Top 15 Lewis Bernstein Namier Quotes

I have always maintained that British history in the eighteenth century is primarily a history of country houses.

The official "Conservative" leaders of 1938–1939 were mostly ex- or semi-Liberals of middle-class Nonconformist extraction, whose Liberalism had gone rancid – anxious business men lacking imagination and understanding even in business, and in foreign politics lay preachers full of goodwill à bon marché.

The declaration of war on September 3, 1939, is one of the great turning points of history, and should be remembered in awe and gratitude. At the last moment Britain, though fully conscious of the mortal danger she was facing and of her own weakness, called a halt to a process which had gone much too far, and which, had Hitler pulled off his trick once more, would have subjected all Europe, and perhaps ultimately the world, to Nazi Germany.

[T]he German scene was transformed by the entry of Hitler: never before had a man so malignant attained such power, nor a nation shown so little revulsion from evil. Crude and hysterical, full of virulent hatreds and envy, he powerfully appealed to the Germans, and set about doing their work in Europe... Hitler had shrewd skill, but no wisdom; with him there was no appealing to reason or even to rational interests—which men like Chamberlain were slow to grasp. Nor was there in him a conscious control of his own moves; hence he appeared incalculable and chaotic.

Churchill alone, month after month and year after year, exposed the growing dangers of the international situation, pleaded for a consistent and active European policy, and pressed for re-armament on an adequate scale.

For 20 years between the two wars the Germans have contended that the cutting off of East Prussia by the Polish Corridor created an utterly untenable situation, and they certainly did their best to make it so. But Poland cannot exist without access to the sea, and the behaviour of the Germans in Czechoslovakia (and elsewhere) has proved that no State can safely harbour them as a minority. Therefore their removal from East Prussia is the only solution. Lord Quickswood dwells on the cruelty of transfers of population; nothing can surpass in cruelty what the Germans have inflicted on humanity by this second world war. A third must be prevented. Lord Quickswood admits that "the great mass of the German people have doubtless a certain moral responsibility for the crimes of their rulers," but sees in it mainly sheep-headed stupidity. Millions of German soldiers and civilians have witnessed the unspeakable massacres and atrocities ordered by their rulers; had there been a normal human reaction these orders could not have been carried out. The German nation is corporatively responsible for what has happened.

States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or obliterated, by argument and majority votes; nations are freed, united, or broken by blood and iron, and not by a generous application of liberty and tomato-sauce; violence is the instrument of national movements.

He writes about the decade before the war:—"Foreign policy ('rearmament') and social services ('the dole') were competitive claims on a straitened national output." Surely, with 2,000,000 unemployed the output could easily have been expanded to satisfy both claims. It was not; because we believed in "thrift" and transferred this conception derived from individual economy to that of the nation, in which it is apt to turn into sheer nonsense. Further, in the "thrifty" view of national economy production for export is a virtue, but for self-consumption it is, at the best, excusable. This led us into a second absurdity. If we produced material for armaments and exported them, say, to Germany (and they were financed by city loans on which the Germans duly defaulted) "classical economists" beamed with pleasure over our "roaring exports." But had anyone suggested using these materials for the rearmament of this country he would have been decried as a "spendthrift militarist."

[T]o millions of Jews, Palestine means much more than the solution of their individual problem—it stands for the oldest national and religious tradition known to the Western world. It is not within the power of men to make us renounce it.

If it is a question of policy, the rights and claims of non-Arabs in the Near East must not be swept away by a legerdemain into the wide Arab pocket. The historic connexion of the Jewish people with Palestine has received international acknowledgement, and so has the fact that they are in Palestine of right and not on sufferance. The Arabs now look forward to fuller realisation of their desire for union and independence; the Jews claim the right to establish a free Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. The blood of a million Jews murdered by the Nazis cries to heaven; the world-wide Jewish problem calls for a solution; it has its roots in Jewish homelessness: in Palestine, and through Palestine alone, can a solution be found. It should not be impossible to arrive at a settlement of the Near East which would satisfy the needs of both Arabs and Jews, and realise their national aspirations.

The League was to cure humanity and lead it into better ways. It was an expression of the morality and idealism of the Anglo-Saxons, and of their ignorance of what it means to suffer of neighbours and disputed borderlands (Ulster alone knows it).

Now the acid test will be applied to the friendship and devotion which various communities feel for the British Empire; and I am certain that no Jewry, free to speak and act, will fail in this test. As stated in your issue of to-day, Dr. Weizmann has declared at the Zionist Congress in Geneva that the Jews stand behind Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies.

There is no-one alive engaged on history work with your experience of politics, government, and war. Please do not try to write history as other historians do, but do it in your own way. Tell us more how various transactions strike you, and what associations they evoke in your mind. When studying the detail of government at that distant period of almost 250 years ago, many comparisons must have occurred to you, which you seem to have suppressed. Too much history is written by don-bred dons with no knowledge or understanding of the practical problems of statecraft.

For us Jews no sacrifice is too great for the sake of Palestine and of our National Home. Soil shall be created in Palestine where there is none at present, and trees shall be planted however many times Arab hooligans uproot them; and Haifa and Tel-Aviv shall grow into ports and cities equal to, or greater than, Alexandria.

Before the war the manor-houses on the big landed estates were centres of high culture and mainstays of modern economic life in Eastern Europe. They resembled Roman villas in semi-barbaric lands. Their inhabitants read the works and thought the thoughts of the most advanced civilisation in the midst of an illiterate peasantry.