We will fight them on the centre ground, we will never remember: the Second World War, psychocultural repression and liberal configurations of modern British identity

ABSTRACT

This article argues that a form of what Sigmund Freud termed ‘abnormal repression’ [(2014). Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Read & Co. (Originally published in 1910] writ large onto British cultural memory is essential to understanding several phenomena: firstly, the UK’s popular amnesia about the Second World War, a process that echoes Michael Billig’s proposition that ‘Historians creatively remember ideologically convenient facts of the past, while overlooking what is discomfiting’ Billig, M. [(2014). Banal nationalism. Sage, p. 38]; secondly, how such repression has informed contemporary political debates about British imperial and neo-imperial actions to Brexit to ‘rising anti-Semitism’ [Lentin, A. (2020). Why Race Still Matters. Polity]; and thirdly, how a dialectic between these first two phenomena are patterning a British national identity proposed by the political centre. As Ernest Renan observes, mass-forgetting is ‘a crucial element in the creation of nations’ [(1990). What is a nation? In H. Bhabha (Ed.), Nation and narration (pp. 5–22). Routledge, p. 11].

KEYWORDS:

• Memory studies
• liberalism
• Second World War
• cultural studies
• English literature
• ideology

In ‘War on the Web’, her study of the changing emotional tenor of Second World War collective memories over the years, Lucy Noakes summarizes the British wartime medical establishment’s diagnosis of ‘combat fatigue’ – or psychological trauma caused by combat experience – as ‘the outward expression of, and failure to master, fear’ (2014, pp. 56–57). The material imperative to ensure these ailing servicepeople were returned to the front line as soon as possible meant that therapeutic emphasis was placed on patients learning to ‘control’ their feelings and remain calm in the face of death. Such a perspective, argues Noakes, had its pop-cultural epiphenomena in wartime cinema, with films such as In Which We Serve (1943) ‘represent[ing] the expression of fearfulness as shameful; an understandable emotion that had to be mastered if one was to do one’s duty in wartime’. (p. 53) (No doubt there were propaganda dividends to these portrayals of courage under fire especially early in the war when public morale was darkening under the growing shadow of German invasion). The cinematic convention was to outlive the war, claims Noakes, with pictures such as Reach for the Sky (1956) and Dunkirk (1958) championing a ‘stoic response to wartime conditions’ (p. 57)

Another word that characterizes this approach to the self and how it relates to a hostile world is repression. But while repressing one’s feelings (particularly of fear) may have become desperately unfashionable since the 1940s, a broader-scale, culture-wide iteration of repression is crucial to the questions of remembering, forgetting, history and national identity that this essay addresses. I want to argue that a form of what Sigmund Freud termed ‘abnormal repression’ (1910/2014) writ large onto British culture is essential to understanding several phenomena: firstly, the UK’s popular amnesia about the Second World War, a process that echoes Michael Billig’s proposition that ‘Historians creatively remember ideologically convenient facts of the past, while overlooking what is discomfiting’ (2014, p. 38); secondly, how such repression has informed contemporary political debates about British imperial and neo-imperial actions to Brexit to ‘rising anti-Semitism’ (Lentin, 2020); and thirdly, how a dialectic between these first two phenomena are patterning a British national identity proposed by the political centre. As Ernest Renan observes, mass-forgetting is ‘a crucial element in the creation of nations’ (1990, p. 11). Although terms like remembering, forgetting and cultural memory in this context are not easy to define, Geoff Eley’s elucidation of the latter phrase strongly informs my own analysis:

cultural memory emerges as an entire dimension of politics, one involving conscious and unconscious capacities, resources and interventions – that is, an apparatus of [mis]remembering (or forgetting), a complex of media and sites (film, television, radio, song, photographs, advertisements, museums, commemorations, tourist spots, fictions, ceremonial, buildings, popular histories, sermons, political speeches and more), a collective common sense, an entire repertoire of cultural scripts that are given to US, become memorized, become subject to all sorts of political influence and dispute, and by these complicated processes enable coherent understandings to be secured. (2014, p. xviii)

Paul Gilroy has suggestively reached for mental health metaphors – ‘neurotic’, ‘self-understanding’, ‘deferral’ ‘feelings of comfort and compensation’ (After Empire, pp. 95–97) – to comprehend Britain’s complex relationship with the wartime past and its role in reinforcing a national identity that yearns for a ‘long-vanished homogeneity’ and ‘whiteness’ (p. 95). While my extrapolatory application of abnormal repression may complement Gilroy’s insights, my focus is on an ideologically different model of national identity, one proposed by a contemporary, ostensibly pluralistic and progressive liberalism that is, to some extent, the heir of what Gilroy himself described back in the 1990s as ‘privatized multiculturalism’ (1993). My argument, as we will see, is that the endless recuperations of the Second World War for a conservative ideological agenda have involved as much cultural self-deceit and historical amnesia as those recuperations mobilized in service of a liberalism that has been shorn of progressive possibilities by the neoliberal drift of British society that began thirty years after the war ended.

