What is a 'Good War'?

What do the lives of two composers tell us about war?

About this time last year, I remember watching the funeral of Baroness Thatcher being celebrated in St Paul’s cathedral at a public cost of £10 million. Although it could not be a state funeral, the addition of a gun carriage and a troop of soldiers mirrored Churchill’s military interment half a century ago. At the front of the congregation sat Tony Blair, then recently resurrected into national political life. Is it fanciful to detect a link between Thatcher’s death and Blair’s resurrection? All that week, the British media was crowded with editorials stressing Blair’s debt to Thatcher – primarily in neo-liberal economic policy, but also in controversial foreign adventures.

As the walls of Christopher Wren’s masterpiece echoed the tramping boots of the Baroness’ cortege, memories of war overcome contemplation. The few distinguished transatlantic guests only reinforced the military theme. America was represented, not by its President or current Secretary of State, but by Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger – the respective begetters of wars in Iraq and Cambodia.    

We call wars “bad” or “good”, but what does that really mean? I am making a BBC documentary about conscientious objectors in the Second World War, and writing a biography of one of them – the English composer Sir Michael Tippett, who spent three months in Wormwood Scrubs prison sewing mailbags because he refused to be associated in any way with that war. His fellow composer, Benjamin Britten, was also a “conchie”, although he passed the first eighteen months of the war in neutral USA and on his return was prepared to write film scores indirectly enhancing the war effort.

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