‘Blue Jerusalem’ Review: How Tories Fought Tyrants
Wartime conservatism in Britain was more than propaganda—it was a political force that shaped both the war’s strategy and its aims.
The Nazi conquest of Europe was, in no small measure, a result of the British Conservative Party’s failures. After the September 1939 invasion of Poland, the public turned on Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain; voters understood that his appeasement policies had encouraged the conditions Adolf Hitler needed to spark the war. The elite version of conservatism Chamberlain represented was largely discredited, and into the breach stepped Winston Churchill’s new coalition government. This new leader’s distinctive wartime style, argues Oxford-trained historian Kit Kowol, allowed other kinds of conservatism to jockey for power. In “Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War,” he claims that the struggle to defend civilization from totalitarian threats encouraged thinkers on the right, as well as those on the left, to consider bold new futures. Though often overlooked by academic accounts of the war, wartime conservatism shaped the modern world.
Many popular histories present the conflict with the Axis as a “people’s war,” a step along the progressive path toward egalitarianism, liberalism, even socialism. Mr. Kowol contrasts wartime calls from Labour and the British left for the “socialization of the military” with a conservative push for “militarization” of society. Some on the left hoped the war effort could be used to advance an agenda of social change, but conservative forces within British society pushed back. Institutions such as the Home Guard and various cadet groups were formed not only to help with the war effort, but to advance values including a sense of duty and patriotism.
During the war, many conservative political and intellectual figures also began advocating a return to religion. Mr. Kowol writes that they came to believe “Christianity was the antidote to totalitarianism not only because of its emphasis on the dignity of the individual soul and the brotherhood of man but because of the higher loyalty it demanded.” Writers such as T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers defended British institutions in explicitly Christian terms and portrayed Nazism as a new pagan force in the world.
Mr. Kowol believes this wartime conservatism was more than propaganda—it was a political force that shaped both the war’s strategy and its aims. The intellectual class that defended British society also imagined creative solutions to practical problems, ranging from new forms of international organization to more humane economic arrangements, “a pan-European federation, a new corporatist economic order, or the creation of a Christian elite.” (Mr. Kowol is skeptical of some of these policies, suggesting that such proposals “were about maintaining the British Empire, a capitalist economic system, and an inegalitarian social order.”)
Read more in The Wall Street Journal.
