For Emperor, King, Queen and Country
BBC4’s new imported historical epic ‘1864’ reminds me a little of Tony Richardson’s criminally-underrated 1968 movie, ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’. Although in ‘1864’ the nation under the spotlight is Denmark, the parallels are potent. A country encouraged to believe its people are God’s chosen few, even if the majority are governed by a nobility minority whose role is to whip-up jingoistic fervour that will swell the ranks of the army as they prepare to launch into a suicidal war with Prussia. In the case of the Light Brigade, the enemy was Russia, but that’s academic. What this superlative Danish drama really highlights the way in which a romantic notion of a nation can motivate the masses to embrace death as glory.
As the male population have traditionally provided the cannon-fodder, it’s interesting how a maternal figure is often evoked when urging the necessity of duty. One thinks of ‘Mother Russia’, the Virgin Mary or even our very own Britannia. Reminds me of how the Krays wouldn’t think twice of subjecting their enemies to sadistic punishments, yet were still good boys to their ‘ma’. There must be something inherent in the male psyche that makes anything permissible if mother is the motivation. Sometimes an actual living person rather than a symbolic one can be painted in such a light, as Queen Victoria and Elizabeth I were; but the image that waved the boys into battle was as far removed from the actual women as Britannia herself.
Nation-states are not alone in myth-making and summoning-up an ideal of what its people are fighting for, however. The IRA cannily tapped into a seductive concept of Ireland as a permanently subjugated land of the free that would flourish as soon as its oppressors were hounded off the emerald isle, and various other more contemporary terrorist organisations present their followers with a similarly simplistic vision of purity that an enemy is sullying. This persuasive method predates the advertising industry by several centuries, but utilises the same psychological techniques to galvanise people into contemplating self-sacrifice for a good that is portrayed as undoubtedly greater. Even non-paramilitary political groups are guilty, as the ‘Yes’ camp and the SNP demonstrated in the Scottish Independence Referendum; and one only has to see a couple of US Presidential campaign ads to count the seconds before the expected appearance of the stars & stripes, the Statue of Liberty or the Lincoln Memorial.
When John Lennon sang ‘Imagine there’s no countries’, the slick and easy-on-the-ears arrangement of a song that has been endlessly misinterpreted since Lennon’s death tends to soften the radical concept behind the lyrics that has echoes throughout post-Enlightenment history. Samuel Johnson famously said ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’, whereas the twentieth century German-American philosopher Erich Fromm expanded the theory when he said ‘Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult.’ I personally would distinguish between patriotism and jingoism; I think it’s possible to love aspects of one’s country whilst simultaneously despising others – and at least here, the latter can be comprehensively dealt with in the time-honoured British tradition of mischievous mockery and savage satire.
A perfectly natural emotion that can be conjured-up by a landscape, a speech, a piece of music or a poem, patriotism can be essentially harmless. The strains of ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, along with Elizabeth I’s Tilbury speech or some of Churchill’s more celebrated ones, undoubtedly stir something deep and indescribable in many that can be manifested as patriotism, but it doesn’t necessarily go any further than a shiver or a swelling stemming from the gut and working its way upwards until eventually expunged via the tear-ducts. Patriotism only becomes dubious and dangerous nationalism when one is wilfully blind to the faults of one’s country and one begins to see it solely in terms of opposition to another, engineering an illogical sense of superiority to other pieces of land that is ripe for the propagandists and those with a vested interest in war. In its purest sense, patriotism renders people vulnerable to such cynical stimuli and can be an invaluable weapon in convincing them there is a cause worth dying for.
In theory, the great Empires successfully suppressed nationalism and gathered different nationalities under one benevolent umbrella, whether the Holy Roman Empire in the centre of Europe or the British Empire beyond Europe. In practice, there was an ever-present separatist agenda bubbling beneath the surface throughout, handed down the generations from a time when the country in question was once ‘free’ and enjoying a Golden Age that ended the moment it was absorbed into a confederation of nations ruled over by a foreign Emperor. Of the four great Empires intact when the First World War erupted – the British, the Russian, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian – only the British survived and yet even that only lived for perhaps a further half-century. The post-war European ‘Totalitarian Empires’ had a far shorter lifespan, but their abrupt collapse in the early 1990s gave birth to nationalist (and in some cases sectarian) bloodshed that was deemed a necessary evil on the road to supposedly preferable independence. Nationalism can bring out all the worst human characteristics and utterly obliterate the best.
