by Paul Jones
In many ways the title of this 1939 British film could also be seen as representing a “goodbye” to Western Civilization, something which had been on a steady decline since the disastrous, fratricidal W.W. I.
Mr. Chips, as he is called by his students at a traditional, all boys boarding school in England named Brookfield, began his work as a Latin teacher in the late 1800’s, the height of the power of the British Empire. The saying, “the wars of England are won on the playing fields of Eton” was demonstrated through the kind of esprit de corps developed through sports like rugby and cricket. All of this spirit was then channeled into the hysterical patriotism of World War I, as hundreds of thousands of Britain’s finest, many from schools like Brookfield, went manly off to the mass slaughter of trench warfare in France as their schoolmasters cheered them on.
Ironically, the movie was produced a few months before the next British involvement in a world war was about to take place. The British gentry by that time was “a shell of its former self,” but was still able to muster enough of the martial virtues present in World War I into the next one.
So looking back on the role of so many fine school masters who have been part of the British educational tradition, what can be learned? First and foremost there needs to be asked, “who benefited from the wars?” In the case of the First World War, it was the Balfour Declaration which assured the Jews a foothold in the Mideast and led the U.S. into that war in 1917. In World War II, it was the defeat of National Socialist Germany which allowed the Jews to create Israel as a Jewish state and set them on their way to world domination.
What can be learned is that we don’t need any more “Mr. Chips,” with their hollow nationalism that is used and manipulated by another group for its own interests.
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