In James Bond, a technocratic hero who harks back to the age of chivalry, the novelist Ian Fleming created a British literary brand of astonishingly enduring global appeal. To widespread acclaim, Bond’s latest screen incarnation, Daniel Craig, has ruggedly revamped Bond as a 21st century British knight with a mission to rid the world of evil.
Yet it is not chivalry but perfidy that has long been seen as the hallmark of the British. Especially has this been so in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Many Arabs are forever mindful of Britain’s double-dealing over Palestine, which, in the early part of the 20th century, was promised by the British imperial class to both Jews and Arabs. Many Iranians cannot forget how Britain colluded with the CIA to subvert the democratically elected government of Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, an episode that confirmed long-held Iranian suspicions that the quality that most distinguished the British was cunning.
As a practitioner of duplicity, Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair could be said to have conformed to an old national type. He has conformed to it, too, perhaps, in proving so adept at playing a part — at being, in short, an actor. It was Blair’s special flair for performance that enabled him to persuade the British Parliament and a sizable swathe of the British public that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that unless Britain joined the United States in waging pre-emptive war against him, the West was at risk of being exposed to nuclear attack. Now that Blair’s credibility is in shreds, it has grown hard to recall the original dramatic impact of his stark warnings. So much are his skills as a performer, as a virtuoso salesman, still prized by corporate interests that the ex-British leader now ranks as the most highly paid public speaker in the world, with earnings that were reported last week to be in excess of £12 million a year.
The British author Nicholas Rankin’s absorbing new book, “Churchill’s Wizards: the British Genius for Deception 1914-1939”, makes much of the British flair for putting on performances — performances that have often deceived not just others but the British themselves. The Argentinean fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges, he notes, believed that the British were peculiarly addicted to unreality. Among Rankin’s case studies is T.E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”, the patrician Briton who got himself up in Arab dress during World War I, purporting to be a great friend of the Arab people at a time when they were yearning to throw off the yoke of the Ottoman Empire and assert their independence. In the event, Lawrence became embroiled in what turned out to be a grand deception on the part of the British, a commitment to reward the Arabs for their cooperation that was to be cynically betrayed.
The evidence suggests that he was tormented for the rest of his life by a guilty conscience, though the myth of Lawrence as a romantic freedom fighter assumed such vast proportions as to make forming a real sense of the human being behind it virtually impossible. His inscrutable memoir, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (1922), contributed more than a little to his mystique. What is certain is that Lawrence was the very epitome of British patrician theatricality, an actor and fantasist with a natural affinity with the world of espionage. It is hardly surprising that he became a source of special fascination to the prolific pioneer of gentleman spy fiction, the Scottish novelist, John Buchan, who incorporated elements of Lawrence into one of his best-known characters, the well-born master of disguise, Sandy Arbuthnot.
It was Buchan’s imperial secret agents on whom Ian Fleming drew when he dreamed up James Bond. Bond may be said to have sprung from a deep-seated psychological need that this former British intelligence officer shared with many of his compatriots to sustain the myth of British invincibility at a time when it was becoming inescapably apparent that Britain’s days as a great world power were numbered. With Bond, Fleming conjured up the ultimate compensatory national fantasy figure, a British superman whose very name proclaimed moral steadfastness.
Embodiments of the British penchant for role-playing, Fleming’s James Bond novels also enshrine the self-flattering national conviction that Britain is an incomparable force for good. What is extraordinary is that, thanks to Hollywood, their legendary protagonist truly has conquered the world, operating as a sort of continuation of the British Empire by cinematic means.
Rankin believes that British deception has often been employed for morally justified purposes — as during World War II when Prime Minister Winston Churchill made use of a formidable array of intelligence operatives and code-breakers in his efforts to defeat Nazi Germany. It has been otherwise in recent times, though. Conducting himself like a latter-day Churchill, Tony Blair poured his energies into convincing his own Parliament that Saddam Hussein posed just the sort of threat to the free world that Adolph Hitler once did. Indeed, what was notable about Blair’s extravagant rhetoric was precisely the way it sought to exploit British folk memories of the struggle against fascism in order to encourage the belief that Britain was once again engaged in an epoch-making struggle against the forces of darkness.
It is sobering to reflect that had not Blair succeeded in selling the case for attacking Iraq to the British Parliament, thus committing Britain to joining the US in invading Iraq, the war in Iraq might conceivably have been averted. It follows that, but for Blair’s theatrical talent and deceptive way with words, untold numbers of innocent Arabs might not have lost their lives.
Consider furthermore the ruinous economic impact of the astronomical military expenditure entailed by the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq. There is even a temptation to speculate that the current international financial crisis might have been avoided, or at least not been quite so severe, if Blair had not nursed the self-aggrandizing delusion of being the new Churchill. The British compulsion to indulge in the make-believe of still being a great imperial power may have produced the innocuous escapism of the James Bond movies, but arguably it has also led to fateful consequences in the real world.
