> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theprecedentedtimes.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # It Is Always 1939 - URL: https://www.theprecedentedtimes.com/it-is-always-1939/ - Published: 2026-09-07T09:00:08.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-07T09:00:21.000Z - Author: TPT - Tags: long read --- On 11 November 1919, after huge popular demand, the new, permanent Cenotaph was unveiled on Whitehall, to serve as the United Kingdom's primary national monument to the more than a million British and Empire soldiers who had had their lives stolen by the First World War. In 1946 it was rededicated to encompass the dead of the Second World War, and has since come to serve as the focal point for this country's official 'remembrance' of every conflict it has participated in up to the present day. The word *cenotaph* itself is derived from the Greek for 'empty tomb'. And the Cenotaph *is* empty - there is no body here, not even one of an unknown soldier. There is nothing so specific as an actual, literal victim of war, who, though we might not know it, had a name, and a face, and a death. It is a grave purely in the symbolic sense. In place of any confronting specificity, that empty space has provided fertile soil in which our society has cultivated a whole ecosystem of ideas, symbols, reference points and rituals. Out of those two wars we have derived our entire cultural imagination, our moral grammar, our narrative universe, of armed conflict - and a blank cheque that Anglo-America is still trying to cash. --- Not since the Thirty Years' War in the first half of the 1600s had Europe known carnage and destruction like that of 1914-18\. Six percent of the British adult male population was dead. Well over a million wounded soldiers brought the traumatising bodily violation of mechanised slaughter home to every town and village in the country. No language yet created could grasp at such cataclysmic, civilisational rupture, so we birthed a new vocabulary. Gone in Britain were the days when 'commemorating war' meant erecting a victory monument; in its place grew a new cult of remembrance - a language of cenotaphs, of poppies, of They Shall Not Grow Old, of little wooden crosses, of The Last Post, of two-minute silences, of At The Going Down Of The Sun And In The Morning We Will Remember Them. The war poets sketched the form of our new language, many of them in revolt at the cultural script of adventure and duty that had earlier prevailed - their own experiences providing an unassailable negation of the patriotic nonsense employed to pretend that there is glory and honour in muddy puddles of rainwater and blood. *Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori*, sarcastically quoted Wilfred Owen. *It is sweet and right to die for your country*. Those who die in war - like Owen, killed exactly a week before the Armistice - do not die in a corner of a foreign land that is forever England; they just die. It was inevitable that this vocabulary would become shorthand. To even attempt to comprehend waste on such an unimaginable scale is too painful, too confronting; it demands nothing less than a full-bodied commitment to ensuring that the Great War is the last war. A national system of 'remembrance' must translate such waste into representational shorthand - symbols, icons, that, depending on their deployment, can be just as distancing as they are powerful. Four years of continental conflagration reduced down to a red poppy, an empty tomb, a flag. And it was also inevitable that any genuinely anti-war spirit in our new national symbology would not last long. There is a hard limit to how anti-war any nation's official state remembrance can be, inversely proportional to the state's desire for meat for the meat grinder. *In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning* cannot coexist with military recruitment. The sharp edges, the specificity, must be attenuated. There must be no confrontation with unmanaged feeling. Grief and horror must be dulled, mutated into the language of 'respect', controlled and choreographed, decorated by ersatz emotionality. A specific cadence must be employed. Soldiers weren't killed; they 'fell', they 'gave their lives', and, in dying, they became The Fallen - both more and less than human. In Berlin, the neoclassical Neue Wache serves as Germany's Central Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny, their primary site of national remembrance and their closest equivalent to Whitehall's Cenotaph. Alone at the centre of the small building, exposed to the elements under an open oculus, is Käthe Kollwitz's arresting sculpture *Mother with her Dead Son*, carved in the late 1930s in memory of her own son Peter, who died in a road ditch in Belgium during the First Battle of Ypres only a couple of months into the war, having volunteered - with his mother's enthusiastic permission - amid a frenzy of militaristic patriotism. As the chief instigator, and loser, of two world wars within its first hundred years of existence, Germany has had to face up to the ugly agony of war more than most. *Mother with her Dead Son*, which has served as the central element of the memorial since its inception in 1993, puts faces to pain; it is a piercing embodiment of human suffering. It is not all things to all people, an empty space into which a redemptive national mythology can be inserted, but specific - and in its specificity, its direct and literal portrayal of grief, it refuses to allow the effects of war to go unseen, unimagined, buried beneath platitudes and shorthand. Not so with the British state's official post-1918 language of remembrance. Carved into the anonymous white Cenotaph are the words The Glorious Dead. It's unclear quite where the glory is to be found in dying shivering and afraid in some godforsaken shell hole, with - in Sassoon's words - *nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache*. Perhaps this monument is only for those deaths deemed glorious, and all the inglorious deaths are memorialised somewhere else. Such a dedication is part of the national state project to assimilate such unfathomable losses and create out of the mass war graves of Europe a new militarism, one that uses the blood of the dead - sorry, The Fallen - to anoint itself, to declare itself above question. