Human Beings Will Always Betray You

There was a fantastic documentary on the BBC in 2007 called The Trap. It was all about freedom and how essentially, the concept of freedom is in itself a barrier to freedom.

The first episode concerned the ideas of human selfishness (mainly during the Cold War) as acting as a barrier to personal freedoms. It put the concept forward that our lives our controlled by how we react around people and how they react around us, and our reactions are determined by our own self interest – even if it results in you doing something good for someone. This is apparently none the more relevant than in the family.

This concept of self interest plays out internationally as well – Game Theory is a response to what is best for your own country, and which always leads to an equilibrium. So in the context of the Cold War, because both sides have nuclear capabilities, the most sensible option is to not bomb the other, but instead make sure the other side knows you have the military strength to retaliate. So it’s all about self preservation.

Digressing, on a historical note, it is perhaps not a coincidence that since the development of nuclear weapons, there has not been a significant war between two strong nation states. Perhaps it is an uncomfortable truth that big countries possessing nuclear weapons leads to peace between countries?

Back to the documentary.

Another theory that supported selfishness came to the fore. It was the Nash Theory, called F*** You Buddy. This suggested that in a situation involving two people where either both sides get what they want from the other, or one side will screw the other over, then the most sensible option is to screw the other side over because that way if they try and screw you over too then you keep what you have, but if they are foolish enough to give you what you want, you will keep what you have and gain a bit more. [Watch first video below if sounds confusing].

These ideas of self interest also play themselves out in the state.

The notion was put forward that before the 1980s, bureaucracy that was intended to help the public only served to create zealots and serve self interest. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, in state systems before the 1980s, orders where taken from above and you carried out those orders – there was no freedom at work which meant the system became very stagnent. Secondly, when the role of the administrator is to serve in the public interest, then because there are so many different opinions and ways of living and thinking in the public, the idea of the public interest becomes more focused on what the elites believed was the public interest, and as such their orders to the workers carrying out policy were dipped in the pool of self interest first.

This system changed by the time of Thatcher. Leading up to the 1980s it was obvious that the systems in place were not working and in fact acted as a barrier to freedoms. Therefore, the Thatcher Government needed to change the way things were run. Here was born (in the NHS at least) the ideas of efficiency. (And in other industries; privatisation and the rise and rise of self serving capitalists) This efficiency was based around numbers – targets, statistics. The idea is that if you work to targets or efficiency gains then you are not working for a zealot. You are working for something not human, and which is controlled by the free market, which of course is meant to equal freedom. However, as should be obvious, working to targets is also a stumbling block towards achieving personal freedoms. Also, for workers working to these targets, whereas the idea was meant to be that the worker would freely decide themselves how to achieve those targets (and hence gain personal freedom), what it meant in reality was that they were working to their own self interests.

Hence the cycle continues.

Another offshoot in the documentary was how the idea of being ‘normal’ was also limiting personal freedoms. The documentary looked at how when challenged, psychiatrists had to change the way they diagnose patients in order to treat mental illnesses. The proposals they decided on included the ‘creation’ of new mental illnesses (ADHD for example), and this required tests to show  people what they were suffering. The result of this was that when people took these tests, the majority came back with having some sort of mental anxiety. But then these people wanted to be ‘normal’ (despite the fact that if the majority of the population have a mental anxiety, then to not have one would not be normal). The quests to becoming normal therefore altered the way people thought and acted, and as such their personal freedom was controlled by ideas of normality.

This is all from the first of three episodes to the documentary.

There are of course criticisms (the Nash Theory would only work if both sides had something the other wants and that both sides were of equal strength for example) and there is so much information in what is essentially such a complex topic. But, the documentaries are fantastic and are more than likely going to open your eyes up to concepts of freedoms and selfishness, and the extent to which we want one over another. I would therefore strongly recommend their viewing, and they are all below. So, enjoy!

