“We Survived the War!” Misappropriating and Misremembering

As it’s VE Day, I’ve been reading a bit about how people remember wars. That is, how we commemorate and what that says about us, rather than what it says about any particular war. That put me in mind of how wars are misremembered, even to the point of some people imagining they participated in them, even if they were born years and even decades after them. To do so, they often use a “we” that takes the concept of an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson) beyond mere identification with other people’s experiences into the appropriation of those experiences—as in “we fought the war” and “we survived the war” etc.

These appropriations are often committed for political purposes that often aim for the opposite of what a certain war was fought for—as in the appropriation of the victory over Nazism as weapon for rather than against nationalism. The Second World War was used first as an argument for brexit—“we stood alone in 1939-45 so we can stand alone now.” Never mind that a) no “we” didn’t and nor did our forebears and b) the world has changed since then. During the subsequent campaign for a no deal brexit the trope transitioned into “we survived the war so we’ll survive no deal,” which prompted me to write the following, which I initially did as a Facebook post and that I’m now re-doing as a blog post for the 75th anniversary of VE Day, about how some people misremember and misappropriate the Second World War. The picture illustrating this post is of Mark Francois, a brexiter who was especially fond of the “we fought” and “we survived” tropes, as rightly and brilliantly mocked by @Sarf_London. Francois was born in 1965, and, according to the evidence of his parliamentary expense accounts, he could neither fight off a packet of Gummy Bears, never mind the Wehrmacht, nor survive six minutes on his sofa, never mind six years of global warfare, without a bottle of Vimto, a couple of Curly Wurlys, and a bag of Monster Munch.      

Picture credit to @Sarf_London               

“We Survived the War!”: the Unflushable Rhetorical Turd of English Nationalism

I see the unflushable “we survived the war, so we’ll survive no deal” turd has bobbed back to the surface of the tragically misnamed brexit “debate.” And that’s despite the many who have taken up their metaphorical toilet brushes and attempted to batter the pertinacious feculence down during its previous appearances. As they have already pointed out.... 1: The Second World War was imposed on us, not something like brexit, which we imposed on ourselves (or in fact that 52% of voters, 37% of registered voters, 26% of the population imposed on the rest of us). 2: The only people who survived the war are 75 years of age or older. The rest of us no more survived the Second World War than we did the Battle of Hastings. 3: “We” survived thanks to allies in colonies, in free countries, and resisters in occupied ones who bailed us out and fought beside us, though the costs of that were the collapse of empire, rationing until 1954, and lend-lease repayments that took until 2006 to complete. 4: Over 440,000 Britons, including 67,000 civilians, did NOT in fact survive the war, and were among the 70-85 million who died world-wide, including 50-56 million civilians, plus another 20-30 million if we include those killed by famine and disease.

And yet, far from being dispatched to the sewer where it belongs, the obdurate jobbie has merely lurked momentarily around the U-bend of national consciousness until resurfacing, with exasperating predictability, to foul the waters of civic conversation yet again. So, I am taking up the heavily encrusted cudgel of bathroom hygiene and shall attempt to sink the monstrous floater once and for all with a series of what we might call History Hits™. I do not expect to succeed. Even so, let’s think about the phrase “we survived the war” in relation to those who, in fact, did not survive the war, with my apologies to anyone who’s said the following before. And let’s, with a slight but I think necessary adaptation of historiographical nomenclature, call the following exercise a counter-fatual.

The 440,000 dead represent just under 1 percent of the 1939 British population of just over 46m, just under 48m for the whole UK. Let’s extrapolate from that figure to see what a “we’ll survive no deal” scenario would mean in terms of everyday experience today.

Neighbourhood: from the house I grew up in I could see maybe 25-30 other houses with up to perhaps 150 residents. That means one person or more in most people’s immediate neighbourhoods would die in the surviving the war/no deal scenario.

Personal circles: the size of people’s family and friendship networks vary, but most people know or have known several hundred others, more or less closely, meaning several deaths among family and friends in the surviving the war/no deal scenario.

Villages and towns: in my hometown of Lutterworth, current population of 9,353, 80 to 90 people would die in the surviving the war/no deal scenario. The figure will vary according to region, social class, and pre-existing health conditions.

Counties: in my home county of Leicestershire, current population of 547,352, about 5,000 people would die in the surviving the war/no deal scenario.

Nationwide: in the UK as a whole, current population of 67,594,347, about 600,000 people would die in the surviving the war/no deal scenario.

These figures are vastly overblown, or at least I hope so, but I’m thinking here about no-deal rhetoric rather than statistics, about what “we survived the war, so we’ll survive no deal” means. On the face of it, “we survived” means no-dealers are prepared to see one or more of their neighbours, several of their family and friends, scores in their towns, thousands in every county, and hundreds of thousands across the country die for a no deal brexit. If that’s not so, brexiters, then I’d like to see your figures—how many people ARE you prepared to see die for a no deal brexit, given that there will certainly be deaths in the wake of shortages of medicines, and one coroner has already reported a brexit-related suicide? If you deny there will be deaths, or if your estimates are much lower than above, then the “we survived” analogy makes no sense. If so, then maybe you should get off your porcelain thrones, pull your trousers up, and stop talking out of your arses about the war.