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the language of remembrance becomes incompatible with any serious conviction that war is an unalloyed evil, its rituals an unholy combination of pompous solemnity and a sanctifying, glorifying, and romanticising of armed conflict - rituals that work to conceal the tension at the heart of, at the very least, First World War-centric 'remembrance', between the horrific, *insulting* pointlessness of the slaughter, and the insistence that there is some glory, some honour, some heroism to be found in it. The glorious dead. It is 2026, and the British Army is running a recruitment campaign called We Take Fun Seriously. More than a hundred years of distance stand between us and the nauseatingly jingoistic war poems of Jessie Pope - *Who's for the game?* \- but you wouldn't know it. One would hope that if the dead of the First World War had died 'for anything', it would be for a future in which the undiluted horror of sending men in the prime of life to kill each other would be recognised, and the nonsense of *Who's for the trench - Are you, my laddie?* put to bed forever, but alas. Perhaps that is their final insult. For the closer you look, the clearer it is that all the cenotaphs, all the saluting, all the ceremony, the whole cult of remembrance, serve to repeat, without a shred of irony, that which was inscribed on the wall of the chapel of the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst in 1913 and has never been taken down, that which Owen called the old Lie: *Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori*. --- A generation after the trenches, we did it all again. Here was a new war, with largely the same belligerents in largely the same alliances, but under radically different circumstances. A sequel which, on a global scale, dwarfed its predecessor in terms of mortality and catastrophe, but which took a very different shape - the overwhelming burden of death falling on the civilian populations of China and the Soviet Union. Conversely, the proportion of the British population killed by the Second World War was roughly half that of the First. This was a very different kind of conflict. Just like its predecessor, it brought with it a new, enduring vocabulary, forever changing our linguistic landscape of war. Appeasement. Doing One's Bit. Keep Calm and Carry On. We Shall Fight On The Beaches. Blitz Spirit. The Few. But perhaps most consequentially, the way our culture narrativised the conflict gave back to war a sense of grand purpose, a sense of heroism, a sense of meaning. The First World War resists meaning, the idea that it was all some grand struggle 'for' something. Despite every attempt to wring patriotism out of that war, the cultural script that has endured in this country remains one of futility, of meaninglessness, of a pit of hell into which Europe threw its young men for no good reason. Historians may quibble over the extent to which this is *strictly accurate*, but in some sense, it doesn't matter - that is the story that has been remembered. Ask your average British person today what the soldiers of the First World War were fighting for and they will not be able to articulate an answer - a sentiment not uncommon in the trenches, especially as the war dragged on. To dub any of it 'glorious' is to truly embrace a cult of death, of fighting for the sake of fighting, of following orders for the sake of following orders, of seeing some kind of romantic 'sacrifice' in village boys who had never left their shire being blinded and crippled in France. It is the disgusting attempt to find something redemptive in unfathomable tragedy. But where the First World War resists meaning, the Second is perceived as positively overflowing with it. An enemy - born out of the First - so evil, so unwilling to negotiate, so single-minded towards military conquest, that *anything* done to stop them can be construed as not only justifiable, but heroic, in comparison. A situation so extreme that it is those who advocated against war, and in favour of forging a treaty with Nazi Germany, whose stance seems short-sighted and indefensible, while the sabre-rattling Never Surrender types for once seem reasonable. A pitched, epic battle between the Forces of Freedom and the Forces of Darkness, in which it mattered deeply, to hundreds of millions, which alliance prevailed - in which the idea of 'liberating a continent' was more than mere puff to drive recruitment. In other words, the perfect narrative gift to militarism. History, of course, isn't narrative. The past is a mess; the deeper you look the more complicated it gets. Nothing you can learn about Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan could ever soften their evil - there is no 'moral complexity' in extermination camps and death railways - but there is much that tarnishes any image of the Allies as upright and incorruptible. We have forged a kind of historically illiterate Newton's third law of morality, in which the wholly, irredeemably evil nature of our enemies is taken to mean that we must have been wholly, irreproachably