Blood and Soil

To the extent that any investigation headed by Sir Eric Pickles can provoke more than derisive mirth, the inquiry into events on Alderney during Mr Churchill's glorious crusade seems to have stirred up a certain moral Britishness. As the past few years have demonstrated rather conclusively, the basic British objection to Fascism was never that it is extra-legal, authoritarian or murderous, let alone that it is nationalistic; the doctrine's essential beastliness lies in its being foreign, and therefore fitting only for Huns, Japs, Eyeties and Dagoes.

Equally, it seems strange to claim that the Holocaust was a uniquely depraved episode in European history, or even a particularly unusual one. Pogroms against Jews have been a defining feature of Christendom throughout its existence, and what was most shocking about the death camps - aside from the obvious truth that such things shouldn't happen to non-Communist white people - was most likely the revelation that such traditional Christian values as antisemitism, slavery and genocide had been so effectively promulgated by means of modern industry. The idea that technological advances might be matched by moral progress had already lost a good deal of plausibility thanks to the Great War, and the discovery of Belsen and Auschwitz might have cured the delusion for a generation or more, had the USA not ridden to humanity's rescue with its virtuous incineration and irradiation of some tens of thousands of Untermenschen.

In an encouraging demonstration of the persistence of British values, the current moral horror at the idea that the Nazi race war might have spread onto British land appears essentially territorial in nature. When the great British nation sent refugees packing to protect its breeding stock from the taint of Jewry, it did so in precisely the same spirit as those who now worry that British soil might once have been contaminated by actions worthy only of the lesser breeds.