Bleeding hearts
James Delingpole
Qne of the many things that peeves 14-1 about this justice-free universe is that the penalties for being wrong aren't severe enough. The intellectuals who wanted to appease Hitler — there was never any piquant set of coincidences whereby they ended up being dragged off to the concentration camps. The useful idiots who applauded Stalin — they never got to experience the gulags. The Michael Moore types who currently delude themselves that George Bush is worse than Osama bin Laden: you just know that when the next al-Qa'eda atrocity happens, they're going to be somewhere else, ready to exculpate Islamic fundamentalism and blame their own leaders.
I was reminded of this when Secret History: Sink The Belgrano (Channel 4, Monday) broadcast old footage of a TV encounter between Margaret Thatcher and a Gloucestershire housewife outraged that the Argentine cruiser had been sunk outside the 'total exclusion zone'. Mrs Thatcher's defence was that the Belgrano was a threat to the fleet and therefore fair game, but I imagine the sympathies of most of those watching at the time would have been with the housewife: the informed, articulate, ordinary member of the public who dared to put this shifty, mendacious battleaxe in her place.
Even I. fascist bastard that I am, remember feeling a bit uncomfortable at the thought of those 323 Argentine sailors being sucked down to the icy depths with no warning, when we were barely even at war. It seemed so terribly unfair, given that they hadn't killed any of our lot — yet. And though I took Tam Dalyell's increasingly tedious protestations about the supposed 'illegality' of the sinking with a tremendous pinch of salt, I did all the same conclude — like almost everyone — that there was no smoke without fire and that somewhere down the line we had very probably done something wrong.
But no, apparently we hadn't. At least not according to this fascinating revisionist documentary, which argued that the sinking of the Belgrano was the right and sensible thing to do and that without it we might well have lost the Falklands war. What it successfully achieved was to persuade the Argentinians to withdraw their carrier fleet from action (for fear of being torpedoed), thus sparing our own indispensable carriers from the likelihood of being sunk.
No doubt there are some who would still have preferred bloody and ignominious defeat to the dishonour of having won the war by underhand methods. But their case was badly undermined by the documentary's dramatic new testimony from the Belgrano's captain that, at the time of the sinking, he was under orders to engage with any British ships he encountered. In other words, it most definitely wasn't a case of peace-loving Argies being massacred by blood-thirsty Brits too gung-ho to allow diplomacy to take its course. Indeed, around the time of the sinking, the Argentinians had been planning a massive pre-emptive assault on the British fleet. The only reason it didn't happen was that the weather conditions weren't right to launch their carrier aircraft.
The sailors on the Belgrano suffered horribly. Those that weren't vaporised when the first torpedo struck the engine room had to jump into seas so cold it was, recalled one seaman, like being stabbed by a thousand needles. The Belgrano — in its previous life in the second world war with the US navy it was known as a lucky ship — was kind enough not to drag any of the life rafts under as it went down. Even so, many of those who made it into the life rafts were lost in the subsequent storm or died from hypothermia. But none of those interviewed expressed any resentment towards the crew of the submarine HMS Conqueror which sunk them. Had the roles been reversed, they said, they would have done exactly the same.
Which brings me back to that Gloucestershire housewife and her instant armchair expertise on the nuances of international law. Is she now going to appear on TV and say. 'Oh, dearie me. I feel such a fool. I was only parroting something I'd read in a newspaper, somewhere, and I now realise that if our foreign policy had been dictated by bleeding hearts like me, we would have lost the Falklands, lost the fleet, lost hundreds of British lives'? Of course she isn't, because, like her successors who talk so expertly of the 'illegality' of the Iraq war, she's never going to be held accountable for her views.
This seems to me terribly unfair. What we need, I think, is for our scientists to create a series of parallel universes where bien-pensants are forced to live with the consequences of their briefly fashionable pieties. In one, the world has been carved up between the Third Reich and imperial Japan; in another Britain is a Soviet satellite; in another, Saddam is still cheerily gassing Kurds; in the Gloucestershire housewife's, the Thatcherite revolution was brought to a juddering halt by General Galtieri and Michael Foot. If there really is a God, he will make it so.
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