good. Victory tends not to compel any soul-searching, but perhaps it should. To acknowledge that many of our military actions would, were they not set against a backdrop of arguably the worst atrocities ever committed, count as world-historical crimes in themselves is not to pretend there is any true moral equivalence between the Allies and the Axis; it is to acknowledge that war is hell, and a situation not exactly conducive to moral scrupulosity - a situation in which terrible choices are asked of flawed people. Yes, even when the enemy is as unquestionably evil as the Nazis, in fact perhaps *especially* when that is the case: war is hell. It is, for some purposes, narratively convenient that the Axis Powers were as indefensibly, nihilistically destructive as they were. It allows a rewriting of history, a construction of memory, in which our government's decision to go to war and stay at war was not complex and situationally specific - the result of a desire to maintain the balance of power in Europe, secure our imperial possessions and continue our global dominance - but simple and morally motivated, born out of a specific and selfless determination to stop that destruction. It has allowed us to conjure a setting in which there was a good, clean, guiltless point to militarism, to getting behind a war effort, to reflexive loyalty to country. Our general cultural acknowledgement of the pointlessness and horror of the First World War asks difficult questions of us, asks us to reckon with what we did as a society, who we were - our women handed white feathers to men to shame them into joining the military; was that right? Our socialist organisations largely collapsed any kind of international working-class solidarity in favour of the narrow nationalism of 'getting behind one's country' in wartime; was that right? We shot over three hundred of our own men as 'cowards' - including one who claimed 'I haven't been the same since I scraped my best friend's brains from my face' - and took until 2006 to pardon any of them; was that right? The Second World War ought to push us towards equally uncomfortable questions, but we have mythologised it in such a way as to specifically avoid them. There's no room for genuine discomfort in the ever-popular artistic space of nostalgic Second World War content; what sells is a highly conservative vision of a gloriously united country, an almost chivalric age, in which war is sad but never questioned, dissent is nonexistent, struggle is honourable, and death is purposeful, all justified by the notion that what is being fought is the faceless, nonspecific concept of evil itself. There isn't room for the reality that the evil wasn't some alien force; it wasn't Sauron; it was other people, doing their own nationalism, their own militarism, their own unquestioning loyalty. Our cultural memory of the conflict is a replica without an original. History is complicated; myth is not. We were Good, and will always be good; they were Evil, and our enemies will always be different manifestations of that same evil. The national narrative we derived from the Second World War is something we desperately needed, and still do. Arguably, the only reason the First World War is allowed to be remembered so unforgivingly as a war of disastrous futility is that it cannot exist without the supposed counterpoint of its sequel. That war may have been pointless, but it was merely a dark chapter before our finest hour, you see. That 'finest hour', and its cultural domination as not just *a* war we fought, but *the* war we fought, has served to wipe our moral slate clean, erasing any need to wrestle with a deeply compromised past. We have re-remembered our own history to begin only in 1939, with perhaps a brief trench-themed prologue. And what a convenient history - gone are hundreds of years of colonial slaughter, gone is our position as the brutal oppressor of a staggering chunk of the globe, gone are the decades we spent as the unrivalled dominant force on earth. The six years of 1939-45 - and a deeply blinkered view of them at that - have been dramatically magnified to be representative of our whole history; we have apparently always been the brave little underdog, gallantly defending freedom, sticking our necks out to liberate the downtrodden. Within this country's vocabulary, the Second World War is *the* template, *the* reference point for war. When we want archetypes for 'military heroes', no one speaks of Wellington or Nelson; we reach for Montgomery and Brooke and Churchill. When we want a reference point for being under grave national threat, no one talks about the Spanish Armada or Napoleon; we default to the Battle of Britain. When we want a pivotal victory, few reference Trafalgar or Waterloo or Plassey; we go for Normandy or El Alamein. We have come to have an incredibly short national memory. But it's more than just a national foundation myth; it's also *the* narrative ammunition reached for by anyone who wants to justify further British military action. Because we were in that situation once, it is, apparently, always possible that we could be in that situation now. Differences between then and now are flattened, and anyone questioning the wisdom of current military involvement painted as 'the kind of people who would have left us defenceless against the Nazis'. When politicians want to advocate for military action, it's the Second World War that gets relentlessly dragged up and referenced, not as a complex historical event, but as a shortcut to an argument, an emotive touchpoint, and as a blank cheque. We were righteous then; we are still righteous now. War was good and necessary then; it is good and necessary now. The mere *existence* of