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Opinion

The Old Lie

08 Sep 2024 5 minute read
Photo Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire

Ben Wildsmith

Now that the broken glass has been swept up from last month’s riots in England, under-occupied culture warriors will be looking forward to politicising Christmas.

Before scouring council announcements for evidence of Christ-erasure from the festival of consumerist vulgarity, however, they can ease themselves into the mood with a full programme of poppy-shaming and historical distortion.

Remembrance Day has mutated in recent years from a quiet, solemn event to a month-long assertion of questionable values. Every public figure is scrutinised to gauge their enthusiasm for proceedings whilst small groups of local busybodies insist on ever gaudier murals and displays of poppies.

To object is, apparently, to insult the fallen. Where I lived in Mid Wales a couple of years ago, an elderly gent was publicly berated for wearing a white poppy at the commemoration.

These were introduced in 1933 to warn against renewed militarism as the immediacy of WWI faded.

Given what the future held, you must concede that the Co-operative Women’s Guild, who produced them, had a point.

Winston Churchill

For all the Wilfred Owen poems we study at school, though, it is the collective memory of WWII under which the UK chooses to shelter from the realities of the 21st century.

In particular, the wartime utterances of Winston Churchill, alongside his subsequent history of the conflict, dominate the nation’s imagining of itself. For many, the utopian vision that Churchill used to cohere a nation under threat has replaced the inconvenient truths of our past.

Americans refer to those who fought in WWII as the ‘greatest generation’. In the UK, the achievements of this cohort have been minimised and misrepresented in the service of values to which most never subscribed.

My grandfather, who reluctantly fought in North Africa, saw the war through the prism of life before it.

He’d lived through the miners’ strike in 1926, when new, horrifying levels of poverty settled on the Valleys. In 1931, he and his brothers had battled with police who were trying to force entry into houses to enforce the new means test – designed to remove unemployment payments from all but the starving.

Inspectors were empowered to rifle through the belongings of households looking for anything of value. 53% of claims were cancelled as a result.

So, for him, the war was part of an ongoing narrative in which the forces of capital conspired against the people.  Having spent six years fighting it, he emerged not with an idealistic gratitude for the country’s past, but a conviction that it must change.

New start

He wasn’t alone. Labour’s 1945 election victory was delivered by the votes of active servicemen and those who had recently returned to find their bomb-damaged country in need of a new start.

Many had seen their fathers return from WWI to promises of social justice, only to be cast into spiralling poverty as the interwar years unravelled.

The achievements of post-war Britain derived from a determination to march away from the war towards a modern way of life based on equality of opportunity and a base standard of living for all.

The NHS, quality social housing, and free university education were declarations that the old way of doing things was over. Entry into the Common Market in 1973 seemed to signal a final acceptance that the imperial model was over.

Six years later, when Maragaret Thatcher won power, the WWII generation was approaching retirement.

We forget that before the internet turned us all into publishers, retirement effectively silenced people.

Without the forum of the workplace, nor the opportunity to shape national life through working practice, pensioners lost their voice and influence.

Ersatz patriotism

Thatcher’s rhetoric was consciously Churchillian, evoking a lost, halcyon age that had existed before the progressive politics of the post-war consensus. Cloaking the UK in ersatz patriotism, she sought to tear down the achievements of those who had shaped the country after fighting for it.

Their contribution was reduced to military service and nothing more; their values derided as unpatriotic and foreign. A country that was purposefully rejecting the failed statecraft of its recent history was turned around to face a fictionalised version of it and told to believe.

A few years later, in the 2000s, Vladimir Putin would commission state television to make lavish dramas about the ‘Great Patriotic War’, foregrounding Russian resistance to Ukrainian Nazis.

Contrasting the quiet gatherings around war memorials that I remember from childhood with the militaristic hubris that characterises national commemoration nowadays, I see a shocking betrayal.

The people lost in contemplation were remembering actual human beings whose loss had marked their lives, not the flag-draped phantoms of a political fantasy.

Five miles from the Cenotaph, Grenfell Tower still stands as a tombstone over the values that would have kept it safe.

Means testing

As our Labour government embraces means testing and military solutions, they wear the clothes of the Attlee government, as if in mockery.

My grandad kept his medals hidden away in a box; I’d have to beg to see them.

‘Why would I want to look at them? It was the worst six years of my life.’

He knew there was no golden age before the war, so did everyone he fought alongside.

The half-starved victims of industrial exploitation were herded into a conflict that wasn’t of their making and returned with the moral vigour to make a new world.

Through the mountains of lies, flags, poppies, royal weddings, huckster politicians, spivs, and deliberate impoverishment it is still possible to see their hopes realised in the NHS.

Fight for it, on the beaches if it makes you feel better.


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Mawkernewek
Mawkernewek
9 days ago

Poppy season starts earlier and earlier every year.

Adrian
Adrian
8 days ago
Reply to  Mawkernewek

…and Pride started as one parade for gay people: now it’s an entire month of public autogynephiliic fetishism.

Last edited 8 days ago by Adrian
CapM
CapM
8 days ago
Reply to  Adrian

I can’t imagine how you cope with the level of self righteous indignation you must generate about Christmas.
Christmas fetishism begins in mid August!
Then on Boxing day those Cadbury’s cream eggs make on appearance.
I can only feel pity for you.

j91968
j91968
7 days ago
Reply to  Adrian

Young Adrian here is very keen to assert how very cis-het he is. He must have really struggled in the pantomime season all his life.

