The same Winston Churchill, always longing for a fight, and in love with Dreadnoughts, was probably involved in the crazy decision to send two giant battleships, HMS Barham and HMS Ramillies, to the same estuary during the General Strike of 1926. Again, they never actually did anything. Merseysiders are, I would guess, quite proud at having been taken so seriously, though there is no evidence that the tactic made any difference. One has to wonder what would have happened if their ships’ companies had been ordered to open fire on Liverpool. I guess it would have gone badly for whoever gave the order. The famous Kronstadt sailors, who helped out in Lenin and Trotsky’s Petrograd putsch of 1917, may have been fooled by the Bolsheviks at the start. But they rebelled against them in 1921 when they found out what Lenin was really like. And it was to Trotsky’s lasting shame and disgrace that he massacred them that March.

Our own Royal Navy is famous for its mutinies, in HMS Bounty in 1789, at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, and most recently at Invergordon in 1931. It is a curious organization, its hammocks once filled by the cruel Press Gangs kidnapping innocent men and forcing them to sea and possible death, its discipline for many years enforced by the cruel cat o’ nine tails and the occasional shooting of an admiral to encourage the others. But it stood between us and the world, without trying to take over the state, and it was very beautiful, and many of us loved it. In London and the big seaport cities, bluejackets in their Edwardian uniforms were still a common sight in my childhood. They were reassuring, not overbearing. Since 1901, when horses failed at the task, Navy men have pulled the gun carriage on which Royal coffins (and Churchill’s) have rested at state funerals, an extraordinarily moving sight. These were our defenders, upon whom, as Charles II’s Articles of War first proclaimed, “under the Good Providence of God, the safety, honor and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend.”

In an era when soldiers were often despised, or even feared, sailors were not. Think of Kipling’s 1890 poem “Tommy”, intended to change the drunken delinquent reputation of Queen Victoria’s redcoats:

For it’s “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

In George Orwell’s perfect novel Coming Up for Air, Edwardian civilians are appalled when a young man signs up for the Army: “‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A fine young fellow like that!’ It just shocked them. Listening for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets.”

But sailors, possibly because they were at sea so much, were idealized as “hearts of oak” manning the wooden walls (and later the steel walls) of England. And the same was true for officers, credited above all with the great victory at Trafalgar in 1805, which secured national safety and prosperity for the rest of that century. They had a reputation for taciturnity and bluffness, which never does anyone any harm, and they often lived up to it. The fictional Jack Aubrey, in Patrick O’Brian’s witty and clever books about the Napoleonic wars, is a perfect rendering of this type. They tell terrible jokes. They don’t say much, just “Kiss me, Hardy” (Nelson as he died); “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield” (Beatty at Jutland, as British warships repeatedly blew up under German fire); and “Continue to engage the enemy” (Warburton-Lee at Narvik, dying on his bridge after smashing up Hitler’s destroyer fleet and so making a cross-Channel invasion impossible).

And so the word “Navy” had, for many years, a useful commercial magic if you were selling something a bit manly and bluff, such as Navy Cut tobacco and Navy Rum, or even Senior Service cigarettes. But it did not have the yelling, martinet character of the Army. I have never yet seen a naval officer’s uniform that fits properly, and when sailors are marched aboard their ships (does this still happen?), the drill is far from pernickety. Close contact with the Navy — both my parents were in it, and so were most of their friends, some of my schoolteachers and many of the parents of my schoolfellows — revealed a dry, faintly sarcastic view of the outside world which had never been to sea. Even my mother, an ocean-going snob who would die of shame if she heard me use the word “toilet”, had mastered the sarcasm of the fleet. More than once I jumped with surprise when I heard her icily remarking about some inadequate if feeble attempt at recompense. “Well, that’s damned nice of him”, she’d say, which, for a Fifties married middle-class woman in a respectable suburb, was going it a bit.

This reputation was kept alive just a little longer by two films. The first, The Cruel Sea, is one of the best movies ever made and shows, among other things, how the spirit of the Navy, stretching back through centuries, embraces and takes hold of ordinary men and turns them into something very nearly heroic. The other, In Which We Serve, features a speech by Celia Johnson, playing a naval wife, and explains the privations of this role. It can reliably reduce me to tears, and not just because of the way she says “sloop”, so upper-middle-class that nobody could get away with it nowadays. During one scene, at a 1939 Christmas dinner, she is wearing a small brooch, in a shape worn by my mother and known to her as the “Crown of Neptune”.

Few will ever notice this, but the little shiny badge betokened membership of a secret society. It was a sign to other such navy wives of a great unknown sisterhood, familiar with the grim features of married quarters and rented lodgings in glum seaports or remote colonial stations, the endless disruption of life by emergencies and distant postings, the miserable pay, and the infuriating tussle with their great permanent love rivals: their husbands’ ships. In Which We Serve also features the glorious Navy Prayer, one of the Church of England’s “Forms of Prayer to Be Used At Sea”, written when the Navy was recognized as an indispensable part of the nation. It is a plea for a safe return from danger, and opens with the words, “O Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea, who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end…”

And this is one of the beauties of the Navy which once endeared it to so many. For it was beautiful. Great warships, which we no longer possess, are beautiful, as such engines of destruction should probably not be. The boxy, enclosed modern vessels of today’s piddling navies lack this magic, as do the two giant car parks we call aircraft carriers. But in the early Sixties, I couldn’t get from my home in the village of Alverstoke to Portsmouth without crossing the harbor by ferry, under the immense 15-inch guns of the last British battleship, HMS Vanguard. There is something uplifting and thrilling about great guns, and the swooping lines of the ship itself, 814 feet long, that expressed power as few other works of man can do. It made our hearts swell a bit, to know we possessed such an instrument. And many hearts, including my own, have shriveled, as that lovely fleet has melted away.

Of course, all this is also wrapped in England’s deep love of the sea. One sign of this can be found in Arthur Ransome’s books about children sailing in the Lake District. It is now impossible to imagine the hold these stories had on hundreds of thousands of English childhoods, lived far from the shore. Michael Frayn, who grew up in the Surrey suburbs, has confessed that he read them over and over again, and tried to write one of his own. Eventually, the children in the series escape from their lake and actually go to sea, in reality and in fantasy. Towards the end of Peter Duck, one of the strangest of these remarkable novels, the children sing their way up the Channel to the words of the sea shanty “Spanish Ladies”, a favorite of my naval father, marking the ancient landmarks known to homecoming Englishmen since the time of Grenville and Hawkins:

And the First land we made, it is called the Dodman,
Next Rame Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight;
And we sailed by Beachy, 
By Fairlight and Dungeness,
Until we brought to by the South Foreland Light. 

Those who still savor the “inshore waters” part of the Shipping Forecast, as I do, were probably brought up in a maritime Britain, where there was still a bit of salt in everything and the sea was a friend and fortification, not, as it seems now, a door left wide open. Modern Britain is now so turned away from the sea that it brings to mind a passage in C.S.Lewis’s Prince Caspian, one of the Narnia books. The new rulers of Narnia fear the sea and what might come over it, and have deliberately allowed thick woods to grow along the coast. Lewis, who also grew up in more naval days, though he lived far from the sea, understood, like any British person of his time, that the ocean is a source of power and inspiration and a great highway to the world and all that is in it. But only if you have a Navy.

To be specific: Hazel, Lady Lavery — whose features her artist husband Sir John Lavery enlisted as model for the Irish Free State’s legal-tender notes — set Churchill the artist free. She came calling while, brush in hand, the novice stood terrified before a virgin canvas. “My hand seemed arrested by silent veto,” Churchill’s 1921 essay “Painting as a Pastime” recalls. The Irish-American heiress, trained artist, and political salonnière born as Hazel Martyn grabbed the brush. She lustily applied splashes of vivid blue to “the absolutely cowering canvas”. Liberated, Churchill felt that “my sickly inhibitions rolled away”. He seized the largest implement he could find (there’s something phallic in this account) and set to work with “berserk fury”. As it often would for him, audacity prevailed. 

Hazel Lavery, a Nationalist whose key backstage role in securing the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 may have included an affair with the Sinn Fein commander Michael Collins, had initiated the future icon of imperial Englishness into the pleasures of the easel. Churchill did receive some formal instruction in technique as well. That came later from the artists William Nicholson and Walter Sickert, but first from his Kensington neighbor John Lavery: a slum-born Ulster Catholic, and high-society portraitist, touted after independence as a suitable Governor-General of the Free State. The Lavery home at Cromwell Place convivially brought together political — even military — antagonists. For Churchill, from the outset, painting meant not diligent adherence to the rules but hedonistic self-expression fueled by friendship. A quasi-erotic thrill runs through his descriptions of the craft: “The colors are lovely to look at, and delicious to squeeze out.” 

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Churchill created more than 500 artworks (mostly oils, but watercolors too) after he took up painting as a hobby following the débâcle of the Dardanelles campaign in 1915. His naval strategy a fiasco, his career shattered, the ousted First Lord of the Admiralty quit as Liberal MP for Dundee. He faced “long hours of utterly unwonted leisure in which to contemplate the frightful unfolding of the War”. While “a spectator of the tragedy, placed cruelly in a front seat”, the disgraced minister found that “the Muse of Painting came to my rescue”. When he saw his sister-in-law, Lady Gwendoline Bertie (“Goonie”), happily at work with a paintbox, he decided to have a go himself. 

Although peak productivity for his oils and sketches coincided with periods out of office, or in respite from its cares, he did paint scenes of the Western Front while an officer with the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1916. Some French Riviera seascapes in 1921 — the fruit of a painting trip with Lavery — were executed after the then Colonial Secretary had helped shape the map of the modern Middle East at the Cairo Conference. During his years as wartime prime minister, Churchill claimed to have finished only one work, but ranked it among his best: a view of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech, with the Atlas peaks behind it, painted after the Casablanca Conference in 1943, and given to President Roosevelt.

To his devotees, holy relics; to his detractors, amateurish daubs: Churchill’s pictures attracted large crowds when a selection toured the US and Commonwealth countries in 1958-9 (with support from the founder of Hallmark Cards), then came home in triumph to the Royal Academy. Their maker had been created a “Royal Academician Extraordinaire” in 1948. Since then, the auction market for his work has boomed. Once the property of Angelina Jolie, that Marrakech scene was sold by Christie’s in 2021 for £8.2m. However, the six decades since his death have seen no large-scale public shows. Opening tomorrow, the Wallace Collection’s exhibition Winston Churchill: the Painter gathers more than 50 pieces, half in private hands. For the Wallace’s director Xavier Bray, this carefully-curated sample of his strongest pieces not only narrates “an autobiography through visual means”, but represents “the closest we’ll get to an apotheosis of Churchill as painter”.

Dappled garden vistas and shadowed pools at his Chartwell home in Kent; sunlit Mediterranean coasts under azure skies; armies of pines massing beside sandy shores; storm-roiled Highland glens and peaks; Moroccan townscapes and valleys washed in eerie desert light: Churchill’s art throbs with a vibrant sense of place. Save for some melancholy scenes of wreckage on the Western Front — such as the forlorn shell-stripped trees above idling troops at “Plugstreet” (Ploegsteert) in Flanders — his painting escapes into landscape in search of solace and uplift. Art here means the commemoration of sensuous pleasure: in color, light, heat, atmosphere. As he wrote about the French Impressionists and their successors (guiding spirits for his work) they “brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of the joie de vivre”.

How good is Churchill’s art? At the time, anonymized works impressed experts. When, exhibiting as “Charles Morin”, he had a small show at a Paris gallery in 1921, four out of five works sold, at £30 each. In 1925, a bold, free, thickly-painted view of Chartwell under snow won a competition for amateurs, with no name attached; one adjudicator wanted to exclude it because it was clearly the work of a professional. A certain “David Winter” submitted two paintings to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1947: both were accepted under that name.

Churchill struggled with human figures, as many amateurs do — although an angular, dramatically lit, self-portrait hints that he could have achieved more had he tried. Still, the balance and contrast of shade and texture in the strongest landscapes show both command of form and zestful close-focus attention to ever-changing effects of light, wind and water. He makes a captivating effort to match the plein air dynamism and fluidity of the Impressionists he loved. Unlike his dark and shady prose, Churchill’s paint exults in acid, strident colors. “I rejoice with the brilliant ones,” he wrote of his preferred palette, “and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns”. The brighter, the better: the Mediterranean littoral, with its deep-hued collisions of sea, rock, tree, scrub and flower, always excited the ardent Francophile.

Let’s not invoke Cézanne, Monet or Matisse, his favorites: Churchill knew his limits and felt content with “a joy-ride in a paintbox”. His loose, mobile brushwork and zestful, garish palette can sometimes seem more slapdash and casual than truly evocative. High-level dilettante pieces they may be, but they both reflect, and convey, that delight in process and practice. When he apes the quicksilver Impressionist pursuit of light and wind, his relative clumsiness can slow down, and weigh down, the work. Churchill was correct to think that Morocco — which he visited six times between 1935 and 1959 — brought out the best in his painting and yielded works “a cut above everything I have done so far”. A firmer control of plane and volume in this clarifying air joins with starker, though coherently connected, blocks of color: ochre, rose, purple, leaf-green, deep blue. This landscape has shape and sinew as well as shimmer. 

The great art critic Sir Ernst Gombrich — who had fled Hitler’s Europe in 1936 — delivered a judicious verdict in 1965, the year of Churchill’s death. For Gombrich, Churchill’s “basic idiom was that of his whole generation of British painters”. Rebels against strict academic procedure, they hailed the Impressionists and their heirs as liberators, and never quite escaped their shadow. They reveled in “the joy of painting boldly in strong colors without retreating from likeness”, but didn’t opt to follow the Picasso generation into abstraction. Churchill shared, and indulged, that cult of “spontaneity” and “freshness of vision”, and his work could achieve — as his RA acceptance shows — “a standard of competence that satisfied the guardians of traditional skills”. 

Churchill, however, was a writer — over many “wilderness” years, a well-paid author and journalist — before he was a painter. What really impresses Gombrich is the critical acumen displayed in “Painting as a Pastime”. These meditations on art “beat most professional critics hollow”. Churchill treats picture-planning and execution as a heroic exercise in strategy, vision and realization. So the overarching design of a Turner, say, testifies to “an intellectual manifestation the equal in quality and intensity of the finest achievements of war-like action”, or of “scientific or philosophical adjudication”. As Gombrich glosses Churchill’s argument, “if painting is like generalship, then generalship is like painting”. The artist’s war to execute a vision ranks with the art of war itself.

Can we plausibly relate Churchill’s painting to his politics? After all, Adolf Hitler also loved painting — from early youth, rather than as a middle-aged latecomer — and was, notoriously, twice rejected in his applications to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, in 1907 and 1908. Gombrich sounds a justifiable note of caution about the hunt for an essential bond between Churchill the epoch-making statesman and the holidaymaker at his easel. He warns against “trivial and deceptive” equations of style and ideology: “Hitler, the screaming demagogue, painted tame watercolors.” For Gombrich, “nobody could learn much worth knowing about either of the protagonists of World War Two from a contemplation of their works”. 

For sure, specious attempts to contrast Churchill’s “freedom-loving” outdoor vistas with Hitler’s “repressive” views of Vienna landmarks seldom convince. Anti-Churchillians will quickly point out that an aesthetic taste for rule-breaking spontaneity and happy-go-lucky self-expression did not extend to striking trade unionists (in his early career) or colonized Indians (before and during the Second World War). The apostle of liberty could also be the enforcer of unjust order. Likewise, Hitler’s fussy, anxious architectural sketches that failed to please the Vienna selectors may have revealed only a hesitant nobody from Linz, not the future maestro of genocide. The professor who spotted the young aspirant’s lack of interest in human figures grasped that his strengths lay in architectural form. He thought that the candidate should consider an architecture course instead — and, as Führer, Hitler would empower Albert Speer to fulfill his megalomaniac master-planning dreams. 

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But Churchill, too, tended to avoid the figure — although the Wallace show does feature still-lifes whose poignant assemblies of abandoned bottles and jugs (one, from 1926, is entitled “Bottlescape”) somehow summon the forms of absent drinkers. In both cases, artistic difficulty rather than private psychopathy may explain a reluctance to put the body in the frame. All the same, it will be difficult for many visitors not to extrapolate some kind of socio-political personality from the landscapes in these rooms. 

Great freedom of method and effect — as in the open, rapid, busy brushwork of the sea in “Cannes Harbour at Sunset” — coincides with an urge, sometimes thwarted, to find balance and harmony in the tonal relations of the scene, and the pattern of its elements. Gombrich might disapprove, but quite a few of these works do seem to blend a bold, even erratic, enjoyment of surface liberties with an underlying quest for structural order. You might even call it Whig (rather than Tory) art. In contrast, the young Hitler’s ultra-disciplined landscapes lock nature, and its perception, into a rigid topographical frame. 

The Wallace Collection show will hardly shift the opinions of Churchill disciples, or dissidents. To them he will remain either the spotless warrior hero of the Anglosphere, or the incarnation of imperialist brutality. It does reveal a public man for whom the dedicated pursuit of pleasure, and relaxation, mattered: not as a phoney “hinterland” to bulk out a political CV, but a foundational source of strength. The escape also served as a renewal. “Painting is complete as a distraction,” he wrote: “I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind.” Whether or not you reverence the foreground Churchill, the background Churchill — the artist and the author — did much to sustain and protect him. 

Churchill once admitted that “If it weren’t for painting I could not live. I couldn’t bear the strain of things.” Ernst Gombrich makes no overblown claims about the quality of Churchill’s art. He does allow himself to comment that “If he was right, his painting may have helped to save Western civilization.” 

‘Winston Churchill: the Painter’ continues at the Wallace Collection until 29 November

Hiroshima was transformed in an instant. The bomb exploded around 600 meters above the city’s industrial district, and most of that area either disappeared completely or began to be consumed by fire. Some 70,000 buildings in total were destroyed.

Soon after the explosion, people began journeying into the city center to look for relatives, pushing carts in the hope of carrying home the injured. What they saw reminded them of images of Buddhist hell. The artwork at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which I visited in recent days, captures these real-life scenes in unforgiving detail. In one drawing, people are slumped over the sides of a large fire cistern, with bright-red burn marks across their backs. Desperately seeking water, they made it to the cistern and then died or passed out when they got there. In another, ghoulish figures stagger along the road, heads bowed and arms outstretched. Their clothes are in tatters; their flesh drips from their bodies.

Elsewhere in the city, bizarre sights could be picked out through the blood-colored smoke: the pattern from someone’s kimono imprinted on a wall; a pink cavalry horse standing alone in the street, its hide stripped away by the blast. The steps running up to the Hiroshima branch of Sumitomo Bank were bleached white, save for a patch where someone had been sitting when the bomb went off. Those steps are now kept behind glass in the museum, and you can see the dark patch marking the spot where that person was incinerated. Nearby, a photo reveals the bathos of wartime Japanese bureaucracy carrying on despite it all: just hours after the bomb was dropped, a policeman sits at a table in improvised bandages issuing disaster certificates to people who have suffered property damage in the blast.

At this point, of course, no one knew what was coming next: vomiting, hair loss, rapidly worsening skin conditions and hopeless attempts by bewildered relatives to stop their loved ones slipping away — all signs of the enormous quantities of radiation released by the bomb. Most people on 6 August naturally put the blast down either to a very powerful conventional weapon or, given that American B-29s had not been sighted in the numbers required to inflict carnage of this kind, some kind of devastating accident.

Japanese scientists were swiftly dispatched to Hiroshima to investigate. They soon concluded, based on tests of sand and bone, that the Allies had beaten Japan to an atomic weapon. The “prompt and utter destruction” threatened in the Allies’ ultimatum to Japan just a few days earlier took on a terrifying new dimension. A single bomb had done all this. And who knew how many more the Allies possessed?

Eight decades on, the question of whether or not the United States ought to have resorted to using its new weapon at this late stage of the war is as far as ever from being resolved. The most compelling argument in favor was, and remains, the enormous loss of life — both Allied and Japanese — thought likely to occur if a ground invasion of the Japanese home islands went ahead as planned in the autumn of 1945.

Projected casualties were sometimes exaggerated after the war, as a way of justifying Hiroshima and Nagasaki amidst worldwide revulsion. Nevertheless, the ferocity with which minor Pacific islands and other territories were defended by the Japanese naturally pointed to an enormous death toll if the Japanese military and ordinary civilians decided to defend their country to the very last. It seemed plausible that a threat of prompt and utter destruction, combined with a taste of its awful reality, might tip even Japan’s military hardliners into agreeing to the surrender terms set out by the allies at Potsdam.

