Don't Mention The War...

DER SPIEGEL's correspondent in Britain has been asked "for a strongly worded polemic about the British obsession with Germany and the war". He delivered a fine piece (tough maybe wording strongly was too much at the expense of making distinctions), here is one quote:

Every German schoolchild knows the tales of German atrocities. But in England, Prince Harry parties with a swastika arm band. Eighty per cent of youngsters don't know what Auschwitz was about, but each one will be familiar enough with heroic films about the "Battle of Britain" to believe they had personally kicked the Hun up the backside.

Where does this giddy pride come from - and the lack of sensitivity toward the victims?

The Russians in the meantime consider us friends, even though they lost 25 million people in the fight against the Nazi horde. They respect us as a hard-working, peace-loving people who have emerged renewed from the devastation.

The British, who only survived thanks to the Russians and Americans, behave as if they had conquered Hitler's hordes single-handedly. And they continue to see us as Nazis, as if they had to refight the battles every evening. They are positively enchanted by this Nazi dimension.

(A less frequent but not milder version of this syndrome exists in the USA too; witness US pro-Democrat, pro-capitalist economist and blogger Brad DeLong's recent mad diatribe against Nobel laureate, onetime standard bearer of the post-war West German anti-fascist and rememberance movement, German novelist Günter Grass: after Grass's attack on capitalism in a piece translated and reprinted by the NYT, DeLong manages to accuse him of being a "crypto-Nazi scum"...)

The author also refers to the silly discussion going on in Britain about the film Downfall, something I covered before.

And then he connects the recent rehabilitation of imperialism (Gordon Brown: "the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over") to the present war that shouldn't be mentioned:

I believe the official British triumphalism has to do with the Iraq war. If you continuously inflate your self importance with memories of grandeur in the Second World War, if you endlessly replay your "finest hour", you will have a distorted view of the moral problems of today.

A Britain which assumes itself too much in possession of all virtue has dangerously self-aggrandising features. Through deception and manoeuvrings you can find yourself going into a war that breaks international law and costs thousands of innocent civilian lives - simply because of an uncritical faith in an historic mission. For Tony Blair, it seems to me, "Rule Britannia" applies to the moral sphere as well.