J. R. R. Tolkien, War, and Nationalism
Tolkien may not have intentionally created his fictive nations to mirror real nations, but his world certainly bears the scars of his experiences of war. The World Wars heightened his fear of losing everything that he loved about his local culture through literal obliteration or assimilation into another culture in the event of England‘s losing. Tolkien saw the nation as a social construct that potentially could minimize losses, if not wholly protect local culture from the forces that threatened to destroy it. Yet he also perceived the nation‘s limitations in its ability to protect culture. A nation could grow too large for itself, becoming obsessed with consuming other nations. For Tolkien, national property-amassing leads to a loss of the cultural identity that nationhood aims to preserve. When the forces threatening individual nations become overwhelming, those nations often need to join forces to prevent being taken over by other, more powerful countries. An examination of Tolkien‘s fiction and numerous other sources, including essays and personal letters, suggests that he felt that separate nations should co-exist without imposing on one another, and that the nation taking over others would lose its own identity, whether gradually or suddenly. Despite Tolkien‘s efforts to distance himself from what he felt modernity represented, his fiction (whether consciously or not) grapples with the mid-twentieth century ideological conflicts surrounding the nation. The resulting sense of loss and powerlessness underlies much of Tolkien‘s fiction and leads him to a concept of the nation as an imperfect protector of culture, tempered by its need to rely on other nations. INDEX WORDS: Tolkien, Nationalism, World War I, World War II, National identity, National memory, Internationalism, Individualism, Modernism J. R. R. TOLKIEN, WAR, AND NATIONALISM
The Security Service, the Communist Party of Great Britain and British Fascism, 1932–51
In the often dramatic story of the confrontations between the labour movement and British fascism from the 1930s until the early Cold War, there is a tendency to forget the role played by a third player in the proceedings, the state authorities, particularly the security service and the various police forces around the country. Yet although the state saw its role as being that of an impartial umpire between the combatants, there was a significant difference in the attitude adopted towards the two parties: the labour movement was seen as a tool to further the alleged sinister motives of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whilst the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was perceived as a contradictory mixture of disillusioned right-wing patriotic Conservatives and revolutionary nationalists to whom Mosley inclined. The growth of civil unrest and what was perceived by the state as extremism in the interwar period, led to political surveillance of the CPGB and the BUF, by the secret agencies of government. The function of the police and the security authorities was to maintain public order and to investigate presumed linkages with foreign powers, particularly with regard to financing political activity, the dissemination of propaganda and the organisation of espionage and subversion. British security after 1921 was particularly concerned that the CPGB was controlled and directed by the Comintern, the Communist International, with its stated objective of organising the revolutionary overthrow of the British Empire and furthering the interests of the Soviet Union.
The secret state
Behind President Carter's 'human rights' rhetoric lies the reality of dozens of dependent dictatorships in the Third World. Meanwhile, in the developed capitalist nations, whose leaders pride themselves on the liberty enjoyed by their citizens, new measures of social control are being introduced. In Britain the targets of these attacks include the right of citizens to know what is done in their name. The deportation from Britain of Philip Agee and Mark Hosenball and th prosecution, under the Official Secrets Act, of Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell have been part of a concerted campaign by the state to stop journalists from writing about matters of which it is determined the public should remain ignorant. By its actions the British state has focussed attention not only on official secrecy but also on the very questions it sought to hide from view — the operations of the CIA in Britain, western Europe and the Third World; the increased size of British security services and their brief to keep political activists under surveillance, and the role of Signal Intelligence (SIGINT), not only in monitoring the communist world, but in eavesdropping on the communications of many Third World countries. E.P. Thompson, the historian, here takes up two aspects thrown up by these cases. First, the secrecy that surrounds the British state and especially those agencies concerned with surveillance and covert actions at home and abroad. Secondly, he takes the left to task for failing to respond on questions of civil liberties and democratic rights in the past decade. Throughout the last two hundred years the liber tarian strand of radical and working-class groups have come together to oppose repeated attempts by the state to curb political rights. This 'nerve of outrage' is in urgent need of re-discovery. In particular, he attacks those on the left who dismiss the need for action on the grounds that all states, all police, all law are bad. And, in doing so, Thompson takes up questions which are relevant not only to Britain but to all liberal democracies.