A friend once compared the EU to the medieval Christian Church: an extortionate, self-indulgent, hugely expensive and non-productive deadweight that European societies narrowly afforded until the Reformation.
The cost of Brussels has become insupportable. If we continue to burden employers and wealth generators, large and small, with its Utopian vision, only relentless decline can lie ahead. The truth is that European institutions with huge spending power lack effective supervision. Resources shared between 27 EU nations are distributed with reckless irresponsibility by unelected officials.
Those who obey the rules suffer by comparison with those who break them. France — to name but one — observes only those Brussels edicts that suits it, while Romania, Greece and Italy remain chronically corrupt. Meanwhile, Britain is constantly penalised for its rigid adherence to EU law, enforced by our judiciary and civil servants. Rockfall in the path of common sense: The European Court of Human rights has had a perverse effect on justice in the British courts. So what to do? As a result, we are caught in a web of treaties, agreements, organisations and understandings so dense and interwoven it would be hard to escape from them.
I still reject the crude jingoism of the UK Independence Party, which ignores the practicalities of avoiding a breach with our vital trading partners. And I realise that quitting Europe would engage us in a crisis that would sap the entire energy and attentions of any British government for years. But it has become essential to repatriate powers from Brussels.
This is not in furtherance of isolationism, but of the economic imperative to strengthen our competitive position in the world and repair our social fabric.
Almost incredibly, the latest net immigration figures are the highest ever. If the EU maintains its present path, it is hard to see the structure surviving longer than another decade. Its failure will become ever more starkly obvious to the electorates of Northern Europe, who pay the bills for the chronic corruption and incompetence of the South.
Brussels cannot justly be blamed for many things that are wrong in Britain today, our educational system notable among them. Also, Germany and northern Italy demonstrate that, even within the EU, it is possible to have a strong manufacturing sector, as Britain does not. But fundamental issues persist: the EU imposes on its members structural costs, social benefits, consumer protection, health and safety measures and environmental rules, which are unaffordable in our harsh new world.
I feel embarrassed to have to admit I have been wrong for so long about something so important. I still reject the notion that Britain should embrace lonely isolation, enfolded in the flag. But membership of the EU in its present form has become a blight, imposing unacceptable social, cultural, commercial and industrial burdens and constraints.
With so much else to trouble him, David Cameron is understandably reluctant to precipitate a crisis of choice in Brussels. I have interviewed hundreds of World War II veterans all over the world, and made extensive use of their words in my books.
I disagree with academics who declare that these are valueless. They contribute to a sense of mood, time, and place that can make an important contribution to a portrait of how things seemed to contemporary participants.
But I strive to exclude testimony that carries a scent of falsehood, and would never rely upon the memories of elderly men and women to substantiate any important factual assertion. As MacMillan observes, human memory is wildly selective. After the passage of years, most of us begin honestly to believe in the reality of things we think we saw and become muddled about chronology. When I encounter people whom I met on battlefields decades ago, in my days as a war correspondent, I am shocked by how often they correct mistaken memories of my own, of which I had become implicitly confident.
Beyond flaws of recollection, it is a fallacy that those who were present can be trusted to know what happened. MacMillan remarks on the folly of supposing, for instance, that those who participated in the bombing of Germany and Japan possess overriding credentials for passing judgment on its merits, as was deemed the case in the s controversies in Ottawa and Washington.
Wars are conducted in part by senior officers, who make the decisions and unsurprisingly seek later to influence historical assessment of them, especially if they continue to hold high rank and exercise some power over the contemporary documentation and what use is made of it. The other, overwhelmingly more numerous participants in conflicts are very young men and women, most of them immature and ignorant of anything beyond their own rifle sights. They are unqualified to offer useful opinions about the big picture of events in which they played small parts.
