As someone who lived through the 1950s as a child and young teenager, I am absolutely fascinated by the BBC's The Hour. Everything about the series is perfect except perhaps the title itself which doesn't ring quite true to me. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis which I was too young to understand at the time. Like most children of that time I was deeply patriotic and, again like most children, echoed the views of my parents. I well remember how angry my stepfather became at what he believed was a betrayal. He was very much a child of the British Empire and he must have felt that his whole world was under threat. As indeed it was.
Looking back on that troubled time, I now see very clearly that the "establishment" view of Suez was not so much wrong as wrong-headed and against the tide of history, but it took me and many others like me more than a generation to understand, and more important, to accept this simple fact. We now live in a world of instant communication and rapid change, but just because things move so quickly it does not follow that we come to terms with social upheaval any faster than before. Only now, almost 70 years after the event, are the French beginning to lay to rest the ghost of the Second World War, and they still haven't really digested the Algerian War. The treatment of the Indians and the blacks, truly America's original sin, continues to this day to cast a long shadow over American society.
And now we have the "Arab Spring". How long before the tormented countries of North Africa and the Middle East find a semblance of peace? There seems to be no short cut to wisdom.
Looking back on that troubled time, I now see very clearly that the "establishment" view of Suez was not so much wrong as wrong-headed and against the tide of history, but it took me and many others like me more than a generation to understand, and more important, to accept this simple fact. We now live in a world of instant communication and rapid change, but just because things move so quickly it does not follow that we come to terms with social upheaval any faster than before. Only now, almost 70 years after the event, are the French beginning to lay to rest the ghost of the Second World War, and they still haven't really digested the Algerian War. The treatment of the Indians and the blacks, truly America's original sin, continues to this day to cast a long shadow over American society.
And now we have the "Arab Spring". How long before the tormented countries of North Africa and the Middle East find a semblance of peace? There seems to be no short cut to wisdom.
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