I confess that ‘the Schleswig-Holstein Question’ was not one I was over-familiar with before beginning to watch ‘1864’, but knowing that Prussia was en route to becoming the most fearsome military machine in central Europe at the time, I’ve a strong feeling it’ll all end in tears for Denmark. Britain’s entry into the Crimean War just a decade earlier was motivated by the same deluded arrogance, one that overlooked the fact that the country hadn’t been involved in a major conflict for a generation and was led by aristocratic officers who collected army commissions like MPs collect directorships today. But they all acquired their cannon-fodder because they played the recruitment game with far greater skill than they directed events on the battlefield.
Outside of the Balkans and Ukraine, Europe has enjoyed its longest sustained period of peace in centuries since 1945, but enforced enmities between borders survive to the present day, albeit in different forms. The ongoing debate on the EU and the sovereignty of its member states is merely its latest manifestation. Despite what John Lennon said, it’s hard to imagine there’s no countries because country is like family; you can hate it with a passion, yet the bastard always has a claim on a part of you. And ours is bigger than yours, Kraut, Frog, Wop, Dago…
Petunia Winegum
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May 24, 2015 at 10:38 am -
The anti-English propaganda of the SNP turns my stomach. I weep to think what the country of my birth will become if there is nobody to stand up to their fishy socialism.
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May 24, 2015 at 12:33 pm -
“The anti-English propaganda of the SNP”
Care to cite some actual examples? There are actually a quite large number of English members and supporters of the SNP, so I rather doubt doubt that you can.Tribes are a form of family; and very often spin mythologies about ‘that lot up there’ – the one that they don’t have much to do with, because they speak some strange guttural tongue, dress weirdly, have different customs. “They’ll steal your chickens, they’ll kidnap your women, they’ll kill your grannies!” goes the gossip around the communal fires in the evening. And so the concept of ‘foreign devils’, capable of any evil, is born. Pity Lennon couldn’t shoehorn ‘tribe’ into his lyric.
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May 24, 2015 at 2:16 pm -
Anti-English propaganda was remarkable for its absence in Scotland. The change.org campaign for the north of England to join Scotland has been attracting 12 supporters every five minutes since the General Election result was known and attracted over 37,000 signatures.
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May 24, 2015 at 3:50 pm -
@Mrs Grimble,
You may like to review what was said about Gloucester born JK Rowling by SNP supporters.-
May 25, 2015 at 7:43 am -
JK is a big girl who can look after herself. When she was writing the earlier Potter drivel she was supported by lots of Scottish people in small ways. She made her bed supporting Better Together, the organisation of the rich, Brit establishment, red, yellow and blue Tories, the privileged, etc. etc.
Answer me this? Why would the Brit establishment want to maintain Scotland within the UK when we are so costly?
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May 25, 2015 at 3:31 pm -
Easy, Labour wanted to keep you in because it was the only way it could get a majority, and the Conservatives could not be seen to want you out because they couldn’t be seen to contradict the full name, the “Consevative & Union Party”.
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May 24, 2015 at 10:48 am -
Yes Petunia, I’d agree to a point. But if you don’t like what your ‘family’ (country) is doing and don’t see a way to persuade them of their folly, then you are at liberty to metaphorically change your address and phone number by emigrating. My attitude is; let them stew, and have a little fun sniping from the sidelines.
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May 24, 2015 at 10:55 am -
Jingoism is a word invented to disparage the armed forces and their love of their homeland. Kipling wrote, it is worth remembering:
“We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, ”
So jingoism should be reluctance, not gung-ho, but a determination to see it through.
As for the Irish and their potato famine – the whole of bloody Europe was in a state of famine because of the weather. Ever seen (or read) ‘Les Miserables’? Great efforts have been made to play down the support of other parts of the UK to Ireland at the time: the IRA have dynamited monuments in Ireland that attest to it. And, let’s not forget, the diaspora of the Irish at that time to England, America, Australia and other parts of the empire. The empty villages are a testament to the exodus as much as to starvation.
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May 24, 2015 at 11:30 am -
May 24, 2015 at 12:17 pm -
Not Kipling. The line is from a music hall song of 1878 – when Kipling was a boy of 12 – sung by a chap named GH MacDermott.
We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.It was reflecting British fears of Russian expansionism during the Russo – Turkish war, which potentially could have seen Russia take the capital of the ailing Ottoman empire.