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Instead, in the hours and days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, those hardliners argued that if Japan could withstand firebombing then it could — and must — withstand atomic bombings, too. Stalemate within the Japanese leadership, split between would-be peace-makers — who still held out hope of persuading the Soviets to act as intermediaries with the other Allies — and military officers who refused to countenance surrender, remains perhaps the best argument against the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945.

The Allies were aware of the somewhat uncertain position of the Emperor in Japan’s modern constitution. He was, in theory, the supreme authority in every area of Japanese life. At the same time, his elevated status — descended from the gods — meant that he was not to be troubled with everyday decision-making. A relatively late convert to the cause of peace, Emperor Hirohito had always preferred to give his blessing to decisions made by civilian and military leaders rather than force his will upon them. He tended to make his feelings known by asking pointed questions or by employing strategic silences. After the Soviet declaration of war against Japan and invasion of Manchuria on 8 August, and the bombing of Nagasaki a day later, the emperor’s subordinates still had to make two requests for a seidan — “sacred decision” — before he broke the ministerial deadlock by calling decisively for the war to be discontinued.

It was far from clear at the time that the use of an atomic weapon could somehow overcome these institutional barriers to peace-making in Japan. Then again, would any of the alternative options, including an extended naval blockade, have fared better? How hungry would people in Japan have needed to become before their leaders — who had, so far, regarded ordinary citizens more as raw material for achieving strategic objectives than as human beings whose lives were precious — decided that enough was enough?

There is some merit to the claim that Hiroshima was partly about showing the Soviet Union what America was now capable of. It is true, too, that the Americans feared the Soviets getting their hands on large chunks of Japan, if the war was not concluded swiftly and on terms favorable to the United States. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for America, there was no obviously superior means of ending the war in the summer of 1945.

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Reluctant supporters of America’s decision to use an atomic weapon might add that, distasteful though such arguments may be, it is difficult to draw a clear moral distinction between napalm — itself a relatively new weapon, used to devastating effect against Japan’s wood and paper buildings in the spring and summer of 1945 — and an atom bomb. The latter is vastly more powerful and has after-effects that dwarf those of firebombing in their horror and longevity. And yet it remains the case that far more Japanese people died, suffered injuries or were rendered homeless by firebombs in the Second World War than by atomic weapons.

The arguments over Hiroshima and Nagasaki will no doubt change in the decades to come, depending on the role that nuclear weapons play in shaping our world. Up until now, it has been possible to argue that the sort of devastation to which the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum bears grisly witness served as the clearest possible warning against allowing conflicts ever to go nuclear. But 80 years from now, people may look back and conclude that we simply got lucky for a while: proliferation was limited and, among powers who possessed atomic weapons, a combination of cool heads and good fortune prevented the unthinkable.

Already, memories of the disaster are fading. The numbers of hibakusha — people directly affected by the atomic bomb — are dwindling, their stories in danger of vanishing with them. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is already advertising talks both by the families of survivors and by “successors”. The classics of Japanese cinema and literature that the bomb helped to inspire are meanwhile now firmly in the past, from the first Godzilla film — whose eponymous monster was envisaged as atomic disaster “made flesh” — to the harrowing animated movie Barefoot Gen.

Does Hiroshima still have the power to shock us, and to stop people with access to nuclear buttons from pushing them if they feel they really must? We must hope so. Perhaps another 80 years of relative peace between the world’s great powers is possible. But no one should underestimate the potential of nuclear brinksmanship gone wrong, or the steadily escalating deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to take us to a point where the extraordinary suffering visited on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki breaks the bounds of history and comes for us all.

By the same token, we sometimes fail to appreciate just how radically those two wars transformed the country, socially and politically, especially in the massive expansion of state capacity required to wage total war. When you put these observations together, a third comes into view: that Britain’s welfare state, the so-called “postwar settlement”, is nothing of the sort. It was, rather, created to sustain those aspects of wartime social organization that Britons liked and wanted to keep, just without the fighting.

Our so-called “postwar settlement”, then, is in fact a continuation of the wartime one. And as evidenced by news this week of a Labour rebellion against Keir Starmer’s efforts to rein in welfare spending, after 80 years Britain is still (administratively speaking, if in no other sense) on that war footing. Except that this settlement is now running perhaps decisively out of two vital resources: funds and solidarity. As the two wars recede from living memory, I predict its long afterglow will too — whether or not Starmer’s rebel MPs prevail.

Possibly the only person alive in Britain today who remembers the country before large-scale administrative bureaucracy is Ethel Caterham, who at 115 is Britain’s oldest living citizen and this year, became the world’s oldest living person. Born in 1909, she can maybe just about recall the polity described by historian A.J.P. Taylor, whereby until August 1914 “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.

It was the scale, coordination, and population-wide mobilization required for total war that laid the foundations for Britain’s modern administrative state — along with its abiding connotations of solidarity and moral mission. It wasn’t just the millions called up to serve. It was also, as British writer Mary Ward approvingly documented in 1916, every last corner of the country reconfigured for the war effort: workshops turned over to munitions manufacturing, jobs opened to women, villages turned over to barracks, volunteers planting and harvesting, and all administered by a suddenly radically-expanded state. As Taylor put it later, during the two world wars the state “established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed”.

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The result was welfare bureaucracy that blended moral and administrative objectives, all based on the unwritten premise of a common wartime goal. This blend was in evidence from the outbreak of the First World War, in the “separation allowance” paid to the wives of soldiers. This was a measure that both paved the way for later welfare expansion and opened new opportunities for state surveillance of recipients. Standards of sexual conduct were imposed as a condition of payment, for example, and payments could be withdrawn for (among other things) drunkenness or gross neglect of children.

Thus was born the uneasy mix of bureaucracy, moral tutelage, and state munificence that has been Britain’s institutional modus operandi ever since: one that, as Taylor also notes, only grew more expansive and morally self-assured when the Second World War broke out in 1939. The Beveridge Report, that first proposed making permanent this state administration of national wellbeing, was written in 1942, while the Second World War was still ongoing: for Beveridge recognized the situation as a “revolutionary moment” whose lessons and effects should be seized and built upon. “Now,” as he put it, “when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field.”

Once peace was declared, postwar Labour government declared war on Beveridge’s five Great Evils instead — Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. This meant turning Britain’s newfound, large-scale administrative capacity and shared moral purpose to new collective ends, via social housing, state education, a welfare safety net, nationalized healthcare, and plentiful good jobs. The resulting administrative infrastructure employed many of the bureaucratic innovations first established as war measures, only now in pursuit not of wartime victory but peacetime national flourishing.

Much of Britain’s postwar politics has concerned how this project can best be advanced — and, importantly, how to pay for it. For the retooling of Britain’s wartime administration as a vector for transformation in peacetime also meant continuing the approach to public spending that had characterized Britain at war. That is: we sold stuff to fund it. The wartime fire-sales began in 1940, with the Ships for Bases deal that traded 50 obsolete American warships for 99-year leases on territory in Newfoundland and the Caribbean that would be used as US military bases. This programme of selling off the empire by degrees would continue, for example in US pressure on Churchill to abandon the “imperial preference” trade tariff system, as a condition of US loans desperately needed to avert military defeat.

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By Dr Emma Jones

This great sell-off continued in the war’s aftermath, as a means of funding Beveridge’s vision. As historian James Barr notes, again under pressure from the US, while seeking the $3.5 billion reconstruction loan that Attlee’s government needed to realize its welfare programme, the British government began by degrees to cede control of Mandatory Palestine. Still there never seemed to be enough money; more auctions followed. When oil and gas was discovered in the North Sea, Thatcher used it to fund her programme of de-industrialization, leaving whole towns and cities dependent on welfare, all funded by the oil bonanza. By contrast, the Norwegian government used the proceeds to create a national sovereign wealth fund, to safeguard that wealth for future generations.

More recent governments have scraped about ever more desperately for assets that can be liquidated to keep things going. Public utilities, railways, flagship companies and grand buildings have raised a few bucks here and there, all of which then promptly vanishes into the same ever-expanding maw. This perpetual crisis has been rendered still more acute by the implosion of another unexamined assumption of the postwar era: that the native population would continue to grow. Instead, Britain’s native population has been shrinking since 1973, meaning a welfare programme that was never very affordable to begin with is now making ever more demanding calls on a dwindling working-age tax base.

The resulting fiscal and political impasse is painfully visible in our medical and adult social care services, where a growing proportion of spending is on age-related health and welfare interventions. Caught between the irresistible force of a population aging expensively on the NHS, and the immovable object of Britain’s looming penury, so far government policy has been public sector supply-side reform via immigration: another kind of fire-sale, namely opening the country itself to migrants from elsewhere. In healthcare itself this takes the form of covert supply-side reform, which is to say using foreign healthcare professionals to dilute NHS staff bargaining power. Even so, it is never enough: now, despite the high-flown rhetoric that surrounded last week’s Parliamentary vote to legalize doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the obvious NHS cost-saving implications suggests a bureaucracy sufficiently desperate to tear up both its founding charter, and even the Hippocratic Oath, by adding deliberate killing to its list of “treatments”.

What will the addition of euthanasia do to the assumed solidarity underpinning the NHS mission? Lurking behind Beveridge’s proposal was always, in the background, a presumed “us” unified by the war effort: a group of people with a shared purpose, somewhat (if never monolithically) homogeneous, and from which it is therefore implicitly possible to be excluded. With the two wars on their way to disappearing entirely from living memory, will that sense of unity persist? Perhaps. But as things stand, the migration policy pursued by every government since Blair, in the hope of keeping our fiscal show on the road, is actively militating against this.

Even Keir Starmer himself is now warning that the country is becoming at best “an island of strangers”, if not a morass of competing religious and ethnic blocs. Such a transformation could hypothetically be halted; but net migration remains high, with Britain’s welfare regime serving both as justification, in the name of the employees, tax receipts, and GDP growth needed to sustain it, and also as attractor for those who wish to enjoy its relative munificence. This seems unsustainable though. If rapid demographic change risks curdling the politics of scarcity into bitter competition between in-groups, this could pose an existential threat to the welfare settlement full stop. Should the general electorate come to believe — however unjustly or at the instigation of activists — that Britain’s welfare system now functions not as a vehicle for solidarity within an overall national in-group, but a mechanism for fiscal transfers from one ethnic bloc to others, it is unlikely to continue commanding broad support.

Taken all together, then, Britain’s embrace of permanent wartime bureaucracy has a quality of tragedy. We’ve spent 80 years coasting on a cozy sense of big government and common purpose, held together by vague ancestral recollections of ration books, blackout wardens, brisk nurses, and national unity. Successive governments raided the piggy-bank again and again to pay for it, and have by now resorted to burning the furniture. Starmer’s rebels are just delaying the inevitable: as things stand, whether in the prospect of suicide on the NHS or the bitter politics of Channel boats and domestic scarcity, our welfare regime feels like it’s hurtling toward a dénouement it cannot avert without in some other way hastening the disaster. I don’t know what it would look like for Britain to establish a true postwar settlement, but at this point it is some decades overdue.

By 8 May 1945, the Americans had only taken a very small part of Japan — the 11.5 square miles of Iwo Jima island — a conquest very expensive in blood: 6,821 US troops were lost and three times as many were seriously injured. Japanese combat was very different from that of the Americans: they would fight to the death with no thought for their own survival, and their tactics were designed to circumvent the vast superiority of American firepower. Victory over the remaining 145,937 square miles of Japan, therefore, would inevitably come at the cost of far more lives than all the allies had worldwide.

The Japanese had no intention of surrendering. They were determined to continue to inflict such heavy casualties that the allies would give up their demand for unconditional surrender and instead accept a negotiated settlement that would assure the continuation of the imperial dynasty — a strategy they called Ketsugō (Operation Decisive). And, with more than three and a half million Japanese troops still on duty in the home islands, not counting those being evacuated from China and Korea, they had the manpower to make it happen. Beside combat forces, which would attack using aircraft and small arms, there was the Civilian Volunteer Corps — all able-bodied men and women armed with rifles and pistols taken from the British, Chinese and Dutch troops defeated earlier in the war. But what really made the Japanese so confident, what made them truly a force to be reckoned with, was their extraordinary stoicism. Uniquely, they really did prefer death to surrender.

But because Ketsugō was not studied properly by foreign historians for decades, a false narrative took hold — one that serves as useful propaganda for the Russians to this day. This asserts that when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Japan was already defeated. Cut off from oil supplies immobilizing aircraft and ships, surrender was only days away at most. The only reason the bomb was dropped, in this telling, was to frighten Stalin into accepting US supremacy in Europe in spite of the superiority of the Red Army. The deaths of the men and women of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the prolonged suffering of the survivors poisoned by radioactive fallout were most cruelly inflicted for cynical American political purposes.

Every part of this narrative is wrong. In reality, when Hiroshima was bombed, Japan could still count on as many as 10,000 aircraft for kamikaze suicide attacks. Second, nobody in the chain of command, from President Truman right down to Paul Tibbets, the 29-year-old pilot of the B-29 that dropped the “Little Boy” fission bomb, knew anything about immediate radiation or the subsequent radioactive fall-out — apart from the sheer size of the explosion, they had no idea of what they were about to unleash. The reason the bomb was dropped was that US military leaders and President Truman were terrified by the thought of all the Iwo Jima battles it would take to conquer the rest of Japan.

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Despite the desperate damage inflicted, the bomb did serve one enduring purpose. For decades after, all of us remembering VE day in May 1945, looking at those pictures of celebrating couples kissing enthusiastically, could be certain of one thing: there would be no more wars in Europe. That certainty was not because of the actions of the United Nations, utterly ineffectual even then, nor the result of some Great Power diplomacy in the Security Council, which only fails when it is most needed. Instead, the very long peace that Europe enjoyed — an unprecedented 77 years without a major war — was “the sturdy child of (nuclear) terror”, as Churchill said, a thing far more reliable than any human wisdom. And this only came when the bomb was dropped two months after the emotional celebrations of VE day.

That was still true on 24 February 2022, when Putin, who had been creeping into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, dramatically escalated and invaded Ukraine outright, aiming straight for its capital, Kiev. For it wasn’t the protective arm of nuclear deterrence that failed on that fateful day and led the Russians to make their reckless move. It was the failure of NATO, and its attendant governments, to reaffirm deterrence in word and deed during the weeks and days of growing tension before the invasion.

In fact it can be argued that the Biden administration unwittingly triggered the Russian escalation when, at the behest of the always-wrong CIA, which was predicting the swift fall of the city, it evacuated the US diplomatic mission in Kiev. That, in turn, precipitated a mass flight of other Western (and Middle Eastern) diplomats. Even worse, the German government contrived to outdo Biden’s foolish move by declaring that it would not stop the Nord Stream II doubling of gas imports from Russia, even if there was “some incident” in Ukraine. For the German-speaking Putin it was a big green light to invade.

Russia’s “post-modern” invasion did not rely on firepower. It aimed to capture Kiev and conquer the country by giving the impression of strength: the image of that endless double column of armored vehicles was a powerful one. When that fashionable fantasy collided with the reality of stubborn Ukrainian defenders firing anti-tank rockets at very close range, Nato’s leaders had an opportunity to take immediate action. They could go into an emergency session to demand an end to the fighting, and a prompt return to pre-combat positions.

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But no such session happened because only the British and the new Nato members who had long lived under Soviet rule were willing to oppose the Kremlin head-on. The Biden administration was mostly focused on “avoiding escalation” and the French, Germans and Italians as usual loudly demanded a voice in Nato’s decisions while offering only platitudes when it was their turn to speak .

As a result, on VE day 2025, a war still rages while a fragmented alliance struggles to cobble together an effective defense strategy. So as flags are waved in celebration of that long-past victory, men are again dying, and European governments again hoping that the US will step in and do the heavy lifting. It was, after all, an approach that worked well enough in the past, when the US had far larger forces and Russia was everyone’s bad guy.

But today everything has changed. There is an enemy that the Americans are more worried about than Putin: Xi Jinping, the Mussolini of our time, who is determined to show that today’s Chinese are courageous and formidable fighters, unlike their defeated ancestors. And as China openly prepares for war, the US has no choice but to prioritize the “Indo-Pacific”. Perhaps, as Europe finds itself abandoned, or at least insufficiently protected, and unwilling to rearm in earnest, it is now the time to ask: for how long will the nuclear deterrent hold?

But for how much longer will we remember those ghosts? This week marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day — the moment the war ended in Europe. The youngest surviving veterans are now at least 98. And of the millions of British people who served in the war, only tens of thousands remain: perhaps 0.01% of Britain’s total population.

But perhaps the question should rather be: what will we remember? In theory, an event doesn’t need to be within living memory to be memorialized. In practice, though, as the generations change, the meaning of even the most notable historic moments will waver and mutate. We still mark the foiled attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament, for example, but few remember the details of what Fawkes was trying to achieve.

Similarly, when I was a child, there were still First World War veterans alive: I remember interviewing Bill, a local veteran of both wars, for a school homework assignment. He had lied about his age to volunteer in 1914 when just 14, and was in his nineties when I spoke to him. He would spend all day sitting on a pavement bench, in full uniform including medals, nodding and smiling at passers-by. He talked vividly about his war memories for my project, but seemed largely oblivious to the modern world. That long-ago war was, for him, still all of meaning and reality, along with most of his personality.

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What did that war mean, though? My school history lessons presented its origins as murky, and largely driven by longstanding European rivalries. More recently, though, now that the last of its veterans has died, I’ve noticed this war increasingly repurposed as a Goodies Versus Baddies fable about “freedom and democracy”. And so it may soon be with the Second World War, however many of its ghosts still haunt Britain’s woodlands.

This week, ceremonial officialdom creaked into gear for the four-day celebration of “VE 80”, complete with military parades, fly-bys and appearances by the Royal Family. But as I watched BBC coverage of dress-uniformed soldiers marching down the Mall past the King, two things struck me. Firstly: each group was neatly formed, beautifully trained — and teeny weeny, mere pocket-sized mini-units dwarfed by the scale of a thoroughfare designed for huge parading battalions. It felt like a vivid metaphor for a Britain that rattles around in architecture built for an entirely grander state. And second: that as living memory of the Second World War fades, much more is about to pass from us than the last of the Greatest Generation.

Who were they, that generation? And how do we remember them? Two days before the military mini-units marched down Pall Mall, the ghostly airmen of my local woodland seemed briefly as though they might see another modern-day echo, when a Spitfire crash-landed in a field in Kent. All on board were, mercifully, safe — but it felt like an omen. For there is something especially emblematic about these twin-engined fighter planes.

The excitement and admiration that has always clung to folk memory of Britain’s role in the Second World War also flew on twin engines: technical inventiveness, and manic bravery. While my step-grandfather was a POW in Colditz, for example, he hand-built a glider with which he planned to escape over the battlements — a staggeringly risky engineering project only interrupted by rescue when the war ended.

Perhaps more than any other symbol of the Second World War, the Spitfire stands as an emblem for this mix of can-do engineering and wild risk-taking that enabled Allied airmen, some still teenagers, to take to the skies in the legendary 1940 “Battle of Britain”. But though we won the Battle of Britain, and eventually VE Day too, all of Europe lost the war. It was civilization-destroying. With it ended industrial, imperial Europe, and in its aftermath arose a new civilization centered on America: one only superficially in continuity with what it succeeded, and whose explicit foreign policy it has been ever since to ensure the Old World never regained its pre-1945 bellicosity.

This policy was, of course, not simply imposed on Europe. For the most part it happened with the active support of at least the leadership class, among European peoples shattered and traumatized by the bloodshed. But its effects have been far-reaching. Under the new order, nationalism was decried, and the universal fraternity of all peoples extolled. A new aspiration to global peace and cooperation based on institutions and rules took shape, even as national borders and peoples were encouraged to become ever more porous, fluid, and intermingled.

We have lived within the resulting consensus ever since. These days we often refer casually to “the West”, as a collective; implicitly we mean by this the alliance within which the post-war consensus holds, underwritten by American hard power. The center of the world is now Washington. All that remains of imperial Europe is museums, architecture, and some carefully-preserved examples of the machines that enabled both that era’s manic bravery, and also the horrific war it produced. And those surviving machines which are not in museums or private collections have been repurposed for the central cultural activity of the successor civilization, “the West”: individual consumer experience. An hour-long “Battle of Britain” flight with Fly a Spitfire, the company whose plane crash-landed over the weekend, costs £6,750.

