17 September 2015
A cruel and ugly truth
by Neil Tidmarsh
One of the most interesting things I read this week was a letter to the Guardian from Leslie Brent, Emeritus Professor, University of London. As one of the Kindertransport children of 1938-39, he is urging a more generous response to the current refugee crisis. But the really thought-provoking comment came in his last paragraph: “Together with many other Jewish refugees, I joined the army in the middle of the Second World War…”
During World War II, many young men escaped from countries which had been over-run by the Nazis – Holland, Belgium, Poland, France, Norway, even Germany – and crossed Europe under the most perilous conditions. Once safely in Britain, these refugees then took up arms and returned to the war-zone to fight to establish the way of life they wanted in their European homelands. It is thanks to them, and to the young men from Britain, the Commonwealth and the USA who fought alongside them, that Europe is no longer the kind of place refugees flee from but is now a place refugees flee to.
It’s one of history’s most cruel and ugly truths that a country enjoys only that society which its young men are prepared to fight and die for. That’s why Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is a foundation stone of the USA, why Pericles’ Funeral Oration was a foundation stone of classical Greece. It’s a truth we’re reminded of every year on Remembrance Day. It’s a truth I thank God I personally have never had to live up to.
The recent images of refugees show not just families and women and children, but also young men. Many unattached young men. Nobody could or should order them into uniform, and they deserve our pity and sympathy. But are you tempted to wonder whether their numbers, if rallied, would be sufficient to make a difference back in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria?
One of the Middle East’s problems is perhaps that there are already too many young men fighting there, prepared to kill for what they believe in. Perhaps the more young men that leach away from the conflict, the more it might de-escalate. And could they really make a difference – is ten thousand, even a hundred thousand, enough to turn any tide? And don’t forget that the refugees of 1939-45 had the British to give them a lead in the armed conflict (though it’s worth pointing out here that Britain and her allies have tried to give such a lead in Afghanistan and Iraq in recent years, but that project – to build the kind of free, just and prosperous society the refugees are seeking – failed, mainly, it seems, because of native indifference or even hostility). Also the situation is complex in the extreme. Who would they fight for? Is there any government worth fighting for out there, any government that is not either corrupt or run by tyrannical war criminals, or both? Is there any anti-government group fighting for the just, free, prosperous life the refugees want? Is there any group which would not persecute gays, Christians, Yazidis or Jews even if they wanted to fight alongside them? Is there even any comprehensive vision of that kind of non-sectarian life or free society out there? Is Isis’s nightmare world-view the only dream alive in the Middle East?
The situation is indeed complex, but possibly not more so than in France in 1940. The country had fractured in defeat, was caught between the Allies and the Germans, and was facing civil war. Yet de Gaulle managed to chart a just and decent course through the chaos, a course which ultimately triumphed, and he didn’t have millions of troops to command. Cometh the hour, cometh the man; a Middle Eastern de Gaulle might yet arise (though we have been waiting some years for him already – the Middle East has given the world one mini-Hitler after another – it’s about time it produced a de Gaulle, a Mandela, a Churchill, a Garibaldi, a George Washington or an Abraham Lincoln – it’s almost a thousand years since both the West and the East sung songs in praise of Saladin).
And yes, there is a vision out there in the Middle East of a just, free and prosperous society; it was there in the Arab Spring and it’s there in every head that turns longingly to Europe. But is it a vision people there are willing to fight for?
The other interesting thing I read this week was Martin Fletcher’s piece in the Times about the Syrian journalist Zaina Erhaim, who bravely returned to Aleppo in 2013 ‘to help the revolution by training citizen journalists’. The account of life in that city is horrific. Yet she maintains that there are still fighting groups true to the spirit of the Arab Spring sticking with the struggle, moderate groups caught between Assad and Isis, shedding blood for the kind of society the refugees seek. She has seen friends die for it. “They died because they wanted a better country, more democracy and freedom, and our role is to keep that going or to sacrifice ourselves for it” she says. Wondering whether she could leave, she says to herself: “You were with them in the demonstrations, chanting ‘I won’t let this country down and we’ll pay with our lives.’ They just paid and you just leave? I can’t do that.”
She speaks with the voice of one embracing history’s most cruel and ugly truth. It is a voice of incredible courage, a voice fainter than those of the refugees because it is further away, but a voice which must not fall silent.
