Bunting, Blitz spirit and calling people Nazis: Using the Second World War for modern agendas

‘Bring out the bunting!’ It’s just over a month until what will no doubt be an epic weekend celebrating the King’s coronation, but you would be wise to get your bunting now. We mustn’t forget that there was a bunting shortage crisis before the platinum jubilee! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bunting-shortage-platinum-jubilee-b2089153.html. It is striking that whenever the UK embarks on a national celebration we try to recapture the 1940s. Suddenly vintage style decorations, chintzy table cloths and napkins, home baking and a bit of swing or boogie woogie in the background abound. Few people choose a more modern, edgy look for their communal festivities. There are more sausage rolls than kale and chickpea bites! It is understandable that our late Queen evoked nostalgia for Britain’s past, especially that wartime period of history of which Brits are rightly proud. In my local area of rural Buckinghamshire we were encouraged to put on 1940s outfits for the Newport Pagnell Platinum jubilee celebrations and the local retailers also ‘returned’ to that period. Highlights of the festivities included a spitfire flypast, displays of military vehicles and wartime communication methods, table top war games and of course plenty of swing dancing to live music.

However our British obsession with all things WW2 extends far beyond royal occasions and historic anniversaries. My locality sees many regular vintage fairs and open air events that centre heavily around the 30s and 40s. The year before lockdowns I recall being entertained at the Newport Pagnell and Allies Vintage Wartime Event by Winston and Mrs Churchill lookalikes! But our love of all things WW2 isn’t just shown in special big event. It sells products from homewares, (who can resist a ‘keep calm and carry on’ mug or apron?), food and music to happiness itself. As I walked down St Pancras station last Valentine’s Day a fantastic female vocal group with a distinctly war time vibe was serenading the travellers. Victory rolls hairstyles, nylons, bright lippy and classic 30s/40s tunes like ‘I get a kick out of you,’ all added to the uplifting nostalgia. There are of course great love stories from that time to be told - sweethearts separated by war and reunited. Naturally the euphoria of the greatest of victories also helps to explain our enduring attempts to relive and remember. Remembrance Sunday is of course rightly still central to our nation’s calendar. But when looked at critically one can’t help but notice that the romantic haze through which many Brits look back at the war years is in fact remoulding history to fulfil a current need. Considering the extraordinary hardships and indeed trauma of daily life during the war it is rather ironic that for many Brits today wartime nostalgia is a ‘happy place’ antidote to the stresses of modern life. In an age when many people feel somewhat lost and disconnected the vision of a time when there was connection through common purpose and values is enticing. We are adrift and seeking an anchor, if only via reliving the past.

The Second World War also offers a type of moral clarity and certainty that is very attractive at a time in which so much is disputed, even what a woman is. Back then we were on the right side, the good fighting the bad. It was uncontroversial and ‘simple’. This perhaps helps explain why calling someone a ‘Nazi’ has become so ubiquitous in popular discourse. What better way to decisively condemn of an opponent than to lump them in with probably the most famous ‘baddies’ in history. The hysteria around Gary Lineker’s tweets and the Conservative Government’s migrant policy of deportation to Rwanda is a perfect example. Lineker infamously comparing Tory Government rhetoric to ‘1930s Germany’ was a way of trying to frame the debate as a clash between good and evil, rather than a nuanced discussion around political policy. It’s also a reference everyone understands and it does in fact seem to be many people’s only historical reference point for evils such as dehumanisation, authoritarianism and genocide. That could be seen in the ludicrous, vile photoshopped memes on social media of Suella Braverman in front of the gates of Auschwitz. There was widespread insistence on Twitter, even amongst supposedly intelligent people, that the Rwandan accommodation for deported migrants resembled Nazi concentration camps. Of course misguided and bad taste attempts at cheap point scoring in political and social discourse is nothing remarkable in itself. As well as being grossly insensitive to relatives of all who suffered and were killed under the Third Reich, the prevalence of the ‘it’s like the Nazis’ tactic betrays a depressingly common ignorance of what Nazism actually entailed. The problem with transposing the moral clarity of opposing Nazi Germany into 2023 is that is dangerously reduces morally complex debates to simplistic, crude soundbites.

I also fear that harnessing the moral certainty of Britain’s stance during the Second World War is often deliberately and cynically deployed by those who govern us. The Government’s Covid public health information strategy, better described as a propaganda campaign, was designed to make us feel part of a war effort that harnessed the ‘Blitz spirit’. I lost count of the number of times Boris Johnson, his ministers and scientists urged us all to ‘play our part in the fight against Covid 19.’ Prominent media voices, such as the Daily Mail and Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain, also leapt into using war language right from the earliest pandemic days in 2020. They were very proud of deploying that emotionally charged war rhetoric to get people to comply with the Covid laws and rules.  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8236903/Brits-invoke-Blitz-spirit-describing-virus.html  We also of course had the Air Raid Precaution warden style  Covid Marshalls and the national vaccine rollout effort echoing ‘dig for victory.’ However injecting a hastily brought to market novel medication into your body has proven to have rather more lasting harms than growing potatoes in your garden. There is potential for tragedy when this nostalgic war language is used irresponsibly. When it is weaponised for moral blackmail people loose their critical facilities and start believing wearing a flimsy bit of cloth on their face will protect them from death. People start thinking their ‘duty to obey the rules’ means jumping into a road rather than walking close to someone on the pavement.