1945 was thus a rupture in more ways than one. Fully 95% of Britain’s population today comprises those who grew up in “the West” that succeeded it. Like shepherds grazing their flocks among the ruins of the Colosseum, this much-reduced successor Britain trots its dinky military along vast avenues, or turns its palaces and vintage machines into tourist spectacle, or simply builds over the traces of a bygone culture and worldview largely opaque to us.

Now, as the remaining Second World War veterans approach their own centuries, and even the lovingly maintained museum-piece Spitfires are struggling, it won’t be long before even those who remember how it ended will be gone. What will VE Day mean then? I don’t think it’s a coincidence, in this context, that we are once again witnessing land war at the edges of Europe itself. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that Second World War and even Holocaust revisionism is on the rise, in the bowels of the internet. Such revisionism often involves a worryingly sketchy or actively malign twisting of historical fact; and its bedrock enabler is less ignorance as such, which is surely a human constant, than the events themselves passing from living memory.

As this proceeds, long-settled narratives are showing signs of increasingly volatile contestation — and not just in the more lurid corners of the online Right. The meaning of the Second World War, and its memorials, is a target for progressives as well: a fact signalled by the orange crash barriers surrounding the flag-draped Cenotaph, in a photo posted on Monday by the Ministry of Defense. This casual mix of pre-war grandeur and ugly, plastic safetyism epitomizes the dispiriting contrast between pre- and post-war British sensibilities. But it also points to the increasing politicization of war memorials in general. The Cenotaph in particular has become a popular target for protest, and sometimes vandalism, by (usually) far-Left protesters with grievances from Gaza to climate change. So frequent and provocative a focus for publicity-seeking political actions have war memorials become that there have even been nativist counter-protests. In 2024, the Government criminalized climbing on such structures during political actions.

By the time the Bank Holiday Monday VE Day ceremonies reached the Cenotaph, the crash barriers had been removed and serene solemnity reigned. But there was a time when no barriers would have been necessary.

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Some disgruntled Brits attribute this, and other purported signs of indifference to VE Day, to demographic change. Given that only 37% of London residents are white British, perhaps rather fewer of the city’s contemporary majority feel an emotional connection to sacrifices made almost a century ago, for a country to which their own ancestors sometimes had very different relationships. As a byproduct of the utopian softening of borders, this demographic change is, itself, an effect of the post-war internationalism that characterized “the West” as it has existed since 1945. And, as underlined by recent Gaza protests, the cultural pluralism that results is undoubtedly accelerating the loss of shared reverence for British war memorials.

But the fading of VE Day is not, or not only, a matter of multiculturalism. Were this the case, we might expect celebrations to be as enthusiastic as ever, in those parts of Britain where most inhabitants have ancestors who served. My Shires town is one such area. And yet there were, to my knowledge, no local events to coincide with the grand parades in London. To the extent that it accelerates the loss of shared reverence for the lessons of the Second World War, then, the post-war internationalism embraced by “the West” is indisputably hard at work dissolving its own legitimizing consensus. But demographic change is more an effect of this dissolution than its principal cause. This is, in the last count, simply a matter of time.

The Second World War itself was a cataclysm so immense that it obliterated almost everything Britain had previously been. Poor shattered Bill dressed in full military uniform every day into his nineties; and it’s as though Britain somehow did the same, at the scale of a whole country. So as we salute the last of the Greatest Generation, perhaps we can also feel a sense of relief at the prospect of letting those memories fade a little, in time. We should not forget the effort, the sacrifices, or the courage. But letting that era pass beyond living memory may also, in time, grant us more room to take stock of the kind of place Britain is now.

What will we conclude? It need not be defeatist. I dare say some of those ghostly airmen long to rest; if we could only grant this, perhaps those of us alive now might feel more able to do away with the figurative crash barriers and take up their legacy of inventiveness and daring. Then, perhaps, in holding our past just a little more lightly, Britain might one day be free to have a future again.

I’m in Puchły, at the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, wooden, dark blue, and completed in 1918. The church is small and the village smaller: officially Puchły has a population of 42, but even that feels generous. Yet in tiny places like these, in the region of Podlasie, a whole forgotten world comes to life. For in this corner of northeast Poland, famed for its forests and its rare herds of wild bison, you can uncover a diversity mostly lost to Eastern Europe.

Those old ladies, after all, do not mumble in Polish, but in Podlachian, a microlanguage far closer to Belarusian and Ukrainian. Unusually for the homeland of Pope John Paul II, the babcias aren’t Catholic either. As the Cyrillic blessing on the archway of the Church of the Protection implies, the people here are Eastern Orthodox, sharing the Podlasie countryside with Lithuanians, Muslim Lipka Tatars, Jews. Some locals even continue to rely on szeptuns, folk healers who blend Orthodox and pagan practices. No wonder many Podlachian refer to their nationality simply as tutejsi — “from here”.

Over recent decades, though, people here have been under rising pressure to be from somewhere, the remorseless logic of nationalism pushing them to be Polish, or Belarusian, or even Russian. That’s especially true now, as literal walls go up right across Podlasie, and governments across the region prepare for future bloodshed. Yet that hardly means Puchły and its people are anachronistic, forgotten and marooned as the continent rearms. On the contrary, its borderless identity evokes both the deep past of Eastern Europe — and reminds us that another future is possible.

Places like Puchły were fired by history. Located in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose eastern lands were once known as Ruthenia, Podlasie was a place where varied identities could coexist without contradiction. This wasn’t due to some magnanimous vision of pluralism, but simply a reflection of reality. In the 16th century, the Catholic kings of the Commonwealth spoke Polish, a West Slavic language related to Czech. But most of their subjects spoke East Slavic tongues like Podlachian, and practiced Eastern Orthodoxy.

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Jews and Muslims were welcomed as merchants and warriors respectively, integrated as yet another layer in this complex society. One excellent example of the multifaceted nature of identity in Eastern Europe is the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Born in modern Belarus, to a family with probable Jewish roots, he began his famous Polish-language epic Pan Tadeusz: “Lithuania! My fatherland!”

To a certain extent, this cultural richness endures in Podlasie. “On a daily basis, we speak Polish,” says Daria, a young Puchły parishioner, her light brown hair covered with a blue headscarf. “Or, like many in Podlasie, we speak po svojomu.” The phrase means “in our own way” — but though Daria is referring to the Podlachian language, it’s an elegant stand-in for the region’s broader identity. “For me, being from Podlasie, being Orthodox, is being someone who sticks to his own,” says Roman Ostapczuk, head of the nearby Koweła village, chomping on home-cured sausages and horseradish, an icon of the Virgin Mary hanging above our heads.

Nor do you have to speak Podlachian, or even be especially religious, to spot Podlachian pride. Puchły is one of several villages in a microregion evocatively known as the Land of Open Shutters. Here, houses, churches, and even bus stops feature ornately carved patterns, their wooden shutters painted the colors of the rainbow. Orthodox crosses guard the entrance of every village, while carved figurines adorn windowsills and shelves. Other cultural practices are distinctive too. Village choirs sing “in voices” — a style of belted singing typical of the region.

It’s tempting, then, to see this place as a kind of Disneyland of Slavic folklore. But that’d be wrong — and not just because there isn’t a tourist in sight. For if the long-dead Commonwealth was broadly indulgent of religious and ethnic diversity, recent decades have been far less gentle on Podlasie. During the interwar period, over a hundred Orthodox churches were destroyed by Polish authorities across the country. As the state religion of Tsarist Russia, an empire that had occupied parts of Poland for centuries, they were razed as an alien presence.

Despite enduring deportation to Siberia at the hands of invading Soviet forces from 1939, just like their Catholic compatriots, Orthodox communities in Podlasie were also targets of a racist “pacification” campaign once the Second World War was over. Led by rogue officer Romuald Rajs — nicknamed Bury, meaning “dark” or “grey” — a group of Polish partisans killed dozens of Orthodox civilians right across Podlasie, burning villages as they went. One middle-aged woman I met recalls being unwilling to even admit she was Orthodox as recently as several decades ago, for fear of being mocked as a kacapy: a Polish slur for Russians.

To be sure, Rajs’s actions were condemned by his superiors, and described as genocide by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance in 2005. But the age of nationalism isn’t easy to escape, with an extremist Polish fringe lately recasting Bury as a freedom fighter. And, in 2019, under the auspices of the Right-wing and strongly Catholic Law and Justice Party (PiS), the Institute of National Remembrance walked back on its earlier conclusions about Bury’s butchery. Not to be outdone, nationalists from across Poland have held annual marches in Hajnówka, ostensibly to honour various anti-communist fighters. But chants of “Bury, our hero” inevitably abound.

There are more contemporary geopolitical pressures here too. Before 1939, Poland’s borders extended deep into modern-day Belarus, placing Podlachian side-by-side with their Belarusian kin inside a single state. But the creation of a hard border, when Belarus became part of the USSR in 1945, separated mothers from sons, and villages that once shared a life ended up in different countries. More recent developments have spurred division too. Responding to a migration crisis, artificially set in motion by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Poland has erected a five-and-a-half-meter tall wall along its eastern frontier. Warsaw has also started a network of fortifications, and withdrawn from an international convention against anti-personnel mines, to guard against future Russian attacks.

These tensions show up in politics. Despite the traditional values of locals, the county town of Hajnówka has for decades voted for center-left parties in national elections. That’s in stark contrast to most of Poland’s east, where the PiS enjoys ironclad support. Beyond the electoral map, though, you really feel this opposition to PiS’s national vision from Podlachian themselves.

“I am not a Pole,” says Wiktor Stachwiuk, an author and philologist in Trześcianka, a village near Puchły. “I am a Belarusian, a Ruthenian from Podlasie.” Surrounded by a kingdom of manuscripts in his orange-shuttered living room, pouring generous shots of plum moonshine as he goes, Stachwiuk suggests that the Catholic Poles have “connected themselves mentally” with the West, preferring to be “with the British” than their Slavic cousins. Though he emphasizes he’s fervently opposed to the regimes of Putin in Russia and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, he laments the distance political borders in the region have created between him and and his brethren to the east.

Other Podlachians have gone the other way: citing their long presence on Polish soil, they’ve situated their unique local identity within a broader loyalty to the Polish nation. Either way, such attitudes are probably an inevitable consequence of the region’s hard borders — and of the forces, on both sides of the fence, that see Poland as a Catholic country with little space for Orthodox Podlachians. It hardly helps, of course, that the clergy itself has arguably muddied the waters. In early 2023, the head of the Polish Orthodox Church set off a media storm when he appeared to condemn Ukraine’s moves to establish its own separate church from Russia. Amid the backlash, Metropolitan Sawa was forced to apologize, denouncing Putin’s “criminal” invasion of Ukraine.

Unease is also heightened by the sense that Podlachian culture is at risk of vanishing altogether. When he was young, Ostapczuk recalls learning Polish as a foreign language. Now, though, the number of Podlachian speakers dwindles with each passing generation, and the number of people actively writing in it can be counted on two hands. Ostapczuk adds that his children today live their lives in Polish first and foremost, seeing Podlachian as a language tied to the home. For writers like Stachwiuk, then, putting the language to paper is not just about developing its literary tradition — it’s about giving Podlachian a kind of immortality. “This exists,” he proudly declares, showing me a book he wrote entirely in Podlachian.

Not that everyone here feels drawn to binary national labels that place Podlachian identity in opposition to Polishness. One example is Ostapczuk, who emphasizes he doesn’t want to be “pigeon-holed” as Belarusian — whatever language he grew up speaking. The historian and ethnographer Doroteusz Fionik has a name for this more intimate form of belonging. “The little fatherland is that place where a person feels best,” he says. “For the little fatherland, there are none of today’s state borders. The person doesn’t endeavor for those borders to change, the person just wants to be able to live comfortably in the place where he exists.”

Once again, history offers a guide here. Set amid the gentle bluffs north of Puchły, the Supraśl Orthodox Monastery is perhaps the most spectacular expression of the deep bonds between Poland and its Orthodox community. First built in 1503, all lofty towers and vaunted ceilings, the monastery’s Belarusian Gothic interior is dazzlingly ornate. At the back of the nave are vivid frescos showing the End of Days. Tellingly, the space features icons depicting both Orthodox and Catholic saints, while the monastery’s choral tradition combines Byzantine and Latin influences.

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In fact, the new church was only built in the Eighties, at the tail end of communist rule, after the original monastery was destroyed by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1944. Yet even that speaks to Supraśl’s hybrid identity. According to Brother Jan, a monk at the monastery, the Germans targeted this monument to Orthodoxy not to spite the Russians — but because they saw it as an expression of Polish identity that needed to be crushed. As Jan puts it: “This place was supposed to highlight what unites us, not what divides us.”

And if Supraśl has reemerged from the ashes of Poland’s bloody 20th century, there are other signs, too, that the “little fatherland” endures. Podlasie now boasts a pair of Belarusian language schools, and though younger generations may not speak po svojomu as much as their parents, activists like Stachwiuk are fighting to keep the tongue alive. Revivalists scored a major win when a song by a local duo, written in Podlachian, made it to the final round of Poland’s qualifications for Eurovision — the first time most Poles had ever been exposed to the language.

Yet as usual in this corner of Poland, politics threatens to smash this fragile identity. With growing heterogeneity within, and mounting threats without, the old Polish temptation to draw lines in the sand is starting to rear its head once again, with many urging loyalty to a single national ideal. For the country’s far-Right, gaining in polls ahead of presidential elections in May, the multifaceted landscape of Podlasie poses a challenge to their “us” and “them” vision of modern Poland.

Despite a respite of two years, ultranationalists returned to Hajnówka last month to hold yet another parade honoring the partisans who fought in the region — with Bury among them. Supporters of the far-Right Confederation Party came to protest the establishment of integration centers for foreigners in the region, a move funded by the Podlasie regional government and backed by many locals who view it as an expression of their historic openness to multiculturalism. And, after that Podlachian song’s success in Eurovision, the contest again turned into a theatre for nationalistic chest-beating, with online Rightists tying the language to Russia and Ukraine, calling it an attempt to “Ukrainianise” Poland.

But here, in Podlasie, the tutejsi know another way is possible. “If there is the term ‘Pole’ today, then we don’t have to imagine a Polish nationalist who shouts ‘Poland for the Poles!’” Fionik says. “We should move toward an understanding that when someone says ‘Pole’, we imagine that this is a person who loves his neighbor, no matter his faith.” A heartening sentiment — even if Podlasie’s little fatherland remains in danger.

Born Mikes György in a small Hungarian town in 1912, he had been too young to experience the staid but stable Habsburg world eulogized in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. He instead came of age in a very different kind of Central Europe. One in which old certainties had disappeared, and new ones had yet to crystallize. Where radically “modern” cultural and political forces vied for attention in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, and beyond, feeding off the new culture of uncertainty.

With fascism and Stalinism ascendant in the Thirties, hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans fled their homes. Mikes was one of them, the product of a great migration that, if not quite entirely forgotten, is certainly inadequately remembered in Britain. As Owen Hatherley argues in his masterful new book, The Alienation Effect, those Central Europeans like Mikes were part of the first modern mass migration that “had a really decisive, transformative and positive effect on British culture”.

Though Hatherley’s focus is on the arts — the émigrés often came as bearers of a continental modernism fiercely resisted before (and even after) their arrival — their influence on the course of British politics, economics, philosophy, and more was often equally consequential. Of course, even if their influence had been negligible, the fact that hundreds of thousands of Britons today can trace their ancestry back to this migration is itself cause for interest. In the early 21st century, both of Britain’s major parties were briefly led by such descendants (Michael Howard and Ed Miliband).

But unlike the postwar imperial migration since mythologized as the founding act of modern, multicultural Britain, the place of these Central European exiles in the national story (or stories) has been left much more ambiguous. When London’s Overground lines were given names for the first time in 2024, the one running through areas settled by immigrants from the “West Indies” was christened the Windrush line. No Finchleystraße or Freud line appeared, however, in those parts of northwest London favored by Central Europeans to commemorate their role in the making of modern Britain.

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The two cases are not of course strictly comparable. The Windrush story is a fundamentally British one, carrying British citizens (or those that were soon to be such) to the mother country that had ruled over them and their ancestors for centuries. They were not, as the Mikes, Freuds, and others were, “aliens” from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland. This status condemned tens of thousands bearing German or Austrian citizenship, many of whom were Jewish, to mass internment in 1940/41. Even though many chose to remain in Britain after this experience, it offered the starkest example of what it meant to be an “alien”.

Some Central European migrants came in passing, spending a few years in Britain before moving on, like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Others, like Sigmund Freud, arrived just in time to die, gifting little to their country of refuge except for a stage replica of the life they left behind. But tens of thousands — including Freud’s grandson Lucian — made the United Kingdom their permanent home.

They were overwhelmingly educated and middle class and — excepting the 250,000 Poles of Anders’ Army, unable to return home due to the Communist takeover of Poland, who were offered citizenship in 1947 — mostly of Jewish descent. They were not necessarily people who saw themselves as Jews or considered it an important part of their identity, however, but rather highly assimilated urbanites from modern and cosmopolitan cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest who shared and had taken pride in the national and urban cultures they were raised in.

By the time they arrived in Britain many of them had thus experienced a double alienation. First from their homelands that had turned on them, and only then as “aliens” forced to adapt to the peculiar non-continental ways of the British. If the various émigré accounts recorded by Hatherley are anything to go by, the new migrants and refugees viewed their new home with a mixture of bemusement, confusion, and admiration.

Compared with the ferment and upheaval on the continent they had left, Britain appeared to these Central European exiles as an aloof and parochial haven of good manners, peace, and stability. The socialist psychiatrist Charlotte Wolff described “a sense of enchanted unreality” taking hold of her as she disembarked at Dover in 1935. The comfort and quietness of the subsequent train to London “acted like a tranquilizer”. The Marxist intellectual Perry Anderson lamented this tranquilizing effect that he thought had caused Central European exiles to leave their continental radicalism behind, instead adjusting to “the mediocre and inert” culture that defined “the most conservative major society in Europe”.

Hatherley’s book is a belated riposte to Anderson’s thesis. He explores all the ways in which these exiles did indeed bring their radical continental ideas with them: how they helped to write the cultural code of the “modern Britain” created out of a crumbling post-Victorian empire in the mid-20th century. Often with an explicitly Left-wing conviction that the mock Tudor houses and tenement slums were symbols of the capitalist rot of Thirties Britain that had to be swept away and reinvigorated with new artistic, social, and economic ideas fit for the “modern world”.

There was, for example, the Hungarian-born Stefan Lorant, who had a successful career as a filmmaker and photojournalist in Germany before being forced to flee on account of his Jewish heritage. In 1938 he co-founded the Picture Post in London, modeling it on the Münchner Illustrierte Press he had edited in Germany. It became wildly successful and influential thanks to its pioneering photojournalism and its anti-fascist political stance, both of which long outlived Lorant’s own stay in Britain which lasted only until 1940.

British publishing too was revolutionized by Central European encounters. The London-based publishers Phaidon Press and Thames & Hudson, known for their high-quality and visually striking illustrations, are both the products of Viennese exiles, while Penguin Books effectively copied its modernist book design from the pioneering German publisher Albatross Books.

Then there were the countless producers, cinematographers, set designers, composers, and costume designers that formed the invisible backbone of the British film industry. Or photographers like Bill Brandt, who used their lens to make permanent their own “alien” perspective on British life. Sculptors who brought monumental and abstract forms onto British streets and art historians like Ernst Gombrich and Nikolaus Pevsner who introduced German systematization to the British study of art and architecture. And, most notoriously of all, the architects and planners that helped to transform the ruins and slums of the Forties into the cities Britons know today.

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Depending on one’s perspective, these architects are either the greatest prophets or the greatest scoundrels of modern British history. The continental utopianism undergirding their embrace of sleek modernist architecture is either an “un-British” abomination or a welcome, if imperfect, contribution to British architectural traditionalism. Indeed, Ian Fleming hated Ernő Goldfinger so much for blighting Hampstead with a row of modernist houses that he turned him into a Bond villain. (With a suitably evil modernist lair, naturally, itself designed in the film adaptation by a Central European exile.)

Much of the influence of Central European immigrants was, however, unseen. The 1942 Beveridge Report that laid the intellectual foundations of the postwar welfare state was ghostwritten by four economists, two of whom were born on the continent — Nicholas Kaldor and E.F. Schumacher. Many of their achievements were eventually repudiated, if not quite undone, by the Thatcher government, whose émigré Central European economist of choice was the Austrian Hayek. “This is what we believe!” Margaret Thatcher reportedly proclaimed at a Conservative Party meeting in the Seventies as she slammed a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty down on the table.