Episode One: F*** You Buddy

Episode Two: The Lonely Robot

Episode Three: We Will Force U 2 Be Free

Human Beings Will Always Betray You; You Can Only Trust Numbers

As a matter of personal (self) interest… Last year i wrote a blog about shopping and how even when buying presents you are being directed by self interest. I had watched this documentary about a year and a half before, and perhaps a bit of it has sunk in! Anyway, that blog post is here. [Self plugging]. Also, i have been speaking to a few people recently and we have come to the conclusion that volunteering and helping charities (both things i do) is also served out of self interest. Of course you may want to help people, but a lot of people will do so because it makes themselves feel good or because they have done something they feel guilty about and want to feel better about. Consequently, when it comes to religion helping other people out, then despite the fact that people helping other people for whatever reason is a good thing, it becomes more obvious when religion is involved because then you are helping people because your religion tells you it’s the right thing to do, and you want to follow your religion as well as you can don’t you, i mean, where would you spend your afterlife if you didn’t?

A racist Spitfire?

After Military generals apparently had a go at the BNP’s use of military symbolism in their racist propaganda (i say apparently because they did not mention the BNP by name, although we all know who they meant), Griffin came out saying that “the Spitfire represents the British fighting spirit against Continental totalitarianism” and as such they would not stop using it.

Well, i was wondering whether the BNP would acknowledge pilots from these countries who fought for Britain during the Battle of  Britain; Australia – 32, Barbados – 1, Belgium – 28, Canada – 112, Czechoslovakia – 88, France – 13, Ireland – 10, Jamaica – 1, Newfoundland – 1, New Zealand – 127, Poland – 145, Rhodesia – 3, South Africa – 25, United States – 9.

Do they also acknowledge the effort of the Jamacian pilot who i blogged about a few months back? Or Pilot Officer Mahinder Singh Pujji who came from India to fight in the Battle of Britain who said:

there were other Sikh pilots who readily took off their turbans and put on helmets. But I told them that I didn’t want to because of my religion. So they allowed me to have a special headset with the oxygen mask and microphone that came over the turban.

All of these fought for Britain against a regime going on a racist crusade across Europe. But then it does not look like the BNP would denounce the Nazis as quickly as history and the majority of British people during 1939-1945 [and long afterwards] have:

Nick Griffin:

“Yes, Adolf went a bit too far. His legacy is the biggest problem that the British nationalist movement has to deal with. It just creates a bad image.”

“I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lamp shades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat … I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”

Mark Collett (BNP Director of Publicity)

“Churchill was a fucking cunt who led us into a pointless war with other whites standing up for their race”.

[Reference for above quotes]

What’s interesting is that it appears that Collett believes it was Churchill who led us into war… You’d have thought the ‘defenders’ of the ‘indigenous’ British race would know British history.

…or

Howabout this picture of John Tyndall, the founder of the BNP: link.

Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes – A Short Twentieth Century – MA Level Review

With this work, Hobsbawm tries to guide us through the history of the twentieth century through his own eyes. This, a period of time other commentators have described as the end of history, has otherwise been acknowledged by Hobsbawm as not his specialist area and as such he notes that not only his, but other historians works on the topic would be influenced by their own life experiences during the period.

It is with this introduction to his work that we can catch a glimpse of the direction this book will take. Hobsbawm was an active member of the Communist Party, and as such it would not be naive of us to assume that this book will focus heavily upon the USSR, the development of communism and a constant attack on capitalism – and this is exactly what this work does.

It is interesting to look at the period that Hobsbawm has chosen as his Short Twentieth Century, starting in 1914 with the start of the First World War and ending in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This ensures that the whole work is written in the pretext of the USSR being in existence and the ability to parallel capitalist and liberal democracy throughout the period with communism in the USSR.

Divided into three main sections – Age of Catastrophe (Hobsbawm likes to categorise periods of history into ‘Ages’), The Golden Age and The Landslide.

The first third of the book looks at the two world wars, the rise of communism during this period and to a lesser extent the rise and fall of fascism – both of which have been tied together with a chapter on the crisis of liberal democracy. Hobsbawm brushes aside socialism and social democracy in favour of focusing fully on communism, and especially Soviet, Marxist and Leninist communism – Hobsbawm even goes as far to mentioning the role of Trotsky and Trotskyism in the development of communism only in passing.

