England’s Anti-War, World War II Member of Parliament, Tony Benn Died Last Week — Reminding Me that Horrific Shared Personal Experiences Make No Dent in Subsequent Generations’ Rock Headed Sensibilities — a Comment about Futility and Hope

© 2014 Peter Free

 

18 March 2014

 

 

World War II made a lot of people wiser — unfortunately, the lesson did not last

 

James Brownsell wrote:

 

 

One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, a British child coming of age will turn to their elders and ask why it is that politicians seem to only serve themselves, the powerful and the wealthy.

 

And their parent, or possibly their grandparent, will turn to them and say: "It wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, there were politicians like Tony Benn..."

 

Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, who has died at his home in London, aged 88, was a member of the British parliament for 50 years. A veteran of the radical left, he was frequently described by left-leaning Brits as "the best prime minister we never had".

 

Born in 1925, he was a pilot during World War II, an experience which left him with profoundly anti-war views - views he later spoke about with the eloquence for which he was to become known.

 

© 2014 James Brownsell, Death of a radical: Tony Benn, 1925-2014, Al Jazeera English (15 March 2014) (paragraphs split)

 

Tony Benn’s recollection of World War II paralleled my father’s of the same period:

 

 

"I was here in London during the Blitz," he said.

 

"And every night I went down into the shelter. Five hundred people killed, my brother was killed, my friends were killed.

 

“And when the Charter of the United Nations was read to me, I was a pilot coming home in a troop ship:

 

'We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.'

 

“That was the pledge my generation gave to the younger generation - and you tore it up.

 

“And it's a war crime that's been committed in Iraq, because there is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons."

 

© 2014 © 2014 James Brownsell, Death of a radical: Tony Benn, 1925-2014, Al Jazeera English (15 March 2014) (extracts)

 

True.

 

But how quickly we forget or repress. When I’m flinging a rock, bullet, or bomb at your wife and child, it magically becomes righteous.

 

 

Futility and hope

 

I was 3 years old, when the Korean War began.  I remember struggling to read English language captions under war photographs in the newspaper in 1950 Italy.

 

Old now, I see how little my generation and its successors learned from Vietnam.  Iraq and Afghanistan have both been marked in too much blood and too little beneficial result.  It is as if Tony Benn and my father had never been here.

 

That’s the futility.

 

Hope lies in recognizing that what is true never goes away.  No matter how determinedly we suppress it.

 

 

The moral? — Greed and fear try to drown truth every day, and our institutions lend weight to the murder

 

Hope survives by lighting a few souls afire, with the assigned mission of touching a handful of similar others across generations.

 

Whether this is enough, no one can say.