democracy. Professor Biggar knows about the post war development of an insidious Rights culture – he explains it in his last book, “What’s Wrong with Rights?”  Why then does Professor Biggar not espouse “Christian democracy” against the “liberal democracy” which has spawned the very problems in academia to which he, quite rightly, objects  ?

    GRC

    # #  I identify this vital but overlooked assertion by Edmund Burke at paragraph 251 in my edition of his Reflections on the Revolution in France