Hobsbawm within his introduction to this work correctly makes the point that history should be all encompassing, this means that history should not just focus upon the elites and what did happen, but also upon how decisions and events effected the society as a whole.  It is therefore surprising that this first third of the book is highly a narrative of events and the development of ideology. Hobsbawm notes how the First and Second World Wars were the first truly total wars that effected all aspects of a society (there is room for debate here as a civil war would effect all of a countries society as well), however, he does not examine the extent of the impacts of war upon the people in a country. Take for example the effect of the Luftwaffe’s Blitz upon the peoples of London. There is still a debate here as to whether the war had a unifying impact upon London’s citizens, or whether this united front perpetrated during and after the war was essentially a myth.

But this would go against what the book is really about. Hobsbawm seems to have not gone out with the intention to add to the historiographical debate on twentieth century history – he is, as he mentions, a historian who specialises mainly in nineteenth century history. It is with this context that an examination of the further two sections of the book can be taken. Furthermore, this book is a study of the economical ideological history of the twentieth century, so there is no room for Hobsbawm to talk about world changing events such as the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement in the US or apartheid in South Africa. Although, perhaps inclusion of events such as the Holocaust would lead Hobsbawm to look at Stalin’s own purges and as such question a Stalinist and Soviet system that Hobsbawm appears to be loyally defending.

The following two parts, The Golden Age and The Landslide are very dependent upon each other in order to piece together Hobsbawm’s train of thought. Whilst the Age of Catastrophe set the background to the later twentieth century, these two parts paint the picture of the state of the world in 1991.

The Golden Age is the period of time, 1950-1975, that Hobsbawm sees as the glorious period of capitalism and also the stability of Soviet communism. Far from living in harmony, both systems – assured of mutually agreed destruction – flourished during this period (this applies mainly to capitalism). The Landslide looks at the beginning of the end of the USSR and communism, the faults of capitalism and the rise of social democracy as an attempt to find the ‘middle way’. As we would have come to expect from Hobsbawm the Landslide begins and ends with the fall and collapse of the USSR as a world power.

Throughout the work, Hobsbawm has attempted to bring into the history of the twentieth century the impact of ideologies on other parts of the world, from Asia to the Far East, to Latin America to the Third World – although it is firstly within Europe and then later in the USA and USSR that key movements and ideologies in the world develop, and it is the combination of these three entities that shape the period. Going back to the Age of Catastrophe, Hobsbawm seems strained to include ‘the rest of the world’ in his chapters, often as a side section towards the end of a chapter. He does pay more attention later in his work to the Third World (Africa) as he devotes whole chapters to this topic.

The other aspect of Hobsbawm’s work is the devotion given to art and culture by assessing art during 1914-1945 and then 1950-1991. Even here however, Hobsbawm cannot get away from his commitment to Avant-garde as he seems to bemoan its demise in the later half of the twentieth century. As this work focuses heavily on ideology and economy, the inclusion of the arts is a rather peculiar one. I have previously mentioned that focusing on economics allows Hobsbawm to sugar over sociological issues such as the Holocaust, but then this narrative of the development of art and culture seems to contradict this.

Hobsbawm also gives attention to the developments in science and technology during the Short Twentieth Century, as even Hobsbawm acknowledges that technology has shaped the world by the date his work was published.

It should be said, that despite his attention to communism (which of course played a huge role in twentieth century politics, economics, culture and society), The Age of Extremes is an extremely good starting point for historians interested in the twentieth century, or for anyone interested in what factors have shaped the world that we currently live in. Although I have only briefly suggested discrepancies in Hobsbawm’s analysis it would be ridiculous for Hobsbawm to try and assess every sociological aspect of the short century in what is already an extensive piece of work. That would be more relevant to multiple volumes. But Hobsbawm’s extensive use of reference material and the powerful construction of the narrative and his arguments are merits to the long career of this esteemed historian.