Before examining how abnormal repression operates on the level of culture and mass-memory, it is worth outlining what it originally meant to Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud’s patients would attempt to avoid the ‘high degree of mental pain’ caused by trauma by consigning the memory of that trauma to the unconscious. However, this defence mechanism is far from failsafe because, while the sufferer has

indeed driven it [the harmful memory or idea] out of consciousness and out of memory, and apparently saved themselves a great amount of psychic pain, but in the unconscious the suppressed wish still exists, only waiting for its chance to become active, and finally succeeds in sending into consciousness, instead of the repressed idea, a disguised and unrecognizable surrogate-creation …  (Freud, 1910/2014)

Such surrogate-creations were evident in the irrational, anomalous, contradictory, fragmentary and/or overcompensatory behaviours of Freud’s patients. This essay contends that these surrogate-creations have macro, psychocultural counterparts that emanate from the abnormal repression of the facts of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War. Novels, films, journalistic articles other popular media are awash with neurotic and perverse attitudes, images and speculations that betoken a profound national and cultural insecurity about what Gilroy calls the ‘overarching figuration of Britain at war against the Nazis, under attack, yet stalwart and ultimately triumphant’ (2004, p. 17).

Gilroy’s formulation alludes to that enduring sense of certainty that the war against the Axis powers was incontrovertibly just. While conflicts Britain has prosecuted since 1945 – from Suez to Iraq – have often been politically controversial, there is rare mainstream ideological consensus between an illiberal, neo-nationalist conservatism on one end of an ever-narrowing spectrum and a dematerialized, identity politics-driven liberalism – that is the focus of this essay – on the other about the Second World War as an intrinsically moral struggle of good against evil. On one side, so the popular narrative has it, were the free, tolerant and democratic Allied nations of which Britain was a shining example, and on the other the despotic and racist dictatorships led by Nazi Germany, which remains for many the historical yardstick of mass-homicidal cruelty. The heroism of those Britons on both the martial and domestic fronts has long been honoured across a dizzying range of cultural industries from public memorials and re-enactments to fashion lines and household wares to books, films and TV dramas. Since 1945 and the development of Britain as a multicultural and more socially liberal society, the ideological framing of such remembrances has been expanded to include women, working class people, LGBT + people¹ and members of minority ethnic groups – in other words, people who in reality were oppressed and discriminated against in pre-war and wartime Britain. Despite this anachronism – and anachronism is fundamental to cultural remembrance – the national pride and positivity associated with the Second World War have been recuperated in support of a highly tendentious vision of contemporary Britain as classless, gender-equal and post-racial. Perhaps the most memorable instantiation of this is a scene in Darkest Hour (2017), the latest cinematic panegyric to Winston Churchill (this incarnation played by a fat-suited Gary Oldman). Despite its relative brevity, it is a psychocultural surrogate-creation of instructive irrationality.

At the height of national dread about German invasion in summer 1940, a sombre piano arpeggio accompanies Churchill staring mournfully out of the window of his chauffeured car at an anachronistically multi-ethnic throng of decent Britons looking equally mournful in the inevitable British rain. At some traffic lights, Churchill impetuously unlocks the passenger door and waddles out into the streets of London. After he vanishes into the bustle, the chauffeur exits the car looking baffled and the narrative jump-cuts to a sober-suited minister in the ill-lit War Rooms informing his fellow elite officials, ‘We’ve lost the prime minister’. Churchill then enters a London Underground station and puzzles over a tube map – he may love the common people but he’s lovably ignorant of their modes of transport. He then asks a young working-class girl how to ‘use this thing’, she shows him how to travel back to Westminster and he thanks her graciously. We cut back to the War Rooms and zoom into an empty chair – where Churchill ought to be sitting – while Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) – who has been popularly remembered along with Chamberlain as a weak and Hitler-appeasing (Cull, 2009) figure contra Churchill – entertains a peace deal proposed by Mussolini. Back on the tube, Churchill boards a train and the passengers leap to their feet startled. He breaks their uneasy silence by asking for a match from a hangdog bricklayer and quipping, ‘We shall have great need of bricklayers soon – business will be looking up’. This superficially charming piece of gallows humour makes his fellow passengers laugh, humanizing him in their eyes and allowing him to come across as ‘one of us’. Churchill’s avuncular kindness extends to a mother and her young baby – ‘how old?’ he asks through a puff of cigar smoke – and to a young Black man who excitedly introduces himself in a Caribbean accent as ‘Marcus Peters’. He is the only passenger aboard the train whose name Churchill repeats respectfully after introduction.