We can also look to our attitude towards the recent war in Europe to see the war of the past looming large and influencing our leaders. In a Telegraph Article historian Robert Tombs acknowledges that Britain’s speedy, zealous military support of Ukraine ‘is because of a broad cultural and political consensus derived from the collective memory of appeasement. Consequently, opposition to today’s policy is muted.’ Yet despite Tombs rightly stressing that the always ‘ambiguous’ lessons from history have lead our nation astray in the past, (notably the 1956 Suez crisis and Iraq war), he still hopes the WW2 parallel is serving us well regarding Ukraine. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/12/putin-might-todays-hitler-history-offers-little-guide-what-happens/ I’m not as optimistic. When Russian invaded Ukraine Boris Johnson clearly thought all his dreams of emulating his hero Churchill had come true. As with the vaccine rollout, the Ukraine conflict coincided with an urgent political need for improved poll ratings. But it’s also nearly the whole British political class that has sought to present pouring millions into Ukraine as akin to standing against the Nazis in 1939. Putin frequently gets compared to Hitler and anyone questioning the policy of limitless, endless arming of Ukraine without any simultaneous diplomatic efforts for peace is labelled an ‘appeaser.’   https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/05/29/just-hitler-left-europe-dividedon-act-does-putin/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/31/hitler-should-have-seen-putin-coming/

From early on Zelensky himself grasped the huge potential for psychological manipulation of the Brits by evoking the Second World War. He echoed Churchill’s famous ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech in his first historic address to the House of Commons. Since then he hasn’t missed an opportunity to draw those same rousing parallels. Boris Johnson also awarded him the Winston Churchill Leadership award back in July last year. We’ve also recently learnt that our new favourite poster boy politician has a bust of Winston Churchill in his war time bunker and that when he visited the UK in 2020 he sat in Churchill’s chair and ‘felt his bravery’. The spirit of the past is a powerful thing, especially in the hands of those with ultimate power over others. Even those on the mainstream UK Left, who often seem allergic to embracing the positive aspects of patriotic WW2 nostalgia, have cottoned onto its potential power in psychologically manipulating the populace. Yet as with a medium trying to summon ghosts, the problem with politicians ‘summoning history’ is they could well be charlatans or even conjuring up something decidedly evil.

The ubiquitous ‘keep calm and carry on’ slogan were never actually used during war as people found it patronising. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/truth-behind-keep-calm-and-carry-on Surely the vast majority of modern Brits who enjoy that particular piece of uplifting vintage advice are blissfully unaware that war time Brits rejected its usage. This perfectly illustrates how we often reshape the past for a modern purpose. The reality of life in the Second World War was profoundly grim, deeply traumatic and often fractious. Furthermore, despite the obvious hideous clarity of the evils being fought, there was moral complexity even then. Few would label all Germans living under Hitler as fully complicit in the evil committed by the Nazis. I write this on the morning that King Charles has joined the President of Germany in laying a wreath at the St Nikolai memorial to victims of Allied bombings in Hamburg. The deliberate bombing of purely civilian targets by Britain and her Allies is at the very least morally controversial. My late German grandparents lived in Nuremberg, a city that had its beautiful medieval centre devastated in bombing raids that killed tens of thousands and whose aim was purely to demoralise. Indeed I grew up learning about the horrors of Nazism and the moral complexity of war was shown to me in the very goodness of my ‘Oma’ and ‘Opa.’ Recently a friend of mine attended a high profile London event of journalists and academics discussing the Ukraine war, including possible lessons from history. Someone asked the panel of experts if there was such a thing as a good Russian. A Guardian journalist replied, ‘you could fit them in a smaller room than this one.’ He may as well have been condemning all Germans who happened to live in Nazi Germany, including my wonderful grandparents. Emotive, moral simplification under the guise of learning from history is eternally attractive but it is intellectually bankrupt and dangerous.

I am praying the coronation weekend will see rather un- British warm, sunny spring weather so that I can enjoy the celebrations, including revealing in some patriotic nostalgia around our nation’s history. It is very important to be proud of the historic achievements of one’s nation. Likewise it’s essential to remind each new generation that history has a lot to teach us. However there are dangers in using and reshaping the past for very modern needs and agendas. We could start by taking the political agendas out of history in schools and universities. Professor Matthew Goodwin has written persuasively about the problem of the left wing capture of our universities in his latest book ‘Values, Voice and Virtues.’ But whether from the political left or the right, simplicity will always be more comfortable than complexity and yet the most important lesson of history is that all lessons are complex. Life contains recurring themes and threads of common human experience run through the ages, but the past can never be fully transposed onto the present. Beware of anyone, especially any politician, claiming otherwise.