Interpretations of history

A short idea/extract that randomly popped into my head at work a few weeks back that I emailed to myself:

The reason why there are so many different interpretations of history is because humans and their rule of thought is too complex to generalise. There is no one reason for anything. Everybody thinks differently and everybody acts differently. In this sense, it is amazing that anything progresses at all. And it is no coincidence that it takes ‘big’ events to really change things; and there is no way to predict what big event will happen next and how that will change things. When it comes to describing what society was like during a short period in history, there are no limits to the amount of words that can be used, and to then conclude, summarise and generalise is to forget the fact that everybody is different and everybody acts in different ways. There are no characteristics of a society or a nationality, just assumptions and stereotypes placed upon them. Everybody is different and everybody acts in different ways.

The importance of history in developing national identity

Interest in your own country’s history amongst those other than historians develops largely out of a longing to find your nation’s place in the world and where your national identity derives from (national identity is best pitched by comparing your culture and history to another culture and history). The times when interest in history grows is often when people feel a lack of pride in their nationality, so they look back at past ‘achievements’. However, when it comes to these achievements as events to be proud of, they are often distorted. For example, the Armada- although was a fantastical victory, it was a victory in a war that England essentially lost. The Blitz was indeed a time when Brits had the mentality to stand up to the greatest might the world has seen, but was also a time when Britain lost its imperialistic history. In fact, the coupling of the First and Second World Wars helped destroy what Britain had become- it helped bring down the Empire, it helped break the class system and drive equality (everything that Britain at the time was historically not) and it also levelled Britain’s footing in world politics in comparison to other countries.

However, this should not hide away the benefits this history can bring to developing what has always been an evolving national identity. (I must stress that patriotism and nationalism does not always induce national and racial tension- it is only when these forces are moulded into that direction that it does). For example, the Empire was imperialist, colonialist, based on false racial claims and was exploitative. But when people look back on it patriotically, they do not do so thinking we ruled over inferior races, they do so thinking back at Britain’s influence in the world, or ability to have influence in the world- its power. The myths form stories based in the Blitz evoke feelings of doggedness, standing up for what is right, doing your bit. The Second World War belonged much more to the forces of anti-imperialism, to equality, to the fight against fascism and hence racism and to social justice than to powers that bought about racial cleansing and who had(ve) the power to enslave humanity, to destroy cities, to kill innocent lives- all of which Britain could shame to but which Britain had to switch from as it grew up into a world developing it’s own national consciousness’. Britain may not have a history it could be ‘proud’ of in its most traditionalist interpretation, but there is much history during Britain’s darkest moments to enlighten a national identity, a national culture and a national consciousness that helps shape the direction of what being British (or English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish) really should become.

Looking back at Britain’s history develops a notion of wanting Britain to be a world power again, but in a world where social, economic and political equality and justice flourishes. Being a world power should not mean you rule over other peoples, to tell them what to do- instead it should be about setting an example. Making other people and countries look at Britain and aspire to be like it. But in this day and age we as a nation are well off of this example, and that is why I look back at our history and wonder….

From Jamaica to Britain; fighting for the mother country in the Second World War

As part of my continued research (i.e. academic reading) I have come across several accounts detailing the experiences of civilians and soldiers fighting on both sides during the Second World War. In a book I have previously mentioned, Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain edited by Joshua Levine and taken from the oral archive at the Imperial War Museum, I have come across the following account of one Jamaican’s trip across the Atlantic to fight for Britain, the ‘mother country’, in the RAF. I think this is such an amazing story, it almost reads as the plot outline for a film.

The Jamaican RAF pilot in question is one Flight Lieutenant William Strachan of the 99 Squadron, and here is his story. I hope you enjoy.

We had heard these requests on the radio in Jamaica, coming from Britain, speaking to their large family overseas that they should help to defend the Crown against the German invaders. I’m an 18-year-old, just left school and I had the ambition of getting into the RAF – but it was difficult. The British army were still in Jamaica so I went down with a friend to see them and I told them they I wanted to join the air force. We had difficulty getting past the guard but they sent us for a medical and we were both passed fit. ‘Right, we want to join’, we said, ‘will you send us to England?’ We were laughed out. ‘You find your own way there!’ they said.