Having won over the hearts and minds of a microcosm of the British people, Churchill assumes a more statesmanlike mien and asks them what they would do if the ‘enemy were to appear in those streets above’. ‘Fight the fascists’, says one middle-aged woman. ‘They’ll never take Piccadilly’, declares Marcus. ‘They’ll never take Piccadilly indeed’, Churchill giggles. He then suggests the option of a peace settlement with the Axis powers. Slightly after all the adults have cried ‘Never!’ a girl of five or six says it quietly. Churchill approaches her and begins reciting ‘Horatius’ by Thomas Macauley, only for Marcus to finish the quotation: ‘for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods’. Churchill is already weeping into a handkerchief when he grasps Marcus’ hand in fraternal affection. By the time the train arrives at Westminster, Churchill is resolute about going to war in the teeth of irresponsible mollifiers like Halifax.

It is not only the curious trope of an impromptu focus group that shows this surrogate-creation of Churchill to be a figment of the contemporary liberal memorializing of the Second World War. New moral and ideological coordinates are necessary to remodel Churchill as a hero of our time, as much of his. Almost every beat of the scene reviewed above presents a Churchill who has compassion for ordinary working men, women, children and people of colour. His impulsive decision to hop out of his chauffeur-driven car and enter the London Underground shows him to have an instinctual connection with the proletariat, ready to descend to their level – literally and socially – at the vital moment to gauge their convictions about the state of the nation. He is particularly deferential to immigrants of colour like Marcus Peters, especially if they have made the special effort to integrate themselves by learning about the high culture of their adopted country. The mischievous abdication of his official duties also exposes an anti-establishment iconoclasm, a willingness to alienate the out-of-touch ruling class – as represented by the anxious chauffeur and government colleagues – in favour of the opinion of the masses. Plucky humour in the face of adversity, a much older cliché of Englishness in general and of Churchill’s alleged popular appeal in particular, is mobilized in Darkest Hour but as a technique to achieve consensus amongst a diverse public who, despite all their apparent political, social and ethnic differences, can all agree on the rectitude of fighting in the impending Second World War.

It is intriguing that most of the dramatic action of this scene takes place in subterranean locations – in the London Underground and in the War Rooms – for belowground is a timeless spatial metaphor in art for the unconscious (Bjelić, 2011, p. 316) or, more specifically, psychological repression. Indeed, the very twenty-first century ‘woke’ surrogate-creation of Churchill in Darkest Hour can only be conjured by repressing a good deal of the truth about the man. That the tolerance and progressivism exhibited by this version of Churchill are attributes that are almost diametrically opposite to his real-life political deeds and attitudes, suggests that, operating in tandem with psychocultural repression, is a macro form of compensation. In Freud’s original conception of compensation, an insecure individual exaggerates or over-emphasizes certain of their personality traits or capabilities to counteract self-perceived weaknesses of character. As Freud himself puts it in his Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, ‘under the pressure of our repressions, [we] find reality generally quite unsatisfactory and so keep up a life of fancy in which we love to compensate for what is lacking in the sphere of reality by the production of wish-fulfilments’ (Freud, 1910/2014).

Darkest Hour’s liberal wish-fulfilment must necessarily deny almost everything we know for sure about the real – and highly illiberal – Churchill. In reality, he was the apotheosis of the British ruling-class insider who, though he earned a reputation as something of a maverick within the narrow Overton Window of Conservative politics in the 1930s, was a zealous class elitist, colonialist, imperialist and biological racist. In 1910, serving then as Home Secretary in the Liberal Party administration of Asquith, Churchill ordered the troops to intimidate striking miners in Tonypandy. A decade later, he called for the machine-gunning of those participating in the General Strike. He was no less merciful towards people of colour. In 1902, he argued that in any conflict between ‘barbaric’ and ‘civilised nations’, ‘the Aryan stock is bound to triumph’ (Cited in Ohlinger, 1966). ‘I do not admit for instance’, he said in 1937 as concerns were growing among British liberals and left-wingers about Hitler’s racist policies, ‘that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place’ (Cited in Broinowski, 2005, p. 8). But Churchill put his toxic thoughts into lethal action – most notoriously, he deliberately starved over three million British Indian subjects in Bengal in 19421943, which has prompted historians like Shashi Tharoor to label Churchill as one of the ‘worst genocidal dictators’ of the twentieth century (Cited in Oppenheim, 2017). It seems staggeringly unlikely, then, that the real Churchill would have welcomed the likes of Marcus Peters warmly.

