Do we remember the Second World War wrong?
Maybe we misunderstand all great events, and consequences that flow from them
Are we remembering the Second World War wrong?
The great historian Adam Tooze says yes, largely because recent events have made a tidy memory of that era come in handy.
Maybe we misunderstand all great events, as well as being blind to the consequences that flow from them.
Britain is telling itself that fighting COVID-19 has been very much like a domestic-only version of the war, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson alone in finding himself Churchillian, with PPE (personal protective equipment) being hustled on the black market and, remarkably, a gauze being cast over poverty as if it were a patriotic mission to endure it.
And, as Tooze writes in Foreign Policy magazine, green activists are seeking another New Deal, presumably postTrump, which is unlikely, while both right and left refer to the wartime Bretton Woods Conference as if it were a kind of sunlit upland.
Equally, the anniversary of VE-Day (Victory in Europe) on Friday was celebrated, as always the underlying notion being that such a thing could be repeated.
What they forget, Tooze suggests, is the war and what it was.
It’s one thing for China and Russia to use it as an emblem of revived nationalism, but “the weird thing in the West is the peculiarly bloodless quality of people’s collective memory.”
The civilian casualties of the air war over Britain were terrible, Tooze says, because a cheapskate Conservative government adopted threadbare air raid precautions, but that has been forgotten in favour of plucky Londoners in the Blitz. In the same way, national writhing over the lack of PPE might well vanish from memory in favour of “We’re all in this together” sloganeering.
In fact, the war was awful, the violence unheard of in human history, and its effects made the planet worse, not better.
“The point is to put into question the 21st-century memory of 1945 that leaves the violence out and imagines the world that came after as made out of the positive energies of solidarity, mobilization, and co-operation alone.”
We will always need daily journalism, but we also need historians’ skepticism and precision. Tooze is dronelike, flying overhead looking for what Henry James called “the pattern in the carpet.” The pattern in the case of the last world war is a hideous thing, an apparition. Most people would prefer not to see it.
For it may be that the COVID-19 pandemic will be largely forgotten, like the Spanish flu, because it was only the Grim Reaper’s first little knock on the door.
Like Naomi Klein, another historian with a talent for pattern-spotting — the imposition of free-market shock being one — Tooze is a gifted writer. His previous books, on the Nazi economy, the global order after the First World War and the 2008 crash, recount what happened in extreme and fascinating detail, but also ask what it meant and will mean, something we may not know for a century.
He offers a terrible suggestion. “If there is a historical grand narrative that does justice to the significance of the 1945 moment … it is what 21st century environmental historians call the ‘Great Acceleration,’ the vast and dramatic acceleration of humanity’s appropriation of nature that reached a turning point in the middle of the 20th century.”
For the Second World War birthed the atomic age and the use of oil as the driver for economic growth. In other words, Tooze seems to suggest, that great victory we yearly celebrate, the end of the worst and most protracted human violence ever seen, sowed the seeds for the destruction of humanity through climate change.
The Nazi monster had to be destroyed. The question no one asked was what that inadvertently energy-driven triumph would lead to. “Out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety,” Hotspur said in “Henry IV, Part I.” He died soon after.
Equally, this pandemic is being fought, badly but devotedly, and the question being considered is what economic changes will result, same as after the war. But no one is asking a bigger question, whether it will matter. The heating planet will drive change that will dwarf anything happening now. Will COVID-19 insularity make things worse?
Oh for historians like Tooze who think ahead.