I knew if I’d gone to my father and said, ‘I want to go to England’, he’d have completely squashed the idea. As conservative as he was, he inherently suspected Britain and I knew he wouldn’t support the idea.

Wartime rules had been brought in that nobody could leave the island unless they had didn’t owe the government any income tax and didn’t have a criminal record. Because I was 18, just left school, I had no income and no criminal record so that was no problem. Still, how was I going to travel? I had no money so I went round all the shipping companies -  they were all run by Englishmen, white men – and I said, ‘Can you give me free passage to England?’ I’d been listening to the propaganda on the radio sating how everybody was loyal to the crown but none of them were interested until I went to Jamaica Fruit Shipping Company, major shippers of bananas to Britain. They had a number of boars coming out from Britain with middle-class white people who were fleeing from the war to the colonies for safe haven and I was able to persuade the management to take me. Nobody was going from the Caribbean to Britain but they told me that I might have to pay for it. The full price was about £45 and i paid £15. I didn’t have that so I had to sell my bicycle and my saxophone and I got about £17 for them. So I got on a ship and left Jamaica with £2 10s in my possession and a small case with one change of clothes. That’s how I came to Britain.

On this ship – a vast luxury passenger ship – I was the only passenger. I was given a first-class cabin which was rather fortunate, right next to the captain, but that was for their convenience, to save opening up lot of the cabins and having cleaners and things. I ate with the captain which was regarded as quite an honour in those days. Normally those ships would have deck quoits and swimming pools, but those facilities weren’t opened up so I spent my time smashing tin cans, saving metal for the war effort. The trip usually took just over two weeks in those days but it took a month because they had to do the zigzag route because of the U-boats in the Atlantic. We arrived at Bristol. I remember the train station. A porter came towards me in his uniform. ‘Your case, sir,’ he said and I saluted him. I thought he was a bloody admiral in his uniform. I didn’t dare thing that he would take my case. ‘No, sir!’ I said.

I got on the train to Paddington. The ticket was about thirty shillings and wartime England was dark. There was a blackout. The only place I’d heard of to stay was the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road – every West Indian that I’d ever met seemed to go there – so I took a taxi from Paddington, spending six shillings out of my fifteen. It was Saturday night, wartime, places were boarded up, wardens and Local Defence Volunteers walking round the place. I was so tired I went to bed. Come the Sunday morning, I went across to the YWCA to meet some people there. I met a lady there who was a Jewish refugee. It was the first I’d heard about these things from Germany. I went out with her for the Sunday evening and she told me what she was fleeing from and all that sort of thing.

On Monday morning, how do I get into the RAF? I’ve got no money, no connections, nobody. After great difficulty I found that the Air Ministry was at a place called Adastral House which was at the foot of Aldwych. So I went along to Adastral House and I spoke to the guard who I now know was a corporal. I said to him, ‘I want to join the air force.’ I’ll never forget this. He said to me, ‘Piss off.’ Here am I dressed in rather lightweight colonial stuff in March – I think he thought I was drunk or a lunatic. I persisted and as he tried to get away, a sergeant came along, and asked what was going on and I tried to tell him. He said ‘You don’t join the air force here, you’re trying to take the mickey out of us! This is the head office of the Air Ministry!’ But in my logic at that period, where else do you join the air force but at the Air Ministry? I didn’t even know about recruiting stations. So I persisted in my arguments with this sergeant and he said, ‘Where do you come from?’ and I  said, ‘Kingston.’ He said, ‘There’s a recruiting station at Kingston down in Surrey,’ and I said, ‘I don’t come from Surrey! I come from Jamaica!’ He didn’t know where Jamaica was. As he stood there quite mystified, a Hooray Henry type young officer came past and heard the argument. He said, ‘Oh you’re from Jamaica. One of our colonial friends. Welcome! I did geography at university and I’ve always been impressed with you West Africans. Come in!’ And this to his supreme ignorance I was dragged in. This bloke was a pilot officer, the lowest officer but he was above the sergeant. And thanks to his intervention, he took me in and I was taken up and saw a much higher rank, a flight lieutenant. I had to go through this story in much more detail and he really satisfied himself of its truth. And then they sent me for a medical at Euston.

