Owing to the fact that we now live in a media landscape where everything has to be hyperbole all of the time, where everything is awesome, everything is terrible, everything is the best, everything is the worst, where we live in a surfeit of wisdom and an age of incredulity, et cetera et cetera et cetera... the 2020 United States Presidential Election has been declared as the most important ever...
...111 RoXoRz da BoXoRz, lulwut. etc.
Indeed while the implications of what has happened and the consequences of the various players have certainly made sure that all available oxygen in the room has been sucked out to the exclusion of all else, the long game of history will eventually judge all of this as being a weird blip in the past, as you and I both die and the memories of this moment and indeed the memories of the people who were living in this moment, were all swept away upon the winds. History as the wind which follows in the wake of the Destroying Angel Of Death who has an appointment with everyone, blows most things away as dust and our place remembers us not.
Maybe it will be remembered as myth as is the case for someone like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln but the fact remains that practically nobody remembers the worst President in the history of the United States, James Buchanan, and perhaps quite rightly so. In the moment, everything seems consequential but history in playing the long game, consigns everything to mere memory and even then, only as long as there is someone actually still alive to remember it.
When it comes to the broader question of what was the most important election in modern history (and I use that in the incredibly narrow sense that there are still people around to remember it and/or the consequences) then the election which brought Hitler to power in the 1930s certainly is up there but even that falls into a much larger narrative of generational hatred which was revisited roughly every 30 years for the previous 300. Even someone as horrible as he has been and gone and his place is beginning to remember him not.
I think that the election which was actually the most important is also one of the more boring ones; which is often the case with history. We tend to have this view that history is a series of unfortunate events which turn on the actions of few great men but really, the long game of history takes the collective actions of millions and often gives leaders the words to a song that the great unsung multitudes were already singing.
During the midst of the Second World War and only after it became obvious that the world was changing, the British people voted to change from Winston Churchill's Conservative Party to Clement Attlee's Labour Party as the party in charge of government. Domestically, the Labour Party had a very large vision for the future and it was able to bring the British people with them. That vision included nationalising key industries as well as the setting up of the welfare state (which included the establishment of the National Health Service), based on the immediate evidence that the people had worked together to see off Nazi Germany and Hitler and that a shared collective future would be the best placement for the next immediate phase of history.
Of immediate importance was what should happen to the Union Of India. All of India had basically been run from a single office in Whitehall for decades and during the years of the Attlee Government from 1945-1951, the world changed in ways that it hadn't for at least a hundred years before and in some cases in a way that it hadn't for a minimum of not quite 1900 years. That is the kind of scale of importance we are talking about here.
Not to put to fine a point on it but actions of the British Government from 1945-1951 immediately changed the course of what is now at least 8 countries, a current population of 2.3 billion people, probably helped to kick off at least six wars, was partly responsible for changing the course of the Cold War and may have had a hand in the Korean War.
I think that it is almost impossible to overstate the importance to modern history of the stance that the British Colonial and Foreign Offices took.
Independence for The Union of India and what would subsequently be India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh was a question which had been posed since the beginning of the century.
There were lingering questions surrounding what would happen to Palestine and Israel which were British Mandate Territories which had been won after the defeat and breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and there was also questions to do with Burma, Sudan, and lesser questions that had to do with the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.
The Attlee Government was forced to immediately confront the fact that Great Britain wasn't quite so great and that its star position of being World Superpower No.1 had faded and died. Britain almost meekly stepped away from its former colonial possessions and while that's a vast oversimplification, it explains why Britain has sort of ended up as this insane little hermit kingdom just off to the side of Europe, wedged between American imperial capitalism and Europe's barely held together quasi-collectivism.
History has been so quick to cast aside the memory of who was in the administration of the most important and boring set of decisions of modern history, that I had to look up who they were:
The Secretary of State for India and Burma was Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who had already spent the earlier part of the 20th century campaining for womens' sufferage. He was involved in more the negotiations that led to India's independence; including meeting with Gandhi on multiple occasions.
Christopher Addison who became Leader of the House of Lords under Clement Attlee, basically oversaw the implementation if Labour's post-war anti-imperialist policies and was the responsible minister in charge of the transformation of the Dominion Affairs Office into the Office of Commonwealth.
Ernest Bevin's appointment as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, gave him the job of overseeing the end of the Mandate of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel.
Almost certainly there were mis-steps with disastrous consequences but given that the job of overseeing the independence process of many countries is far bigger than just a few offices in Whitehall, which was part of a government which also had to oversee the rebuilding of a shattered country as well as how it related to an equally shattered Europe and world, then its easy with 75 years' of hindsight to see why and how there were mis-steps.
This late in time, the 2020 United States Presidential Election looms large because it has an out sized voice in our ears at this moment but even if it ends up as a root cause for a second Civil War (which I very very very much doubt that it will), that's still nowhere near as big as the consequences of the 1945 British General Election which in its own way, helped to shape maybe a third of the world as it currently exists. The election of the President of the country with the second largest economy and only 4% of the world's population pales in comparison to the election of a government which was vicariously responsible for 20% of the world's population.
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