While these facts never surface in Darkest Hour’s compensatory and repressive surrogate-creation of Churchill, contemporary liberal pundits on other platforms have opted for the strategy of outweighing his defects with his merits. After excusing Churchill’s white supremacism because ‘he was powerfully influenced by the imperialist, racist, sexist ethos of his age’, Gary Scott Smith in Newsweek concludes that, ‘His greatest contribution was comforting, inspiring and empowering the British people to resist the Nazis during 1940–1941 when Britain stood virtually alone and invasion seemed imminent’ (2021). Smith then reaches further back across a trajectory of liberal apologism for Churchill, including Time magazine’s decision to nominate him as ‘its person of the twentieth century’ and the American intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr’s commendations of his ‘wisdom, statesmanship and courageous leadership of Britain’ (Smith, 2021). A position must be taken in the memory war over Churchill and Britain’s role in the Second World War (the two are almost always conflated, as we can see from the above quotes) that, in the final analysis, exonerates him. The limitations of the liberal worldview means that it cannot admit – and must repress – the unattractive historical truth that the war was fought between two blocs of illiberal, undemocratic, imperial nations led by autocratic bigots of varying degrees. Not only had Britain for centuries before 1939 ruled a foreign empire within which racial segregation, arbitrary imprisonment, massacres and forced famines were the norm (Andrews, 2021) – and that drew plaudits from Adolf Hitler himself (Seymour, 2014) – but when war broke out became a centrally-planned state and economy, forcing millions of its citizens into either compulsory military service or labour in war-necessitated industries, (Heartfield, 2012) in an administrative and economic model that echoed – but was obviously not identical to – Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, or indeed subsequent ally the Soviet Union (Mattick, 2011). Such were the material and strategic imperatives for all ruling elites on both sides in the world’s last great capitalist-imperialist conflict.

However, not all cultural memory discourses so emphatically repress – and try to compensate for – the sordid facts of the Second World War as texts like Darkest Hour. Other surrogate-creations are much more ambiguous and perverse, paralleling the neuroses of some of Freud’s sickest patients. There are now so many cinematic and novelistic counterfactual narratives of Nazi Germany and its allies winning the war that they constitute an entire genre, labelled by Carl Tighe (2000) as ‘Pax Germanica’ texts. As Gavriel Rosenfeld has noted, such fictional ‘alternative histories’ have always said more about the politics of their time of writing than about the historical period they re-imagine; their primary function has been to ‘expose the virtues and vices of the present’ (Rosenfeld, 2005, p. 94). Counterfactual narratives evidently share this characteristic with cultural memories. For Šimon Ďanek, the UK’s economic decline beginning in the 1970s – which, we could add, went hand-in-hand with the crumbling of the social democratic consensus which was the major peace dividend of the Second World War – informs novels such as Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978), which ‘disperse the myth of British moral superiority, channelling its disappointment about its current situation and … loss of its status as a global power (2016, p. 13). SS-GB presents a nightmare scenario for disciples – liberal or conservative – of any modern British identity dependent upon victory in the Second World War. The Germans are occupying Britain, Churchill has been executed and there is no hope of either the United States or the Soviet Union entering the war on Britain’s behalf. Just a year into Nazi occupation, many if not most Britons have willingly adapted to the new regime, embracing fascist ideology and informing on ‘undesirables’ (Deighton, 1978/2021). As with Vichy France and other new German possessions, a puppet prime minister and parliament have been appointed and repressive state apparatuses from the armed forces to the police are now doing the Nazis’ dirty work of crushing resistance. Going further than even this perverse reversal of the Manichean image of the good British versus the evil Germans that undergirds the hegemonic remembering of the Second World War – even in recent, if more subtle iterations such as the Darkest Hour surrogate-creation – in SS:GB’s eerie counterfactual milieu the British, at times, appear to serve the aims of national socialism with more relish than its originators. The young protagonist of the novel, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer of the Germanised Metropolitan Police Force, is regularly ridiculed by his colleague, the older, more cynical Detective Sergeant Harry Woods for his obsequiousness to the Nazi Commissioner Kellerman. ‘Jawohl, Herr Major. Kiss your arse, Herr Major’, Woods mocks (1978/2021). Archer defends his superior’s actions, stating that his leadership has effected the smooth transition of the Met from a key institution of an independent Britain to an instrument of Third Reich occupation. ‘Kellerman’s not too bad … He’s kept the Metropolitan Force more or less intact’ (Deighton). While examining the corpse of a murdered suspected black marketeer, a police doctor snaps at Archer: ‘Jesus! … You people are worse than the bloody Germans. I’d rather talk to the Gestapo than talk to bastards like you … ’ (1978/2021)

Like SS:GB, Robert Harris’ bestselling novel Fatherland (1992), fuses counterfactual speculation with police procedural conventions, except this time the crime is a series of homicides orchestrated by the Nazi High Command to silence those who attended the Wannsee Conference that initiated the Holocaust. In an alternate 1964, Germany, which now dominates Britain and the rest of Europe, is concerned that, if the truth about the extermination of the Jews gets out, it will undermine efforts to achieve détente with the United States. These murders are later revealed to be one part of a mass-cover-up of the Holocaust that has also included the demolition of death camps such as Auschwitz (Harris, 1992/2012).