this particular war, the worst in human history, is seen, paradoxically, as the ultimate 'gotcha' against the view that war is an evil - because no matter how wildly different the context and circumstances in fact are, by rhetorical sleight of hand one can appear to put the opponents of a modern military intervention in a situation in which, in order to be internally consistent, they supposedly must also believe that we shouldn't have gone to war then either. When Hilary Benn argued for Parliament to support the bombing of Syria in 2015, he openly stated that the reason to do so is the same as 'why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini'. We borrow the perceived valour of the past and deploy it as endless justification for more conflict. Every foreign dictator is Hitler. Everyone who opposes some new military action is an 'appeaser'. Every major development is Germany invading Poland. It is always 1939. --- But Britain's superpower status didn't last long after 1945\. We transitioned into a burnt-out former imperial power, licking our wounds, bankrupted by war, telling ourselves stories of our finest hour, reminiscing about an imagined past in which we somehow both ruled the waves and were a plucky little underdog. To fill that void rose the United States, which emerged from the Second World War not as a bombed-out wasteland but as the world's dominant economy. They cultivated their own national narrative of that conflict: one of a previously non-interventionist power, reluctant to meddle in world affairs, compelled to throw that aside to defeat the greatest evil the world has ever seen (essentially single-handedly, of course), forced by circumstance to take up its role as the world's police - a role it benevolently and rightfully occupies because it is Good. After all, where would the rest of the world be if America hadn't saved everyone from the Nazis? That's all it takes to establish the fundamental, inceptional morality of the US empire, or so the mythology would have you believe. It isn't as convenient to remember the history of US interventionism *before* the Second World War, to remember that its supposed status as 'isolationist' and 'non-expansionist' was only ever partial - unless we are to understand that it was by some kind of mysterious magic that, say, the Philippines came under US control at the turn of the twentieth century. But it is true to say that 1941-45 solidified America's status as a reflexively interventionist power, and forever normalised the idea of the US army fighting wars thousands of miles from its own shores. Much as in Britain, the United States has come to mythologise the Second World War as representative above all wars - not as the most horrific conflict ever waged, but as a magnificent defining hour, and a template for future glory. The cohort born between 1901 and 1927, the ones unlucky enough to have their early adulthood overlap with that war, is known especially in America as the Greatest Generation. The US, in its position at the centre of the global entertainment ecosystem, has produced no end of films and shows extolling the supposed virtue, heroism and honour of its involvement in that war. The war (or rather, a narrativised version of it as a just war between Absolute Evil and Absolute Good) is seen as foundational - not as a very specific era of history, certainly not as an aberration, but as the rule of what America Is. And there is a peculiar danger, not to mention an irony, in the fact that the nation which suffered the *least* out of any of the great powers of the Second World War is also the very same nation able to emerge from it as the next global hegemon, the nation with the most ability to weight the dice of history. The civilisation that internalised the least anti-war spirit, that learned the fewest hard lessons, got to be the next military superpower. Americans' experience of the most destructive war ever fought was still of a conflict largely very far away, without any real, sharp risk to the contiguous United States - they have no cultural memory of hiding in air raid shelters as enemy aircraft rain down bombs, of watching a genocidal occupying force march through one's town, of desperate partisan warfare and underground resistance. Robert Moses did more to destroy New York City than Adolf Hitler or Emperor Hirohito ever could. War was something that Americans got to bring to other countries, not something that strikes at home. And when that is your national model for what conflict looks like, it can't help but breed a distinct strain of blasé bellicosity, of strike-first-think-later, of measuring the price of war *solely* in terms of US military casualties, without a shred of empathy or concern for the foreign civilians who have to live in the firepath of American decisions. They should be grateful; after all, America, the benevolent interventionist, is there to help. If it weren't for America, those Cambodians would probably be speaking German by now. Just like in Britain, the Second World War has become the default historical justification, the default reference point, for US military endeavours - in spite of, and precisely *because* of, its relative uniqueness. When mining the past to justify future interventions, who would point to Vietnam? Or Korea? Or Iraq? The quote-unquote 'postwar' era is littered with countless disastrous US interventions in damn near every corner of the world, which at the very least problematise the idea that bombings and invasions generally leave a country better than it was before, not to mention any image of America as a benign force acting only to protect freedom and democracy. But whenever that image needs bolstering, whenever those who question