I went there in the afternoon. I was told to stand in a room, ‘Get all your clothes off because you’re going to be medically examined.’ I was shivering and freezing. I’d only been in England for 48 hours. They examined me and found me fully fit. The doctor said, ‘Right now you can go home and we’ll call you up when we can take you in.’ I had to explain that I had no money and going home was very difficult. That took another period of argument but by about nine or ten o’clock I was on the train to Blackpool recruiting unit. I’d managed to break all regulations – to get recruited after 48 hours in this bloody country. I was joined up in 4 Elementary Flying Training School. On the Tuesday morning, I was in the RAF, in uniform, kitted out, in a group of 50 strange Englishmen. I was the only coloured person from the colonies. I was very proud of what I’d achieved.

And then these English people said, ‘You’re mad! You’re a bloody fool! If we’d been in Jamaica, we’d still be there now! What an idiot!’ It destroyed all my ideals of what I believed the whole thing was about. I was so proud of what I’d achieved and they said, ‘We’d do anything to get away from the bloody war and you say you come all this way and you tell us that story.’ They thought it was completely weird.

The corporal in charge of us was an ex-Bertram Mills clown. He was extremely gymnastic and fit and he looked at us in the traditional way a corporal looks at a bunch of new recruits and he said, ‘Now I want you all running on the spot.’ These blokes creaked into action. And then he looked at me and said, ‘Right, I’m making  you my deputy. Darkie, come over here!’ I’d never been called ‘darkie’ in my life before. I was shattered because it was a term of contempt. He said, ‘Darkie, you are in charge of the squad!’ I had conflict in my minds. I was annoyed I was called ‘darkie’ but my chest swelled out because I was regarded as a man fit to be promoted, second airman in the RAF.

We should never forget all those who fought against and died as a result of fascism during the first half of the twentifth century and we should never forget what they were fighting against and what they were fighting for. Remember to support the troops even if you don’t support the war.

The Battle of Britain (1940)

The Battle of Britain was ‘won’ by Britain due to a few interdependable factors.

The first was Britain’s eye in the sky, RDF (Radio Direction Finding), or what the Americanised English language describes as Radar. RDF was a fantastic defensive weapon during the war as it allowed Britain to keep an eye on what Luftwaffe squadrons were doing over the sea and what direction they were taking (once German planes made it mainland RDF was less effective and instead the British eye in the sky relied people on the ground to report enemy movements) this help Britain plan for enemy attack and mobilise a more effective defence.

The second was the coupling of the Spitfire and the Hurricane planes. The Spitfire was used primarily as a nimble fighter plane against the Luftwaffe’s other fighter planes. The Hurricane was used effectively against the German bombers as it wasn’t as effective as the Spitfire at fighting German fighters.

These two factors were at the route of Goering’s two biggest mistakes when tactically planning the German attack.

One; Goering was encouraged to attack the RDF stations- it should be noted that although the German’s had a vague idea of the existence of RDF and it’s use, there existence was still not wholly accepted as plausible by German leaders. For a short period in 1940 the Luftwaffe attacked these stations however, destroying some such as the one on Ventnor (Isle of Wight) and putting them out of commission for days, weeks at a time. To counter this in some cases, such as at Angmering  Park, where a RDF was completely wiped out a MB1 transmitter was set up that sent the same signal as the RDF into the air leading the Germans to think that hadn’t knocked the RDF out.

As Goering felt that it was pointless attacking what he saw as small defensive units and with the apparent ineffectiveness of knocking many of these of the map, it was decided to ignore these RDF stations (not fully understanding their importance to Britain) and again fully focus on the destruction of the RAF.