Psychoculturally speaking, the dynamic of SS:GB and Fatherland texts arguably relates to the notion of compensation above. But in this instance, these texts enact a kind of ‘under-compensation’ because they betray an insecurity about the putative righteousness of Britain’s cause by positing an alternative narrative outcome in which the unrighteous won the war – with the consent and collaboration of the righteous. The condition is perhaps analogous to a mentally pathological individual who, despite their good reputation in one field or another, makes self-deprecating jokes or cryptic comments because they have doubts or feel guilt about the validity of that reputation. Jimmy Savile, who was instantly relegated from national treasure to national disgrace when it was revealed after his death in 2011 that he had been a lifelong sexual abuser, made several public remarks – often beneath the camouflage of irony and bawdy humour – when he was alive that should have led to his prosecution. That he was prepared to run this risk and never be held to account in his lifetime bespeaks an audacious narcissism (James, 2014).

The source of these Pax Germanica fictions’ insecurities is not just the historically evident moral, political and social similarities between Axis and Allied states. Since the 1970s, a number of revisionist historians, often working from declassified documents, have shown how British capitalism directly funded the construction of the Nazi war machine in the 1930s (Forbes 2001; Preparata, 2005). Moreover, American corporations did much the same and, by 1936 President Roosevelt was admitting that over 100 of them had ‘subsidiaries here or cooperative understandings’ (Sutton, 1976/2012). The question of US complicity is relevant enough given that the United States has long been recruited into the official British (mis)remembering of the Second World War as an incontrovertibly just struggle. Up until the war commenced in 1939, Nazi Germany was Britain’s premier trading partner and in 1937 ‘provided a market for more British goods than any other two continents combined’ (Preparata, 2005). In 1934, the Anglo-German Transfer Agreement between Britain and the Third Reich permitted the latter to ‘accumulate a sizeable trade surplus vis-à-vis Britain; the surplus translated into free sterling, which the Nazis could employ to purchase whatever commodities they might need for rearmament on the empire’s world markets; rubber and copper being chief amongst them’ (2005). In a parliamentary debate on 28 November of that year, a Lt. Col. Moore asked the Secretary of Britain’s Overseas Trade Department, Lt. Col. J. Colville, if he was concerned about an ‘economic boycott’ of Germany proposed by an international conference currently meeting in London. Colville responded dismissively: ‘I know nothing of this conference except what I have seen in the Press … too much importance is attached to its activities’ (UK Parliament, n.d.). Due to growing opposition among the British left to fascism, economic planners and captains of industry had to be circumspect about discussing the details of their succour to the Nazis. The armaments manufacturer Vickers-Armstrong began selling armoured cars and tanks to the Third Reich from 1932, the company’s chairman Sir Herbert Lawrence evading tricky questions about the ethics of rearming a tyrannical regime with this consummate politician’s statement: ‘I cannot give you assurance in definite terms, but I can tell you that nothing is done without the complete sanction and approval of our own government’ (Preparata, 2005). In 1935, leading commercial concerns including British Petroleum, Dunlop and Unilever had to be equally discreet about their foundation of the Anglo-German Society to nurture trade with Hitler (2005) It is clear, then, that long before the cultural surrogate-creations that preoccupy this essay, British elites were repressing the UK’s complicity in the rise of the Third Reich it was later to fight. The repression continued in peacetime by, as Antony C. Sutton argues, ‘British businessmen [getting] themselves appointed to key positions in a post-war investigation to divert, stifle and muffle investigation of Nazi industrialists and so keep hidden their own involvement’ (Sutton, 1976/2012).

The repressive and compensatory devices by which these Pax Germanica texts fit into a contemporary liberal conception of British identity are surely more ambiguous than the Darkest Hour example. Nonetheless, it is telling that both Len Deighton and Robert Harris, so far as we can ascertain from their public statements, are of a liberal political persuasion. Deighton has praised the ‘meritocratic and democratic’ 1960s (cited in Kerridge, 2017) and has asserted that ‘Prejudice of any sort is evil; it is illogical and destructive’ (Cited in Dossier, 2012). What distinguishes these principles from that of a leftist, though, is that Deighton also, in true liberal spirit, broadly accepts the political and economic status quo. ‘I was a self-confessed capitalist’, he has said. ‘I am not a class warrior’. Harris has more enthusiastically embraced the centrist settlement (Dossier, 2012). Currently a member of the Liberal Democrats, (Edwardes, 2017) he was a donor to Tony Blair’s Third Way project in the 1990s and named Peter Mandelson as godfather to one of his children² (Cited in Press Association, 2014). In interviews Harris has imbued his political outlook onto the Second World War. In 2020, while promoting his novel V2, about wartime female intelligence operatives, he told the Hot Press website, ‘for the first time, you had women doing crucial jobs, like photo reconnaissance which my heroine Kay does. And indeed radar and codebreaking; these are all vital jobs’ (Cited in Carty, 2020). While there is a progressive aura of gender equality about Harris’ feminizing of the Second World War, Heartfield, Preparata and others remind us that there are moral intricacies around women being drafted to serve in a conflict – in addition to men – by a nation state that itself was and remains oppressive to women, and that had helped instigate that same conflict through masses of military and economic aid to its eventual enemy. A comparable argument has been raging between liberals and socialists about the approximately 15 million British colonial subjects who fought for Britain against the Third Reich and imperial Japan. The former celebrate these servicepeople of colour’s contribution to defeating racism and ‘making the world a safer place’. The latter assert that these servicepeople saved the very ‘inglorious empire’ (Tharoor, 2018) that had subjugated them for centuries and, furthermore, helped establish a new American-led world order that was to subjugate them all over again, albeit in neo-colonial modus operandi (Andrews, 2021).

