Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, rendered a tub-thumping, swashbuckling performance at Lancaster House last week, when he gave a speech reminiscent, to me, of the propaganda in the Pathé Newsreels of World War II, which used to glorify in faultless BBC RP our deeds of derring-do on land, at sea, and in the air, in defence of the realm, to a background of stirring and patriotic orchestral music of the sort you might encounter in a war movie like Okinawa, or The Longest Day. Mr Shapps even utilised the word “patriotic”, or its opposite. Apparently, if we did not feel inclined to prepare to intervene militarily on the world stage, we were “unpatriotic”. I couldn’t help remembering the words, I think of Samuel Johnson, that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Most of Mr Shapps’ speech was quite predictable. After all, defence secretaries are always on the lookout to increase the defence budget. We live in a dangerous world, and we must prepare for the next cataclysm. Did not Winston say as much in the 1930s? We must rearm! Preparation for war was the sole guarantor of peace.
All well and good. But I was struck by remarks passed towards the end of Mr Shapps’ speech. Something I’ve noticed about speeches, committee meetings, and conferences: you must always sharpen your attention towards the end, at the precise moment when your alertness is inclined to flag. The most significant remarks, ergo the most critical decisions, are likely to occur during “Any Other Competent Business”.
And we have come full circle.
Moving from a post-war to a pre-war world.
An age of idealism has been replaced by a period of hard-headed realism.
Mr Shapps was harking back to 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a speech Mrs Thatcher also made in Lancaster House, ushering in a new age of optimism. We may look back on it now as a moment of unparalleled opportunity. Three people, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Michael Gorbachev, in the depths of the Cold War, somehow managed to forge a rapport. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was the possibility of creating a more stable, ordered world. It never happened. To all intents and purposes, the USSR was taken over by the mafia. But the West’s attention was diverted elsewhere. The next game-changing event on the world stage was 9/11, which ushered in, for whatever reason, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And now, we are where we are. Russia has attacked Ukraine; China threatens Taiwan; Israel bombards Gaza; we bombard Yemen. There seems to be a general consensus that a discretionary solution to many of the world’s problems is to drop a bomb on somebody. Mr Shapps has, essentially, predicted the imminent arrival of World War III.
Running in parallel with all this in the news this week, is a story from Germany. Apparently in November there was a secret meeting of far-right groups, in a villa beside a lake in Potsdam, to discuss the possibility of deporting millions of German citizens whose “Germanship” may not be of the highest order. I picked up on this because I happen to watch „Tagesschau“, a much revered newscast of German television, every day. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is not best pleased.
You cannot hear of this, without recalling another secret meeting, in Wannsee, not so far from the Potsdam meeting, in 1942, when the Nazis decided upon “the final solution”. The Potsdam meeting has even been dubbed “Wannsee 2”. That specific connection is probably why so many Germans have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the alt-right. During the same newscast that covered the secret Potsdam meeting, Tagesschau did a piece on Mr Sunak’s latest attempt to get his Rwanda Bill through the House of Commons. This was relatively unusual, because Tagesschau seldom covers UK affairs. And why should it? Naturally, the political focus is on the Bundestag in Berlin, a spacious chamber full of light beneath Norman Foster’s magnificent crystal cupola. In fact, the contrast between the airy Bundestag, and the dark, cramped, claustrophobic, pokey chamber in the Palace of Westminster, with its adversarial green benches, was striking. Three individuals bowed to Mr Speaker as they presented the count from the latest division in the lobbies. “The ayes to the right… the noes to the left… the ayes have it. Unlock!” Take a pinch of snuff at the Commons’ door on the way out, the snuff box made from the charred remains of the old chamber door, bombed by the Luftwaffe. We are stuck in a time warp.
Talking of things German, on Thursday we had our first meeting this term of our class, that has been rebranded “German for everyday life”, back at the Goethe Institut in Glasgow. There was great fun, and lots of hilarity. For homework, we had to identify 20 words on the basis of a series of definitions, somewhat like a crossword puzzle. Then we had to take the first letter of each solution, in order, to spell out a phrase in Latin.
Spoiler alert…
Ne sutor supra crepidam.
It so happens, I remember being taught this at school, actually in the form Ne sutor ultra crepidam, literally, something like “Never cobbler above sandal.” The conventional translation is “The cobbler should stick to his last.” From this has arisen a word in English: to “ultracrepidate”; that is, to criticise above the sphere of one’s knowledge.
It occurs to me that our Defence Secretary, in his critique of the world situation, is an ultracrepidarian. He has moved beyond his remit of shouting for his own corner in order to assure a state of preparedness. He is telling us to prepare for war, because war is inevitable. Anything less is “unpatriotic”. The trouble with resigning yourself to a specific future is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
jamescalumcampbell 