In the 19th century the notion that the birthplace of industrial capitalism should take economic cues from Austria would have read as a bad joke, like taking lessons on empire-building from the Germans. Yet, as Hatherley’s panoramic portrait of Central Europe-on-Thames shows, by the late 20th century it was difficult to find any aspect of British life that had not been touched by some sort of Central European intervention. It would be absurd to attribute any development solely to their influence, but it would be equally absurd to dismiss them entirely.

What makes it hard to tell as a distinctly British story, however, is that Britain’s Central European migration was small compared to the much greater numbers who made their way to the United States, USSR, and newly founded state of Israel. The waves of post-imperial migration from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, by contrast, were distinctly rooted in British history, something that makes Windrush an attractive metaphor for modern Britain’s transition to post-imperial multiculturalism.

The “aliens” from Central Europe who chose to make Britain their home in the Thirties and Forties do not fit comfortably into this narrative. Yet as Hatherley convincingly demonstrates, they helped Britain forge its own vision of 20th-century modernity, not as a facsimile of the world they left behind, but as a new synthesis of old and new, of continent and isles, of Britain and Central Europe. They brought ideas and experiences with them but naturally formed new ones as they adjusted to their new home, working hand-in-hand with British counterparts. As the “aliens” slowly became British, so too did Britain become a little “alien”.

For many, the notion of a foreign coach is anathema: isn’t international football supposed to be the best of ours against the best of theirs? At the very least, for England to turn abroad feels like an admission of failure, an acknowledgment that the English system is not producing high-level coaches and managers. And Tuchel is not just foreign: he is German, and for the past century nothing has seemed quite so obviously inimical to England as Germany.

The wars color everything. Even when Germany aren’t involved, it’s common enough to hear England fans singing “Ten German Bombers”, gleefully emphasizing the countdown after “the RAF from England shot them down”, or humming the theme to The Great Escape or The Dam Busters. It’s hard to imagine that changing just because England now have a German manager.

Yet this feels a significant step. When England faced Germany in the semi-final of Euro 96, The Mirror mocked up Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne in military helmets and with the headline, “Achtung, Surrender! For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over”. It’s hard to imagine England could even have contemplated a German manager then; even the appointment of a Swede, when Sven-Göran Eriksson got the job in 2001, provoked apoplexy in the Mail, which screamed, “We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness”. And yet there is Tuchel, broadly accepted, leading England into a World Cup qualifying campaign.

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Tuchel actually seems rather more popular in England than in Germany, where his neo-vegetarian nerdery sat uncomfortably at Bayern Munich. But when things go wrong for him in the England job, he will be accused of not understanding “our” game. Even his interim predecessor Lee Carsley, who was born in Birmingham but played for Ireland, faced howls of protest in some quarters for his refusal to sing the anthem — not a political act, he explained, but because he felt singing would disrupt his focus. Tuchel has said he needs to “earn the right” to sing the anthem, a politically adroit policy, but whether he does so or not, an awareness of his nationality will in part shape reactions. The entire recent history of Anglo-German relations, in fact, can be traced through football.

There were the tentative early meetings in the Thirties, when England was broadly disdainful of German football and its high-minded decision to remain amateur. This was an ethos that was quickly adopted by the Nazis and repackaged into sensuous propaganda by Leni Riefenstahl. Professional sport, it was decreed after the Anschluss, was a Jewish perversion. As a result, the highly successful Austrian league was forced to return to amateurism and a great footballing culture was destroyed. A month before that announcement, in June 1938, England had already, in the spirit of appeasement, given the Nazi salute before a 6-3 win in Berlin.

There may be a level of irony to the chant of “Two World Wars and One World Cup” — not least because Germany have won four World Cups — but when England won their only World Cup in 1966, beating West Germany in the final, the Second World War was very much on people’s minds, a point made by Duncan Hamilton in Answered Prayers. The evidence of bombing was still evident in many cities, while every adult knew somebody who had been killed in the fighting. The maths is obvious, but the point is worth stressing: that final came just 21 years after VE Day, and the events of the war were less distant than today is from 9/11.

Certainly there was an awareness on the German side of the need for sensitivity. Their coach was Helmut Schön, who had fled the Soviet zone for the West in May 1950. He had been an air-raid warden in Dresden and seen terrible things. “Women lay in the streets”, he wrote in his autobiography, “charred black or dried out like Egyptian mummies. They had children in their arms, bundles of ashes.” When the fires were extinguished, 30,000 charred corpses were stacked up by the Kreuzkirche and the job the firestorm had begun was finished off with flamethrowers. “We were used to gigantic numbers, including the victims of our own country”, Schön said. “That was abstract. Now we could see the reality: 30,000 individual people who had died terrible deaths.”

Yet Schön, who spent five days hunting through the smoking rubble for his father, seems to have harbored no sense of bitterness against Britain. His family was liberal, and had rented out an apartment to a Jewish publisher until as late as 1939. Schön had no doubt who was to blame for the war and told his players before they came to England in 1966 that what mattered was less whether they won than whether they “behaved like gentlemen”. Their job was to rehabilitate the international image of Germany.

Although England beat West Germany in the final, that meeting at Wembley turned out to be the first part of a five-act sequence that would overturn their respective footballing statuses. West Germany achieved a first-ever win over England in a friendly in 1968, a game whose significance was widely ignored in England but gave West Germany great self-confidence. West Germany then came from 2-0 down to beat England in the World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in 1970, before outplaying England in beating them 3-1 at Wembley in the first leg of the European Championship quarter-final in 1972. L’Équipe described the German performance as “football from the year 2000”. In the second leg in Berlin, England, apparently giving up any hope of turning the tie around, played out an aggressive and negative 0-0 draw. In less than a decade, West German football had accelerated past England: it was the future; England some moribund relic. After West Germany’s economic miracle, anybody looking at the relative economies of the two countries might have drawn a similar conclusion.

Although Schön was still manager as West Germany won the World Cup on home soil in 1974, when England didn’t even qualify, he had become an oddly distant figure. The players had threatened strike action over bonuses before the tournament, something Schön, who came from a generation with a clear sense of patriotic duty, couldn’t comprehend. When West Germany then lost to East Germany in the first group stage, he had some sort of breakdown with the result that the captain Franz Beckenbauer effectively took over: the generation of self-assertive boomers were led by one of their own.

But whatever reservations there were, at home and abroad, about the behavior of certain German players, they kept beating England, most notably in the semi-final of both the 1990 World Cup, their last tournament before reunification, and Euro 96, their first tournament as a united nation. Players such as Jürgen Klinsmann, who had family in the East and regarded football as a symbol, perhaps even a tool, of rapprochement, were baffled by the English obsession with a war half a century in the past.

In the flush of victory in 1990, Beckenbauer, by then the manager, had said that he felt sorry for other nations because a united Germany would be unbeatable. It has not turned out like that, although Germany did win the 2014 World Cup. In competitive games since 2000, England actually have the edge, with three wins to two (including their famous 5-1 World Cup qualifying win in Munich).

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Yet German coaching is far more influential than English coaching. There is a discernible German School, born out of Swabia, that prioritizes winning the ball back as soon as possible by the high-risk deployment of players high up the pitch — Gegenpressing. The likes of Jürgen Klopp, Jogi Löw, Ralf Rangnick, Hansi Flick, Julian Nagelsmann and, yes, Tuchel, led the resistance to the hegemonic possession-heavy style favored by Pep Guardiola.

There is no English School. The Premier League might be the best league in the world. It’s certainly the richest. But what that means is that it imports talent, coaches in particular. There are only two English managers in the Premier League. And that perhaps is why there has been so little outcry about Tuchel. It’s less that England has suddenly become a mature and cosmopolitan nation than that the Premier League is essentially a global league that happens to be played in England.

Just as you can wander through parts of London and barely see a building that isn’t owned by Saudis or Russians or Japanese, so our football clubs are owned by oligarchs, sheikhs and hedge funds. These potentates then appoint the best coaches — or at least the coaches they believe to be the best — with no parochial interest in developing local talent. So everybody gets used to the idea that the best coaches are foreign. And now that English academies have, after their overhaul following the failure to qualify for Euro 2008, begun to turn out high-level playing talent, it seems logical that the best coach to lead them into the World Cup should be foreign, even if he is German.

For a nation that can’t help selling off its assets and institutions, this is a decision rooted in pragmatism. And so we end up with a situation where the man appointed to make it two World Cups would have been on the other side in the two World Wars.

Perhaps that’s just what reconciliation looks like. Perhaps it’s just modern England.

In practice, though, solidarity hasn’t always been easy. Though 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of Japan and South Korea officially normalizing relations, the past six decades have been a rollercoaster mix of cooperation and nationalist hatred. That’s clear enough recently — in 2019, Tokyo and Seoul became embroiled in a bitter trade war and mutual boycott. Foreigners are often baffled at why two countries with such similar systems of governance, and both surrounded by nuclear-tipped threats, get into such heated spats. Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even tried to get both sides to get along during the 2019 trade dispute. To no avail.

In part, the answer involves the normal ebb and flow of politics, with parliamentarians in Seoul and Tokyo happy to exploit their neighbors for short-term gain. In 2023, for instance, opposition politicians in South Korea’s parliament bashed President Yoon Suk-yeol for a summit with then-Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, calling it “humiliating, subservient diplomacy”. At root, though, what really matters here is history, and the brutal legacy of Japan’s long occupation on the mainland — even if Trump’s foreign policy revolution may, finally, bring the two sides together.

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Following its defeat in 1945, Japan relinquished imperial control of the Korean Peninsula. The spheres of influence which would define the Cold War for the rest of the century soon formed, as the US occupied Japan and what became South Korea, while the Soviet Union backed the Kim regime in Pyongyang. The Korean War broke out in 1950, following Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the South, which quickly drew America into the conflict. Despite Washington pressuring Seoul to allow Japan to get involved, South Korea’s dictator Syngman Rhee balked at the idea of Korean soldiers fighting alongside their erstwhile enemy, not least when memories of the occupation were still fresh in everyone’s mind. While acknowledging Japan’s strategic importance as a base for US forces, Rhee staunchly refused to normalize relations.

That would only happen in 1965 when both countries signed the Treaty on Basic Relations. Rhee had been ousted from power, but the parliamentary system that replaced him was weak and ineffective. President Park Chung-hee took advantage of the instability and launched a coup, cementing himself as a brutal military despot. Though he was also a militant anti-communist like Rhee, he also recognized the need to partner with Tokyo to face down the reds in China and the DPRK. It probably helped that Park had collaborated with the Japanese during the Second World War, working with the Empire as an officer instead of against it as a rebel. He graduated top of his class at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, one of the few Koreans allowed to attend.

In other words, then, though relations between Japan and South Korea were officially normalized decades ago, it only happened within the context of Cold War geopolitics and through a controversial Korean president who didn’t truly speak for his people. That meant Tokyo and Seoul moved on from their tragic past — but only for a while. This was proved after South Korea emerged as a democracy in the Eighties, and there was now more space for free discourse among Korean citizens.

For better or worse, old wounds reopened. There is no getting around the fact that, for 35 years, Imperial Japan subjugated the Korean people to its whims. Slave labor was widespread throughout the Empire, while by 1944 Korean males were being drafted into the army to assist with manpower shortages. These men saw direct combat with Allied forces, with over 22,000 dying on the battlefield. Between 270,000 and 810,000 Korean forced laborers also perished in coal mines and military factories under appalling conditions. The lack of clear data makes precise figures hard to determine, in turn allowing those with political agendas to inflate or diminish the number of victims as needed.

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Even more emotionally charged is the issue of “comfort women” — a euphemism for the Korean and other Asian women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops. Intense debates persist around exactly how many comfort women existed, and to what extent the highest echelons of the Imperial Japanese state were involved in the practice. Just as striking, some Japanese politicians continue to show a distinct lack of contrition for the affair. In 2012, for instance, the late governor of Tokyo said that “prostitution was a very good way of making a living for women at that time and they chose the trade not unwillingly.” Osaka, for its part, terminated its sister-city relations with San Francisco over a proposed comfort women monument.

To be fair, Japan has tried to make amends. In 2015, for instance, a bilateral agreement signed between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Korean counterpart Park Geun-hye included apologies and financial reparations — and was supposed to have been the final word on the scandal. Yet by 2019, the deal was essentially dead in the water. The conservative Park was ousted after a major corruption scandal, while the succeeding progressive Moon Jae-in administration was uninterested in maintaining the status quo.

Moon chose to capitalize on the anger of activist groups that probably wouldn’t ever have accepted any settlement to start with, even as he made Korean nationalism, fueled by anti-Japanese feeling, a key pillar of his government. This was further seen when South Korea tried another round of diplomacy with North Korea in 2018. This bickering explains that 2019 trade war, with some restrictions in place as late as 2023.

Yet, once again, the vagaries of politics are making themselves felt. After Moon finished his term, South Korea again went conservative. Affirming that Japan has “transformed from a militaristic aggressor of the past into a partner” President Yoon Suk-yeo made repairing relations with Tokyo one of his main priorities. On the Japanese side, meanwhile, the nationalistic fervor of Shinzo Abe’s faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has largely been replaced by Fumio Kishida and his more emollient tone. Into this mix came Joe Biden, and his focus on preserving America’s traditional alliances. The result was a rare moment when South Korea, Japan and the United States all backed their tri-party partnership against the looming Chinese threat.

If all of that sounds too good to be true — it was. Yoon is now in hot water for his failed attempt at enforcing martial law, a botched effort to harm the progressive opposition. It’s unclear if the disgraced President’s impeachment will be upheld, but if an election were held today, it’s almost guaranteed that Korea’s progressives would return to power. The leader of the opposition, Lee Jae-myung, is notorious for his anti-Japanese views. Some say these are genuine beliefs; others that he’s just an opportunist. Either way, Tokyo can probably expect some awkward conversations if Lee becomes South Korea’s next president.

As for Japan, the timing couldn’t be worse. The ruling LDP coalition recently lost their Lower House majority for the first time in 15 years, while Kishida is hardly as sly a political fox as Abe. With little domestic backing, he must walk a fine line between pushing for Japan’s interests and maintaining a good relationship with the tariff-happy Trump. Their first summit in February wasn’t a disaster — but Kishida pragmatically chose not to take sides in Washington’s criticisms of Ukraine.

Going forward, then, Japan will do its best to keep the US onside, but it’ll also have to work hard at maintaining good terms with South Korea. Ironically, anyway, pressure from one might prompt friendship with the other. If Trump introduces serious tariffs against both countries, they’ll inevitably need to boost mutual economic exchange. Not that American power is likely to vanish altogether. Especially on security, the US has always played a key role in getting Japan and South Korea to play nice. Washington’s last-minute intervention saved a pivotal information-sharing pact between Tokyo and Seoul during their 2019 trade war. Given Trump’s tough attitude on Europe, expect the commander-in-chief to make similar demands of his Asian partners once more — whether they want to get along or not.

And while many in Webster came specifically to see Jamison, they also used his post office to visit each other. So, as their postmaster, he installed benches, a community bulletin board, and a library. I ask him to explain himself; Jamison aw-shucked. “I figure if folks are talking to each other, it is hard to hate each other.” In truth, though, the Webster postmaster was merely fulfilling Title 39 of the US Code: “The United States Postal Service’s (USPS) purpose is to bind the nation together”. Lord knows that, in the aftermath of a brutal election, America needs some neighbourly ties. And Lord knows that few organisations do that as well as the Post Office, even if its triumphs hint at state failure elsewhere.

By sheer numbers alone, USPS is an American giant. With 33,904 post offices, it’s burrowed into every nook and cranny of the nation, from Kaktovik in Alaska to Ochopee in the Florida swamps. The country’s single biggest non-military institution, every day its army of 525,469 employees delivers mail to 167 million unique addresses. That’s even as USPS retains the so-called “Postal Principle” — meaning users pay the same fee no matter how far their package travels. No wonder Americans love the Post Office, with an eye-popping 91% of us viewing it favourably. By comparison, 29% of Americans support public schools, which is about equal to the 32% of citizens who have a positive opinion of God. “The Post Office is the last bastion,” says Erica Etelson, co-founder of the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative. “It is still something everyone loves”.

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For Professor Richard John, this isn’t incidental. As the Columbia professor and post office expert has written, the Founders always “intended the Postal Service to be a pillar of the republic, squeezing together millions of Americans, urban and rural, for the common good”. Created by Ben Franklin and the Continental Congress, the US Constitution explicitly calls for “Post Offices and Post Roads”. But, more than that, John says it’s the Post Office Act of 1792 that matters most. Because Congress deemed access to newspapers central to an informed public, the legislation kept postal rates low. This, John explains, ensured political parties wouldn’t dominate the news — while, as an apolitical institution, the Post Office could “follow the nation and stay close to the people”.

The Postal Service most certainly stayed close to the expanding republic. Between 1790 and 1840, the number of post offices exploded from just 75 to over 13,000. A few years after the Civil War, the service was operating over 76,000 offices. That, says Cameron Blevins, made it the largest “communication network” on earth. As the associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver explains, this was basically a function of 19th century expansionism. As the pioneers forced their way west, and Manifest Destiny rushed Americans from sea to shining sea, post connected the “whole nation together”. And so it proved in practice too. Consider Arizona’s Supai post office as an example. Established in 1896, it connected the Grand Canyon’s miners and the Havasupai nation of Native Americans to the wider world. 128 years later, mules still haul the outgoing mail three hours up steep, sandy passes to the next post at Peach Springs. Ten years after Supai’s founding, in 1906, free rural delivery integrated even more Americans. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, the Post Office started delivering parcels, further connecting people to the bounties of American life.

Public respect for the Postal Service reached further heights during the Great Depression, when FDR expanded its footprint still further. In truth, though, its acclaim during the first half of the last century isn’t really about numbers. In the Thirties, three-quarters of all Americans believed the federal government would “do the right thing almost always or most of the time”. Far from being naïve dupes, this civic faith was fired by depression and war, together creating remarkable social solidarity. At the core of this social trust were institutions, like the Post Office, that for Blevins represent the veritable cartilage and guts of the nation. “The US Post,” he says, “is a model of what an effective government could be.”

That, in turn, made Americans have more faith not just in far-off bureaucrats — but also in each other. For Americans born in the first half of the last century, neighbourliness and social trust flourished. Buttressing this sensibility was New Deal liberalism. More than a pastiche of programmes, the New Deal was grounded in a principle that Americans look beyond narrow self-interest and towards the common good. FDR, for his part, understood the Post Office was the one federal entity Americans most used, leveraging it as a tool of social solidarity.

During the Second World War, for instance, the Post Office offered “Victory Mail” to soldiers deployed overseas. Through the so-called V-Mail scheme, the Army Postal Service connected millions of troops to their families and loved ones — all free of charge. At home, the Post Office served as a hub for wartime information. Community boards posted draft posters, air raid instructions, and information about federal schemes. Postal workers added the sale of war bonds and war stamps to their duties.

It’s little surprise that public regard for the Postal Service reached its zenith in the early post-war era. As Richard John notes, the humble post office commanded so much respect that it’s used as a major plot device in the 1947 Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. “Santa Claus exists because the Post Office says so,” John explains. “It had unassailable credentials”.

In 1970, the Post Office’s golden age came to a screeching halt. A confluence of forces — postal worker strikes; delivery inefficiencies; Richard Nixon — resulted in the Postal Reorganisation Act. This transformed the Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service (USPS). The Postmaster General was moved out of the cabinet and into a boardroom, even though the new “postal corporation” remains a public service. Blevins calls this new creature a Frankenstein monster. “It is expected to provide a universal service,” he says, “but it is not funded to do so”.

In 1975, Americans encountered Frankenstein. A deep recession spurred massive postal deficits. To cover costs, bureaucrats planned to close 12,000 post offices — mostly in rural areas. Popular uproar forced them to scrap the plan. But the situation has hardly remained stable. With the profit motive now king, postage stamp prices have typically been raised three or four times a decade since 1970. From the turn of the millennium, meanwhile, the cost of sending a first-class letter has increased 18 times, even as the number of USPS employees has been cut almost in half. That’s unsurprisingly led to shuttered branches, shortened opening hours, and a delivery window for First Class letters that’s almost doubled.

Not, of course, that post offices have suffered alone here. On the contrary, the squeeze on USPS has been witnessed across the public sector and beyond. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory was merely a symptom of a sharp collapse in social solidarity. While Reagan’s neoliberals cut budgets aimed at the collective good, the proportion of unionised jobs had already fallen from a third in the Fifties to a quarter by 1980. Membership in civic clubs, from the Red Cross to the PTA, collapsed too. Unsurprisingly, time devoted to informal socialising spiralled downward. The ties that bind, from the Post Office to the coffee klatsch, withered.

