Another Civilising Intervention

Britain's leading liberal newspaper professes itself shocked at the levels of decency, restraint and tolerance with which newly declassified documents characterise a notably successful episode of literary Britishness. In the early sixties, with Western civilisation yet again imperilled by a so-called elected leader, Britain's plucky little intelligence boffins went right to work. With straightforward British honesty, they declared a fatwa against the Indonesian foreign minister and incited pogroms against the ethnic Heathen Chinee. After all, the minister was a leftist and therefore presumably antisemitic. British restraint was much in evidence in a radio script where six kidnapped and murdered military officers blamed their fate on ethnic communism, and British decency found its own accustomed level in the pronouncement that, while in an ideal world all lives may matter, reality tends to slant against those who bring trouble on themselves by defying a global force for good. Eventually the so-called elected leader was removed and a sensible moderate stepped in to avoid chaos, while so efficiently restraining the natural and spontaneous anti-communism of his little brown brothers that the losses may have amounted to little more than half a million expendables. So sensible was his moderation, so tolerant Her Majesty's Government, and so palpable the shock of the contemporary Press, that he remained in power for over three decades.