Daily Mail, 7 June 2004

Sixty years on, D-Day casts a long shadow. We look at the extreme heroism of that time and ask ourselves whether such solidarity and self-sacrifice could take place today. The answer is usually a despairing no, and it isn’t hard to see why.

For what above all won the war for the allies was self-discipline, a willingness to sacrifice oneself for the common good. Today’s Britain, by contrast, is characterised by self-centredness and a breakdown of self-discipline. Sated by unprecedented material prosperity, this society has all but lost the concept of overcoming setbacks or hardship. It has lost its capacity for endurance.

What won the war was leadership and excellence. Yet nowadays, these are scorned as ‘elitist’ and have been replaced by mediocrity. What characterised those D-day heroes was their stoicism and laconic self-effacement. But now, stiff upper lips are a prescription for the psychiatrist’s couch, explicit TV war footage has become the recruiting sergeant for pacifism, and emotion and sentimentality trump all.

If World War Two had been fought with our current lethal attitudes, we would surely have lost it. Just imagine the demoralising effect of today’s armchair defeatists after the retreat from Dunkirk. What would have happened, when it looked as if Germany was on course to defeat the allies, if their high command had started falling out in public?

For this is what is happening over Iraq, as those responsible noisily pass the buck for their manifest failures in forseeing the complexity of winning the peace. But such public disunity, which plays into anti-war hands, is a recipe for demoralisation and defeat.

D-Day was an operation of staggering military complexity which could easily have ended in disaster. Iraq is an operation of staggering political complexity — but over which no allowances are being made for inevitable bad luck or human error, let alone its particular complications. Instead, logic and rationality themselves have been suspended, as everything happening in Iraq is viewed through a prism of defeatism and appeasement.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to sentimentalise the past and demonise the present. The British Army is still the most formidable fighting force in the world. Its young soldiers who are asked to lay down their lives are no less heroically brave. And in the population at large, there remain many millions who would fight to the death for independence and democracy.

The difference is that when it comes to Iraq and the war on terror, the British have not accepted that their way of life is threatened. People say that — unlike now — at least in World War Two we knew what we were fighting for.

But in fact, there are uncanny similarities between then and now. For in the 1930s, Britain’s refusal to accept that the threat from Hitler could only be tackled by war almost proved fatal. It was only after the defeat in 1940, when Britain had its back to the wall, that the country finally awoke from its trance and pulled together under Churchill.

People contrast the brilliance of the intelligence double-cross that made D-Day possible with today’s intelligence failures over al Qaeda or Iraq. But we should not forget the signal failure of intelligence before 1939 to forecast the Nazi-Soviet pact. Nor should we forget that fighting and disorder went on long after the war had been won; nor the anti-Americanism of British public feeling during the war, or the gloating defeatism even then of the intelligentsia.

Finally forced to stare into the abyss in 1940, Britain not only pulled itself together to win the war but from its finest hour forged an image of the nation itself that persists to this day — as immortalised in the essays of George Orwell, who helped paint a national portrait of Britain as resolute, steadfast, and heroic.

The problem is that we are still transfixed by that heroic history. Britain thinks of a national threat only in terms of a total war waged by one nation against others. But we now face a very different kind of threat from a different kind of war: an intricate, global network of terrorists and rogue states who want to cripple the west and re-establish the medieval Islamic empire by conquest, and who intend to use weapons of mass destruction to do so.

Those who don’t accept this threat obviously don’t accept the need to attack it at source by trying to draw the dragon’s teeth of tyranny and terror sown throughout the Middle East. Hence the defeatism.

But the question is whether, if the British lion ever rubs the sleep out of its eyes, it will be too late. For it is not merely that the programme of the political class —signing up to the European project, mass immigration, multiculturalism, abolishing Britain’s historic constitution —is undermining the coherence and identity of the nation itself.

It is also that the values of the nation have been badly undermined by that same intelligentsia, which has refused to hold the line for self-discipline. The churches, police, legal profession, civil service and above all the universities have either tolerated the moral slide or actively promoted it, with drastic effects on family, education, social order and national character.

The fact is that since World War Two was won, Britain has been struggling with an erosion of confidence, role and sense of purpose — first with the loss of empire, and then the destruction of its identity as a great manufacturing nation. Weakened by the ‘me-first’ dependency of the welfare state, it has now descended into the destructive rancorousness of victim culture.

Add in the toxic illusion of our human rights industry that war must always give way to law, and you have a witches’ brew that exudes the rank odour of decadence. Yet there is still a great yearning for solidarity, clarity of purpose and moral conviction — a longing, in short, for the ties that bind a nation, of which the instinct to defend it is the most potent expression.

Victory over Hitler was achieved only because the leaders of the free world took a tremendous risk on D-Day that their judgment would not result in disaster. Today’s spoiled, childish and demoralised populations require their leaders to take no risks, and accordingly hold them to a standard of perfect foresight and flawless judgment that they can never attain.

United yesterday on the beaches of Normandy, both Britain and America are facing potentially lethal confusion and uncertainty. The US, beset by rampant anti-Americanism and tearing itself apart over its mistakes in Iraq, may now retreat once more into the historic isolationism from which D-Day was such a departure.

For its part, Britain — riven internally by rampant cynicism, moral confusion and political disillusionment which are sapping its ability to defend its interests - is torn between supporting the flawed giant of America and the giant flaws of the European project.

We face no less of a choice between their two opposing ways of looking at the world: drawing a line in the sand, or burying our heads in it. The lesson from the Normandy beaches is surely that the essence of courage lies in facing reality head on, and never flinching.

Posted by melanie at June 7, 2004