Some brief reflections on VE Day, wars, nationalism, forgetting and 'remembering.'

The 19th century French intellectual, Ernest Renan said (in Eric Hobsbawm's translation), 'Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.' A glance at this nation's sense of its historical self over the past four years illuminates the truth of this observation.

It should be so obvious, and the point should not need labouring, that the war that the British 'remember' so fondly, with such a warm glow, was, for the rest of the world, a catalogue of horrors, cruelties and privations. The rest of the world must think it odd, to say the least, that we insist on remembering this period so fondly when humanity showed its most brutal aspect. The rest of the world must marvel at the fact that we forget that rescuing the world from Fascism and Naziism was a collective effort of the world's peoples. It also should be so obvious, and the point should not need labouring, that almost every significant war that Britain has fought over the past 300 years or so (excepting those of colonial conquest) were with allies. (It is generally agreed, for example, that the Prussian army was crucial in the outcome of Waterloo). We fought one major war alone, the American War of Independence, which we lost. It should be obvious, and the point should not need labouring, that, after the war, the United States called in its debts, and that at the time of the Suez disaster, the United States made it brutally clear that we were no longer a Great Power. Following directly from Suez, the liquidation of most of the empire, our subordination to the United States, and our increasingly desperate attempts in the Macmillan and Wilson years to join the Common Market, marked a fundamental change in Britain's status (Dean Acheson : "Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role' (1962) ). All this, and much else that has happened in our post-war history, appears not to have made the slightest impression on most of the British.

For years, the British have deluded themselves with sentimental consolatory delusions about the 'special relationship' (as Macmillan said, our relationship to the Americans was like that of the Greeks to the Romans: funnily enough, no US administration has ever seen fit to avail itself of our supposed pearls of wisdom). This has been supplemented in recent years by that superlative concept, resplendent in its intellectual emptiness: 'Global Britain.'

It is one of the consolations of lockdown, that on VE Day, we were spared even more of this self-congratulatory nonsense and this willful forgetting. Had lockdown not happened, Johnson would have turned this into a festival of ebullient Brexit celebration and tragicomic self-delusion about 'Global Britain.'

More people than at any time in our history are being taught History at schools and universities. More history books are being read than at any time in our history, Some historians even have the dubious honour of becoming television superstars. It is a marvel that all this appears not to have made the slightest impression on public discourse about current political issues.The British evidently prefer to view their past as a comfort blanket. Anything else might force a more painful confrontation with reality.