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May 24, 2015 at 5:41 pm -
Zippgun,
You’re right. I checked my memory against the dratted internet, and the quatrain was there on a page about Kipling, but if I’d worn my best glasses I’d have seen the attribution (but in the page I consulted it was G W Hunt, not MacDermott). Ah well, some clever fecker wrote it, and he wasn’t Kipling!
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May 24, 2015 at 6:40 pm -
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May 24, 2015 at 8:06 pm -
“There in’arf been some clever bastards”
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May 24, 2015 at 8:32 pm -
“There in’arf been some clever bastards”
Oh dear. If someone other than Pet (who is beyond redemption anyways) is getting my obscure and misquoted references to songs of the 80s then I might have to look for some new (or older) material, Little Jenny.
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May 24, 2015 at 9:45 pm -
G H Hunt wrote it, MacDermott sang it. The composer was known as “Jingo” Hunt ever after.
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May 24, 2015 at 11:04 am -
because country is like family
a truly terrifying analogy….mind you not everyone has a family that can trace it’ s Norfolk line of descent back to 1545 (Aged Mother Dwarf having been the coven’s genealogist ) in the same small village . It begs the question; which bit of the UK , of the country of my birth, is the six fingered, triple breasted, web toed, retarded drooling hermaphrodite kept hidden à la Mrs Rochester, the family’s dark secret shame? Somewhere North of Watford Gap Services I assume. Yorkshire maybe?
Which bit of Britain makes a habit of sleeping with it’s daughters and passing the family psychosisi down the generations like cheap tarnished Silver plate teaspoons (the women of my line end up in an asylum every other generation…it’s a tradition and a Parish Bylaw I think)? London perhaps, fucking over all its’ sister cities and spawning the birth of genetically dubious like Milton Keynes…?
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May 24, 2015 at 11:47 am -
Crimean War not a good comparison, Petunia. To quote Wikipedia: “The immediate cause involved the rights of Christian minorities in the Holy Land, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The French promoted the rights of Catholics, while Russia promoted those of the Orthodox Christians. The longer-term causes involved the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the unwillingness of Britain and France to allow Russia to gain territory and power at Ottoman expense. Russia lost the war and the Ottomans gained a twenty-year respite from Russian pressure. The Christians were granted a degree of official equality and the Orthodox gained control of the Christian churches in dispute.” And Jingoism didn’t arise until the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) in which Britain did not take part. Lots of “deluded arrogance” on all sides of course. Particularly bizarre pseudo-religious Russian nationalism at the court of Nicholas I, with his stated principles of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality” not dead yet in Russia, I fear.
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May 24, 2015 at 11:54 am -
I wasn’t really referring to the causes of the Crimean War, more the attitudes of those who dragooned the men into it. The outcome of Britain’s involvement at least led to a reorganisation of the way in which the officer class were chosen, no longer based on privilege and peerage, but actual military skill.
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May 24, 2015 at 12:30 pm -
The irony is that the great mistake by British forces in Crimea, the “Light brigade” charge was caused by Captain Nolan, who represented the new breed of professional soldier in conflict with the aristocratic “playboys” who dominated the army’s upper echelons, such as Lucan and Cardigan, who were stunned at the supposed order from Lord Raglan to charge the Russian guns through the valley of death. “Here goes the last of the Brudenells”, mutters a gobsmacked Cardigan in the 1968 film – though the Earl would survive the charge and become a national hero, while Nolan himself, who precipitated the action, perished.
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May 24, 2015 at 2:35 pm -
Was Nolan the character played by David Hemmings in the 1968 movie?
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May 24, 2015 at 5:07 pm -
the officer class were chosen, no longer based on privilege and peerage, but actual military skill.
Not quite. Promotion of a common soldier to the commissioned ranks was very rare, but at least commissions couldn’t be bought.
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May 24, 2015 at 5:40 pm -
It certainly stopped the sale of commissions that was such a scandal in the early 1800s, with one of the future William IV’s mistresses involved, as far as I can recall.
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May 24, 2015 at 8:09 pm -
A mistress on commission – there’s a niche market!
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May 24, 2015 at 9:36 pm -
Yes, it was quite a scandal.
Our beloved PM is descended from William IV via a daughter by his mistress.
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May 25, 2015 at 1:43 pm -
One issue. The Crimean War was actually misnamed. The real action was in the Baltic, and we (UK and France) won.
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