Curiously, in the same interview, Harris cautions against the ‘British wallowing in nostalgia about the period’, but the subsequent clause of his statement – ‘and how great it was not to be part of Europe’ (cited in Carty, 2020) – suggests he feels that some ideological uses of the Second World War are more equal than others – or some do not count as such at all. For a liberal such as he, over-emphasizing a seemingly progressive aspect of the war effort (new opportunities for women to participate in the workplace) is dispassionate historical analysis, whereas the Brexiteers’ selective recall of the Second World War as an alibi for their ‘Britain can thrive alone’ narrative is hopelessly biased.

Harris is surely right about this dubious Eurosceptic enlisting of the war to its contemporary political aims. But the Remain side in the Brexit argument – that he has taken – is also guilty of repressing history in support of a romantic reverie of Britain’s relations with the European Union in particular and the continent of Europe more generally. ‘The European desire to collaborate and avoid the awful things that happened [in the Second World War]’, as Harris himself puts it, sums up the attitude of many liberal pro-EU pundits and politicos. Broadly speaking, they contend that the war was fought for the ideals of democracy, equality and liberty, which were afterward put into practice by the EU through its policies of free movement, racial and gender equality, human rights and poverty alleviation through targeted investment in its poorer member states. The proof of the efficacy of the European project is apparently in the uninterrupted peace and prosperity the Union has enjoyed since the dark days of 1939-1945.

However, the narrative has never been very convincing. Most recently, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II’s death in late 2022, Le Monde columnist Philippe Bernard tried to recruit her into this liberal metropolitan model of Europe. He was perhaps aware of how the nationalist and xenophobic British right had long ago fashioned her into a stoic home front heroine of the Second World War (Bernard, 2022). But just as that conservative image of her crumbles when exposed to the facts of her extraordinary privilege that put her at some remove from those huddling in rat-infested shelters during the Blitz – let alone the unpleasant truth of her relatives’ fascist sympathies (2022) – her face hardly fits Bernard’s more enlightened picture either. As he reports, just three years after the close of the war, the then-Princess Elizabeth said – in French, being the cosmopolitan, forward-thinking personage she was – ‘in a world so tragically shaken, those who want to will find [in this history] the promise of a better future for Europe’. (2022) Later on, in 1992, she declared that ‘the European Community is a model of peace and progress’. In 2015, she warned, ‘We know that division in Europe is dangerous and that we must guard against it’ (2022). That said, she might have been asked to define terms like ‘better future’, ‘peace’, ‘progress’ and ‘division’, given her position as the unelected head of a profoundly illiberal, multibillion-pound de facto ‘corporation’ notorious for subverting numerous British laws and democratic mechanisms (especially relating to taxation), and underpaying, overworking and sexually and racially abusing its employees and associates (Clancy, 2021).

