Hilary Benn’s speech was just a shallow historical re-enactment

What’s with the orgy of fawning over Hilary Benn’s Syria speech? It was eloquent, yes, but content-wise it reminded me of those historical re-enactment shebangs where sad men in their fifties try to inject meaning into their lives by pretending to be a Viking in a field for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon.

Only instead of donning archaic armour and a horned helmet, Benn and his overnight Bennites – those currently clogging up Twitter with wild claims that his speech was the best oration since the Gettysburg Address – are wrapping themselves in the moral garb of the mid-20th century warriors against Nazi Germany. Benn’s speech, and the feverish reaction to it, confirms that British politicians, especially Labourite ones, really, really miss the Second World War. They crave the moral certainty of that conflict that pitted Us against the worst Them imaginable: a vast, murderous system of Nazism. This is why Benn madly talked about the decision to fire a few rockets at the godforsaken city of Raqqa in the same breath as Britain’s long slog of a war against Hitler and Mussolini. Such a comparison is the height of historical illiteracy. Yes, Isis is the nastiest death cult on Earth right now, and I would like to see it put down with extreme prejudice, ideally by the valiant Kurds, who aren’t afraid to engage in the kind of boots-on-the-ground, gun-toting combat that might actually finish off those barbaric theocrats. But in terms of size, reach, politics, outlook and just about everything else, the head-choppers of Isis are not comparable to the exterminators of Nazi Europe. Isis is not about to take France, or govern Italy, or claim 20m lives in a ground war with Russia. But it’s clear why Benn rolled out the Hitler talk, like an elderly, nostalgic lady dusting down her Vera Lynn collection: because in an uncertain, values-lite era like ours – where relativism rules, ‘Britishness’ is treated as a swear word, and ‘Who am I to judge?’ is the cloying cri de coeur – nothing looks more attractive than the sharp moral divide and mass momentum of the events of 1939 – 1945. Benn was indulging in generational envy, bathing temporarily in the light of what our grandfathers thought and did.

But his act was unconvincing. There was a striking disparity between his descriptions of what British forces must do against Isis now and his citing of the war glories of the past. British missiles in Syria can ‘make a difference’, he said; we can give Isis ‘a hard time’. Scary stuff!

Try to imagine Churchill uttering such soft, schoolteacher-style platitudes during the war with Germany. Where’s the talk of blood? Sacrifice? Victory? That Benn can talk about the war to the death with Hitler in one breath and then say we must give nasty Isis ‘a hard time’ in the next confirms the very shallowness of our era – and of the modern Labour Party – that he is seeking to disguise with anti-Nazi nostalgia. Benn’s speech had a powerful whiff of issue-avoidance. He’s absolutely right that Isis holds our values, especially liberty and democracy, in contempt. But so do an eye-swivelling number of our own citizens. Visit any Western campus, jump on the Eurostar to Belgium, hobnob with Occupy activists or Islamist yoof, and you’ll find an awful lot of people who think the Enlightenment was a mistake, freedom is overrated, and everything the West has ever done is a crime. The nostalgic neatness of Benn’s West vs The New Hitlers meme feels like a dodging of the massive moral crisis within the West itself, where anti-Westernism is rife, and where we’re no longer sure what we stand for, far less are we willing to commit a single boot on anyone’s ground to fight for whatever it is. Speaking of boots on the ground: Benn mentioned the International Brigade, the Westerners who joined the battle against Franco in Spain in the 1930s, and for that he got an especially loud cheer from the Twitterati left.

I’m sorry, but have you people no shame? The point of those brave battlers against Franco is that they believed in democracy and progress so much that they were willing to put their necks on the line to fight for them. What do you do? Make 12-minute speeches and write 140-character tweets about what meanies Isis are, and call for the RAF to do all the fascist-slaying on your behalf? It is cringe-worthy in the extreme for you to fancy yourselves as the new Orwells.

A final point, Mr Benn: two weeks ago, an 18-year-old British-Kurdish woman was sentenced to 21 months in jail for trying to get to Kurdistan in order to wage war on Isis, for seeking to be a 21st-century international brigadier. Are you actively campaigning for her release? If not, then I’m afraid your speech about fascists and hard times and the International Brigade was even more shallow than I thought.