State glorification of war is wrong, but citizen heroism will always be right

It’s eighty-two years since the Erich Maria Remarque anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front was turned into a Hollywood movie starring Lou Ayres. Banned by Hitler because he feared that its chilling exposition of war’s obscenity might weaken the German spine for things to come, the film’s acting and dialogue of course looks wooden today.  But its innovatively moving direction and visual hyperbole remain powerful and fresh.

For some reason, the second rank TV channels tonight have been examining everything from WW1 trench warfare to WW2 bombing. On ITV4, the Lou Ayres classic was followed by The Dam Busters, and the contrast was startling. On the one hand we had disillusioned German infantry, and on the other, RAF fliers disdainful of danger and up for derring-do in an all-out attack on the Nazi war machine. But just in case we might be confused, BBC2 had Dam Busters Declassified, giving us lots of arrows about what was real, and what was Ealing bollocks.

While the BBC2 documentary didn’t do it for me (Martin Shaw as the presenter seemed pompous and invasive) the programme did at least crystallise something: no matter how hard we try to achieve otherwise, filmic drama glamorises war. Even Saving Private Ryan – easily the most shocking presentation ever of D-Day carnage – wound up suggesting something romantic about war that is totally absent from the reality of it. Spielberg strove to overcome this in Schindler’s List, and I think overall he succeeded. But that movie is about insane genocidal ideas, not war as a physical conflict between two competing sides. Somehow  – and films from Iron Cross to Galipolli have tried – no amount of world-weary cynicism can remove the one element of war that makes for emotional impact: heroism.

War forces ordinary people into choices they never thought they’d have to make, but above all it makes them less selfish. There is the camaraderie of the platoon of course, but there is also the sacrifice required in order to save one’s colleagues. A higher cause – liberal democracy for example – sends people off to the colours, but it’s the profound tribal instinct to die for the good of the tribe that nobody can ever completely dismiss.

Today it is fashionable to suggest that higher causes no longer exist, and that the current generation would never again be prepared to die for their country. I used to believe that when I was younger, but I don’t any more. Multiculturalism is a hopelessly misguided attempt to engineer the production of citizens with no pride in the host culture, but it has failed and – in the end – will have to be abandoned here in the same way that it is being dismantled in Germany, Holland and France. What we have seen over the last five years is the sowing of seeds that could very easily produce another war in Europe: a war between those with a controlling desire to build an illiberal superstate, and those like the British and the Greeks who want the freedom to develop in their own way. This too, in the end – once the fudgers and trimmers have been dismissed – will produce the tribal identity that inevitably leads to sacrifice.

When Richard Attenborough made Oh What a Lovely War, he was acutely conscious of one reality: the only way to mock war effectively is to turn it into a performance medium wherein it can no longer be taken seriously as, well….war. His pointedly staged musical pulled it off by using utterly unreal parallels and peacetime social allusions. We found ourselves in cafeterias and on piers and in dance halls. But the minute shattering bangs and horrific gore make an entrance, any possibility of making war look futile is compromised. Because the audience asks how did it get to the stege where real people would put up with this, and as soon as that happens, the world is divided into cowards and heroes: those who fight, and those who collaborate with another tribe.

In my opinion, the best anti-war film ever made was Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, about three innocent First World War French soldiers chosen at random to be executed because their regiment refused to mount a hopeless attack. But in truth, this Kubrick masterpiece is an attack on callous military officer-class incompetence, not war per se. And in the end, Kirk Douglas emerges as the hero prepared to take on that disgraceful elite, show up its moral emptiness, and defeat the hypocrisy of every search for fall guys.

It seems to me that two entirely separate considerations tend to get blurred and muddled in the often caricatured Peacenik v Action Man debate. The first is the universal tendency of nations at war to cynically glorify the cause; the second is the genuine desire of individual citizens to see their prized mores survive an attack from outsiders they regard as ruthlessly alien. As a lifetime student of media propaganda, I no longer think the process is as simple as media brainwash citizen, ergo robotic citizen goes off to kill needlessly. Once again, we are dealing with the cynicism of a governing elite alongside the entirely laudable emotions of those they would dismiss as putty in their hands.

The war in Iraq under Blair, for example, was a false cause. At best it divided Britain; in the end, it united us in a belief that we had been conned by spin doctors and oil-obsessed Americans.

But the European Union is, for a growing number of Britons, an issue that increasingly threatens our freedoms, our independence, and even our financial survival. Equally, an inflexible Islamism that flatly refuses to integrate into our culture – and indeed seems intent on overthrowing it – does not need any contrived propaganda to give ordinary people the nagging feeling that one day it will have to be either put in a box, or thrown overboard. One has at times the same feeling about banks, tabloid media, and Whitehall embezzlers. These are not the naive emotions of raw young lads saying “C’mon George, join the colours – it’ll be a lark and we’ll all be home by Christmas”.

At the present time, most of the British Establishment is collaborating: with the EU, with the banks, with the SNP, with selfish economics, with half-baked American geopolitics, with the Sir Humphreys, and with the pc ranks. Apart from them in almost every way, ordinary people are gradually coming round to a realisation that appeasement is just going to make the day of reckoning even more bloody when it comes. In essence, I believe that – albeit unwittingly – our self-styled elites are placing themselves firmly in the enemy camp: to a man and woman, they look more and more to me like so many Oswald Mosleys.

What almost every human being will do in the end is defend his family – in whatever form that unit is perceived. Smug ministers who believe that the end of glorified war means the end of heroism are making a mortal miscalculation. They need to think again.