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This collapse in unifying institutions has affected Americans psychologically. These days, and in a far cry from the halcyon days of the New Deal, just 2% of Americans believe the federal government does the right thing “just about always”. That, of course, begs the question: amid so much cynicism, so much disdain for the powers-that-be, how is it that USPS has retained its place in the hearts of the nation? Ironically, and especially in rural areas, the answer might have something to do with the decline of public institutions generally.

For while, in 1940, Americans in the hills of Appalachia or the flat lands of Nebraska would have counted on the Rural Electrification Administration for power, or the Farm Home Administration for loans, to say nothing of churches and social clubs — for thousands of isolated communities the post office is all that’s left. It hardly helps, Jacobs says, that rural Americans rely on USPS far more than their urban peers. “There is material dependency,” he says, not least when even Amazon upon the USPS for unprofitable “last mile” deliveries right across rural America.

Certainly all this — the way post offices tie Americans both to their rulers and each other — helps explain the abiding power of folks like Mark Jamison. But so too, surely, does their individual hard work. As postmaster, after all, Jamison lived next door to his office. At night, he sat on the front porch strumming his guitar, his five dogs all there at his side. Neighbours would stop and seek his counsel. “I drew the line at getting packages at 10pm,” Jamison says. But anyone in Webster who needed a neighbour had one in their postmaster.

It’s something that’s becoming rarer every year. Social solidarity begins with civic society and ends with private friendships. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was gobsmacked by Americans and their unerring sociability. But since 2000, the time Americans devote to socialising has collapsed by 30%. In 1990, nearly half of all Americans reported having five or more close friends. Today, slightly less than a quarter can say the same, even as 12% have no close pals at all.

That reality is surely true in Webster, North Carolina, a place that may yet lose even more. The town still has a building called a post office — but budget cuts mean it no longer has a postmaster. Now that Jamison has retired, there are no plans to replace him. Ultimately, then, the story of the post office speaks to a wider human disconnect. Those ties that bind, from postmasters up, are tattered and frayed. And without common places to meet, and chat, and get their jars opened, Americans have simply quit being neighbours. “I wish more neighbours trusted more,” Jamison says. “But they have good reason not to.”

The show they see on an opening night will consist of two things in existence prior to rehearsal: the actors, and the script. The actors don’t need to discuss the script, they understood it when they read it. They don’t need to zhuzh up their performance through elaborate analysis, they just need to show up and speak up — the subsequent performance will be appreciated on their ability to do so, and on the worth of the script. No performance can enhance a bad script, and a good one needs no help.

Prior to the Twenties, the director was known as the stage manager. It was his job to block the actors such that the audience could see them and hear them, and they didn’t trip over the furniture. “Louder, faster, pause here, don’t fidget while the other fellow is speaking”: these were the panoply of the director’s tools.

But the cobb salad of psychoanalysis and the method replaced the stage manager with the director. His job was to analyse the script psychoanalytically, and lead the actors in a month-long encounter group called the rehearsal process. None of it made any difference to the audience, save that the self-consciousness the charade engendered in the actor, transformed him from performer, to lay analyst. After all, anyone reading a play text understands it sufficiently to appreciate the interactions. And the better a play is, the less it needs a set — Shakespeare plays just peachily on the radio.

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So past simply staging, then, in his responsibility to the audience, how might the director (ex-stage manager) be of use to the actor? In one thing: a subtle alteration of the actor’s intention. The fellow playing Iago understands that he is going to avenge himself on his boss by falsely accusing Desdemona. The actor might play a scene revealing the false clues to Othello as “conveying a favour”; the director might suggest, rather, that he play it to “refute a false claim”. The words are the same, but the intention (known as the objective) is somewhat different, and the change will influence the performance subtly.

Note that in neither case is the actor asked to “feel” anything, or to “believe” anything, he is simply asked to reimagine the objective.

The Crispian speech in Henry V is the greatest in our language, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” It can be played as an exhortation to a crowd, or as a quiet pledge to fellow warriors. The determination of intention can influence performance. Inversely, when baffled by performance in human interactions we can seek clarity by determining intention. For example, Obama’s stated goal was “Hope and Change”; Harris’s seems to be “Joy”. The only intentions inferable from the slogans was obfuscation and the desire to seduce.

Our objective in the Second World War was the destruction of fascism. In Vietnam it was “to win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people — a task for which the Armed Forces were horribly ill-suited; and no one has creditably explained why we invaded Iraq to find “weapons of mass destruction”, which, even if they had existed, posed no threat to the United States.

Our Middle East objective, under the direction of Obama, Biden and Harris, has been opposition to the Jewish state, under the heading of adjudication of the conflict. But a conflict on which external rules are imposed is not a war, it is a duel — ultimate power, thus, displayed by neither party but by the referee. The very term “The Peace Process” indicates an acceptably interminable engagement. Peace is never brought about by a process, but through breaking one side’s will to continue fighting.

After our administration’s abandonment of Israel, the Netanyahu government has, correctly, decided to cease not only its subservience but its acknowledgement of “world opinion”, destroy its enemies, and, so, bring peace to Israel. For “he who dictates the terms of the battle dictates the terms of the peace,” as Napoleon said.

The Terms of the Battle, in stage language, are the Objective. Determined here not by a director, but by an interested referee. Those in the Middle East were dictated to Israel by America, in service to Iran, a criminal folly which led to October 7, and the ebullition of world antisemitism.

Now, various of the good-willed are calling for bookstores to boycott the works of Jewish authors who do not denounce the Jewish state. I was approached to sign a petition decrying this brutality, and to supply a quote. My heart sank, not at the savagery of Sally Rooney and the woke mob, but at the notion that a list of names could decrease savagery.

I, of course, signed the petition to fight antisemitism, but washed up short and queasy thinking of a quote.

I’ve always bragged that I could write in a car crash, but was unable to add my wisdom to this good cause. I wondered why, and determined this: it is pointless to “fight” antisemitism — it presupposes an ongoing (thus extendable) process.

Our objective should be to stop antisemitism.

As Jew hatred is a delusion, it cannot be stopped by any appeal to reason. No exhortation will convince, only the application of dissuasive force to those enamoured of brutality.

My responses have included visiting Israel, to show the flag, and voting for Republicans who will defund institutions permitting the violation of Jews’ civil rights, remove the institutions’ tax-exempt status, and prosecute those threatening and assaulting Jews.

That’s not to say politicians, historians, journalists and teachers aren’t making an effort to mark it. In the former West German capital of Bonn, 11 public figures will issue “love declarations to the Basic Law”, while Berlin is hosting a three-day “Festival for Democracy” with workshops and music. But for all the attempts at fanfare, the anniversary of the Basic Law is no German Independence Day. Buildings won’t be bedecked in the national colours; street parties will be a rarity. As political expert Ursula Münch told the German press, “significant parts of the German people don’t give a monkey’s about this anniversary”.

A tempting explanation for the lack of public displays of affection for Germany’s legal framework is the country’s ultra-conscious relationship with history. But guilt alone doesn’t explain the absence of the “constitutional patriotism” that West German thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas had hoped for. Germans have long found other outlets for post-war national pride, football being the most obvious example.

When West Germany won its first World Cup in 1954, fans bellowed a part of the German anthem that is now no longer sung — the bit that starts with “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” (“Germany, Germany above all”). Instead, they were supposed to sing the third stanza, the one about “Unity and Justice and Freedom”. Whether they did it out of habit or deliberately is hard to tell, but historians such as Joachim Fest have called that moment of national euphoria the true day when modern Germany was born. Similarly, the 2006 World Cup, which was held in Germany, transformed the country into a sea of black, red and gold. While critical voices remained, most Germans celebrated the summer of patriotic jubilation as a “fairytale” moment.

So, Germans can celebrate themselves under the right circumstances. But pinning a sense of national togetherness on a legal document isn’t as easy as it is on sporting success. It doesn’t help that republican democracy is not a form of government that lends itself to pomp and pageantry. With their interchangeable office holders, rules-based order and attendant bureaucracy, such systems are intended to be fair and sensible, not awe-inspiring and glamorous. How do you celebrate something that doesn’t like fanfare?

German politicians had already struggled to drum up passion for rational republicanism after the First World War, when they tried to set up the country’s first fully fledged democracy but found it difficult to compete with the ceremonial flair of the dethroned monarchy. When the new constitution was passed in 1919, “there was no jubilation, no address, no tribute, nothing”, a conservative newspaper grumbled. “The state’s constitution shuffled out into the country like an indifferent guest.” Harry Graf Kessler, a pro-democracy aristocrat, wrote in his diary, “the republic should avoid ceremonies; this form of government doesn’t lend itself to them. It’s as if a governess is dancing ballet”.

Such generalisations go too far. France and the US make a valiant effort each year to celebrate their republics, but both have rousing origin stories to draw on. When the French mark Bastille Day, they don’t remember the signing of a piece of paper but the day in 1789 when revolutionaries attempted to storm a hated political prison. It was a rebellious act that symbolises the defeat of dynastic rule by people power. Similarly, Americans see the Fourth of July as a celebration of the moment they gained national freedom. Both are dramatic stories of a victorious struggle for democracy.

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Modern Germany’s story, by contrast, begins in defeat and shame. Nazism had bankrupted the nation politically, economically and morally. The country lay in ruins and its people were dejected and hungry when the Western Allies decided that they needed their zones to become a bulwark against communism in the emerging Cold War.

To remedy this, in 1948, a Parliamentary Council was summoned under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer who would soon become West Germany’s first chancellor. They discussed, drafted and redrafted the articles under the watchful eye of the Allies, and agreed them on 8 May 1949. There was no pathos. In lieu of the anthem they didn’t yet have, the delegates sang the 19th-century song “Ich hab mich ergeben” — “I have surrendered myself”. Over the next few days, the Allies signed off on the document and so did all regional governments (with the exception of Bavaria, which didn’t agree to it but acknowledged it as lawful). On 23 May, the West German constitution became law and created a new German democracy.

The origin story of the Basic Law isn’t the stuff of national legends. Many West Germans have much stronger feelings about post-war chancellors like Konrad Adenauer or Willy Brandt, the first Social Democrat to take office in 1969. There is an intense collective memory of the so-called “economic miracle” of the Fifties in which Adolf Hitler’s people’s car, the Volkswagen Beetle, somehow became one of the most iconic vehicles in automotive history. While the Basic Law enabled the economic, political and social stability that emerged, it remained a largely unsung hero.

Another problem with using the birthday of the German constitution as a national rallying point is that it didn’t unite the country, but rather cemented its post-war division. It only applied to West Germany and was deliberately designed to be provisional until reunification with the Soviet Zone of Occupation could be achieved. Its last article, Number 146, said the Basic Law would stay in place until a permanent constitution was “freely adopted by the German people”. At the time this meant that a West German state was founded with its own currency and legal system. The formation of East Germany was a response to that and followed on 7 October 1949.

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During the country’s reunification in 1990, heated discussions ensued over whether the merger of two states necessitated a new constitution with input from Easterners. But Wolfgang Schäuble, the West German Minister of the Interior who led the reunification negotiations, made the situation very clear: “This is not the unification of two equal states,” he declared. “There is a constitution, and there is a Federal Republic of Germany. Let us start with the assumption that you have been excluded from both for 40 years. Now you are entitled to take part.” There wouldn’t be a new constitution. East Germany would join the West German system.

This has contributed to the resentment many East Germans continue to feel about the way their former country was dissolved without much input from them. Such resentment is difficult to overcome and even more difficult to turn into enthusiasm for a document over which they had no say. In the first free elections in 1990, the majority of Easterners had voted for parties that offered quick unification, but this is not the same as having explicit input into the country’s constitution.

East Germans, as a result, are expected to celebrate an origin story in which they feel they had no part while few former West Germans would consider the history of East Germany their own. The East remains the anomaly to Western normality. As the historian Frank Trentmann put it, drawing a straight line from the West German constitution to today risks making East Germany “little more than an inconvenient detour that, with reunification, rejoins the main road to the liberal democratic West”.

Meanwhile, a number of German commentators are also doubtful about the self-assured celebrations of German democracy because of the rise of the Right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which polls as the second largest party in many surveys. The political magazine Der Spiegel is running a stark cover this week featuring a swastika covered by Germany’s red-black-and-gold tricolour and the heading “Haven’t we learnt anything?”, which seems to imply that voting for the AfD is akin to abolishing democracy in the way Hitler did in the Thirties.

Of course, few would deny that Germany is today a deeply divided country with many voters looking for ways to express their discontent outside of the established political boundaries. But the same is true for many other Western democracies who don’t, by and large, mistake a mismatch of political offerings and voters’ concerns as a sign that people are fed up with democracy itself. This equation doesn’t work out for Germany either. In a recent survey, 85% of Germans considered democracy a good form of government. If people are losing faith in parties, politicians and institutions, they still believe in the values of the Basic Law.

Where does this leave today’s anniversary? While bombastic celebrations of the Basic Law may not be appropriate for a number of reasons, few would disagree that Germany is right to take a moment to reflect on the long and winding road that took it back into the fold of the liberal democracies of the West. It is a country that takes its lessons from the past more seriously than most and has bound them into the very fabric of its political system. Passionate “constitutional patriotism” may never have materialised in Germany, but a strong commitment to democracy has. And that is well worth celebrating.

But today should also be a day for Germany to reflect on how to grow democracy out of its West German infancy. When the Basic Law was enacted 75 years ago, it introduced people-power to a deeply Nazified population that had never experienced a functioning democracy and looked to self-assured men like Adenauer to lead the way. Those days are gone. Today, a vocal, confident and well-educated population wants to be able to voice concerns and criticism without being chided by politicians for doing democracy wrong. Article 20 of the Basic Law says: “All state authority is derived from the people.” Some 75 years after those words were enshrined in law, they provide a pertinent reminder of what democracy is all about.

No wonder our society returns obsessively to what we still call “the war”, like an adoptee, severed from his roots, searching for meaning. But of all the explorations since, in film and fiction and popular history, one treatment cannot be bettered. It was 50 years ago this week that Thames TV broadcast what has since become renowned as the greatest documentary series ever made: The World at War. It is impossible to imagine ITV making it now, but then, it is impossible to imagine today’s BBC making it either.

The intellectual gulf between, say, 1997’s The Nazis: A Warning from History (a documentary about the rise of National Socialism) and 2019’s The Rise of the Nazis (a parable about Trump and Brexit, featuring Ash Sarkar and Sir Mike Jackson, doubtless the fruit of a researcher’s Twitter search for a communist and a general) is unbridgeable. It is, simply, unthinkable that any television station today would spend two years and vast sums of revenue hauling out unseen footage from state archives for 26 hours of prime-time history programming, nor present the results with such intellectual and moral sophistication.

But even then, it was prestige television: with an eye to international sales, Laurence Olivier was drafted in to provide the voiceover, with only his eccentric pronunciation — “Shtaleen”, “the Ukryne”— breaking the illusion of an omniscient observer detailing mankind’s foibles. In tones shifting scene by scene from sardonic dismissal of the human frailties and delusions underlying war to cold contempt and sorrowful, clipped pity at the sheer waste of it all, the pathos of Olivier’s narration is central to the series’ artistic success.

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From the very first lines, opening in the ruins of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, whose inhabitants were massacred by the SS, the script’s spare, cold poetry builds the frame that allows the following footage to breathe. “Down the road, on a summer’s day in 1944, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now,” Olivier intones with the mournful rhythm of a funeral bell, in a script drafted by Neal Ascherson. “They were here for only a few hours. When they left, a community which had lived for over a thousand years was dead,” and Oradour left a village whose “martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China — in a World at War”.

Over the 26 hour-long episodes (streamable today in truncated form on UKTV Play), the Glaswegian-Jewish auteur Jeremy Isaacs produced an epic of unimaginable scope, interweaving the grand narrative of geopolitics with the personal recollections of the soldiers, diplomats and civilians involved, across campaigns reaching from the Russian steppes to the American heartland and the jungles of the Pacific. The cast list of interviewees is extraordinary: whole documentaries could surely be pieced together today from its offcuts. Where else could Admiral Doenitz pop up as a briefly-used talking head to talk us through the intricacies of Germany’s U-boat campaign, Anthony Eden (billed as Lord Avon) and Lord Mountbatten to unveil Whitehall’s thinking, Adolf Galland outline the Luftwaffe’s failings in the Battle of Britain or Arthur Harris and Curtis LeMay give us their unrepentant insights into the virtues and limitations of strategic bombing?

Thirty years after the events themselves, the series was made at just the right time for a work of history: long enough for its participants, late-middle-aged in their Seventies suits, to achieve some distance from their younger selves, but too close to have become memorialised, locked away in myth with the rest of the distant past. The passage of time alone means the series is unreplicable now: the great work of television history has become the matter of History in itself. Even the reminiscences of the less notable participants, the French and German and Italian army officers sitting in their book-lined studies recounting their war in cut-glass English accents, the cockneys sharing stories in a smoke-filled East End pub or the Royal Navy veteran matter-of-factly, almost innocently, describing his feelings of what we would now term Post-Traumatic Stress, are visions of a lost world.

The recollections of the survivors interviewed are the series’ backbone, but perhaps taken for granted is the faultless tradecraft of the researchers who tracked down and won their confidence: embedded within this work of history are moments of pure journalism at its best. Perhaps counterintuitively, for a series now coded as “male interest”, The World At War’s greatest strengths are built on the meticulous skill and craftsmanship of its little-praised female production staff. To unlock the memories of the Nazi interviewees, Isaacs wrote, “Susan McConachy, blonde and blue-eyed, was our star” finding and interviewing Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, whose intimate recollections of the regime bunker Götterdämerung have, via the film Downfall, since entered popular mythology. McConachy’s “worst moment”, Isaacs noted, “came when Karl Wolff, Himmler’s adjutant, put his hand on her knee and confided: ‘My dear, you are just the type from whom we liked to breed.’”

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Yet her discomfort brought dividends. As McConachy later wrote of the “most charming” Wolff, “After lunch I asked him to repeat the story he had told me one evening over supper about an incident at Minsk at which he had been present, when a hundred people were shot into an open grave as a demonstration for Himmler. He looked a bit surprised. He had forgotten that he had ever mentioned that. Then the film ran out. I wondered if, with time to think, he would actually tell the story again. When we were ready to go he did in fact tell it. I was relieved, not just because I’d got the story, but because he’d had the time to reflect on what the consequences of telling it might be and I could feel less responsible if he did in fact end up in court again when the programme was shown.”

The scene itself, with the mixed emotions playing across Wolff’s face as he tells the story of Himmler turning green beside the pit as his face was splashed with a victim’s brains, is extraordinary. No less powerful, or compelling in its moral complexity, is episode director Martin Smith’s interview with Albert Speer in the Holocaust episode Genocide, the single episode screened without accompanying music or advertising breaks. Hitler’s armaments minister recounts, with a sort of hesitant uncertainty as to how his testimony will be received, being warned not to visit the camps “because horrible things would happen. This, together with other hints I got, should have made — should have made my decision to go to Hitler immediately, or to Himmler, and to ask them what is going on and to take my own steps, but I didn’t do it, and not doing it was, so I think nowadays, the biggest fault in my life.” As Isaacs later noted laconically, “Albert Speer, surely, was economical with the truth,” but the episode doesn’t labour the point and moves on swiftly to the next scene: the viewer was trusted, once again, to make up his own mind.

As our distance from the war itself has increased, the more rigid and formulaic our emotional responses to it have become: it has become a moral parable, justifying all manner of political malignancies, rather than a narrative of the tragedy inherent in international politics. It is doubtful that, even if we still had access to senior Nazi officials, contemporary mores would allow them to be interviewed dispassionately as witnesses to history. While Smith restrained his personal disgust, it is all too easy to imagine Stacey Dooley storming out of an interview with Speer after giving him a piece of her mind. Yet the series did not shy away from the war’s horrors: if anything, its sheer sparseness made them more vivid, as in the episode intercutting the testimony of Holocaust survivors with the reminiscences of an SS camp guard throwing children into the gas chamber, blankly remarking that “you get used to anything in time”. The war itself has passed into myth: The World at War returns it to the realm of human memory.

