They just keep on coming: laments, regrets, doubts, about continued efforts or new initiatives in remembering this country’s part in the Second World War. Having expressed my misgivings about these attitudes on several earlier occasions, I could just shrug off the latest manifestation, which appeared in an editorial in last Friday’s Guardian. But, instead, I think I’ll take the discussion to a different level. I’ll endeavour to show how this ‘enough about WWII already’ trope reflects certain interpretative choices on the part of those who sponsor it and why these choices are wrong-headed.
The latest Guardian editorial on the theme in question doesn’t flat-out oppose continued memorializing of the war. But it notes that ‘Britain still nurses some deep official collective need to remember these epochal conflicts’, and then throws in a whole lot of questions regarding why remembering is needed. The general direction of these questions is adequately conveyed by the concluding trio:
Do we need any more memorials, plaques and statues? Can we not decide, maturely and respectfully, that enough is enough? Can we at last move on?
The question of whether we remember cannot be divorced from the questions of what and how we remember. For, of course, the Second World War was – as the piece says – epochal; it isn’t reducible to a single dimension or meaning. So what might we want to remember for? I shall suggest just three possibilities, though there could easily be more.
(1) Democracy versus Nazism and fascism. This is a central feature of WWII. It needs to be qualified, to be sure, since one of the major allies, the USSR, was not a democratic country and that fact cannot be spirited away. Nonetheless, one of the results of this war was immensely to strengthen the prospects of democratic political progress in Europe and the world (see here, penultimate paragraph), as compared with what a Nazi victory would have delivered.
(2) Human rights versus the triumph of barbarism. The outcome of that conflict was to give a great push forward to the idea and, in due course, the practice of human rights across the globe, though the speed of this should not be exaggerated or the still-existing limitations overlooked. But, in any case, the contrast with what a triumph of Nazism might have meant can hardly be overstated. WWII saved the world from something that had scarcely been thought possible up to then and which it had seen enough of in a few years of unsurpassed atrocity and inhumanity.
(3) War even though justified war. As against the above two ways of remembering 1939-1945, one must also recognize that the war fought by the Allies, like just about any war, wasn’t a wholly good war (see, for example, 1, 2, 3). What war is or could be? It’s war, not by far the most elevated of human activities or accomplishments. So we should not lose sight of or minimize the dark side of the Allied victory, despite everything of value that it achieved.
However – and here’s the crux – we make our own choices in how we remember, and we may choose to remember the Second World War for the giant barrier it ended in throwing up against the forces of political reaction and obscene cruelty that had covered Europe; may do so without in any way varnishing the bad aspects that were involved on our own side. Why not continue to remember and indeed to do this forever, or at least so long as it is necessary to remind ourselves of what we always stand to lose if such political forces should once more gain the upper hand? It is a mystery why anyone should think this effort of necessary memory has run its full course. After not even a hundred years.
Or perhaps it isn’t such a big mystery. Those so ready to move on in this matter tend towards the end of the political spectrum on which today’s sworn enemies of democracy and liberty and rights are thought of as deserving a little ‘liberal’ understanding, aggrieved about this, that and the other as they diddumsly are, and so should be met not by force and the drawing of firm lines but by seeing their point of view. In this particular book, war isn’t ever about democracy or rights, it’s only about warmongering – and ‘our’ warmongering at that. The perspective of the present warps the realities of the past and World War II becomes, in this light, a subject of political discomfort.