Bush and Pitt the Younger
Vanity Fair has a piece by Niall Ferguson comparing Bush to King Henry V. As recounted or embellished by Shakespeare, the young Prince Hal was dissolute, a party animal. He sobered up dramatically about the time he became king, launched an attack on France that was pretty well completely unprovoked, and enjoyed military success for a while, most famously at Agincourt. Alas, all this military success was reversed within a few years after Henry V's death--partly because his son was a weak king. Joan of Arc kicked the butts of the Brits a couple of times, too.
This is ridiculous, an obvious smear. Ferguson is shopping around for analogies to support the idea that Bush is reckless and lacking in judgment, that the war in Iraq has no real justification, and it will lead to disaster.
How about Pitt the Younger? From a book I borrowed from the library (by Derek Jarrett): England had succeeded in building a navy and an empire, fighting France in the 1750s and 60s, without imposing much martial discipline or inconvenience on its own population. Pitt's father, who became Lord Chatham, had not really lived up to his promise to make glorious war without asking much sacrifice, but "the splendid dream of Patriot war and colonial conquest, the glory of the Pitt family, retained much of its appeal."
War with France heated up again even before the French Revolution, but the Revolution forced everyone to re-interpret the war. Some cool heads saw that France was always France--even at the height of the Terror, when arguably there was no real government in France, or the nominal government truly wished for violent anarchy, in foreign policy it was arguably the old business of becoming dominant in Europe so as to build an empire that rivalled Britain's around the world. Once Napolean took over, he obviously had great ambition for himself and France, but he was in many ways the coolest of the cool customers.
Some in Britain welcomed the French Revolution as a part, even if a messy part, of a new age of enlightenment--especially benefitting the common man. At the opposite extreme were reactionaries who thought everything the Revolution attacked--the power of the old monarchies, the landed gentry, the churches--had to be relentlessly defended. For them dealing with France could never be the same old, same old--this new France had to be stopped, and indeed its influence was like a disease that had to be prevented from spreading in Britain and Ireland.
Pitt was inconsistent--partly because he was caught between a somewhat reactionary king (George III) and his own somewhat more enlightened views. (Jarrett insists Pitt wanted to make things better, more rational and enlightened, primarily for the landed gentry--he had little sympathy for the rising middle class, much less the poor). For years Britain paid levies and gave loans to Continental powers to encourage them to fight France, while largely confining her own efforts to naval battles. Pitt had at least some interest in negotiating with France, but often the King would not hear of it.
Pitt was at his most reactionary at home. In 1794 he suspended the right of habeas corpus (as Lincoln did during the Civil War). In 1795 he censored the press and prohibited meetings of more than fifty people unless they were licensed by the magistrates. There were so many government spies and agents provocateurs around, it was a constant problem trying to distinguish true radical plots from the fantasies of government agents.
As Jarrett says, it is easy to say in hindsight that Britain was actually enjoying fairly quiet years--with no sign of the spread of something like the French Revolution. Critics speak of Pitt's "reign of terror."
Yet there is a certain amount of injustice and even perversity in the charges made against Pitt. By definition, his strong measures were bound to seem unnecessary once they had been successful: it is easy to believe that what did not happen could never have happened.
Pitt and his contemporaries did not "know," as later people seem to, that revolution is "caused by deep-seated social and economic causes rather than by specific and perhaps even accidental events."
Does a reactionary crack down actually make things worse? In Pitt's case, it probably did in Ireland.
There had been dozens of arrests which in England and Scotland had had the effect of preventing any outbreak that might have been planned, but in Ireland it was clear that there was worse to come.
[blockquote]....The arrests in Ireland had been accompanied by a campaign of deliberate and unrestrained cruelty on the part of the troops there...[when the Commander in Chief moved to condemn the atrocities by his own men, Pitt forced him to resign]...and the army in Ireland continued its reign of licensed terror, flogging and torturing and killing as it went. The avowed object of its bloody progress was to prevent a rebellion.... Instead the conduct of the troops drove the whole country to desperation and ensured that when the uprising came it would draw support from all religious communities.[/blockquote]
Of course, Bush is not defending a reactionary old order as Pitt was. But some of the problems of interpreting "Islamic terrorism," and deciding what to do about it, are similar.
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