When I was young, The World at War made me want to see war for myself, and record it for posterity. Rewatching it now, having experienced a decade of close combat and great human suffering in the intervening period, what strikes me most is the sheer quality of the combat footage, obtained by unnamed cameramen on all sides who may or may not have survived their labours. The intensity reminds us that even the most experienced journalist today has never seen war on such a scale: at least, not yet. The almost expressionist editing of their uncredited footage, the long periods when the voiceover and music trails off for bricolaged images of pure chaos, still pays the appropriate honour to their work.

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In her finding and choosing of footage, another of Isaacs’ female production staff, the archive researcher Raye Farr, was responsible for the extraordinary vividness of the series. Realising that the propaganda newsreels of the day provided only stilted, sanitised highlights, Farr searched the state archives of Europe for unused offcuts, too strange or uncomfortable for showing at the time. In the German Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Farr pestered the director for access to uncatalogued treasures, noting later that “not until you have made a nuisance of yourself do the staff throw up their hands in exasperation and say, ‘See for yourself’ — which is what you’ve been waiting for”.

The results of her tradecraft, perhaps taken for granted by viewers, are central to the series’ success. As Isaacs later wrote, among Farr’s uncatalogued finds “was material shot behind the German lines on the Eastern Front by a gifted documentary cameraman. He appears not to have been shooting for the newsreel. Some of his footage was almost idyllic, showing soldiers at rest and leisure. Other sequences were more menacing. He filmed three German soldiers gently, almost reluctantly, but, in the end, firmly clearing a village of its people, sending the men in one direction, the women and children in another. Somehow, we know they will never see each other again.”

As we wait in 2023, hoping to evade what may be an equally great conflagration, both Crouchback’s fictional insight in Men at Arms, and The World at War’s wise and humane cataloguing of the real-world results seem unbearably poignant. The flames of war are already engulfing the world that came into being in 1945: what comes after may be better or worse, but it will be different from anything we have ever known — just as much as the proud, globe-spanning Britain of 1939 differed from the humbled, impoverished Britain of 1945.

Within nations as well as between them, the battle lines are already being drawn. Cities will be levelled, entire peoples exiled, humans killed in hi-definition video for the applause of social media spectators. Our own age is taking up arms, waiting to usher us into its cold embrace. May future generations judge us as soberly and compassionately as the makers of The World At War.

However, as Anthony Barnett observed of the War’s second son after Suez, the Falklands, history doesn’t just repeat as tragedy and farce, but also as spectacle, as media event. And if the War (it is still just about a definite “the”) is our national creation myth, it only became so once we started broadcasting it on repeat, sublimating violence and trauma into a televisual parade of trumpets and valour.

The mythologising started straightaway. Churchill’s words urged us into new conceptions of national prowess, his classical inflections designed to flatter us into thinking we were the Athenians and he our Thucydides. Soon his personal sense of moral destiny became a collective triumph, a pageant to be inspiringly viewed from the cheap seats of austerity Britain. And nowhere was the spectacle more spectacular than in the British war film. Enlisting Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Richard Burton, we turned our parents into hero-warriors — better, into Hollywood stars. For the children of the Fifties and Sixties, Daddy’s war could become theirs too. The testament of a previous generation turned entertainment for the next.

However, to judge from the fate and Zimmer frame of Michael Caine in his new (and possibly last) film The Great Escaper, the war film is dying on its feet. And the Second World War is now very much a grandaddy issue, possibly even just an issue for executors, morticians and undertakers. Caine plays Bernie Jordan, a D-Day veteran who absconds from his care home to attend the 70th anniversary of the landings. If it sounds too twee to make up, it is — the real Bernie became an overnight celebrity after his trip in 2014, before his death six months later. Genuinely unbelievable, though, is the fact that this is one of two films that will retell his story to be released this year, with the second inadequately substituting Sir Michael for Pierce Brosnan. The snout of the British culture industry has evidently sniffed out a winner.

The Great Escaper sparely retells Bernie Jordan’s weekend Odyssey, every detail designed to pull delicately on the heartstrings of the national psyche. There’s Bernie’s wartime romance with Irene (the late Glenda Jackson), consummated in flashback after a shuffle at the local swing night, and still strong after 70 years. There’s Bernie’s reconciliation with some pacified Germans in a café overlooking Sword beach. “What a waste,” he will cry, in a foreign field lined with white graves. But the film need only prod its audience with clichés. We are prepped from early-learning to receive them. The wash of waves and Michael Caine, flat-capped, staring out to sea beneath a commemorative D-Day banner, his glassy eyes blinking, his aged mind remembering. This is what a war hero looks like.

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But Caine’s presence, as well as the film’s title, places The Great Escaper at odds with a very different lineage of war films, one of pluck and daring. Despite all the redcoats and pith helmets, Caine’s first picture Zulu leant directly on the beleaguered British underdog myth of 1940. And he went on to form part of the Shakespearean ensemble behind Battle of Britain, that epic Airfix commercial of 1969. For the other, still vaguely watchable productions from the time, see The Guns of Navarone, Ice Cold in Alex, The Great Escape itself and obviously Where Eagles Dare. (For a refresher, turn on ITV4 at 4pm this Sunday afternoon, or in fact any Sunday afternoon.)

All memoirs of the Sixties recall the intensity of this saturation. “I saw a film today, oh boy,” John Lennon sang in 1967. “The English Army had just won the war.” Geoff Dyer, born 1959, claims that before he was 15 he had only seen Disney cartoons, Alastair Maclean adaptations and a few other war and action movies. “I didn’t know films were made out of anything else,” remembered Christopher Hitchens. And this was part of a more general mania of cultural reproduction that gripped the supposedly Swinging nation, particularly among the young. Just as the war economy wound down, as actual conscription was coming to an end, culture was rearming. Kids read War Picture Library comics, the national equivalent to Marvel. Every boy was accompanied by a portable, idealised Unknown Soldier — at their peak there were four Action Men for every three boys in the country.

While the stories were not always uncomplicated, you never forget who the villains are, and who will and should eventually triumph. This was a Technicolor Second World War, gun-slinging and cocksure. It was what Britain needed. “We won the war… or did we?” went the cynical grumble as imperial pink faded from the map and the Union Jack was lowered East of Suez. But only the most reactionary portions of the British Right actually regretted fighting it. We’d lost our status — but we’d gained a cinematic universe to play heroes in, made all the more believable by being roughly justified. Few of these films mentioned the Holocaust or Nuremberg, but they didn’t have to. You knew the German characters were evil before you knew why — and you knew that your country had done something towards stopping them.

But, much like a child growing to see its father in a different light, our perspective on this past has altered. The war-film industry isn’t dead, but it is changed and chastened from those swashbuckling days. The self-confident silliness we once gorged on is gone. Instead, we’re drawn to the conflict’s murkier corners, background actors such as Turing and Oppenheimer who were as much victims of the War as they were its victors. The best war film of the last two decades, Dunkirk, turned the battle into an aesthetic masterpiece, a ticking set-piece of cold realism, with only a petit four of Churchilliana at the end to sweeten the horror. And, when we return to our wartime leader, the best we can do is turn Churchill into Gary Oldman’s pot-bellied pastiche, just at the very moment that his historical reputation needed intelligent defence, not sentimental reinforcement.

The real Bernie Jordan endured the same sentimentalisation, becoming advertising copy for P&O Ferries and a grinning, geriatric front-page sensation (a dehumanising process that The Great Escaper creditably critiques). The ultimate embarrassment, however, history repeating itself as spectacle and farce, was to come in 2020, when a cabin-feverish media seized upon Captain Tom Moore, a veteran of Burma’s “Forgotten Army” who had started walking across his garden to raise money for NHS charities. Tom became the face of a terrifying convulsion of Second World War parodism in British society, proving beyond doubt that it is still our only serviceable memory of national unity.

But how long until that memory fades? Harry Patch, “the last Fighting Tommy” from the war before, died only five years before Jordan’s great escape — and the death of the last D-Day witness, if not the last Second World War veteran, cannot be far off. Tribute to the obsessive qualities of internet historians everywhere, a Wikipedia page lists dozens of “notable” survivors in various states of decay, many in their second century. Jordan may not be the last to be immortalised in film (a Captain Tom biopic is in production), but the sense of leave-taking in The Great Escaper — bittersweetly conveyed by Caine and Jackson — gestures towards the War’s uncertain legacy as it moves irretrievably beyond living memory.

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No doubt those generic Churchillian emphases — “tears and sweat”, “the beaches” — will kick about the English language for another century, like those moth-eaten scraps of Tennyson that still retain some anonymous poetic charge. Perhaps they will even be reworked into a khaki Henriad by some distant Shakespeare. But the magic of those grand metonyms — “Overlord”, “Alamein” — is already gone for most people. Soon they will seem as antique as Wellington’s rearguards in the Peninsular Campaign.

Clearly, popular feeling is still swayed by memories of the finest hour, by a faith that we’re capable collectively of doing the right thing. But we see it ever more cynically. When Boris Johnson bustled off to Ukraine to tour bomb sites and inspect sandbags, we all knew whose silhouette he was shrouding himself in. Yet at some point in the future, we won’t recognise it at all. We will see only the transparent present, unmoored from the epic past it once aspired to.

Against buildings, small missile warheads and puny drone charges can certainly inflict damage, but not of any real consequence. And this is a key aspect of the entire war, especially when compared to the last great conflict on the European continent.

From March 1942, the RAF’s Bomber Command was flying Lancaster bombers with a typical individual bombload of 6,400kg, so that the first Lancaster raid to feature 400 bombers dropped 2,560 metric tons — more than the total tonnage dropped on Ukraine by Russian cruise missiles since the war started. True, British night bombing was notoriously inaccurate and much criticised in the aftermath. But by 1945, cities such as Hamburg and Cologne were burnt out, while others including Berlin were devastated. Nothing equivalent has happened to Kyiv, nor could it, because Russia only has a small strategic bomber force while Ukraine has none. All the military drones now operational across the globe cannot deliver as much explosive as the Bomber Command could drop in a couple of nights.

Thus the first serious war of the third millennium must be fought on the ground — quite a comedown from the “post-kinetic” cyber and information warfare that had been confidently predicted by both Western and Russian generals. This is a war that must be fought by sheer, grinding, attrition, just like the First World War on the Western Front, with almost none of the “manoeuvre warfare” exploits that made celebrities of Guderian, Rommel, Patton and Rokossovsky in the Second World War, and Arik Sharon in 1967 and 1973.

All those masters of war won disproportionate victories with surprise offensives. Arriving in fast-moving columns, their forces greatly outnumbered and overwhelmed a specific sector, while the bulk of the enemy, distributed across an entire front, could not intervene in time.

In other words, “manoeuvre warfare” depends entirely on surprise. Even in the Second World War, there was reliable aerial photography, so that pre-battle concentrations of tanks, trucks and artillery tractors could not escape detection as they gathered over a period of weeks. But once the offensive columns moved, it was hard to keep them under observation, let alone predict their destination. Photography was impeded by night, clouds and enemy fighters, leaving more than enough uncertainty to deceive enemies with decoys, simulated radio traffic, and the false tales of double agents.

This is how it came to be that on D-Day, 6 June 1944, the strongest German Panzer columns ended up being massed behind Calais to face Patton’s fictional First United States Army Group, while the Allies were landing in Normandy 230 miles away. Douglas MacArthur’s Inchon landings in September 1950, which nullified a string of North Korean victories in the preceding months, likewise achieved total surprise by very elaborately simulating a landing at Kunsan, 100 miles to the south.

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None of this could happen now. The Americans, Russians and other military powers have observation satellites equipped with synthetic-aperture radars, capable of revealing single tanks, let alone any large grouping of forces, regardless of visibility, while their returns are refreshed often enough to detect troop movements in hours if not in minutes. Any other information drawn from intercepts, aerial reconnaissance or ground observation merely supplements this reliable intelligence. It is enough to make the battlefield transparent and operational surprise impossible, killing off the manoeuvre warfare that can win battles quickly and without mounds of casualties.

In early summer, when the Ukrainians deployed the precious “operational reserve” they had built up, there was no great mystery as to what they would do with it: attack somewhere south of Zaporizhzhia and fight their way down to the Black Sea. This would cut off all the east-west roads and rail lines that supply the Russian forces strung out to the west below the Dnipro river. It would set the stage for a great victory, with Putin forced to choose between continuing the war or negotiating a cease-fire to rescue his stranded troops.

There were three possible vectors for the offensive. First, Kyiv could launch a straight assault on Melitopol, which would involve an ambitious penetration offensive over 90-miles deep. Alternatively, it could aim for Berdyans’k with a 125-mile offensive that would cut off more Russians and take more territory. Or, even more daringly, it could march the full 150 miles to Mariupol, a movement that would have to be Napoleonic in speed and concentration to reach the Black Sea shore before the Russians could counter.

None of those options has proved to be workable. While the Ukrainians were training and deploying, the Russians south of the Dnipro were digging trench lines shielded by  minefields that stretch roughly 625 miles — 185 miles longer than the Western Front at its greatest extent. Napoleon called this style of linear defence a “cordon”, a thick rope made of infantry to hold the enemy along a long front. And, in his own time, he rightly explained why cordons were the stupidest way of defending a front: the enemy would arrive in columns and easily cut through the few troops holding the particular sector they attacked.

But once again the transparent battlefield has changed everything. Watching the Ukrainians advance in real time, the Russians could send their forces to intercept them in equal if not greater numbers. And even if the numbers were equal, the combat would be unequal because the Russians would be shielded by their minefields and by their trenches.

It was also unfortunate that the Ukrainians had greatly overestimated the combat value of the huge 66-ton Leopard tanks they had asked for, begged for, and finally practically demanded from the Germans. The Leopard is comparable to the US M1 and Israeli Merkava IV (all three have some 60 tons of layered armour and high-velocity 120mm guns). But it lacks one thing that the M1 and Merkava both rely on when facing the Russian-equipped forces: Trophy, an Israeli active defence with radar to detect incoming anti-tank missiles, and miniature guns to smash their warheads.

The Germans are acquiring the device but insisted on testing it themselves, delaying its shipment to Ukraine. Without Trophy’s protection, the Leopards fell prey to Russian tank-hunters armed with Kornet anti-tank missiles. While much simpler, less versatile and much cheaper than the US Javelin, the Kornet is all too effective with its double warhead that defeats reactive armour. When Ukraine’s long-awaited offensive started, it demonstrated this most unfortunately, with the destruction of some of the precious Leopards that were supposed to lead the way.

One might have hoped for a better outcome from the geo-economic confrontation between the heavily-sanctioned Russian economy and the much richer Western coalition that supports Ukraine — especially because things started so well. Early fears that Germany and Italy would not tolerate the loss of their Russian markets and Russian natural gas supplies proved unfounded. Instead of defections, the coalition that economically supports Ukraine has expanded across Europe and now includes Japan and even South Korea, which sent a token $150 million this year.

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But initial hopes that Russia could be seriously pressured, perhaps all the way to the negotiating table, by stalling both their oil exports and their imports of Western goods soon faded. Unlike China, Russia is self-sufficient in both food and fuel, and can manufacture all it needs, except for micro-processors and other high-tech items that are easily smuggled.

Turkey, while ostensibly a close American ally, is still the transit point for many high-technology exports to Russia, and Turkey’s traders and traffickers have plenty of competition in other countries. As for the Russian economy, the news is gloomy but not gloomy enough. A meagre 1.5% growth will be achieved this year, but that still exceeds the German growth rate (which is expected to be zero). Russia’s inflation rate of 3.3% is also around half the Euro average. The war will not end because of Russia’s economic capitulation.

There is, then, only one route forward: to fight the war in earnest, as befits a struggle of national liberation. Ukraine’s population has declined but still exceeds 30 million, so that the total number in uniform could be as much as 3 million (Israel’s 10% ratio in 1948) or at least 2 million (Finland’s reservists as a percentage of the population). With those troops, Ukraine could win its battles and liberate its territory in the same way as most of Europe’s wars of independence — by gruelling, attritional warfare.

The plan will involve not only the upgrade of Japanese weapons but the procurement of at least 400 US-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. It is a decision some have interpreted as effectively superseding the pacifist constitution and putting Japan on the road to becoming a military superpower.

The initiative shows how seriously Japan’s government takes the threat of an invasion of Taiwan. A Chinese takeover would be calamitous, as it would endanger the shipping lines that supply much of the country’s manufacturing materials and nearly all of its oil. With an American response far from guaranteed, the Japanese clearly feel they need to take their own precautions and signal their intentions unambiguously.

At present, Japan has a unified military structure, the Japan Self-Defence Force (JSDF), founded in 1954. With nearly a quarter of a million personnel, its original purpose was domestic security, logistical (non-combat) support for international peacekeeping missions under the auspices of the UN, and reassuring the population that Japan wasn’t completely defenceless.

Japan was obliged, under Article 9 of the 1947 constitution, to renounce war as a “sovereign right of the nation” — the only country ever to do so. The exact wording stated that Japan would never again maintain “land sea or air forces”, but over time the JDSF has developed from its initial Dad’s Army-style and scale into a significant military force, with license to operate overseas, albeit in limited circumstances. The rearmament plan marks a significant step towards Article 9’s further reinterpretation, this time into virtual meaninglessness.

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Japan’s defence from external threat has long been the preserve of US forces stationed in the country, sanctioned under the Security Treaty signed in 1951 and renewed periodically thereafter. A reorientation of this arrangement would liberate the US from much of its responsibility in the region and a good deal of the cost. The UK is also set to gain, as witnessed by the trinational fighter jet deal with Italy and new defence agreement signed in January.

How do ordinary Japanese people feel about it? The majority, it seems, are pleased. In an opinion poll published by public broadcaster NHK last month, 51% supported increased spending on the military, with 36% opposed. Where once any move to increase the radius of Japan’s military aegis would have seen thousands marching through the streets; now, there are only a few forlorn-looking protesters in Shinjuku station. The press is onside too, with even the Left-wing Tokyo Shimbun newspaper seemingly reconciled to the new direction.

The war in Ukraine has been a powerful catalyst in this change of mood. Nightly coverage of devastated Ukrainian cityscapes has reminded the Japanese that they have had their own quarrels with Russia in the past (over the Kuril Islands), and the threat of a nuclear option sends a chill down the spines of citizens of the only country to have suffered atomic destruction. Kishida himself is from Hiroshima and several members of his extended family were killed in the atomic bombing.

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As for energy, Japan imports 90% of its supply — with 9% coming from Russia — and so is especially vulnerable to disruptions to supply chains. Last May, Kishida announced the restart of the country’s nuclear energy programme, partly suspended as a result of the Fukushima disaster. This, too, was met with little opposition. The anti-nuclear energy movement, once formidable, has weakened considerably in recent years in parallel with the anti-Article 9 revisionists. It was reported in August that 60% of Japanese supported the restart, fuelled by concerns of a winter energy crunch if the Russians were to cut off supply.

The personality of Kishida may be a significant factor too. It is ironic that the current Prime Minister, seen as a milder, more Left-leaning figure than his predecessor Shinzo Abe, should be the one to reposition Japan as a significant military power, realising his forebear’s lifetime goal. But Abe, whose father had volunteered to be a kamikaze pilot and whose grandfather was a Class-A war criminal, was too closely associated with the war, and with the far-Right, for his arguments for reforming Article 9 to be accepted without suspicion. He was seen by many, fairly or unfairly, as an ultra-nationalist who sought to restore Japan to its pre-war glory and military dominance.

Kishida, by contrast, isn’t viewed with such animosity. The mild-mannered former banker is part of the moderate Kōchikai faction within the ruling party, which has generally supported a dovish foreign policy. He has acquired a reputation as being broadly supportive of the pacifist constitution, or at least lukewarm about revising it. For this reason, the Japanese seem more willing to believe his argument — that, in an increasingly dangerous world, the rearmament is necessary and defensive in nature, and not part of a secret plan to return to the dark imperial past.

But can he pull it off? This is the big question. Germany has made similar promises about bolstering its lacklustre armed forces in recent months and so far, they have yielded few concrete results. Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a €100 billion increase to its defence budget nearly a year ago, with promises to make a significant contribution to Ukraine. But apart from a few military vehicles, little has been forthcoming from the Federal Republic. There have even been hints that Germany may resile from its spending pledge altogether.

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The rearmament plan could unfold in a similarly nebulous fashion in Japan. Announcing a major new policy direction is one thing, turning it into a reality quite another. Kishida’s once impressive approval ratings have plunged since his controversial decision to award Shinzo Abe a state funeral. Beset by scandals that have seen four cabinet ministers resign in the last year, and with the fallout from revelations of his party’s close relationship with the cultish Unification Church ongoing, his political capital is low.

