Paul Anderson, review of Blood, Class and Nostalgia by Christopher Hitchens (Chatto, £18), Tribune, 6 July 1990
"Even if you steer clear of Piccadilly with its seething swarms of drunks and whores, it is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory . . . Before the war there was no popular anti-American feeling in this country, It all dates from the arrival of American troops, and it is made vastly worse by the tacit agreement never to discuss it in print."
Thus wrote George Orwell in Tribune in 1943, and it rings almost as true today as it did then. Despite the insatiable British appetite for the products of the American entertainment industry, there is a widespread yet unremarked anti-Americanism among the Brits. America means corruption, street crime, cue-card presidents, napalm, nuclear war. Yankee airmen are drug-crazed woman-beating syphilitics; Yankee tourists are cretins in loud shirts just begging to be fleeced.
Ask anyone – or rather, ask almost anyone on the Clapham omnibus. In Whitehall, the City and Oxbridge senior common rooms, anti-Americanism is anathema: the British elite prefers to talk of the "special relationship" between the British and the Americans, the time-honoured bonds of shared language, culture and strategic interests.
As Christopher Hitchen's new book shows, variations on this theme have been a favourite of the British ruling class for most of the century. Initially, a rhetoric of shared imperial mission and class and racial solidarity was a potent means of wooing the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant East Coast American establishment as an ally in preserving the British empire and fending off the brutish Hun — but only until the British embroiled the Americans in a futile war of intervention against the nascent Soviet Union.
By the fifties, alter another German war had witnessed the resurgence and finest hour of Anglo-Americanism, the Americans had replaced Britain as the world's dominant imperial power. The British establishment appealed desperately to ties of blood and common history as it tried to insinuate itself back into a position of influence in the world.
Of course, the servility was done with some style. "We are the Greeks of the Hellenistic age," said Harold Macmillan in 1957. "The power has passed from us to Rome's equivalent, the United States of America, and we can at most aspire to civilise and occasionally to influence them." Hypocritical cant, of course, but not, as Hitchens remarks, without its "metaphorical truth".
Blood, Class and Nostalgia consists of 13 chapters; each one an essay on some aspect of the relationship between Britain and America. Hitchens's intellectual range is extraordinary: he is equally at ease discussing Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" (a plea for America to intervene in the Phillipines), detailing American neo-conservative responses to the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, or going over British nuclear weapons policy since the war.
A lesser writer would find it impossible to sustain clarity of argument through such diverse material, but Hitchens negotiates his course with customary verve. There are particularly good chapters on Winston Churchill's intellectual debt to James Burnham, the now almost-forgotten ideologue of the cold war, and on the Anglo-American intelligence nexus.
Hitchens concludes by stressing that the "special relationship", if not over, has lost its relevance. "For the United States, the appropriation of Englishness has become principally a matter of style and taste, of the sort that could be easily superseded in a generation. For the United Kingdom, or the English, the claim to a 'special relationship' with a transatlantic super-power has lost much of its force and savour as the axis of the old Atlantic Charter has rusted on the hinge. The world of Churchill and Roosevelt . . . has become a historical curio." Gerald Kaufman, please note.