Having seen in the examples of Churchill and the Pax Germanica fictions how liberalism has psychoculturally repressed the actualities of the Second World War, in the case of the liberal recuperation of the EU, the Second World War – and its protagonists like the late Queen – have been put to work repressing certain unpalatable episodes in post-war European history. The Panglossian account above excises the EU’s contradictory and exclusionary approach to development, for example. The widely trumpeted social and economic benefits of Union membership have been won at the cost of the EU’s complicity in the neoliberal exploitation and impoverishment of the Global South. This phenomenon is curiously under-publicized, repressed even. The globalization scholars Walden Bello and John Feffer have examined how subsidized EU food exports in the 1990s and 2000s drove many West African and Southern African cattle raisers to ruin’ (Bello & Feffer, 2008). This was an element in ‘the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside’. (2008) Though it sits uncomfortably with the egalitarian sentiment behind the liberal defence of the European project – and the catastrophe of Britain no longer being part of it – Kehinde Andrews espies a strong current of racism in EU conduct towards much of the non-EU world. ‘Turkey has basically zero chance of joining the EU because it is not a White country’, he writes. ‘The EU has always been an exclusive club’ (Andrews, 2021). But even if you are ‘in the club’ you may not be protected from Brussels’ almost fanatical devotion to the free market. Again, in collaboration with the IMF, the EU’s reputation for promoting social and economic justice was severely dented by its ‘rescue package’ for Greece after the 2008 world financial catastrophe (Polychroniou, 2015). The package caused unemployment to soar to 27 per cent, GDP to decline by 20 per cent, one in three Greeks to end up close to or below the poverty line, and a gigantic ‘transfer of public wealth into private hands’. (2015) Though the right-wing Brexiteers who invoked Britain in the Second World War were explicitly racist in their scaremongering about EU immigration, (Gietel-Basten, 2016) their liberal Remainer adversaries seldom if at all mentioned race and no doubt would be horrified to be thought of as racist. But instead, they repressed the racist implications of the EU’s development at home/underdevelopment abroad (into which category Greece was placed in, apparently, as a poorer member state on the eastern periphery of Europe) double standard.

There is an additional dimension of insecurity to Fatherland’s perverse surrogate-creation that relates to the controversial history of Germany’s genocide against the Jews, and the Allies’ response to it before and during the Second World War. The primary and propelling injustice of Harris’ story arc is the systematic attempt to conceal the Holocaust that takes place in an imagined 1960s (Harris, 1992/2012). This is of course scandalous to that other sine qua non of hegemonic British memorializing of the Second World War, that saving the Jews was an Allied objective, thereby morally validating the conflict.³ In the context of psychocultural repression, Fatherland can be viewed as compensation for the historical actuality that, as military historian Brian Bond makes clear, ‘The murderous policies of the Nazis were known from the outset and in 1942 the British and American authorities received overwhelming evidence regarding the mass killing of Jews … However, Allied policy and strategy were not substantially altered in light of this intelligence’ (Bond, 2014, p. 12). Ironically, from this essay’s perspective on the ideological uses and abuses of history, nor was this intelligence ‘much used as a propaganda weapon to inflame public opinion’ (2014, p. 12). It was only after the Germans surrendered that ‘the British war effort came to be seen as a moral crusade against evil’ (2014, p. 13).

There may be yet a further layer of compensation to narratives like Fatherland, given that not only has Allied insouciance towards the plight of the Jews been repressed, but so has the true scale of anti-Semitism in Britain before and during the Second World War. While the stirring story of the Kindertransport that rescued 10,000 mainly Jewish children has been transformed into a liberal vindication of Britain’s involvement in the war – and what that means for the kind of society we aspire to be today – some 500,000 other Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis were turned away. Britain’s immigration procedures were, according to Louise London, consciously ‘designed’ to deter Jews from trying to enter (London, 2014). Those who did succeed were subjected to formal and informal discrimination. Jewish immigrant doctors were barred from practising medicine in the UK, while a law was passed to restrict the number of Jewish infants in British state schools, for fear that they would ‘contaminate’ their fellow students with their foreign beliefs and practices (Grosz et al., 2022). Some Jewish children were forcibly taken from their parents and put into foster care. Both liberal and conservative newspapers were generally critical of the influx, with titles like the Daily Mail scaremongering about Jews ‘entering this country by the ‘back door’’ to commit crimes and fail to find employment. Given the media’s parti pri, it is no shock that a national poll conducted in 1939 found that ‘Over 60% [of respondents] considered that Jews are in some way evil; either unscrupulous in business, the main cause of international unrest or altogether too subtle for simple Englishmen’ (Grosz et al., 2022).

What do these repressions and surrogate-creations tell us about contemporary British national identity? Why my emphasis on memories that serve an ideologically liberal end? As alluded to in the introduction, there has already been plenty of research into the conservative exploitation of wartime memories to justify ethnonationalism (Gilroy, 2004), austerity policies at home (Hatherley, 2016) and military aggressions abroad (Watson, 2014, p. 181). But important as these reactionary forces are, there has been less focus on liberal invocations of Britain in the Second World War.⁴ This is a shortcoming, for such invocations are having significant impacts on current political issues in Britain and thus helping to shape national identity. These impacts are often all the more insidious because they are obscured by the rhetoric of equality and tolerance. The contradictions in the liberal recuperation of wartime memory explored above are mirrored by contradictions in a contemporary liberal construction of British identity that has borrowed heavily from developments in American society in the neoliberal era. In his perceptive analysis of the social and economic forces that brought Barack Obama to power in 2008, Pankaj Mishra has written of the ‘bonanzas of free trade and financial deregulation [that] had helped breed greater tolerance for racial and sexual variety’, while warning that such ‘Diversification and multiculturalism among upwardly mobile, college-educated elites went together with mass incarceration at home and endless military interventions abroad’ (Mishra, 2020). While in the case of Britain we might substitute mass incarceration with racial, class, gender and sexual discrimination in migration, housing, employment, healthcare and other fundamental areas of domestic life, Britain ever since its formal empire collapsed has proven to be almost as enthusiastic an exploiter and assailant of the Global South as the United States. It is these unsavoury aspects that modern liberal British identity-making – epitomized in civil society by its corporate ‘diverse hiring practices’ (Andrews, 2021) and ‘anti-bias and cultural competency training’ (Pan, 2020) – seeks to repress just as earnestly as it does the disturbing moral equivalences between British, American and Axis imperialism in the Second World War.