As for actual capital, it is unclear how the rearmament will be funded. Koichi Nakano, Professor of Comparative Politics at Tokyo’s Sophia University, says it is “most likely unaffordable”, without adding to Japan’s already-colossal public debt. The Japanese economy is in terrible shape; 2022 saw a disastrous current account deficit, the Yen has tumbled, and that once-peculiar foreign phenomenon inflation has begun to manifest itself. Signs have gone up in shop windows apologising, in exquisitely formal language, for even modest price increases. Tax rises are the obvious answer, but polling suggests the Japanese are resolutely against higher taxes to pay for an increased military in times like these.

This leaves Kishida in danger of overpromising. For along with the military buildup, he has committed himself to dealing with Japan’s demographic crisis by huge increases in welfare spending. The world’s oldest country is losing hundreds of thousands of citizens every year as the old die off and the young stubbornly refuse to procreate. By some estimates, on this trajectory, the Japanese will cease to exist in a couple of hundred years. The obvious quick fix is a massive increase in immigration, but that is still anathema to most Japanese who view their culture as a unique and delicate artefact that wouldn’t survive the rough touch of legions of imported citizens. Many Japanese are asking themselves: will it be babies, or bombs?

Instead, the Russians were withdrawn to fight another day — but not in Kherson, nor anywhere else in the south. Instead, they were sent to join other Russian forces withdrawn from the southern front, whose strength is increasing daily with the arrival of reservists who have gone through refresher training.

Initially, it was reported that recall notices were sent to 300,000 former conscripts (though I understand the actual number may have been 492,000). Many fled the country or were already abroad, while others were armed with bullet-proof medical exemptions from hospitals — it was no use bribing a mere doctor. Of those who reported for duty, quite a few were sent home as obviously unfit, but what remained was still a larger number of front-line troops than the number available at the start of the war.

More than eight months have passed since Putin invaded Europe’s largest country with a very small army, trusting in the high-tech wonders of “hybrid”, cyber-dominated, “non-kinetic” warfare that work so well in theory. We now know that both Putin’s FSB and the CIA estimated that Kyiv would fall in 24 hours. and the entire country in a few days.

Since then, Putin has suffered many disappointments, for some of which he can only blame himself. The Tuvan civilian Sergei Shoigu, who became  Russia’s Minister of Defence in 2012 despite having zero military experience, signed off on a wildly optimistic plan — a parade advance up the highway to Kyiv — and then failed to appoint others to extricate the army once the column was stuck. It soon transpired that Russia’s military industries had been hollowed out by the wheelings, dealings and thefts of Putin’s oligarch pals. All the gleaming prototypes proudly displayed to the world in recent years had not actually been manufactured, meaning almost all the tanks, artillery pieces, combat aircraft, missiles and ammunition actually used in combat so far date back to the Soviet era that ended more than 31 years ago. They were, therefore, no better than the leftover Warsaw Pact weapons Ukraine has received from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland and Slovakia, and far inferior to the new missiles and artillery sent by the UK and US with dribs and drabs from France, Germany and other NATO allies.

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Meanwhile, Putin’s own refusal to declare war and mobilise the Russian armed forces has, in turn, forced him to rely on individual “contract soldiers”, ex-servicemen recruited in Russia’s poorest peripheries, many if not most of whom had not served in the combat arms in the first place, and on the Wagner mercenaries, who immediately discovered that fighting patriotic Ukrainians was a far harder thing than to fight Libyans or Syrians.

Plunged into this reeking mess of his own making, Putin only has one way to redeem himself, and Russia’s reputation as a country that ultimately wins its wars. This cannot be another repetitive push up the road against Ukrainians forces now sharpened and tempered by their heroic defence, and even more by their successful offensive drives — first to Kharkiv and beyond, and now to Kherson, with others in between.

Only a successful counter-offensive on a theatre scale could allow Putin to extricate himself. Every Russian remembers Operation Uranus, the furious, all-out, four-day counter-offensive that, 80 years ago this week, cut into both sides of the German 6th Army wedge that had almost reached the Volga at Stalingrad. Emerging from the snow and the darkness of the night, Russian troops on foot, on horseback and riding on tanks quickly defeated the Hungarian, Italian and Romanian troops guarding the long flanks of the German advance, and then repelled German attempts to counter-attack. The Germans were left cut off in Stalingrad, starting the siege that would end in the surrender of the entire 6th Army, and the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.

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Ukraine is not Nazi Germany and Kyiv is not Stalingrad, but a new Uranus offensive could be crippling. It would descend from Belarus far enough south to cut the road and rail connections from the West to Kyiv, leaving the city and the Ukrainian armed forces not fully besieged, but unable to receive the weapons, munitions, and fighting vehicles they have been receiving from the West. That might be enough to set the stage for the only negotiated end of the war that was ever possible: fully supervised plebiscites — with complete control by neutral powers and the vetting of eligible voters — in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Of course, if the Ukrainians themselves redeploy from the south in good time, successfully intercept the descending Russian column, and then start to break it up with their precise artillery fire, Putin would finally have to concede defeat, and then leave the Kremlin in one way or another. Whether this happens will become clear sooner than we might think. As I write, the very latest reports suggest that many more reservists are being recalled. This is what happens when a Great Power attacks a smaller one and fails: it tries again, and again.

In episode two, Jonathan Pryce’s Philip tells his (much) younger blonde friend Penny: “The one thing human beings do the minute they make a commitment to a life together” is “grow in separate directions”. His imagined advice to the vulnerable Diana (preparing to detonate her Andrew Morton “bomb”) is even more incriminating: “Be creative… you can do whatever you want, you can make whatever arrangements you need to find your own happiness”, as long as “you remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family in public”. But the show doesn’t dare go further.

Likewise Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth has always been a tough subject for biographers. There is no hard evidence that Philip was unfaithful, and while Her Majesty was still alive the issue was all the more sensitive. This may explain the strange detour in Gyles Brandreth’s otherwise excellent biography Philip, the Final Portrait. Promising an interrogation of the Duke’s reputation as a womaniser, Brandreth seeks to establish what Freud would have made of Philip’s female-heavy early childhood. (He was a longed-for son arriving late into a family of four girls.)

Brandreth explores the hypothetical possibility of Philip having “penis awe”, perhaps even “phallic swagger” — both conditions which apparently stem from disproportionate female attention and devotion when young. He tells us what we already know: that Philip liked the company of young attractive women, but his discussion with a Freudian psychologist is inconclusive. Apparently, men with “phallic swagger” aren’t always serial adulterers.

Had Brandreth really wanted to land a psychobabble blow, he would have looked into the male role models in Philip’s life. There was his father’s failed marriage and glamorous lady friends in the Riviera, his uncle Lord Mountbatten’s notoriously “open” marriage, not to mention his Greek uncle Big George and Marie Bonaparte’s “unconventional” relationship. Monogamy did not have much currency in the Duke’s wider family.

In many respects Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage was in keeping with the pair’s pedigree, upbringing and exceptional status. What went on behind closed doors in their marriage is a moot point and one which has disproportionately focused on the importance of monogamy at the expense of arguably greater goals — an enduring marriage and stable family monarchy.

Aristocrats have long played by different rules, and in the first half of the 20th century, when marriages were often undertaken for practical and dynastic reasons, an exclusive physical relationship was rarely a prerequisite for a lasting union. Between the wars, commentators promoted the idea of emotional and spatial independence in marriage. In 1935 co-founder of the National Marriage Guidance Council, Edward Griffith, recommended “the independence of each must be guaranteed”. Others were more explicit: “A woman may love her husband with all her heart, but even love needs an occasional rest.” And those women, invariably without an income of their own, had to shut up and put up.

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But times were changing fast. Service girls, having enjoyed rare freedom outside the domestic arena during the war, bought into new idealised notions of a companionate marriage. These modern unions were based on affection, friendship, and sexual gratification; it was anticipated that a spouse would meet all of their partner’s emotional and physical needs. Or as a panellist on the 1954 Royal Commission of Marriage and Divorce put it: “We are coming to expect more and more of our marriages.” It was these expectations that meant “marriages today are at risk to a greater extent than formerly”.

Take 99-year-old Daphne Attridge for instance. As a young woman, she served in the female army (ATS) during the war and keenly followed Philip and Elizabeth’s love story. Like many, she got engaged during the conflict (and promptly unengaged). Until she found her perfect man, she pinned her romantic hopes vicariously on the royal couple’s relationship. “We wanted to know they were in love. That mattered to us.”

This post-war companionate model of marriage has endured, but marriages in general have not necessarily. As the Commission predicted, higher expectations led to greater disappointment and a rapidly rising divorce rate. Despite the best efforts of both church and state, marital breakdown quickly became a hallmark of modern living, with Elizabeth and Philip’s union an almighty exception. But then, they were playing by different rules, weren’t they?

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There is no doubting the late Queen’s devotion to her husband; she was sticking press cuttings about sailor Philip’s wartime adventures into her scrapbook aged 14. As for the nomadic Prince, steadfast Elizabeth was a game-changer. However, their union lent heavily on more independent models of marriage in vogue in the early 20th century: Elizabeth did not hang out with Philip’s “funny friends” who entertained him in Soho supper clubs, at Cowdray Park playing polo, and on (and off) the River Solent. She avoided Cowes Week “like the plague”, pursued separate equine hobbies, had agency and income that vastly outstripped her husband’s and slept in her own bedroom. (According to the author and campaigner Marie Stopes, interwar champion of Married Love, the latter was a sensible move. Apparently separate bedrooms prevent “everyday association” which “tends to reduce the keen pleasure each takes in the other”.)

By all accounts, even Charles was irked by his father’s latter-day friendship with Penny; perhaps he was also miffed that there had been a spread featuring 13 women in Tatler, entitled “The Duke of Edinburgh’s Fan Club”. And yet somehow, in both cases, Philip got away with his reputation enhanced: a raffish old man at worst. Who could resist the outspoken Duke in his dotage, stumbling around Sandringham, riding carriages with his sometime blonde companion and driving when dangerously old? Like his father, Charles had also inherited Mountbatten as a pre-marriage mentor, but with very different results. Times had irrevocably changed. The posh propensity to turn a blind eye no longer washed in a society where divorce was prevalent, and modern celebrity promised riches outside the royal club.

Elizabeth and Philip’s union was forged in a different age, when commitment to monarchy and marriage trumped everything else. Ultimately their 73-year union not only stood the test of time, it was a great success, and one which the couple were justifiably proud of. The Queen, never an open book, divulged her tips for a successful marriage in 1972 — the year of the couple’s Silver Wedding anniversary — explaining that a Christian marriage should be “tolerant and understanding”. Fifty years later, the Duke confirmed the Queen had “tolerance in abundance”.

Exactly what that says about the dynamics within our late monarch’s marriage is open to interpretation, as the Duke no doubt intended. After all, Elizabeth and Philip came from an old-fashioned school of thought — it was important to be seen, but, where possible, royalty should not let in too much “daylight upon the magic”. As Walter Bagehot explained, “its mystery is its life”.

Not all Italians are making the pilgrimage to Predappio, of course. The “true believers” who do are an exiguous minority, even if groups such as Casa Pound and Forza nuova register a growing popularity. More numerous are those “post-fascists”, many of whom undoubtedly helped Giorgia Meloni to become Italy’s first female Prime Minister. But to ascribe Meloni’s victory to a widespread revival of fascism would be mistaken; there are many factors that have pushed voters to support the extreme Right, not least the current economic crisis. Even so, the spectre of fascism continues to haunt Italian politics. It is a reminder that, unlike Germany, Italy has never really come to terms with its fascist past. Whereas in Germany, Nazi monuments were torn down and Holocaust memorials constructed to remind people of their crimes, in Italy monuments glorifying the Duce — such as the Dux obelisk in Rome — are still there for all to see. There is no suggestion that they should be removed.

Monuments, in themselves, may not be a problem; it is how people interpret them that is important. When the comparison with German denazification is made, the stock Italian reply is: “But Mussolini was not Hitler.” While undoubtedly true, the implications of this statement are far-reaching. The “lesser evil” argument has been manipulated by those such as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who insisted that “Mussolini never killed anybody”, and the former vice-President of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, who claimed that “Mussolini did many good things” — this last a common phrase, referring usually to the draining of the Pontine marshes south of Rome or the extension of the welfare system. From being the lesser evil, Mussolini has become no evil at all.

This rose-tinted view of Mussolini has several causes, but much can be explained by the way in which the Second World War ended for Italy. After the Armistice with the Allies in 1943 and the subsequent German invasion of the peninsula, the Italian Resistance movement played a great part in the liberation of the country. In order to obtain the best possible post-war settlement, the role of the Resistance was emphasised in the peace negotiations; Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler was played down as much as possible. It was as if Italy had always been a nation of anti-fascists; as if the Italians had been victims of fascism. Although it was not at all clear who exactly the fascists had been, as victims of fascism it was evident that Italians had no need to come to terms with the past. The responsibility belonged to others. We had, essentially, anti-fascism without fascism.

One consequence of this interpretation of Italy’s past was that many fascists were never tried or imprisoned, much less executed for their crimes. There was no Italian equivalent of the Nuremberg trials; on the contrary, there was an amnesty declared for many fascist crimes. At the administrative level, continuity rather than change was common. Many former fascists simply blended into the woodwork and got on with the job, covered by the rhetoric of anti-fascism and Italian “victimhood”.

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For several decades this reading of the past held. The Italian Republic, explicitly founded on the values of the Resistance, made anti-fascism its official discourse. Positions were forced to change in the Seventies when the victim paradigm was challenged by an Italian historian, Renzo De Felice, who said in his massive biography of Mussolini that there had been a “mass consensus” among Italians for fascism. Italians had been complicit with the regime — perpetrators, not victims. Here, surely, was the moment for Italy to come to terms with its past. Strangely though, it didn’t happen. What happened instead was that mass consensus for fascism was seen as legitimising the regime. The argument went: “If we were all fascists, and if, as we know, Italians are ‘good people’, then fascism cannot have been so bad.” Again Italians were off the hook. If, as victims of fascism, they bore no responsibility, as supporters of what was now cast as a benign dictatorship, they had nothing to explain. Germans had a past that could never pass; Italians a past that presented no problems.

The historical roots of today’s indulgence, sometimes even nostalgia, towards Mussolini lie in the belief that, at the end of the day, he did “many good things”. It is a view often purveyed — perhaps unintentionally and possibly because of the lack of other materials — by the media, which continues to show images of the regime that are drawn from fascist propaganda and are, therefore, very obviously, favourable to the regime. The self-representation of fascism remains very much the lens through which the regime is viewed. It is, of course, a world of one success after another: of marshlands drained, trains on time, healthy babies, and smiling faces. It all looks very convincing. The violence of the regime has been airbrushed out of the picture. The constant police repression is glossed over. We rarely see signs of the half-a-million Italian casualties whose deaths in the course of the Second World War were directly attributable to fascist policies, even less so of the tens of thousands of Africans killed in the colonial massacres of the Thirties. In these circumstances, psychological removal becomes easy.

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The centenary of the March on Rome took place against this backdrop. Some may ask why it was commemorated at all, but the real question is: what is the significance of the March today? Here, the answer is less clear-cut than one might expect. Italian attitudes to fascism are often ambivalent: collective memory of Mussolini’s regime reflects what many people would like to believe rather than the harsh reality. It is a distortion which seems to run in parallel with the current drift to the Right in both European and American politics. Many of those factors that have helped the French, Hungarian, and Polish Right (all friends of Meloni) to preach and, where possible, practice an “illiberal democracy” are present in Italy. Dissatisfaction with what all too often looks like political drift, the mounting problems of representative democracy, economic instability accompanied by constant cuts in social services, immigration — these are all factors that serve to fuel a “memory” of a dictator who, as the slogan went, “was always right”.

It is a surprising destiny for a man who, in 1945, was execrated and reviled by Italians, but not so surprising in the history of dictators. Stalin, Ceaușescu, Franco all have their supporters nowadays. It suggests that, even though Meloni may denounce (unconvincingly) Italy’s fascist past, the admirers of Mussolini are likely to flock in ever greater numbers to Predappio.

But in the odd moment during the performance when I briefly regained the ability to think, I was struck by the fact that everyone in the cast spoke, and sang, with American accents. It’s clear enough from the show’s cast list that pretty much every performer is UK-born. The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is, obviously, in the UK. Frozen is set in a fictional country with Nordic styling. Why, then, the accent?

It would have been jarring to see the Frozen story done with English accents — but equally, it’s hard to think of a more vivid example of American soft power than a stage full of English actors performing an American movie in American accents. And of all the delivery mechanisms for that soft power, there are few more pervasive, and powerful, than the American cultural colossus Walt Disney.

Disney, a $200 billion corporate and creative titan, is itself an instance of the American Dream: founded by two Midwesterners on creativity, hard work, sweating employees, and the ruthless protection of copyright. (They’ll even sue day care centres for using Disney images without a licence.) In Disney’s princesses, we can trace the evolution of that American Dream.

The first two, Snow White (1937) and Cinderella (1950), are straight retellings of European fairy tales: in effect, transposing Old World mythologies to New World media. But the ideology that would, in time, replace those mythologies was already taking shape on a far bigger scale.

In 1918, five years before Disney was founded, President Woodrow Wilson responded to the bloodbath of Europe’s first Great War with Fourteen Points. Here he laid out the germinal version of the now-familiar “rules-based international order”, and set America against overt imperialism, declaring that “the day of conquest and aggrandisement” was over. He declared: “National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self determination’ is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action.”

Of course, Wilson’s proposed solution did not result in lasting peace. Between Snow White and Cinderella, the Old World went to war again, and by the time peace was declared in 1945, some 70-85 million people had died. During that time, European confidence in their traditions, faith, and political legitimacy grew as exhausted as their coffers.

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In the shattered aftermath, the governments of 50 nations including Britain and the United States founded the United Nations. Conveniently for the still-confident and far-from-exhausted United States, this new body built a one-way ratchet for dismantling rival empires into its founding charter, via an obligation to “promote self-government” including across then-colonial holdings. But if more than a little geopolitical self-interest crept into the American approach to post-war peace, it was not a purely cynical project. Twentieth-century American culture was also magnetic: against the grim background of post-war Europe, it’s not difficult to understand how the ebullience, informality and sheer prosperity of American products and entertainment might have been so appealing.

As Europe’s empires fell apart piece by piece, aided in no small way by the universal solvent of American-style liberal democracy, so America grew more confident — and Disney moved from transposing to re-working the Old World’s mythical legacy. Sleeping Beauty (1959) was the first princess to make significant changes to the fairy tale: no longer a barely-veiled allegory of female sexual awakening, in Disney’s hands it became a tale of heroic (and more or less overtly Christian) masculine agency fit for a now-ascendant superpower.

Following the deaths of Walt and Roy Disney in 1966 and 1971 respectively, there were no princesses for a couple of decades — at least until history ended. But a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the princess machine roared to life again, and with a confidence born of its standing as the foremost cultural behemoth in the world’s only superpower, Disney flung caution to the wind.

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The traditional princess stories were rewritten in alignment with the now-ascendant American mythos of “self determination”. The Little Mermaid (1990) inverts the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale: a story about the tragic consequences of trying to be what you aren’t becomes one about overcoming family constraints to become whatever you want to be. In Beauty and the Beast (1992), bookish Belle escapes stifling provincial life for a higher destiny (and a nicer house). Tangled (2010) stars a Rapunzel who saves her prince, rather than the other way round, even as she affects her own escape from the tower. And by the time we get to the 21st century’s best-loved princess — Elsa, in Frozen (2013) — the source myth is all but unrecognisable, beneath a story about the perils of repressing your true nature.

Just as the New World redesigned older mythologies to fit its own increasingly dominant narrative, it became clear that for “self determination” to be truly universal, its European legacy had to be sidelined as well. To begin with, this simply meant adding stories appropriated from further afield, such as Arabian Nights (Aladdin, 1993) or the Ballad of Mulan (Mulan, 1998), to deliver a range of self-actualising princesses with different skin tones.

That’s all gone wrong since the End of History itself came to an end. Now, even Disney’s princesses are growing politicised. But just as the Global War on Terror turned the spread of democracy from a matter of leading by example to one of imposing by force, so too the American culture those princesses deliver to little girls worldwide has grown less cohesive, less ebullient, and simultaneously more fractious and moralistic. In turn, this has paralleled a slow stagnation in American culture and lifestyle, notably for those further down the food chain, where the middle class has been shrinking since the Seventies — even as incomes continue to rise for the wealthiest.

