When I started work, most of my male colleagues, if they were beyond their mid-thirties, had been in the forces during the Second World War, and I fondly remember one old boy who had fought in the First! More than one of them had decorations for bravery, and there were a few empty sleeves and artificial legs. At one time I worked for a most generous and pleasant man who had lost one lung and part of the other, to enemy action. Most of my female colleagues had also served, if not in the forces then in the war economy in some form or other.
Yet few of them spoke of it. This was not necessarily because they’d had a bad time; if they did speak of it, it was usually just to recall some wry or amusing incident. I think they felt that the war was just an interruption to normal life, and those who came back just wanted to go back to that life. Everyone had been through it, so why bang on about it?
Gradually our factories, offices and workshops lost their veterans. The last of them would have retired in the nineties, and I wonder how many noted at the time this remarkable generational change? Now all but a handful have died and those who remain find themselves treated – as Captain Tom Moore has discovered – almost as “holy relics rather than real people”. That is a quotation from an essay by Niall Gooch on the (always interesting) Unherd website and it brought home to me a realisation that Remembrance is now noticeably more sentimentalised that it was when most people actually remembered the war.
No doubt most of us saw again the scenes of rejoicing in London on VE-Day, and were struck by the extraordinary lack of “Diversity”. A bitter/sweet remembrance indeed. And I think again about how the men and women that I remember from half a century ago would have viewed our country now, and I have a pretty good idea because almost all of them had views on such matters as race, immigration, sexuality and so forth which would be likely to lose them their jobs, or land them in court, if they expressed them today.
So, for this article I was going to reprise the piece I wrote in 2018 for the centenary of the Armistice, drawing attention to the manner in which post-war governments have delivered a country which would horrify those who fought for her. But Niall Gooch’s essay on Unherd (see the quote above) explains, far more eloquently than I could, just how things have changed; these two paragraphs sum up his thinking:-
“This chronological distancing [from the war} has been accompanied by a curious change in the way that we collectively remember the Second World War. It’s hard to describe the change precisely, or say exactly where it has come from. But if I had to try, I’d say that a folk memory of the Second World War as essentially a war fought for patriotic reasons against other countries to defend the British national interest, as part of a wider ongoing national story, has been substantially replaced by one that regards the war as an idealistic conflict fought in defence of universalist moral values, especially those that nowadays form the bedrock of high-status elite thinking – equality, diversity, non-discrimination, anti-nationalism and so on.”
“This retooling of the popular imagination is necessary partly because of sweeping demographic change complicating conceptions of national history and popular memory, but also because what you might call old-fashioned wars, entered into and fought for reasons of national self-interest, are seen as increasingly problematic. To celebrate a hero because he fought or died for King and country, for the land from which he sprung, makes people uneasy; to celebrate him because he fought for ‘freedom’ or ‘against fascism’ is much more acceptable.”
Gooch is clearly a man of the conservative right and there is much in what he says, but we can be thankful that although the elite thinking which he describes has deeply penetrated our national consciousness, it is by no means universal. The victory of Brexit in the 2016 referendum was a crushing defeat for that elite thinking, and the fall of the “red wall” in the recent general election scarcely less so. Traditional ideas and traditional values have shown remarkable signs of life in recent times!
Alec
- Edit
To those who had sacrificed their lives inspired by a sense of loyalty and patriotism we convey our sincerest gratitude and respects. To those who had cynically exploited this loyalty and continue to do so we condemn them for their treachery which is inimical to the interests of our country and western civilisation.
It is noticeable how all our aspects of history is now so distorted that the contribution of the non- European is so readily exaggerated even if it had been non existent.
Alec Suchi
- Edit
It is becoming a frequent occurrence for our past to be distorted as the supposed contributions of the non-European peoples continues to be exaggerated, when the two world wars were in essence European conflicts, notwithstanding the participation of Japan. The conflicts were fought on a world wide basis and were ruinous to Western civilisation.
Frederick Dixon
- Edit
“Ruinous to western civilisation ” Yes indeed, but that is because the Germans, who do nothing if it is not done ‘thoroughly’ tested to destruction the hitherto respectable notions of racial purity, racial exclusiveness, eugenics and so forth, so that they are no longer mentionable in polite society – which does not apply to us!
Steve
- Edit
I’ve seen this called “crow-barring” where disparate characters are literally forced into films and TV programs. In South Africa the latest propaganda has been to rename the “Native Labour Corps” as “soldiers” fighting in the trenches when they did nothing of the sort.
Alec Suchi
- Edit
The two world wars were ruinous to western civilsation for being fratricidal and in the process weakening the resolve and strength of the European people,as well as a loss of a golden generation; this is said of the first world war in particular. Lothrop Stoddard in his magnum opus: “The Rising Tide of Color”, described WW1 as Armageddon, the unquantifiable losses sustained during the war.
Jock Lewes
- Edit
As Germany was at the centre of both WW1 and WW2, we see them today as more similar than I think they were. WW1 was a battle between the major imperial powers at a time that they were unable to see was at the tail end of that particular age of empire. WW2 was quite different and had a major feature that – along with others mentioned by Mr Dixon – almost every nation was convinced, persuaded, deceived or bullied into crushing Germany, as if it were a nastier, more aggressive, more expansionist power than the Germany of 1914. As I see it now that motivation was a populist cover for the real reason: that Germany was attempting, and apparently succeeding, in implementing its form of National Socialism. It was National Socialism that had to be crushed. Just look at what happened to the parties that were broadly analogous to National Socialism in Italy, Spain, the USA and the UK.