militarism or interventionism need to be appropriately shamed, invocations of the Second World War are chambered and ready to go. The *one time* that military involvement was unquestionably the best thing to do, the one time that the isolationists were indisputably on the wrong side of history, the one time that invasion and occupation left countries better than they had been, is endlessly referenced as if it is the rule rather than the exception - be it by Truman to justify Korea, Eisenhower when imploring Britain to get involved in Southeast Asia, Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bush Senior tot justify the Gulf War, or Bush Junior with his deliberately worded 'Axis of Evil'. Even Trump's go-to line of attack against Keir Starmer over the latter's refusal to allow UK airbases to be used for the initial American and Israeli strikes on Iran was to dub him 'no Winston Churchill' - happily forgetting that it was America who entered that war following Churchill's begging, rather than the other way around, thus rendering Roosevelt arguably a better point of comparison for Starmer's positionality, but none of this has ever been about specifics anyway. The Second World War was invoked especially endlessly over Vietnam, with Lyndon B Johnson claiming that, if his administration pulled out of the war, 'I'd be doing exactly what Chamberlain did', and Nixon writing in his memoirs that 'what had been true of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 was no less true of the betrayal of South Vietnam to the communists'. That's the power and status that the cultural mythology of this one war has been afforded: even now, over eighty years later, every other US intervention is rhetorically swept to the wayside, irrelevant and obsolete in the face of it. The militarists need it that way. We must never be allowed to leave 1939\. It could be argued that this century, in which the US has involved itself in multiple seemingly-endless interventions and occupations as part of the Global War on Terror (including, in the case of Afghanistan, the longest war in American history), often with a murky justification and an unspecified endpoint objective that is difficult for citizens to quite grasp, sees the country in more acute need of being buoyed by Second World War nostalgia and reassurance than perhaps any other time since Vietnam. American soldiers find themselves in situations well expressed by that old song from the First World War, sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne: 'We're here, because we're here, because we're here, because we're here...' But it's vital for the war machine that the American people do not start to understand these interventions through the moral vocabulary and grammar of that war - as disastrous quagmires of hubris and folly, as pointless wastes of human life over desperately complicated conflicts no one seems to quite comprehend. No American who sees himself in a First World War soldier, or indeed a Vietnam War soldier, is understanding himself as heroic and purposeful. But repeatedly offering up the recognisable script of the Second World War, enabling these new conflicts to be painted in those colours, offers a balm: a moral reassurance, a borrowed valour, a supposed simplicity that can be cut and pasted into a new context at a time when people are most crying out for black-and-white narratives for fractally complex situations. The Second World War also appears as if uniquely custom-made to assuage both major concerns regarding US military involvement from those who claim not to be *pro*\-war, but rather only willing to support war under certain conditions: firstly, that America should only go to war when there's something in it for them, when it will benefit the US somehow; and secondly, that America should only go to war when it is in some way morally righteous, when they simply *must* act as a benevolent interventionist to supposedly rid the world of some evil. What major conflict but the Second World War - a war in which America had two heinous enemies in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and from which they emerged as a global economic and geopolitical superpower, thus kickstarting the 'American Century' - fulfils both those criteria? Casting every subsequent US conflict in that light allows them to be framed as both selfishly and selflessly motivated, depending on rhetorical need; the implied parallel satisfying all political stripes. For who, in 2026, would argue that the US was wrong to involve itself in 1941? We have reached a point at which even the most non-specific gestures in the vague direction of the Second World War are deployed in American politics as shorthand for an entire imagined rhetorical universe - one of deep small-c conservatism; of nostalgia for an imagined golden age of American greatness, a 'simpler time' when you could be 'proud to be American'; of the veneration of a supposed moral certainty, unquestioning loyalty, and release from individual moral thought in the obedient exercise of 'duty'; and of a longing to somehow bring all that 'back'. It is a universe that rests on the foundational principle that humanity's best days are behind us, and that our best hope is not to progress into the future, but to attempt to recreate a mythologised past, and to refuse to grow beyond it. In July 2015, the official Twitter account of Donald Trump posted a promotional campaign image, consisting of a slogan - 'We Need Real Leadership. We Need Results. Let's Put The U.S. Back Into Business!' - and an accompanying picture: a transparent snippet of the American flag, behind which had been photoshopped Trump himself, a stack of hundred-dollar bills, the White House, and some American