Opponents of the Boer war were right, but like today's anti-war crowd, wrong about the enemy
Geoffrey Wheatcroft Friday October 19, 2001 The Guardian
For this newspaper, there's nothing new in accusations of unpatriotic pusillanimity, to which anybody opposing a war or urging restraint is always liable. That's something the Guardian, or Manchester Guardian, learned in the past. A case can always be made for peace, not least now as missiles fall on Afghanistan, and the party of peace has to be sustained by faith in its own virtue, and the hope that it will be vindicated by posterity. It often is. The trouble is that, even though the peace party may be right about war in general or a particular war, it is all too often wrong about the enemy. Acting on the unspoken principle "their country right or wrong", the liberal left has a fatal tendency to idealise and extenuate the other side. This has happened again and again over the past hundred years, going back to the most dramatic example of all.
Many on the left not only opposed the Vietnam war - who now defends it? - but persuaded themselves that Ho Chi Minh was nothing more than a brave nationalist and agrarian reformer. That was not how it looked to those who spent years in his re-education camps. In 1956, the Manchester Guardian was right to oppose the Suez expedition, but the Daily Express was right about Nasser, rather than his leftwing admirers. He really was a "tinpot dictator", who did no good for the Egyptian people, or the Palestinians either. Even in 1940-41 there were some leftwing pacifists prepared to extenuate Hitler, as Orwell noted at the time.
But then throughout the interwar years it had been liberals and socialists who not only said that the first world war had been an atrocious mass slaughter, which was true, but that Germany had been the victim, which wasn't. Everyone now damns appeasement, but Munich righted a "wrong" which many on the left accepted. HN Brailsford said that "the worst offence" of the postwar settlement "was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule".
He is a warning to us all. Brailsford was a celebrated Manchester Guardian journalist and socialist authority on foreign affairs, who had confidently stated: "It is as certain as anything in politics can be, that the frontiers of our modern national states are finally drawn. My own belief is that there will be no more wars among the six Great Powers." This was written in early 1914.
Most people on the left agreed with Keynes that Germany had been shockingly ill-used by the Versailles treaty. Lowes Dickinson insisted even after the war that Germany had always been a pacific power, and that the culprit in 1914 had been "primitive, barbarous, aggressive" Serbia. Today, few historians would deny that Germany was in fact the aggressor.
But the time when the party of peace was most startlingly right about the war and wrong about the enemy was 100 years ago, during the Boer war. The "pro-Boers" courageously opposed the war, with the Manchester Guardian to the fore under its great owner-editor CP Scott. This required physical well as moral courage. Pro-Boer speakers were attacked by mobs and - an oddly contemporary note - printers entering the paper's office were searched for bombs. Thanks to its opposition, the Manchester Guardian lost about 15% of its circulation.
Those opponents were half right. The question the war asked was not whether Kruger's Transvaal republic had any moral purpose, but whether the British empire did, and radicals were near the mark when they said that the war was being fought to make the rand safe for the gold-mining companies.
Where the peace party was painfully wrong was summed up in their name, pro-Boers. They idolised the Boers as brave nationalists, a people struggling to be free. They were that in their own terms, but the freedom they wanted meant keeping their hands on the gold - and their feet on the necks of the black Africans. The pro-Boers' nemesis came in 1948 when those Afrikaner freedom-fighters took power in South Africa and created the apartheid state.
And today? It is quite hard to idolise or extenuate Osama bin Laden, but some are doing their best. In response to the atrocity of September 11, a false syllogism was proposed: we should attack poverty and injustice because they are "the causes of terrorism", and "the west should take the blame for pushing people in developing countries to the end of their tether". Poverty and injustice should be righted because they are wrong, but they did not breed this latest horror. Bin Laden was brought up in luxury, and his zealous recruits were educated, middle-class men.
Caution is still a valid principle - against the excessive use of American force or Tony Blair's millenarian rhetoric about changing the whole world. And yet history is tragic, human nature is not essentially benign, the Boers were not noble heroes, the Kaiser and Hitler were not much-maligned men pushed to the end of their tether. And Bin Laden and his followers are not Fanon's wretched of the earth avenging injustice, they are bloodthirsty religious maniacs. The world is not as simple - or as lovable - as liberals would sometimes wish.