The repressive ‘wokewashing’ of Churchill and, by extension, the centrist recapitulation of the British war effort as a struggle for democracy and human rights also plays into a contemporary agenda of ‘humanitarian intervention’: the polite term for Western neo-imperial – and often legally baseless – wars (or proxy wars) against far weaker states from Iraq to Afghanistan to Yemen. Richard Seymour has remarked on the many occasions since the Second World War that British and American liberals have likened foreign tyrants to Hitler, as part of a casus belli against them (2014). In 1994, the liberal academic Daniel Goldhagen and his ideological confreres were calling for NATO to bomb Serbia because its genocidal ‘deeds’ were ‘different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale’ (2014). After 9/11, Seymour further reminds us, the inexorably centrist New York Times declared ‘the end of Western civilization has become a possibility against which the need to fight terrorism is being framed, as Roosevelt and Churchill framed the need to fight Hitler’. (2014) Coined after 9/11, the phrase ‘Islamofascism’ – the second half of this portmanteau word overtly referencing the ideology that until then most had associated with Hitler and his allies – was used to exculpate Britain’s contribution to the United States’ oppression of Muslims at home and abroad under the putatively benevolent smokescreen of the ‘War on Terror’. Liberal myopia about Britain, the war and the righteous mission of the EU will maintain pertinence in an age of Brexit aftershocks and continuing debates about how the UK should interact with the Union as a non-member. Also ongoing is the elite liberal media and political campaign against so-called ‘left anti-Semitism’ that has frequently nodded back to false memories of Britain and its allies fighting the Nazis explicitly to rescue the Jews. This campaign has been all the more concerning for its conflation of pro-Palestinian sentiment with anti-Semitism, and for its repression of the fact that there was a relatively tiny number of actionable incidents of anti-Jewish racism in the Labour Party during Corbyn’s leadership, despite the disproportionate publicity given to the problem (Philo et al., 2019). The campaign, which also at times labelled Corbyn a ‘Nazi’ (Foster, 2016), has had the seismic political consequence of effectively destroying the chances of a democratic socialist government in Britain for a generation or more. A better job of this could not have been done by conservatives. And this, perhaps, after all is the main rationale for grappling with liberal recuperations of the Second World War: in the final analysis, centrist and right-wing memory-manipulators have near enough the same political ambitions. Despite superficial differences around cultural and identity politics, both ideologies are fundamentally accepting of the violence, hierarchies and structural inequalities of neoliberal capitalism – and both ideologies have embraced a narrative of the Second World War that exonerates Britain’s collaboration – then and now – in these problems.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing was rehabilitated as a national hero in part by a sympathetic 2014 biopic, The Imitation Game, which dramatized his 1952 prosecution for homosexuality and subsequent chemical castration. He was belatedly given a royal pardon in 2013.

2 Harris’ later rejection of Blair seems to have been based more on the man’s character flaws than on any major ideological dispute with him – indeed, Harris tweeted that Blairism’s bête-noir Jeremy Corbyn was ‘disastrous’ in 2020.

3 This ‘myth’, as Rosie Whitehouse dubs it, has been invoked both by liberal commentators such as Smith, discussed earlier, as an alibi for Churchill’s depredations and more indirectly by those further to the political left such as the late left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn who, in likening Enoch Powell’s biliously racist 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech to ‘The flag of racialism … that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen’, (Benn cited in Kushner, 2004) implied that the Second World War had explicitly been a struggle against anti-Semitism.

4 One reason why radical voices are reluctant to call out these liberal repressions is that, in the feverishly polarized discourses of digital media, if one questions even mildly the logic or accuracy of politicized cultural memories held by what is nominally one’s own ‘side’, one risks being condemned for somehow playing into the opposing side’s hands. To interrogate the shaky liberal assumption that the EU is a post-racial, egalitarian triumph made possible by the noble victory of the Allies in the Second World War should not automatically make one a Eurosceptic or fellow traveller of bigots. However, it certainly did in the eyes of the centrist disparagers of Jeremy Corbyn, who cynically asserted that his left-wing misgivings about the EU as an instrument of neoliberal power ceded the 2016 referendum to Leave.