soldiers from the Second World War. It was captioned, of course, '#MakeAmericaGreatAgain'. This is the Second World War abstractified almost to the point of absurdity, but such a density of political meaning has been grafted onto it like a snowball that we know exactly what is meant by this choice of images: American greatness is money, it's the flexing of power, it's the privilege of thoughtlessness and inattention that comes with being totally insulated as the global hegemon from the most destructive consequences of war, it's the *a priori* knowledge that you are the good guys, everywhere and at all times, because might makes right. Of course a presidential campaign trying to conjure these ideas reaches for the symbolic language of the Second World War. It may as well be captioned 'Let's Feel Good About Our Wars Again'. --- I was making my way back home from London on the day that Trump posted to his TruthSocial platform that 'Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!' And it was on that Tuesday, two days later, that he posted again: 'A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.' That night, Iranians, and those of us paying attention around the globe, held our breaths, and waited to see if the world as we knew it was about to end. A lot was brought into painfully sharp focus during those long hours. I could think of little else but what we might, if the US went ahead with its president's apparent genocidal threats and deployed nuclear weapons against Iran, be about to lose. I didn't think it was likely to happen - and I'm sure there are those out there who smugly hold that since in the end it didn't come to pass (this time, anyway), anyone who worried that it might was silly and foolish - but the fact that it was on the table at all, the fact that the most powerful man in the world thought it acceptable to casually threaten civilisational wipeout over social media, the fact that the chance of it occurring was *distinctly more than zero*, was disturbing enough. It is the closest that the world has come within my lifetime to tipping over the first domino of nuclear annihilation. I have spent a lot of time immersed in the emotional landscape of war and atrocity, through study, travel and writing. I have spent years not just studying the Second World War, but sitting with it, allowing it to be felt - as much as that is possible at more than eighty years' distance. It is often assumed that those of us who spend an unusual amount of time on subjects like these become desensitised to such things, that we become so used to them that they no longer hit as hard for us as they do for those less familiar. But in my experience, the opposite is true. We don't become desensitised; what we become is impossible to shock. Studying war and atrocity renders one so intimately aware of humanity's worst impulses, and the way in which they are so often invited by times of conflict, that one becomes utterly incapable of surprise. There is no amount of bloodshed, torture, bombing, rape, abuse, displacement, starvation, massacre, or cruelty that can shock me now. When you study historical atrocities in detail, the reaction of surprise, of 'I can't believe people could do that!', is scrubbed from you, and replaced with one of 'Yes, that's what war is. That's what people do in war.' Such lack of shock does not translate into emotional numbness, however. While I can of course only speak for myself, such familiarity is experienced as an acutely heightened sensitivity, a dramatically shortened emotional distance. When you have walked around fifties-era recreations of medieval towns flattened in a single night, their very building façades a representation of tragedy; when you have sat in churches intentionally left as ruins, their stone walls still visibly wounded by bullet holes and bombs; when you have trodden the pavements of cities which have a memorial to a wartime atrocity seemingly every other street; when you have wandered through tiny village cemeteries, and found even there rows of graves all sharing the same date in 1944 or 45, when your country or one of its allies buried entire families in the rubble of their homes; when you have stood in the places where people were rounded up, deported, killed; when you have stood on the very spot on which seven thousand bodies were burned after an air raid because they were simply too many to bury; it becomes impossible to speak blithely and nonchalantly of war and bombing and death - in the past, the present or the future. It hurts so much more because you are no longer able to treat the concept as theoretical, distant, and abstract. Knowledge renders the unthinkable all too thinkable. Only a few days before Trump's declaration that 'a whole civilization will die tonight', I had been at the Imperial War Museum to view their temporary exhibition *Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art*: painting after painting of a city on fire, human beings reduced to huddling in tunnels while all that they knew was destroyed above them, helpless to do anything but wait it out and see what was still standing come the morning. In light of that declaration, my thoughts went to the cities that I love and all the people in them, and to the possibility - simultaneously remote and larger than it had been since the hottest hours of the Cold War - that by the time I awoke, they would no longer be there. All the ordinary people I have encountered, in short but sweet interactions; two strangers briefly coming into each other's orbit in a restaurant or a subway train or a museum or a gallery. The lovely lady in a Berlin café who was so patient with my slow German. The kid on a bus in Salzburg who offered me up timetable