To finesse Unfinished Victory

Ron Unz is keeping up the books listed on the Current-Year Forbidden Index. His latest exhibit is Arthur Bryant, Unfinished Victory.

Arthur Bryant was the heir to Chesterton in British Tory literate circles [UPDATE 10/19 - for better or worse]. He wrote Unfinished Victory over the 1930s, but Events-Dear-Boy overtook his opus so he hastily re-edited what he'd done and hustled that manuscript out the door, for a phoney-war audience, in the New Year 1940. Its palimpsest was, as EH Carr noted in his review, likely a Case For Appeasement. Its 1940 publication, as the Unz crew notes, still preceded when Britain had yet decided upon a total-war attitude against the Nazi menace. And for many months the British public and political-class tolerated the text: so Richard Griffiths 2004, doi 10.1080/0031322032000185569.

Over 1940, the Blitzkrieg overwhelmed all the western Continent and forced a mad English flight from Dunkirk. Bryant could no longer support his own manuscript and did his utmost to recall such copies as had been sold. Bryant shifted to by-jingo patriotic fluff over the rest of the war. He died in 1985.

Unz, though a Mischling like myself, is catering to an antiSemitic audience and that's what Unfinished Victory has attracted to its comments. So I went looking for a proSemitic reaction.

Most reactions I find to this book assume that it's "pro Nazi" and "anti Semitic"; so we find in the "Beast Rabban" blog. Emily Lorimer, Rebecca West, A.J.P. Taylor, and Richard Crossman all deliver ad-hominem along these lines; in lieu of reading them all I shall assume the paraphrases are In-Conclusion. Not listed here is Michael Bernstein in summer 1941. This blog shall look into that review as representative of the batch.

Bernstein's text came out... after the Nazi attack on Stalin. Bernstein implies himself not to be the Stalin sort of communist early on: A profound contempt for the mass of mankind underlies the philosophy of totalitarianism, whether fascist or communist.. But then Bernstein objects to Bryant: Hitler was acute enough to realize that the Marxist did not stand for freedom but for a despotic uniformity, enforced by terror and the annihilation of all who opposed them. From that, Bernstein puts words into Bryant's mouth: Hitler, in Mr. Bryant's opinion, obviously stands for freedom and individualism. Bernstein, if he were opposed to Marx, should - in my opinion - spot Bryant this one as a point of mutual agreement.

As I read Bernstein's review, I notice a lotta wottabowt. Here: Mr. Bryant has no word of criticism for the Junkers who made the war, refused all possible attempts at a peace during its course, forced the Republican government to sign the armistice, bled the Republican government to the tune of hundreds of millions of marks, and then aided Hitler to gain control of the German state. That's a bold statement. It is also a slander: per Bryant, at the end of 1916... the Central Powers had made the first peace overtures. It was to have been a pacification based on the status quo of 1914, together with the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France. But it was not taken seriously either by the German militarists who hoped to retain strategic advantages in Belgium and Flanders...

As to why Bryant glides over "the Junkers" by name: I imagine it's in part because that caste, then ascendant in German military / diplomatic circles, did contain a faction who wanted peace; it's just that many didn't. Also, it's hardly relevant to the book's theme, which is the German proletariat and their Bavarian Catholic-raised Führer, whom Bryant holds up (correctly) as about the polar opposite to the Nationalist-voting East Prussian lord. I would flip this on its head and ask Bernstein why he'd brought it up; I hazard, less for what it says about Schiklgruber and more for what (Bernstein imagines) it says about British Tories like Bryant.

Bryant is trying to be fair to the Junker caste, in short. And he is just as fair to the Jews - at least, the German Jews: the quiet, decent, inoffensive people who had acquired the outlook, habits and sober morality of the German bourgeoisie, and who today have become the tragic victims of an unreasoning loathing which they had done nothing themselves to create. For Bryant it was the arrivistes from the east, who sought those quick profits which Bernstein cannot disassociate in his totalist mind from all "capitalism".

As for the Nazi regime as of 1940, Bryant is under no illusions: a little minority of cruel fanatics to infect a whole nation with their own undiscriminating hatred; It was puritan rather than personal. It is this that accounts for its cruelty and inhumanity. And, since Bernstein is playing the Context Game elsewhere, I note that where Bernstein excerpts They destroyed because they were shocked, he omits to include its prefix Yet to the small minority against whom the popular instincts to which they appealed were directed, they were ruthless and inhuman in their unappeasable hatred.

Bryant's Unfinished Victory may have started as an Appeasement brief, but it evolved - as its author evolved. Bryant had shifted this text (slightly) to the sort of book rife on bookstores during America's own "war on terror": Why Do They Hate Us. Which the Allies needed to understand, should they win the day; before imposing a Versailles II, or - worse - allowing Stalin to bathe his sword in the sea at Calais.

In my neocon phase, I too thought it disgusting that we should bother asking Why Do They Hate Us - of Muslims. Of pretty much any Muslim. For such sentiments I was chastised as a simple hater. So I took it upon myself to learn Islam and to learn its history. And yes, sometimes when people take on the Why Do They Hate Us question they're acting in bad faith. But sometimes perhaps they're not.

For those claiming Bryant as antiSemitic or proNazi, we should dismiss them as simple haters themselves.

BACKDATE 9/15 4 PM MST: for when I finished Bryant's book and found its retort.