Two; Goering wanted the German fighter planes (such as the Messerschmitt 109 and Messerschmitt 110) to protect the bombers (Heinkel 111’s and Junkers 88 for example). To do this the aim was to reduce the fighter’s speeds to that of the bombers to keep them as one tight unit. Bombers were susceptible to British attacks because of the Hurricane’s greater speed and manoeuvrability over them. This limited the effectiveness of the German fighters who were themselves more susceptible to attacks from Spitfires because they were told to fly at reduced speeds and which gave the Spitfire the edge in ambushing them.

There are of course other factors leading to the British ‘victory’. For example, the aim of the German attack was to wipe out Fighter Command and the RAF. If this was done then invasion would be made possible as the Germans would have had a clear path (baring the Royal Navy) across the Channel. However, instead of putting hundreds of RAF planes into the air at a time, it was decided by Hugh Dowding, commander of RAF Fighter Command, to only send small batches of planes in the air. Thus situations occurred where there were 4-20 British planes against 200+ German planes.  This allowed a continuous flow of British planes to be able to take off into the air at any one time- aiding defense. It also helped lower the number of downed British planes and allowed a more robust yet jagged machine line flow of new planes to come out of manufacture to easily replace the downed planes.

Regardless, towards the end of the Battle of Britain the RAF was in dire straits. The Luftwaffe attack on the airfields made many redundant and the inexperience of new fighter pilots was taking its toll. If the Germans continued the war in the air then they would had wiped out the RAF. However- and there are several stories as to why this occurred ranging from Churchill becoming more ruthless and sacrificing huge chunks of the population in major British cities, to a lone Junker 88 dropping a few desperate bombs on London – the Battle of Britain ended the moment the RAF bombed Berlin. This led Hitler to counter attack by moving the focus of Luftwaffe attack from the airfields and to the major population centres- like London. What followed had such a huge cost and effect upon the civilian population and city infrastructure, but in reality it saved Britain from what seemed inevitable invasion.

Historical readings from today… and the death penalty

Today I started my preliminary reading for my Master’s dissertation, my chosen topic; to what extent did the Second World War help develop a notion of Britishness (throw into that the question of race during early 1940’s Britain). So the first book I pick up to read is: Forgotten Voices, stories of the Blitz and Battle of Britain. The Forgotten Voice’s series is a fantastic couple of books that take oral testimonies of those who fought or lived in the war and put’s them into chronological order without historical analysis (well, this point can be debated as only extracts of oral testimonies are selected and it could be argued that the author only selected those testimonies that can be moulded around his own view point).

The point of my reading (not just out of interest) was to try to piece together some ideas of what British people during the war thought of their country and some common characteristics of national culture during the war. I have already done some reading into this- Paul Ward and Britishness since 1860 where he claims many West Indians who fought in the British army called their post-war children Winston out of patriotic support. Also Tom Harrisson’s Mass Observation archive has bought up such classics as ‘I don’t consider myself British, [I consider the Scots and Welsh as a different race] but I would die to defend Britain [and my Scottish, Welsh neighbours]‘.

From my brief reading I have discovered that the whole British identity could be summarised by two things: tea (that old Chinese import) and common decency. One story talks about how during the blitz a father lost his child through decapitation, he held his child’s body stroking it and saying ‘So this is how you went, Jimmy’, he then got up and thanked a stranger on the street for handing him a mug of tea. More obscure forms of common decency came during the vacation of Dunkirk. One example is that many French and British soldiers were shot by their own side, without hesitation, because they tried to barge into the queues for the boats (that’s right, during the evacuation of Dunkirk when the German’s were bombarding the troops you were expected to form an orderly queue while waiting to get onto a boat and in some cases wear full clean uniform and have a shave).

Digressing from my reading, some thoughts on the death penalty came into my mind today. I would like to point out first that I do lose a lot of respect for people when they make the uneducated statement that we should bring back the death penalty, even if it were for only the most serious of crimes. These thoughts centred around the obvious- if the death penalty were a deterrent then why are crimes still committed in places that still have the death penalty. Then onto the notion that if the death penalty were the most righteous form of justice, then why do some killers kill themselves before they are caught? As a matter of fact- why did Hitler kill himself before he was caught, even though the Allies would had killed him in the end anyway? Are the majority of these people acting through the will of remorse, regret and justice? I think not.