L'Angleterre et la guerre

Nous avons souvent écrit dans ces colonnes qu'un des grands perdants de la Seconde Guerre mondiale était le Royaume Uni mais à la différence de la France, de l'Allemagne ou de l'Italie, il ne le savait pas.

Voici quelques jours, la presse de caniveau britannique a ressorti de la naphtaline des déclarations du chef libéral Nick Clegg rappelant que cette illusion de grandeur avait coûté cher au Royaume Uni.

Seul contre tous, le journaliste conservateur (eurosceptique et francophobe) Ed West est venu au secours de Nick Clegg dans son blog du Telegraph.

I hate to say it, but Nick Clegg is right about the War

Horrified though I am at the prospect of seeing a Lib-Lab government in power – I’d threaten to emigrate but that would probably only make people want to vote for them more – I can’t see what exactly Nick Clegg has done wrong here.

In an article written in 2002 Nick Clegg described an incident where schoolboy friends of his, on an exchange visit to Germany, shouted at bemused Bavarians that “we own your country, we won the war”.

He then writes: “All nations have a cross to bear, and none more so than Germany with its memories of Nazism. But the British cross is more insidious still. A misplaced sense of superiority, sustained by delusions of grandeur and a tenacious obsession with the last war, is much harder to shake off.”

Well, he’s right, isn’t he? Almost nothing makes my heart sink more than the sight of English morons taunting the Germans about the war with Nazi salutes and lame Gestapo accents and even shouts of “two world wars, one world cup”. Britain lost about 1 per cent of its population during the Second World War – Germany almost 10 per cent. Another 12 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from their homeland, and Germany’s cities were totally flattened. And we call them humourless for not joining in and having a right old laugh about it all – Ha! Ha! Dresden, we got you there, Fritz!

But mocking someone about a conflict in which their grandfathers were probably killed and grandmothers raped is not only tasteless, it’s embarrassing.

England certainly does have an unhealthy obsession with the Second World World War, which in turn warps our attitude to Germany, which is why relatively so few English people visit the country (which is a shame. We visited Bavaria and the Black Forest in 2008 and couldn’t recommend it more – great weather, great beer, great people, much nicer than the French).
The English World War Two complex exists no doubt because we started that war as a great power and ended it a mediocre one, and have not recovered since, with the last 65 years being a series of humiliations, from Suez to Basra and that San Marino goal.

But the humiliation has been most keenly felt by the British industrial working class, whose sources of national identity began to provoke contempt just as their communities were being destroyed by town planners (who managed to do far more lasting damage than Goering) and their industrial strength sapped.

And these “delusions of grandeur” Clegg refers to are in part a reaction to the attitude of the establishment to which Clegg belongs – made up of people who essentially don’t believe in nations at all, and who regard patriotism to a country for its own sake, rather than for the progressive attitudes they pretend it embodies, as some weird throwback, like religion. It is this liberal-Left establishment that is the hardest “cross” for the British to bear.

Nick Clegg dit vrai

Le Daily Mail s'étrangle de rage. La tête de file du parti libéral-démocrate vient de révéler une des caractéristiques les plus frappantes de la vie britannique depuis soixante ans : le croyance qu'ils ont ont gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale. L'article de Tim Shipman témoigne bien de cet état d'esprit.

Pourtant, c'est bien Nick Clegg qui a raison.

Voici quelques titres de l'historien Correlli Barnett que nos lecteurs se doivent de lire :

Correlli-Barnett, un historien que les francophones se doivent de lire pour mieux comprendre l'Angleterre.

Collapse of British Power
Correlli Barnett
Methuen, 672 p., ISBN-10: 0413275809.

et aussi :

The Audit of War

The Lost Victory:
British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-1950


The Pride and the Fall: The Dream and Illusion of Britain As a Great Nation



Nick Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain as he claims 'our delusions of grandeur' at winning war are more a cross to bear than German guilt

Attack on national pride: Nick Clegg, seen in Cornwall yesterday, said 'we need to be put back in our place'. Nick Clegg has claimed that the British people have ‘a more insidious cross to bear’ than Germany over the Second World War.

In an astonishing attack on our national pride, the Liberal Democrat leader said we suffered from ‘delusions of grandeur’ and a ‘misplaced sense of superiority’ over having defeated the horrors of Nazism.
He said we found it hard to accept that Germany had become a ‘vastly more prosperous nation’ and that ‘we need to be put back in our place’.
His views, outlined in a newspaper article when he was a member of the European Parliament, cast grave doubts over his judgment of international affairs ahead of the second leaders’ debate this evening, when the topic will be foreign policy.
The jibes threatened to undermine the surge which has taken Mr Clegg from also-ran to serious player in the opinion polls. They were laid bare as:
Details emerged of a secret Liberal Democrat plan to make their MPs maximise their expenses;
Tory Ken Clarke warned that a hung Parliament would cause economic mayhem that could force IMF intervention;
The polls began to turn against the Lib Dems;
Labour Cabinet ministers plotted to oust Gordon Brown, who hinted ‘I’ll go’ if voters turn against him.
The passionately pro-Europe Mr Clegg revealed his views in an article for the Guardian newspaper in 2002.

‘Watching Germany rise from its knees after the war and become a vastly more prosperous nation has not been easy on the febrile British psyche,’ Mr Clegg wrote, before attacking Britain’s approach to the war.

‘All nations have a cross to bear, and none more so than Germany with its memories of Nazism. But the British cross is more insidious still.

‘A misplaced sense of superiority, sustained by delusions of grandeur and a tenacious obsession with the last war, is much harder to shake off. We need to be put back in our place.’


Tory MP Nicholas Soames, grandson of wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill, said: ‘These views will disgust people the length and breadth of the country. They show that Nick Clegg is unfit to lead his party, let alone the country. ‘They are an insult to the memory of Britain’s war dead and to a time when the British public all pulled together for the common good.

'They prove that Mr Clegg shares the European view of Britain rather than the British view.’

Pointing out his position: Mr Clegg talks to voters on BBC Radio 1's Newsbeat
He mocked claims last weekend that Mr Clegg is now as popular with the public as Churchill as ‘laughable’. Mr Clegg, who has a Spanish wife, a Dutch mother and a Russian grandparent, began his career as a Brussels bureaucrat and moved to Westminster after a spell as a Euro MP.
Ironically, his mother was interned by the Japanese during the war.

His outburst was not an isolated incident. In another article from June 2003, Mr Clegg continued to denounce ‘Britain’s culture of superiority’.

Making clear his love affair with all things European, he condemned the British ‘belief in our innate difference from our mainland continental cousins’.

He went on: ‘No other culture in Europe is quite so enamoured by such a false notion of difference.

'We Brits concoct a historically illiterate notion that we are divorced from outside influences. Maybe it was loss of empire, the choppy waters of the Channel, or the last war.’