That John, Paul, George and Ringo would not have been able to sing about holding someone’s hand, and The Rolling Stones would not have had the chance of dressing themselves up as deep blues singers straight out of the Black experience.
So America supplied the postwar mood music and the guns that backed that up for us to have our time in the sun.
My own personal love affair with America started with my mother’s constant stories after the war about her prosperous US cousins and their times living in plenty. And her love of big band music. And then later, when we ended up at an orphanage, having US airmen from a local airbase, unable to get home for Christmas, coming to spoil us with presents and shows.
Tearful airmen here to keep the enemy away from our shores, missing their own children and families. Such humanity broke out as the nuns themselves joined in the sense of missing family; they cried in unison.
But Elvis cemented our love of America, and all that was modern and beautiful and wonderful about the big power across the ocean. I would dream at night that when I woke in the morning, instead of gasworks outside our council flat window there were skyscrapers; and I had woken in New York.
All of this comes flooding back; a realisation that virtually all of the peace and tranquillity that most of us have lived with was supplied by our big and powerful ‘friend’. That we could not have had what liberties we have if it were not for this big and at times belligerent force at our side.
It is sobering, especially as we have just passed through the very heightened and angry United States election. Yet even if we are outraged at many of the opinions emanating from the US that we do not agree with, nevertheless we owe them our protection.
At times it has appeared that we are in ‘protective custody’. That we are controlled and expected to follow the US party line. That we are subservient to them because we know that they are our only protection.
Of course, the US came out of its iolation, the Wall Street Crash and the enormous poverty of the 1930s. Without climbing out of that recession that seemed to go on forever it would not have accumulated 50% of the world’s wealth by 1945, and it would not have had a 300% increase in its prosperity by the war’s end.
We have to blame Hitler for creating the power balance of the modern world. Where two powers went about the world as if it were their own. The Soviet Union and the United States were made strong and bold and powerful, and therefore world-dominant, by Hitler’s war. So underneath the US’s supremacy that held back the Soviet Union came the harsh reality that Hitler was the hidden creator of US power. For his war made them wealthy.
Now almost 80 years later we still live in the shadow of that big creation of consolidated power, whose concentration came out of the defeat of Hitler’s Nazism. But now we are having to face these questions being raised again with Ukraine and the growth of an Eastern power that may well dwarf all previous world powers.
What happens in America now and in the future will still be the barometer of our security, and the way hat geopolitics will go. We are stuck in this equation of big power games. Once Great Britain played the big power but now we see other powers imitating what was done by former generations of British statesmen, businessmen and empire expansionists.
Geopolitics is as dangerous today in the world as the collapse of the environment, as the spread of global disruption, and the winds and floods that have come our way and will continue to do so.
Big issues need confronting. Big thinking to go with it. Big changes to the politics that we practise. Let us hope we develop the thinking that gets us out of our various holes. But one thing is for sure: whatever we have been doing so far does not work any more. And the realisation that our liberal ways and beliefs are supported by US power may be the biggest realisation we may need to have.
John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.
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