Britain, we are often told, likes to put aside its differences in coming together to commemorate its war sacrifices and victories.
This was evident last week during the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day. Narratives honed around such commemorations gloss over fragility and uncertainty as the ghost and words of British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill are invoked to emphasise a uniquely resilient British spirit.
One of the French founding fathers of the postwar European integration project, Jean Monnet, suggested that what was believed to differentiate Britain from the rest of western Europe after V-E Day was the lack of a “need to exorcise history”.
The historian Tony Judt, in his sweeping tome Postwar (2005), elaborated on this, writing: “In France the war had revealed everything that was wrong with the nation’s political culture; in Britain it had seemed to confirm everything that was right and good about national institutions and habits.”
Was it for this craven display that London endured the Blitz?
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But myth, mirage and selective history were also part of Britain’s narrative and condition. Along with his focus on defeating Hitler, Churchill’s Victorian mind was saturated with imperialism and his career tarnished with the crimes that went with that. Yet the wartime saviour iconography around Churchill – the man who united Britons – prevailed.
His memory was invoked for an additional reason last week during the V-E Day anniversary as the White House – where Donald Trump after his election promptly insisted on the return of Jacob Epstein’s bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, originally gifted by the British government – and Downing Street trumpeted their trade deal to cement their “special relationship”. Historically this union has been presented as grounded not just in free trade, but in democracy and the rule of law.
Such a perspective was not just born of the second World War; as far back as the 1890s, John Hay, then US ambassador to Britain, said that both countries were “bound by a tie we did not forge and which we cannot break; we are joint ministers of the same sacred mission of liberty”.
Over a century later, in 2001, George W Bush described the two countries’ relationship as “the rock upon which all dictators this century have perished”.
Such historic assertions have been hollowed out beyond meaning. Few would envy Britain managing a US president who is a deranged dictator, but it is a measure of the current international cowardice in dealing with Trump that British prime minister Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, heralded last week’s announcement of the trade deal as a “historic, fantastic day”.
Quickly after Starmer’s display of cravenness, he denounced Vladimir Putin due to the war on Ukraine. Europe, he suggested, was “stepping up” on the anniversary of V-E Day to secure Ukraine’s future and European leaders were united with the US and “are calling Putin out”. This is because of Russia‘s “deadly attacks on civilians” in Ukraine.
At the same time, the Israeli policy of genocide and imposing famine in Gaza is tolerated, as the Israel Defense Forces spends US money on its sickening policy of annihilation.
The relentless focus on trade has skewed any determination to confront the terrifying echoes of the 1930s and this is something that Europeans should be much more vocal about given that the rationale for the creation of what became the European Union was to ensure the prevention of a third world war.
As Tony Judt was to lament in 2010 about the long-term loss of focus, “we have substituted endless commerce for public purpose and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders”.
Such a pursuit also relegates climate change policy, despite its devastating global consequences, to the margins, because selling cars and keeping quiet about fascism is more convenient.
It is delusional to think American democracy is robust enough to withstand the excesses of an elected leader.
As historian Ian Kershaw points out, in 1930, three army officers with Nazi sympathies were put on trial in Germany charged with preparing to commit high treason. Hitler told the court in Leipzig his movement would come to power legally, but would then shape the state as its members saw fit and that “heads would roll.”
The eliding of Trump’s version of that involves normalising his contemptuous autocracy. It also emboldens other leaders internationally to indulge their worst instincts.
Was it for this that London endured the Blitz? As wartime prime minister, Churchill made himself Minister of Defence, sat on military committees and replaced generals he regarded as below par.
When Alan Francis Brooke became military chief of staff in late 1941, things shifted. “When I thump the table and push my face towards him, what does he do?” Churchill recorded. “He thumps the table harder and glares at me.”
Churchill needed to be restrained. Trump, however, is facing no table thumpers, at home or abroad.