information completely unprompted because he was so excited to practise his English. The countless people who have smiled at me on the London Underground. Cities, where human life is lived in its greatest intensity and in its sharpest vulnerability when conflict comes. And, of course, I thought mostly of the people of Iran, who, though I have never met them, I know to be in no meaningful way different from those I have. In those hours, it felt for a brief period as if the distance of time had been collapsed; it struck me that this was a small taste of what the Second World War had felt like, night after night, for hundreds of millions - not to mention an experience shared by every other target of mass bombing in the decades since: an almost paralysing terror, going to bed wondering how much of your world will still be there in the morning, your heart almost breaking with empathy and fear and dread as the fates of so many hang in the balance, powerless before the decisions of faraway men. Truly, a finest hour. There isn't much space in the Anglo-American mythology of war - especially as it pertains to the Second World War - for grief, nor for an appreciation of the preciousness and vulnerability and irreplaceability of human life, the interdependence that makes it a matter of existential importance to our species that we are able to coexist without resorting to war. There isn't space for a mournful contemplation of loss, especially loss outside our own borders, from those who do not bear our flag. There isn't space for anger, real anger - and not at those who are deemed insufficiently pious and respectful, but at war itself, at the fact that war - any war - happened at all, and at all those in high places whose actions set the world on that path. When you have seen how war is remembered without the context of having won it, you are never able to unsee the oddly light and unserious nature of our own approach, one that commemorates major war anniversaries by letting the pubs stay open late. The whole language encapsulated by the *Kniefall*, that whole spirit of profound sorrow, profound grief, that is beyond words to convey, of an insistence on making space for pure mourning unadulterated by 'respect for heroes' or 'honouring sacrifices' or any godforsaken references to 'glory' or 'greatness', finds no place in mainstream Anglo-American cultural narratives of the Second World War; we are too busy trying to use it as some kind of ultimate proof that a 'good war' is possible, and thus that our principal emotional response to it all should be patriotism and pride rather than horrified grief. Our 'remembrance' is only ever allowed to go so far, our expressions of 'war is awful' forever asterisked, because, rhetorically, we *need* there to be an exception. There simply *has* to be a 'good one'; it cannot be the case that all war is hell, yes, even when tragically necessary or unavoidable, yes, even that one. Because if it isn't true that that one was 'the good one', if there is in fact no such thing as a good war, if 'a bad war' is not merely 'a war we probably shouldn't have got involved in' but rather entirely synonymous with 'any war', then we might have to look at ourselves, our history, and our present a little differently. In a cultural place and time in which imperial aggression, self-interested interventions and needless belligerence are increasingly viewed as unacceptable, we need a war we can feel warm and fuzzy about, such that perhaps some of that feeling will trickle down to our other wars by proxy. We need there to be an exception such that it is never militarism in general that is questioned or rejected, but rather specific unpopular wars. We need to be able to believe that it is at least *possible* for our bombing, our invading, our assassinating to be good, even if that good is currently nowhere in sight. --- The overwhelming frustration, of course, is that there *are* in fact a great many lessons to be learned from the Second World War - lessons that, all too frequently, we stubbornly ignore. Even were we to set aside all political considerations, all humanitarian considerations, and look at what can be learned from the standpoint of pure military strategy, that war demonstrated, extremely effectively and in multiple different countries, that terror bombing civilians (or 'morale bombing', when it's your side that does it) simply does not have the desired effect. It *does not work* in breaking the morale of its citizenry or getting a government to surrender, and yet that strategy is still repeatedly deployed all over the world - as if just one more bomb, one more destroyed street, might suddenly tip the scales. There is one good reason why the Second World War is repeatedly invoked, and it's that the problem that it exploded onto the world stage - fascism - has never actually gone away. Sometimes - one could even say, *increasingly frequently* \- comparisons to the Nazis are fully warranted, and the total destruction and replacement of the comparatively democratic, tolerant and forward-minded Weimar Republic by the Nazi state in the 1920s and 30s is, in fact, one of the most important periods of history to study. Far be it from me to argue that that war is irrelevant distant history; it was one of the most cataclysmic, consequential events the world has seen, the effects of which continue to ripple out to this day - and comparisons, far from being axiomatically invalid or misguided, are often valuably instructive. Fascism grows out of and subsumes capitalist democracies like a cancer, and one of the sole advantages we in the present day have over Weimar Germany is that we already have their example to learn from: there is no longer any excuse for not