In my own experience, it is valueless to invite those who fulfilled junior roles to pontificate about matters beyond their own narrow compass. The inherent virtue of oral testimony has become much exaggerated in public imagination. Such evidence has a useful part to play, setting the scene in depictions of recent historical events. But the voices of participants must properly be set in context with documents and contemporary records—though these, too, must be treated with caution.
Some academic historians place an almost religious faith in the sanctity of written evidence. The scientist Solly Zuckerman, who played a prominent part in British wartime councils, told me that in old age, he read anew in the British National Archive the minutes of meetings he had attended, to refresh his memory when writing his autobiography. This exercise caused him to conclude that the papers reflected only the personal prejudices and convictions of those who drafted them, rather than a reliable narrative of what had been said.
No US or British regimental war diary that I have ever seen explicitly admits that soldiers fled in panic, as of course they sometimes do. MacMillan urges that the foremost need in exploring history is a sense of humility. For centuries, in real life as in fiction, even the most brilliant doctors routinely drained blood from their patients.
Their purpose was benign. They were absolutely wrong, but they knew no better. So it is with political leaders. Relatively few, especially in the liberal democracies, knowingly commit evil actions. But the consequences of their actions, in modern times in such places as Suez, Algeria, Vietnam, and Iraq, have often been evil.
Not infrequently, this has been the consequence of reading the wrong parts of history. It can also suggest to us what the likely outcome of our actions might be.
There are no clear blueprints…that can help us shape the future as we wish. Each historical event is a unique congeries of factors, people, or chronology. Yet by examining the past, we can get some useful lessons about how to proceed. The worst mistake often made by national leaders, MacMillan says, is to cherry-pick historical evidence to justify courses of action to which they are already committed. Bush was especially prone to this. He occasionally invited historians to the White House to share their wisdom, but his choice of guests was dictated by their political mindset.
There is no evidence that the President was ever deflected from a course to which he was predisposed by new thinking offered by such interlocutors. MacMillan spares a deservedly unkind word for professional historians who in recent times have made a virtue of obscurantism. Do we need physics that entertains us? Agreeing with MacMillan, I am shocked by the poor literary quality of work, often published by university presses, produced by many academics. It might as well be written in Chinese for all its intelligibility to a lay public.
The consequence, says MacMillan, is that amateurs—among whom she would presumably include me, since I possess no academic credentials and hold no tenure—increasingly work the field. She urges that the professionals should make an effort to regain their lost territory by recognizing a responsibility to tell a story vividly, in addition to sustaining the cause of intellectual integrity. One of the huge ironies is that all through the war, with all their vast intelligence machine, the Americans never really understood that the Russians, especially, loathed the Vietnam entanglement but felt that, as the leaders of the so-called socialist world, they had to go on supporting the North Vietnamese.
As for the Chinese, they had just gone through the Korean War and the last thing they wanted was another big war on the Asian continent. The fundamental reason that the communists won in Vietnam was because they were Vietnamese. After Ho Chi Minh achieved ownership of Vietnamese nationalism, and he maintained this for the following 25 years.
Even after Ho died in , nothing the Americans did was able to shake that. What was extraordinary was that, even in , the Americans understood that the so-called Saigon government they were supporting was paper thin. It was terribly unpopular. They were wrong. It was like trying to use a flamethrower to weed a flower border. They were using completely the wrong tools. And although Americans always professed to loathe colonialism, in a way their approach was profoundly colonialist.
One veteran who made a great impression on me was a former medic called David Rogers who told me about a time when he and his infantry company were out on a sweep north of Saigon with some Vietnamese soldiers. There is no doubt that the communists were better soldiers.
They knew the country and a lot of them were far more experienced than the Americans, who typically only spent a year there, whereas they had been fighting for years on end.
One thing the communists did have was the AK and it was really in this war that it became the most famous gun in the world.
The Americans had the M16 rifle, which is a terrific bit of kit if you are on a firing range — far better than an AK But if you drop an M16 in the jungle, or it gets mud in it, the whole thing will seize up.
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