War Mythology
Make no mistake - the Second World War crippled Britain
This is an extract from my essay ‘War Mythology’, which you can read in the latest issue of Porridge. In it I argue that the there is one myth that Britain has proved itself unable to live without – that of 1939-45. No other nation has their national discourse as loudly or obviously dominated by the collective remembrance of the Second World War and in no other nation does the War cast such a long or dark shadow. Our national debate cannot frame an issue without drawing on the collective remembrances of the War - it is our national mythology. I discuss why that’s the case - part of that is below - and why our constant referral to it is a problem.
It was the events after the conflict that ensured our national pride would never recover, and our national conversation would never move on. In 1962, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role’. His comments caused outrage in Britain, likely because after the partition of India, the Suez Crisis and imperial withdrawal from Palestine, Malaya, Jordan, Libya, Oman, the Sudan, the Gold Coast, Burma, Singapore, Cyprus, Nigeria, Somaliland, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda and Kuwait, everyone knew they were true.
The war was both a high watermark for British power and a catafalque for Great Britain, capital G, capital B. Pre-war, Britain was the princeps amongst nations - no longer the unequalled global hegemon, but still retaining her pride, military strength and an unrivalled global reach. After the war came a precipitous decline to which Britons have still to acclimatise. Before the War, Britain was the author of history and global events. After the War, it was their victim. The shifting geostrategic picture meant the Empire was no longer necessary and Britain was no longer relevant. But if the British Empire did die during the Second World War, at least it died doing what it loved - spending vast amounts of blood and treasure preventing any one country from dominating the continent.
Since, we have never regained our sense of importance or successfully agreed on a new role on the world stage. But the War Mythology allowed the British historical compunction – English Exceptionalism – to spin this positively. Britain’s sacrifice became the sine qua non for freedom in Western Europe. ‘There was a genuine glory and a dignity’, AN Wilson wrote, ‘to the story of the old hero returning to slay some dragons before, bloodied and weakened, he and his Victorian world sank into the regions of twilight.’ The story of a hero sacrificing all in in a last moment of glory for a salvific cause is one the British have lapped up since Beowulf.
But in post-war Britain, a country still searching for its grand narrative, our weddedness to the War Mythology presents many problems.
The first is that it engenders a patriotism of the past, without energy or vigour. All it requires is for one to remember, rather than to build anew. The cost incurred and the scarring of our national pride caused by the decline in Britain’s post-war status means that we are constantly holding ourselves up to the high ideals of a moment of glory, while simultaneously bemoaning our poor and déclassé status. The War Mythology has become a vehicle for the preposterous sentimentality, jejune historicism and performative pride of pub patriotism. By placing the nation of the past on a pedestal, we become sclerotic to the demands and opportunities that the future presents us. It is easier to conjure an image of the defiant ‘Very well, alone’ stand of David Low than examining what role the nation might carve out for itself on the world stage, or what responsibilities the Britain of the future might assume.
The second problem it presents is hardly contained inside these shores. The Nazis were such a perfect evil that the War Mythology creates a black-and-white sense of good and evil that plays in perfectly to the all-or-nothing nature of modern debate. Nazism or references to Hitler have become ubiquitous in public discourse on all manner of subjects, but this isn’t a mark of quality.4 Reflexively comparing an opponent to the Nazis is obvious, straightforward and (usually) the hallmark of a poor argument. Sophists use the War Mythology to establish the guilt of their opposition by the mere accusation. That Godwin’s Law came into existence with the internet is no coincidence. The increase in quantity of arguments seems to have done nothing to increase their quality. Godwin’s Law was created to show that no matter the subject, Hitler would eventually be mentioned – humans on the Internet were more predictable than they were clever. By the overuse of the comparison, Nazism has become so vague as to mean ‘anything I personally believe to be bad’, rather than an abject moral horror upon which all are agreed.
The War Mythology equips us to castigate compromise too. Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement is regularly trotted out as a stick with which to beat those who suggest moderation. The War Mythology leaves no room for nuance in our public debate, but this is rather the point. The extent of the understanding, of the conversation, is limited to them BAD, we GOOD. Between the black and white we lose the nuance of the human condition. But to paraphrase Zizek, ‘the horror of Nazism is not that bad people do bad things – they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.’
Such extraordinary efforts of power and courage as those required to win the War will always command the attention of posterity. It is no wonder that our collective remembrance is captivated by the national sacrifice needed to perform a task to which the nation was unequal, or that we would wish to bathe in the lambency of perhaps history’s most noble act. But for Britons, our inability to escape its gravitational pull or to stop comparing ourselves to the moral ubermensch of ‘the Greatest Generation’ is a cage. Britain’s rich history and, indeed, the lessons of the Second World War, can offer many answers to the challenges Britain will face in the future. But the simplified, Bigglesworthian image of the War Mythology offers us little more than a massage for our bruised national ego.