knowing where that style of politics leads, or for imagining that appeasing fascists - not only in the military sense, but in the media, in law, in political discourse, in criminal justice - does anything but strengthen and embolden them. We owe it to that period in time to learn from it, and one of its great lessons is a one-way death cult, that will burn everything in its path until it is stopped - and that since the cost of doing so on the battlefield is so unfathomably high, it behoves us all to do it long before the battlefield: at the ballot box, in the news media, in the courtroom, in the halls of government, and, when necessary, in the streets. We may not always be in 1939, but there is one sense in which we liberal democratic countries are always in the mid-1920s: modern, developed societies that are only an economic shock, only a few elections, only a hateful resentment allowed to fester, only a passive normalisation of violent bigotry, only a willing handover of the responsibility of thought away from fascism. And there is no way, after tens of thousands of naked, emaciated concentration camp victims had to be buried by bulldozer in 1945, that fascism should be allowed an inch. There is a great irony in the fact that it is often the very same political camp that accuses 'the left' of 'calling everyone it doesn't like Nazis' that loves to invoke the spectre of 'another Hitler' to justify further military conflict - or, indeed, any other political project it can think of. The same Ted Cruz who, in 2025, implored American antifascists that 'your political opponents are not Nazis' was quite happy in 2013 to compare the implementation of the Affordable Care Act to the appeasement of Hitler, and in 2015 to argue that the negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal echoed 'Munich in 1938'. Much of the problem is that the Second World War has been depoliticised - stripped of its specificity, stripped of what *exactly* Nazism was outside 'the bad guys' - in service of being repoliticised, transformed into a decontextualised touchpoint for jingoistic, flag-waving militaristic national pride, hollowed out until it is as empty as the Cenotaph. It has become both culturally omnipresent and utterly absent. An obsession with 'the war' and 'the greatest generation' is often the calling card of those who are, tellingly, more gleeful at the fact that we beat 'the Germans' than that we beat 'the Nazis'. Invocations of the Second World War aren't only used to justify militarism; they were also all over, for instance, the Brexit campaign, in idiotic statements about European 'ungratefulness', pathetic nonsense about being 'bullied by Germans', or a staggeringly insensitive comparison by Boris Johnson of the EU to the Third Reich - despite the fact that Johnson, at the very least, is fully aware of Churchill's role as an early proponent of a politically integrated Europe, but again, none of this country's vibes-based rhetoric of the war has ever particularly cared about factual accuracy anyway. Generations of people who have been raised on popular media about 'the war' remain utterly, even *wilfully*, incapable of recognising what fascism looks like in its modern guise, for that would be difficult, perhaps genuinely unsettling in the personal introspection it might require; it would mean something far more challenging than simply waving a flag. Those who have internalised the idea that grainy, black-and-white archive footage of the NSDAP is the only form that fascism ever takes, and thus mock and spurn those who would apply the word to anything else, are in their own way obstinately unable to move past 1939\. This is all how you end up with people who scream at anti-war and anti-militarism advocates about 'but what if we have to face the next Hitler' while gladly voting for the next wannabe Hitler at the polling station. For many, the reconstructed memory of that war is less a haunting warning of the dangers of fascism, and more about the comfort of righteous violence, the comfort of officially sanctioned thoughtlessness - the most fascist mentality there is. I obscured an important fact earlier. That July 2015 Twitter post from Donald Trump's account that featured his own face, the White House, a pile of money, and some American soldiers from the Second World War? Well, it didn't take journalists long to notice the *Reichsadler* insignias on their arms - and they quickly discovered that, in a spasm of incredible irony, the people in that photo weren't American soldiers at all; they were historical re-enactors dressed as Nazis. Whoever put that post together had found a stock image easily available online, and - I am giving the benefit of the doubt here - simply *not noticed* that it depicted people role-playing Nazi soldiers. Only a month after he had even announced his candidacy, someone on his social media team unintentionally gave us the perfect visual metaphor for his administrations and the cultural moment that enabled them: because when, on the scale of a whole society, you spend more time on triumphalist boasting that your country beat something than understanding what it is that you beat, when a war of unparalleled monstrosity is not a sobering lesson but a finest hour that gave your nation the cultural script to justify whatever it wants and the reassurance that it's always in the right, when you close your eyes and stare into an imagined nostalgic past because that's easier than facing yourself in the here and now, you don't notice when you've become the bad guys. --- *Thank you for reading The Precedented Times.* *If you enjoyed this, and if you are able, please consider supporting The Precedented Times on Ko-fi to enable me to keep writing:*