Bethan
Bethan
7 days ago
Reply to  j91968

How do you know Adrian
is cis-het or he?

Karl
Karl
2 minutes ago
Reply to  Adrian

What a weird response. What has one to do with the other. Pride has no set date. 11.11 should be ingrained in your tiny mind. It’s your kind that means I no longer wear a poppy. People died under bad policies in war, to allow us to grow and be free.Not argue for a fake culture war you seem to be into.

Y Cymro
Y Cymro
9 days ago

There was a wide man whose words are often quoted. He said. “Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it” His name? Philosopher George Santayana. Just look at the riots in England. Soldiers fought and died to repel fascism. And for what? It’s happening all over again . But instead of Jews being the target it’s Muslims. The disgusting attacks on Mosques and those wearing traditional dress reminiscent of 1930 Nazi Germany. What went witnessed was hatred on a new scale. Those will to follow the likes of Nigel Farage & Tommy Robinson. who hang on their every… Read more »

Last edited 9 days ago by Y Cymro
Charles Coombes
Charles Coombes
8 days ago
Reply to  Y Cymro

Every Generation fights the same battle. Tony Benn

Mab Meirion
Mab Meirion
7 days ago

That’s not quite true, a grandfather of mine fought for five years in the first and lived through the depression and the second whereas my father lived through the first war, the depression and wore a uniform for 9 year before, during and after the second war. I on the other hand have fought no wars, experienced half a century of doing as I pleased whilst navigating ‘Britain’s’ boom and bust years, ‘those were the days’ and the best music…do you see where I am going, my generation proves the exception…

adopted cardi
adopted cardi
5 days ago
Reply to  Y Cymro

Well said. As for Churchill all I can say is – talk about history being re-written! – Both my father and father in law, who never met but fought in the same war, said exactly the same thing about him. And he was booted out straight after the war. Some leader of men! My dear old Dad was “invalided” out of the war when his 3 mates and he went over a land mine. His pals were killed in the act. It wrecked his life. He was only about 21 and had lied about his age to get into the… Read more »

Jon_S
Jon_S
9 days ago

Well said.

Annibendod
Annibendod
9 days ago

We are seeing the final threads of that post war consensus unravel. Starmer is on the side of Capital. “The culture is well kept …” so folk can’t conceive an alternative. Thatcher’s greatest success – the Red Tories. Watch “Gary’s Economics” if you want to understand the detail of how the rich get richer at the expense of the poor getting poorer. Anyone labouring under the misconception that Labour is a vehicle for socialism/social justice/equality badly need to open their eyes. In the words of the eloquent RATM – WAKE UP!

Veritas
Veritas
8 days ago

Excellent, perceptive article. This chimes exactly with my experience of Remembrance Sunday. Another national myth is that the UK entered WW2 in order to fight fascism or to defend Poland. The UK finally, reluctantly entered the war in 1939 because its status as a great power was challenged. Certain events from this period are conveniently forgotten, such as the Bengal famine and the catastrophic fall of Singapore. It’s remarkable that the latter is given so little prominence.

Algie
Algie
8 days ago

Superb piece Ben, keep up the good work 👏

includemeout
includemeout
8 days ago

Last month, I attended a performance of Britten’s War Requiem at the Proms; a work notable for its total integrity in presenting the wretched reality of war without any sugarcoating. But then, it was composed at a time when most people still knew what war really was, and weren’t (yet) ready to fall for comforting myths about “why we fight”. It couldn’t be written today. From memory, the militarisation of remembrance really got going in the Blair years, and probably peaked under Cameron. It seems to have faded a bit since; there was a period when it seemed impossible to… Read more »

jimmy
jimmy
8 days ago
Reply to  includemeout

From memory, I think you have that absolutely right. I do recall some 20 or so years ago a great concern within the Government and military that the public were becoming too pacifist and generally sceptical about NATO, along with severe recruiting problems for the services. I did notice what was clearly a concerted campaign by the government, BBC, media and press to promote a more positive and pro military consensus within the population. That continues to this day.

hdavies15
hdavies15
8 days ago
Reply to  includemeout

Blair made “going to war” fashionable, again. He got an appetite for being so righteous in the Balkans, or maybe it was there before but broke to the surface when he backed anybody but Serbia. Topping up with his best mate Bush into Afghanistan and Iraq mutilating and killing thousands, no hundreds of thousands while killing and maiming hundreds of British soldiers and airmen and mentally damaging many more. And people still listen to the garbage coming out of his overpaid gob.

Charles Coombes
Charles Coombes
8 days ago

Well phrased. Thank You.

David C
David C
7 days ago

A super piece Ben, diolch!

Doctor Trousers
Doctor Trousers
7 days ago

My grandfather served in world war 2. I remember tears in his eyes on remembrance day. I saw a lot of different emotions on his face, anguish, rage, loss, disbelief. Pride was not one of them.
Growing up, that’s what I understood remembrance day to mean. The message was that war was a horrible, awful thing, that must never happen again.
If anybody is disrespecting the fallen, it’s the people who have twisted the poppy into the opposite of everything it was supposed to symbolise.

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