Credit:
By Benoit Aubry CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Somewhere behind national pride,
shared memory and a common sense of belonging, forgetfulness stands as one of
the less-appreciated pillars of nation-building. As the French historian Ernest Renan famously observed
in 1882,
forgetfulness “is essential to the creation of a nation.” “Unity is always
achieved by means of brutality,” he argued, and brutality is best forgotten.
There are many ways for a nation to
forget. One way, popular in Britain at the end of its Empire, is simply to destroy
the evidence of wrongdoing and pretend it never happened. This was the case
with ‘Operation
Legacy,’ for
example, an official government strategy for the former-colonies which ordered all
documents that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s Government” to be removed or
destroyed. This included “all papers that are likely to be interpreted, either
reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on
the part of Her Majesty's government.”
Vast piles of documents were
subsequently thrown into incinerators, burned in bonfires or dumped into the
ocean. Officially, in the spirit of national forgetting, none these documents
existed. It was only very
recently that the scale of the project came to light.
A subtler and arguably more
effective option is to commemorate an event and remove any troubling aspects in
the process. The 11th of
November is one such example: Remembrance
Day has become an annual ritual of national forgetting. This event marks
the anniversary of the end of the First World War. It promises to remember all
those people who lost their lives while fighting for the British state, and to
remind us of the value of peace. But underpinned by self-glorification and
selective memory, the realities of war, far from being remembered, are excluded
from our memory.
To make the deaths of our soldiers
more palatable, we ignore the petty nationalism and narrow self-interest that
often ignites conflict, preferring instead to paint it as a battle between good
(the British) and evil (someone else). We speak solemnly of “sacrifice” and of all
those who “gave” their lives, and forget the national conscription that often
forced them into “service.” We remember the victims of our opponent’s brutality
and forget the suffering caused by our own, and we re-imagine wars to suit
ourselves.
As Professor Irwin remarks in Alan
Bennett’s History
Boys, “there is no better way of forgetting something than by
commemorating it.” It’s not so much “lest we forget,” Irwin says, as “lest we
remember.”
Rather than any real reflection on
war and peace, public discourse around Remembrance Day is dominated by the
poppy. The poppy is no longer a sideshow or an emblem; it’s become the main
event. This trend represents the trivialisation of remembrance as a kind of
exhibitionist grief, exploring nothing of war and its devastation. And this
trivialisation has now reached the point of parody. In 2015, for example, ex-Prime
Minister David Cameron’s aides felt obliged to photoshop
a poppy onto Cameron’s blazer. This year the Cookie Monster—a puppet from
Sesame Street—appeared on the BBC’s The
One Show with a poppy pinned to its blue fur.
What is lost in the ceremony and
nationalism of Remembrance Day is the reality of war as a time of universal
tragedy. Until this universality is recognised, war will retain its dignified and
noble glow. All aspirations to promote peace will be lost. For this to change,
the tragedies inflicted by Britain on others— whether during Empire, the World
Wars (like the
bombing of Hamburg in 1943), or beyond—must be given sustained attention.
This is not to begin a blame game or
judge whether each decision was right or wrong. It is the opposite: to
understand that war often transcends the categories of right and wrong, of
victory and defeat. Above all, war should be understood as a time of universal
human loss. In its current form, with its focus on British victims and
victories, Remembrance Day is incapable of doing this.
In this nationalist context, the language
of war can be deployed happily, as something positive. Nigel Farage, the leader
of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), is a case in point. For the past three
years, Farage has complained that UKIP should have a place at the annual
Cenotaph memorial. He
insists that Remembrance Day is “a subject I care very deeply about”: he
really, really wants to lay a wreath.
But from Farage’s “patriotic” perspective, the two World Wars are seen not as
tragedies but unequivocal triumphs of pride and nationalistic victory.
Instead of appreciating that these
binary battles between good and evil no longer exist, he prefers to imagine new
ones. “Win or lose this battle,” Farage
declared before the referendum on the UK’s withdrawal from the European
Union, “we will win this war.” “We have won it without a single gunshot being
fired,” he announced
later—shamelessly forgetting the tragic death of Jo
Cox MP a few days before.
More recently in the European
Parliament, Farage referred
to politicians who continue to oppose Brexit as “quislings,” a term
originating from the Second World War to denote collaborators with the Nazis. Are
these comments really respectful to those who lost their lives in these wars,
or are they actually, in their wistful longing, a tragic mockery?
This problem doesn’t end with
Farage. In the wake of the British High Court’s recent decision on Brexit,
which insisted that a parliamentary debate must be held before Article 50 of
the EU Constitution can be triggered, the popular press revealed themselves to
be equally enchanted with the idea of war. With the scent of poppies in the air,
the Daily Mail ran a front
page headline denouncing the High Court judges as the “Enemies of The
People,” while The Daily Express sought to rally the troops with the following cry:
“today this country faces a crisis as grave as anything since the dark days
when Churchill vowed we would fight them on the beaches.” “More than ever,” the
article continued, “your country needs YOU to fight for its freedom.”
These comments are symptomatic, not
only of the ways in which we are encouraged to remember wars as galvanising and
glorious, but also of Britain’s attitude towards its broader history. For the sake of a perfect past and a pool of
eternal pride, we anaesthetise ourselves to the horrors of war and ignore the
tragedies, traumas and injustices of history in which we are implicated. The
poppy, with its narcotic, sleep-inducing qualities, stands as a fitting symbol for
how we remember. Britain’s dream-sleep as the polite, dignified superpower—always
benevolent in its intentions and respectful in its concessions—is never broken.
This dream-sleep is more dangerous
than it may seem. Paraphrasing
the poet William Yeats, in feeding our hearts on fantasies, our hearts grow
brutal from the fare. By sweeping our brutality under the bed for the sake of a
perfect past, we condone that brutality and risk it resurfacing later down the
line. The belief in an unblemished record of moral victory also suggests that
Britain doesn’t owe anything to anyone. With
millions of refugees from Syria and elsewhere currently looking for a home
amidst one
of the greatest forced migrations of people the world has ever seen, this
belief can be deadly.
While national pride does have an
important role to play in society—as does commemorating those who lost their
lives in fighting for it—generating a sense of national modesty is just as
important. At the moment, this modesty escapes us entirely. In Germany, there
are public monuments called Mahnmale, meaning
monuments to national shame.
This idea could not be more alien to
the British, but it’s one we should embrace. Britain has its own chapters of
shame to draw on. Days of remembrance are no substitute. As it stands, we
flatter the “glorious dead” only to flatter ourselves.