The meaning of the Second World War

It’s often said British people live in a divided nation, a fault line exposed and deepened by the 2016 EU referendum. It sometimes seems that everything, no matter how trivial, can become a new front in a culture war, especially if you spend a lot of time online.

But perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in our collective remembrance of the Second World War, the end of which we celebrate today for the 75th time.

The Second World War — or more particularly, 1940, the year of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain — is the “founding myth” of modern Britain, Dr Charlie Hall of the University of Kent told me. It’s important to us because of the idea that “Britain stood alone” until the Soviet Union was drawn into the war in 1941 — although of course that isn’t strictly true, given the US Lend-Lease programme and the more tacit military equipment supply policies that preceded it.

“Britain stood alone” is nevertheless a pervasive and powerful concept and is anathema to many in this country because of the sense of exceptionalism the three words convey. The poppy is a another example. The poppy can and should be an elegant and restrained symbol of remembrance of the sacrifices made by millions. But somehow this beautiful symbol is now more than that. It’s morphed and become codified for many, signalling a distinct set of cultural values.

James McLean is one of the few footballers in the English leagues who doesn’t wear a poppy sewn into his shirt in November. Born and raised in Derry, where British soldiers killed 14 unarmed people on Bloody Sunday in 1972, McLean says he doesn’t feel comfortable wearing the poppy because “it stands for all the conflicts Britain has been involved in.”

We should be able to accept this even if we don’t agree with it, but of course McLean has been booed vigorously around the UK for many years because of his stance. He has even reportedly received death threats.

This kind of ugly reaction to someone who doesn’t share your enthusiasm for a symbol is perhaps why the poppy has started to become an object of mild mockery on the left, a shorthand for a kind of bullying thuggery and military bombast.

That kind of reaction is also unfair. The poppy still is a quiet signifier of respect for people who have died in British wars. It also does material good: the Royal British Legion raises huge amounts of money for former soldiers through the Poppy Appeal every year.

But this is what the culture war does to us: it reduces nuanced issues — like the many complex ways in which a society remembers a real, global war — into a pitched battle.

This brings us back to VE Day, which we celebrate today under coronavirus lockdown. Most of the planned events have been cancelled, leaving the BBC to invite us to watch Winston Churchill’s speech from the day in 1945. We can also listen to Dame Vera Lynn singing “We’ll meet again” in our “home street party”, complete with bunting that we can download from the broadcaster’s website.

This is poignant at best, and at worst patronising and infantilising. It’s a surface-level, Disneyfied version of remembrance that promotes a few familiar icons and tropes while missing out the reality of what so many British people fought and died for.

Worse, it simply sets up VE Day as another front in the culture war. This piece was written before the anniversary itself, but it seems certain that social media will be abuzz on Friday with angry arguments about the day and about the ways in which we celebrate the war. The sacrifices of British people during the war will become subsumed into discussions about how we view ourselves today.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Dr Hall told me that one of the research areas that he’s pursuing is British people’s lack of understanding about who the Nazis were and what they stood for, despite our focus on the Second World War in school history lessons. Instead we tend to remember them as a kind of nebulous evil that, by threatening us, enabled Britain to be great.

But among the noise, iconography and naked jingoism in our remembrance of the Second World War is something that we can be truly proud of as a country, along with many others. Our ancestors went to war with a country that was systematically killing people because of their religion and ethnicity, among other groups. Not only that, but they did so with the help of millions of soldiers from the colonies, many of whose descendants and compatriots are British citizens today.

That is something that everyone, left and right, Brexiter or Remainer, should be proud of.

More than that, a more nuanced understanding of the Second World War and Britain’s role in it can be the foundation of a more comprehensive patriotism – which will be vital as we leave the EU. As George Orwell said in The Lion and the Unicorn, written during the Second World War: “The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.”

The Second World War may be one of the deepest trenches in Britain’s culture war, but it also represents our best chance at forging a more unified national identity — and a patriotism that we can all be proud of.