Sidney Reilly, nicknamed ‘Ace of Spies’ in the excellent 1983 TV series, knew something about warfare that many commentators still don’t know a century later. That gave him the kind of insight that bordered on prescience.
Wars, he knew, can’t be reduced to the simple dichotomy of winning and losing. Some wars can be lost quite painlessly, others must be fought to the last man.
Thus a few months after the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, Reilly pleaded from Moscow that his superiors in London should shift the emphasis of their policy from the war to that revolution:
“This hideous cancer [is] striking at the very root of civilisation. Gracious heavens, will the people in England never understand? The Germans are human beings; we can afford to be even beaten by them. Here in Moscow there is growing to maturity the arch enemy of the human race… At any price this foul obscenity which has been born in Russia must be crushed out of existence… Mankind must unite in a holy alliance against this midnight terror.”
His entreaties were left unheeded. After all, Reilly was a foreigner, an ex-Russian with an obvious axe to grind. He was also a Jew, born Rosenblum, of which Bruce Lockhart, at the time the senior British official in Russia, never stops reminding us in his memoirs. In other words, Reilly could never be trusted.
Yet he understood something his superiors didn’t. Losing some wars may hurt the country’s pride and possibly her treasury. Losing some others may wipe the country off the map. And losing still others may obliterate a whole civilisation.
Just compare the two world wars. Had the Alliance lost the first one to the Central Powers, Britain would have been humiliated but she would have lived to fight another day. Moreover, had Germany emerged victorious in 1916, conceivably neither the Bolshevik Revolution nor the Second World War would have happened (the former almost certainly).
However, the option of losing wasn’t on the table in the Second World War. Had Hitler occupied Britain in, say, 1940, the country and her unique civilisation would have ceased to exist. Unlike the first one, that one wasn’t a war for geopolitical gains. It was one for civilisational survival.
Moving a bit further back, Rome couldn’t afford to lose the Punic Wars to Carthage. When Hannibal, one of history’s greatest generals, crossed the Alps in 218 BC and invaded mainland Italy, his troops were superior to the Roman legions in numbers, equipment and leadership.
Yet the Romans fought desperately for 14 years because they knew they weren’t just defending their country. They fought for the survival of their proto-Western civilisation threatened by another civilisation they perceived as not just barbaric but evil.
The Carthaginians practised human sacrifice and even the odd bit of cannibalism. That meant Roman soldiers didn’t need to have their morale boosted by indoctrination. They knew in their viscera that losing to Carthage meant losing more than just a war. So the only alternative to victory was death, and they were prepared to face it with unflagging courage.
The two armed conflicts going on at the moment fall into the same category. The West has allowed the “arch enemy” to grow to maturity, and now it is indeed threatening the survival of the human race – and not just metaphysically speaking.
However, yet again Reilly’s acute sense of civilisational danger is missing in the West, as it went missing in 1917 and in the late 1930s. We refuse to recognise that the Ukraine is the easternmost frontier of Western civilisation, which is exactly how the Kremlin sees it.
In one speech after another, Putin and his minions couch their military desiderata in civilisational terms. As far as they are concerned, the Ukraine is only a rampart of Western civilisation, and it’s not merely Russia as a country but the Russian civilisation that needs to bring it down.
This motif is by no means new in Russian history, going back as it does to the 15th century, when Russia qua Russia didn’t even exist. Russia was supposed to be an analogue of a redeeming god saving mankind’s souls in eternity. Since mankind has always been reluctant to be saved by Russia, it had to be conquered and re-educated.
What until 1917 had been a messianic mission articulated mainly in churches and literary salons, became state policy thereafter. Bolshevik leaders openly identified their mission as world revolution, which was the same old messianic idea in verbal disguise.
The West didn’t realise it then and it refused to listen to those who did. In a way that’s understandable.
Essentially decent people (also cultures and civilisations) find it hard to get their heads around boundless evil. No matter how many atrocities barbarians commit or how openly they proclaim their intentions, there is always hope they won’t overstep a certain line in the sand. Yet that line has long since been washed away by the tide of evil. Evil is absolute, and it knows no upper limits.
That, I think, is the main reason for the West’s habitual vacillation – not stupidity, ignorance or cowardice (although these may also be variably present). Just like Penelope refuses to understand my most obscene jokes, so does the West feign deafness when civilisational threats thunder out of the Kremlin. Surely they can’t mean this? Surely they can’t do that? Yes, they can – and they do.
The same goes for the Gaza clash, if on a much smaller scale. From 1948 onwards the Israelis have known that they can lose a war against their Muslim neighbours only once: for the first and last time.
A defeat would be different from the Babylonian or Egyptian captivity and even from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and subsequent diaspora. The Israelites could survive those, keep the civilisational flame alive even in bondage and hope for return to the land promised to them by God.
Today’s Israelis know they can’t survive a defeat. Every one of them would be murdered, and their soil would be sown with coarse salt to make sure nothing would ever grow there again.
Both they and the Muslims see every military clash in civilisational terms. Yet the Judaic civilisation, for all its uniqueness, is also a subset and an outpost of a broader entity, Western civilisation. That’s why, like the Ukrainians, the Israelis are fighting not only their war, but also ours.
Neither they nor the Ukrainians nor indeed we can afford to lose. The Israelis and the Ukrainians realise this, but do we? And Sidney Reilly is no longer around to explain what’s what – and to wring his hands in despair knowing we won’t listen.
I am amazed! My father (1896-1973) notable for nothing, a self-employed cabinet-maker and unsuccessful businessman, lowly member of the RFC/RAF, used to go on about Sidney Reilly. Did he know something?
He must have done. Reilly almost succeeded in overthrowing the Bolsheviks singlehandedly. He was an important figure in the first quarter of the 20th century and, incidentally, one of the prototypes for James Bond (also for Ethel Voynich’s novel The Gadfly).
Yuri Bezmenov received similar treatment in the West, eventually drinking himself to death out of a sense of futility.
I’ve always preferred the Israelis over the Palestinians. However I must confess to a sense of alienation. How do they view sympathetic foreigners, are we their useful idiots?
I fear my geopolitical stance has become ruthlessly mercenary.
Sidney Reilly would not be heeded. We have learned so much since his time. Mainly, that all cultures are equal and all others are more equal than Western Civilization. Thus it is not worth saving.
The trouble with irony is that it is too easily misread. Or do I misread you?