Chris Bryant MP on the Causes of the Second World War

There can be few politicians in the House of Commons today more politically and personally disgusting than Captain Underpants. His recent ranting screed in The Grauniad (puffing his new book*) attacking the British aristocracy rather gives the lie to the notion that either he or the "New Labour" project are or ever were "moderate".

Of rather more interest though is his weird recent pantomime dame performance in the House calling for perverts of the past to be pardoned for crimes for which at the time they were duly and properly sentenced.

One of those he mentioned was one John Macnamara MP, one of the anti-appeasement "golden boys" of the 1930s who eventually shrieked us into a second and even more disastrous war with Germany in 1939. And for a fanatically pro-war, Marxist loon like the Captain, that was a Good Thing! Macnamara was an MP, a soldier, a favourite of Winston Churchill, a "right-wing" Tory and, most eerily of all, a former member of the Anglo-German Fellowship.

What Captain Underpants didn't mention of course was that Macnamara's secretary had been Guy Burgess, another homosexual, a Communist traitor, and, of course, a fellow member of the AGF - his intention having been to misdirect any suspicion of his pro-Russian sympathies by being ostentatiously pro-German. According to Burgess himself, Macnamara organised various fact finding tours to Germany, which invariably ended up including little romantic flings for the two of them with various attractive young Hitler Youth boys. (Jedem das seine, I suppose!)

So, what could possibly have made Macnamara come over all anti-German later on?

Well gee, that's a hard one!

Of course, having successfully got his war and implored Churchill to give him something nice and dangerous to do, he eventually ended up on the receiving end of a German mortar in Italy in 1944 and didn't live to see the end of the slaughter that he'd formerly so ardently wished for. Jedem das seine indeed, one might conclude! But it's difficult not to think that the real tragedy of John Macnamara was not that he was a brave man written off as a pansy by the nasty homophobic British Establishment (including, er, Churchill, presumably?) but that deep down he may well have been an honourable man of peace who was blackmailed into both supporting and dying in a stupid and pointless war because of his own personal weaknesses.

I have no real doubt that the Second World War was merely a continuation of the First, and that delenda est Germania had been Anglo-French policy since before Queen Victoria's body was cold. (The old Queen had died in the arms of her favourite grandson; the new King had liked going to Paris, where he'd sit in a golden bath and get wanked off by French prostitutes. Let's be honest, it wasn't going to end well.) At the same time, claims that the war was at least in part caused by shadowy cabals of socialists, Semites and sodomites aren't entirely without foundation.

*It's published by Penguin Books. (Who else?) And there's a photograph of an underage child on the front cover. (How nice!)

If Tintin was Hitler's son, could James Bond have been Britain's Hitler?

As any fule kno, when Hitler first joined the (proto-)Nazi Party he was still working for Bavarian military intelligence.

Now read on.

In an unpublished memoir, [Maxwell] Knight recalled that he joined the first of the Fascist Movements in the United Kingdom, Rotha Lintorn-Orman's* British Fascisti, in 1924, "at the request of the late Sir George Makgill who was then running agents on behalf of Sir Vernon Kell (Major General Sir Vernon Kell, Director General of the British Security Service, MI5). I remained with this organisation until 1930 when it more or less became ineffectual. My association with this body was at all times for the purposes of obtaining information for HM Government and also for the purposes of finding likely people who might be used by this department for the same purposes." 

[Wikipedia]

Funny to think what might have been! Again as is well known, the son that Hitler never had later claimed that he'd been the inspiration for Tintin. Could the inspiration for James Bond in turn almost have been Britain's equivalent of Hitler?

It's a thought.

*In Britain fascism became quite the thing for chicks who swung both ways.