Douglas Mackillop

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Douglas MacKillop CMG (12 May 1891 – 25 February 1959) was a British diplomat.

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Biography

Douglas MacKillop was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Manchester University. He served in the army during World War I.

Manchester Grammar School independent day school for boys in the United Kingdom

Manchester Grammar School (MGS) is the largest independent day school for boys in the United Kingdom and is located in Manchester, England. Founded in 1515 as a free grammar school, it was formerly adjacent to Manchester Parish Church until 1931 when it moved to its present 28-acre site at Fallowfield. In accordance with its founder's wishes, MGS has remained a predominantly academic school and belongs to the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference.

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The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of British Armed Forces. As of 2018, the British Army comprises just over 81,500 trained regular (full-time) personnel and just over 27,000 trained reserve (part-time) personnel.

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World War I, also known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history. It is also one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide.

Diplomatic career

After the war he joined the Diplomatic Service and served in Sofia, Helsinki, Athens, Brussels, [1] Moscow, [2] Hankow, Riga and Berne as well as in the Foreign Office. In 1937, when he was temporarily in charge of the Moscow embassy, he made "one of the most thoughtful attempts to explain" Stalin's Great Purge: he argued that in all advanced states there was a growing tension between the principles of individualism and community. While governments felt impelled to pay lip-service to the notion of popular sovereignty and individual freedom, they also recognised that promoting economic welfare and national power required them to make the life of the common man more planned, managed and regulated. Although the Soviet regime took this process to an extreme by using terror as an instrument for regulating the population’s behaviour, MacKillop argued that the growth of state power to achieve economic goals was a phenomenon across Europe. The move towards totalitarian government in the Soviet Union reflected deep social and economic tensions that were influencing political development across the globe. [3]

In 1942, while he was in Berne, MacKillop worked to facilitate the emigration of a large group of Hungarian Jewish children to Palestine. [4] As head of the Refugee Department in the Foreign Office in January 1946, he wrote that the exodus of Polish Jewry arose ‘partly for racial and economic reasons, understandable since the new Poland does not offer them thc same opportunities as the old, and there is a spontaneous general wish on the part of European Jewry to go to Palestine. ... Though it is magnified and artificially fostered by Zionist propaganda, it is a real aspiration.’ Despite this Foreign Office understanding, however, the British government continued to resist Jewish migration to Palestine. [5]

MacKillop's final posting was as Consul-General at Munich. [6] He left the Diplomatic Service in 1952 and was for a time employed in NATO International Secretariat.

NATO Intergovernmental military alliance of Western states

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 29 North American and European countries. The organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949. NATO constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party. NATO’s Headquarters are located in Haren, Brussels, Belgium, while the headquarters of Allied Command Operations is near Mons, Belgium.

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References

  1. ↑ "No. 34182". The London Gazette . 23 July 1935. p. 4771.
  2. ↑ "No. 34262". The London Gazette . 6 March 1936. p. 1460.
  3. ↑ Hughes, Michael (1997). Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900-39. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 260.
  4. ↑ Gilbert, Martin (2001). Auschwitz and the Allies. Random House. pp. 77–78.
  5. ↑ Gilbert, Martin (1998). Israel: A History. New York: William Morrow and Company. pp. 124–125.
  6. ↑ "No. 39215". The London Gazette . 27 April 1951. p. 2388.
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