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This slow dimming of the American Dream has brought increasingly bitter internal politics — and with this, the Disney soft power juggernaut has turned its focus inward, proffering not entrancing, confident morality tales that project the American moral vision outward, but didactic ones that project an identitarian update of that moral vision toward Americans themselves. And, in particular, toward those Americans who retain a residual fondness for what remains of the New World’s European cultural legacy.

A trajectory already well under way by the early 2010s, this has now so fully permeated ‘educated’ American opinion that by 2018 undergraduates were writing papers about historic racism and sexism in the Disney canon. And thus, inexorably, Disney has found itself dragged into the culture war, via a growing conflict between the mostly progressive views of its staff and a Disney-buying American public who don’t necessarily share those views.

For the bottom line is that a soft-power colossus on the scale of Disney could only avoid politics as long as the imperium itself was in agreement on the fundamentals. Now, though, this is no longer the case, and the result is a running battle for who owns the princesses. That battle has seen, among other recent skirmishes, a backlash to multiracial casting decisions for live-action remakes of Snow White and The Little Mermaid; a subsequent anti-racist backlash-to-the-backlash; and even a revocation of Disney’s special tax status in Orlando following the company’s intervention in Florida legislation on sex education in schools.

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But amid the fighting over the meaning of Disney’s princesses, what will happen to the future stories? Can there even be new princesses? The demand for more sparkly dresses is, after all, insatiable. And you only have to glance at the extremely strong feelings on both sides of the Atlantic prompted by Meghan Markle’s brief and divisive brush with the British monarchy, to see that even a nation founded in repudiating the Crown still often longs for a sprinkle of royal magic.

But when every new work is minutely scrutinised for the stereotypes it reinforces or challenges, and assessed less on narrative power than compliance with “self determination”, what does this do to the storytelling? Well, consider that the only character in Encanto, the most recent big-ticket Disney animation, who has experienced any significant real-life adventure is the heroine’s grandmother. And Abuela’s adventures, which happened long before the movie takes place, are portrayed as a traumatic backstory that results in her stifling her grandchildren’s self-actualisation. In effect, it’s a Disney princess adventure about the impossibility, under modern conditions, of making Disney princess adventures.

In the name of universal self-actualisation, then, the ascendant American imperium is now seeking to sand its culture free of all Old-World legacies and associated stereotypes. But this raises the question of whether a stereotype-free princess story would even be possible. What are stories, after all, except stereotypes which we embrace imaginatively? And it’s far from clear whether a 21st-century America suffering from a self-inflicted inability to tell compelling stories can ever be as internationally influential as the 20th-century version that propelled the Land of the Free to global hegemony.

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But even if it can’t, both Disney and the American imperium still have a very long way to fall. Queen Elizabeth II may have been Britain’s longest-ever serving monarch, but (as attested by the sea of blue sparkly nylon in Covent Garden last Sunday) the hearts of countless six-year-old girls around the world belong irretrievably to Queen Elsa.

And even if, as some predict, the American Dream really has peaked, it took the British empire a long time to come apart. Former colonial outposts are often the last to abandon the imperial ways: there are, to this day, Anglican schools in parts of the world a long way from England, where imperial-era English is spoken with an elegance long since vanished from the British Isles. I suspect that long after the global American empire is a dim memory, there will still be little girls in far-flung places, playing ice princesses in glittery, grimy blue nylon.

These episodes of our history have been evoked repeatedly in recent days — even since we heard that, come January, if a Whitehall-devised “reasonable worst case scenario” plays out, the UK will face four days of planned power cuts. If they come, the blackouts will strike industry, rail services, government buildings, even homes — just at the moment when two-thirds of UK households face being driven into fuel poverty by rocketing energy prices. This raises the grim possibility of people struggling to pay bills for a service which, for several days, they won’t even receive.

But if, as a government source insists, this is just contingency planning and is “never going to happen”, why did this story grab so much attention? Because the mere prospect of blackouts conjures images of past national crises — crises which traumatised society, but have also been romanticised.

The possibility of nationally coordinated power cuts only really began with the establishment of the National Grid in 1938, as it stitched the country together with cables and pylons. The Grid had been conceived by the Stanley Baldwin government as a state-backed coordinator of commercial firms — a typically Baldwin-esque compromise between public and private sector, symbolic of his dreams of a moderate, modernising democracy. Baldwin might well have baulked at the state-enforced blackouts of the Second World War, policed by overbearing ARP wardens. But in the face of Nazi attack, this too was a rough-and-ready form of national unity — even if that unity was mainly audible in the universal grumbling at having to put boards over the windows every evening, and then having to stay in. Sticking to and putting up with the blackout became the epitome of the much-mythologised Blitz spirit, not least for those who were never actually bombed.

So in February 1972, when blackouts became a dire necessity for a very different reason, sentimental images of wartime stoicism were readily to hand, waiting to be fired up along with the emergency oil lamps. But this time, the “war” causing the blackouts was between Edward Heath’s government and the National Union of Mineworkers. In pursuit of a pay rise, the NUM turned the electricity supply into the site of an all-out struggle for power. Ministers simply did not anticipate that the miners would mount a highly-organised, startlingly creative campaign. But they found themselves up against “flying” pickets fanning out across the country to close docks, coal depots and especially power stations — including a picket of Battersea Power Station conducted with boats on the Thames, with the aid of a loudhailer. The strike won widespread backing from railway workers and dockers. The ordinary, tedious wiring of everyday life, and the work needed to keep it running, suddenly became political.

And so, with the availability of electricity falling fast, the government was forced to declare a state of emergency, imposing power cuts to push consumption down. Medium-sized firms were shocked to find themselves on a three-day electricity week. A million people were laid off. As though to symbolise the chaos, streetlights started coming on in daylight. Why, moaned the Times, had ministers not seen all this coming? The Central Electricity Generating Board warned that if demand were not reduced, they would have to do “block” cuts, “blacking out large areas indiscriminately”. Hospitals included. Already, a doctor was telling the Mirror that two hospitals had been hit by blackouts with no warning, which could easily have killed patients. Finally, the cabinet, forced to meet by candlelight, gave in.

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Unlike in the Forties, this time the lights going out signified not shared national fortitude, but the overweening power of the unions, and the government’s failure to plan. Heath set up a Civil Contingencies Unit to prepare for future emergencies, and when the miners struck again two years later, he declared a three-day week pre-emptively. But after another round of blackouts, the electorate decided to try Labour instead. Margaret Thatcher vowed that, if and when she faced the miners, the lights would stay on.

The miner’s strikes may be a tale unique to this country, but it wasn’t only Britain struggling to keep the lights on. No blackout captured the political failures of the Seventies more dramatically than the one that struck a near-bankrupt New York City on the sweltering night of 13 July 1977. It’s one of those tales of the American berserk that unfolds almost as neatly as a movie. Unlike Heath’s power cuts, the proximate cause was random — a series of lightning strikes — but the blackout was soon helped along by the failings of the power company, Consolidated Edison. The “night of terror” that followed snapped Gotham’s advancing decay into sharp focus. This was the city of Taxi Driver; there was even a serial killer, “Son of Sam”, roaming the five boroughs. Not an ideal set-up for finding yourself suddenly stuck in a stalled, pitch-black subway train, let alone a lift. The city was already drowning in a crime wave; now looting raged. The main source of light in some areas was provided by the many zealous arsonists. Like its mobs, New York’s politicians were held to have completely lost control. The Mayor, Abe Beame, blamed Consolidated Edison, but, like Heath’s, his career was flickering out.

Today, the blackout remains a shorthand for political calamity, for Left and Right alike. In 2015, when a writer for the Mail on Sunday sketched out the horrors of a future Corbyn-run Britain, along with rationing and riots, the doomsday scenario duly included the lights going out. In 2019, in his BBC TV series Years and Years, Russell T. Davies imagined the authoritarian populist Britain of 2028 — complete with a power cut-inducing cyberattack. Whether the attack is internal or external, the blackout captures like nothing else the knowledge that millions of total strangers and the government are all wired up together, and that it may not end well.

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But what’s really striking is that the lights going out isn’t just a harbinger of the apocalypse: the idea is creative. Once theatres could be lit electrically, it did not take all that long for writers and directors to spot the imaginative possibilities. Plunging a scene suddenly into darkness could hammer home a punchline, underline an irony, or send up characters’ helplessness. Mid-century stage thrillers loved to snap the stage to black, with gunshots and screams to follow. The playwright Peter Shaffer forged an entire comedy — called, inevitably, Black Comedy — out of the conceit of showing actors stumbling around in a blackout, but with the theatre lights on full. RF Delderfield’s play Worm’s Eye View made light of the difficulties of trying to meet wartime blackout rules by taking out a bulb. One actor who appeared in it, David Baron, turned a similar scene into something much more sinister once he started writing under his real name, Harold Pinter. In his pioneering early plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, blackouts dramatise how instantly a hostile world can turn on you.

Yet equally, they open up radical possibilities. In her 2006 novel, The Night Watch, Sarah Waters re-imagines the blackouts of the Second World War not only as a frightening nuisance, but as a liberation from prying eyes. A lesbian couple can do things in a pitch-black London doorway that become impossible again in peacetime. The darkness also opened up freedoms for women who preferred male callers. Amid all the accounts of fear and trauma from the 1977 New York blackout, and the enthusiasm of the looters and arsonists, there is also the voice of a young woman rhapsodising that the experience was “far out!” For good or ill, this curious phenomenon defamiliarises the everyday, casting it in a strange new (lack of) light. Like plays, movies and fiction, blackouts signal that the hard limits framing how we live may not be quite so solid after all.

So perhaps that’s one reason why the shadow of blackouts this winter catches our imagination. As in 1972, the boring, taken-for-granted wiring of everyday life is becoming political. Our current blackout scenario centres on a new cable under the North Sea, which sends hydroelectric power to the UK from a Norwegian power station — but may send rather less if Norway’s low water levels force it to prioritise domestic energy production. This is suddenly something that might affect whether we can work or cook — like the standards of maintenance of French nuclear reactors, which may also leave the UK short of power.

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For critics of current energy policy, all this draws attention to a series of long unremarked political choices, which are now registering in the unnerving mix of rocketing prices and possible blackouts. Professor Richard Jones, formerly of the Industrial Strategy Commission, points to the UK’s increased reliance on gas imports to meet our overall energy needs, as North Sea production has declined. At the same time, more countries have started competing to buy gas. Cross-continental pipelines have opened up a global gas market — to which, Professor Jones suggests, we have chosen to leave ourselves highly exposed, in the belief that the market is the best means to access cheap energy. In the Seventies, the UK was deeply dependent on domestic coal and its workforce; now we are dependent on the vagaries of foreign gas supply. So even though the UK is not supplied directly by Russia, President Putin’s withholding of gas still threatens us.

Others blame the Cameron government’s 2013 decision to roll back investment in energy efficiency and renewable domestic energy sources, or, conversely, the green levy. The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy insists that UK supplies are diverse and secure. But former Downing Street chief adviser Dominic Cummings argued recently that “Westminster’s disastrous handling of energy” goes back well beyond the current government, and that “a blackout would belatedly lay bare the consequences of our under-investing ways”.

If the worst-case scenario does happen, it may be that we choose to cast this as another Blitz, and stoically put up with it. But its impact could yet turn out to be more like what happened in the wake of the power cuts of the Seventies. For politicians, and eventually much of the public, in the years after the 1972 miners’ strike, the blackouts highlighted the folly of giving an increasingly radical union the power to shut off the country’s supplies, and the government’s failure to plan far enough ahead to avoid them. Perhaps, in time, a new series of power cuts will come to seem like a rare moment of romance in our wired-up, screen-saturated lives. But in the meantime, blackouts may once again cast a shadow over some long-accepted political choices.

***

Phil Tinline’s most recent series, Pay Freezes, is available on BBC Sounds. His book The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares has just been published by Hurst.

The word “ideology” is often used as a synonym for political ideas, a corruption of language that conceals its fundamentally anti-political character. In the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, primary models for English republicanism and the American Founders, politics was understood to be the collective determination of matters of common concern through public debate. As Aristotle taught, politics consists in the citizenly exercise of logos, the uniquely human power of intelligent speech. While voice registers private feelings — think of animal purrs and yelps — speech reveals what is good and bad, just and unjust, binding us together in the imperfect apprehension of realities greater than our individual selves.

But ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”, it sees them only as groups to be acted upon. The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.

The political philosopher Raymond Aron defined ideology quite precisely as “the synthesis of an interpretation of history and of a programme of action toward a future predicted or hoped for”. In this synthesis, a theory about the historical origins of real or alleged social ills is pressed into the service of an imagined future in which those ills will be cured. The theory is not to be judged solely, or even primarily, by its adequacy in describing the historical record as it presents itself to an informed and inquiring mind. Rather, it is to be judged by the promised consequences of the programme of action it underwrites. Of course, ideological prophecy, appearing in times of organic or manufactured crisis when everything assumes an air of urgency, must be taken on faith.

It follows that the ideological synthesis remains incomplete until the programme of action is implemented. Marx famously claimed that “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. But Marx, whose broad classical education informed his great critique of capitalism, remained at the level of philosophy. His interpretation of history achieved its stated end only when it was put into practice, however crudely, by Communist revolutionaries, starting with Lenin. By his own standards, Marx’s philosophy cannot be cleanly separated from the historical depredations of Marxism.

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Scientific tyranny has captured America

By Jacob Howland

Although ideological regimes were not unheard of in antiquity, ideology’s focus on efficacy rather than truth, its assumption that history is a problem awaiting a rational solution, and its elevation of the possibilities of a deliberately constructed future over the present constraints of the actual world, are characteristically modern. Its closest analogue is the phenomenon of technology, the harnessing of significant social resources to achieve mastery over nature through mathematical and experimental science. Formulated by the early modern philosophers Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the programme of technology rejected inherited intellectual foundations, including the guidance of God or nature.

Descartes, a professed believer whose pencil-thin moustache gave him an unmistakable air of duplicity, reduced the natural or created world to the mathematical abstraction of spatial extension, which is perfectly accessible to algebraic geometry but bears no trace of implicit order or divine goodness. And he divided his profoundly skeptical Meditations and Discourse on Method into six parts, in rivalrous imitation, scholars tell us, of the first six days of God’s creation. Liberated by technology from dependence on God and history, man and world could be fashioned in the image of human desires.

Descartes prophesied a future in which “the common good of all men” would be secured by “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth”, and by the elimination of “an infinity of maladies, both of body and mind”. Should biological science ever eliminate death due to “the infirmities of old age”, as he dared to hope, what would likely be a fresh earthly hell would render the question of the afterlife largely moot. Here, too, an ill-formed utopian vision licenses fundamental social transformation.

But there is a deeper and more important connection between ideology and technology. Ideology is in fact a social technology. The implementation of an ideological programme is an experiment testing the hypothesis that a radiant future can be achieved if only political, social, and economic relations are radically restructured, a process that always involves the preliminary destruction of existing realities. That future, like Descartes’s infinity of satisfactions, is never concretely described and never actually arrives. (Marx imagined a leisurely existence spent fishing, hunting, and philosophising, although philosophising would presumably be pointless when the world no longer needs changing.) This unscientific hypothesis is then tested on actual human subjects.

In the United States, we are currently engaged in many such experiments simultaneously, all undertaken in the name of social justice. What happens when violent protestors are encouraged to riot in our cities, crimes go unprosecuted, and bails are waived? Or biological males are permitted to use women’s restrooms and live in their cellblocks? Or schoolchildren are indoctrinated with identity politics, while professors are required to pledge support for diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas as a condition of employment? Or borders are thrown open to illegal immigrants who enjoy privileges and benefits not extended to citizens? No sensible person would want to find out. But ideology is always and everywhere opposed to the moderate middle ground, not only of politics, but of the general opinion and sentiment that goes by the name of common sense.

History is littered with examples of malicious ideological experiments, which in good Baconian form observe nature — in this case, human nature — not “free and large”, but “under constraint and vexed… forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded”. What is to my knowledge the first such experiment occurred after the Athenians were starved into submission at the end the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, when the Spartans installed an oligarchy known as the Thirty. The regime was led by Plato’s aristocratic cousin Critias, who flattered himself with the thought that he was a greater philosopher, statesman, and poet than his illustrious ancestor Solon. In Plato’s dialogue Charmides, Critias advances a vacuous conception of rule by a “science of sciences” — an ancient prototype of idéologie, which Tracy considered to be a “theory of theories”. According to Lysias, an eyewitness, the Thirty proposed “to purge the city of unjust men, and to turn the rest of the citizens toward virtue and justice” by restoring what they claimed was the ancestral Athenian constitution. The oligarchs proceeded to disenfranchise, disarm, and expel large segments of the population and finally to rob and murder their political opponents, putting to death roughly 1,500 Athenians — perhaps 3% of the citizen body.

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The ideological tyranny of the Thirty left no lasting mark outside of Athens. This was not the case with Communism and Nazism, which also disenfranchised, robbed, deported, and murdered large numbers of people, but did so with modern managerial and industrial efficiency. As Alain Besançon observes in his short but indispensable book A Century of Horrors, these ideologies had much in common. They both aimed to achieve a perfect society by eliminating the evil that hindered its creation. They claimed to seek the good, either of the German people or of all mankind. They used pseudo-sciences like dialectical materialism and race-based eugenics to justify and wield their power. Most important, they claimed the right to kill, and did so on an unprecedented scale.

The Nazis murdered roughly 17 million unarmed civilians, not including those who died in aerial bombings and other ordinary acts of war. After almost 80 years, historians are still compiling a list of ghettoes and camps in Germany and Nazi-occupied territory. As of March 2013, the total number identified by researchers stood at 42,500. But here as elsewhere, the National Socialists were students of the Marxist ones. It was the Soviets who invented and systematised the use of combination slave-labour and death camps, and the concentrationary universe of the Gulag covered an even greater geographical area than the Nazi Lagers. Lenin and Stalin also anticipated Hitler in the use of poison gas (including mobile gas vans), mass deportation, and, in the great famines of 1921-22 and 1930-33, targeted starvation to liquidate what Lenin called “harmful insects”.

The Black Book of Communism estimates that Communist regimes murdered between 85 and 100 million of their own people during the 20^th century, fulfilling the eerie prophecy in Dostoevsky’s Demons that socialism’s cure for the world’s ills would involve “lopping off a hundred million heads”. And while Besançon regards the Holocaust as the “absolute zero” of murderous intensity, he rightly observes that “communism brought about a more widespread and deeper moral destruction” than Nazism. Thoroughly discredited by the Holocaust, Nazism exited the world stage in 1945, but Communism officially endures today in China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Marxism furthermore remains a respectable alternative to capitalism in the eyes of many Westerners, even including some who acknowledge the aforementioned facts. This is itself due, in large measure, to the ideological distortion and suppression of history.

Ideology’s most horrific social experiments illustrate several points that apply also to the “Totalitarianism Lite” of contemporary American life. First, while human beings naturally form social groups for common purposes, ideology assumes that organic associations cannot support a good society, which must be engineered from the top down. This assumption, which no ideological experimentation has ever sustained, makes up in arrogance what it lacks in humility.

Second, ideology abjures persuasion, preferring what Hannah Arendt called “mute coercion”. We see this today in the insistence that certain widely-shared opinions that were uncontroversial only a few years ago are so morally illegitimate that they do not deserve a hearing. We see it in the fact that those who publicly voice such opinions are commonly smeared, hounded, denied financial services, investigated, and fired, even by institutions that are publicly committed to diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.

Third, ideology always involves the scapegoating and purging of opponents. Today these primitive religious rituals, enacted within the framework of a secularised and apocalyptic Christianity, include the sanctification of “victims” and the (for now metaphorical) public crucifixion of “oppressors”. Those who are targeted by, or resist, the ideological programme — denounced variously as kulaks, capitalist roadsters, vermin, or white supremacists — must, with the exception of a few penitents who are mercifully spared, be decisively defeated in battle with the forces of good. For only then will the earthy salvation of a just and harmonious society be achievable.

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In modern times, the template for the use of violence in the name of the highest political and moral ideals was established in the French Revolution. Marching under the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Revolution took less than five years to move from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Terror of Robespierre and the genocidal destruction of the Vendée, a French Department where the Revolutionaries responded to a peasant rebellion by slaughtering roughly 15% of the population. The trajectory from utopian fervour to nihilistic bloodshed, traversed over the past century in countries scattered across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is unsurprising. One could hardly expect a programme of radical social transformation that demonises its opponents to be free of bloodshed.

Anyone who thinks that the United States could not descend into similarly horrifying violence is deluded. Ideology is a highly communicable social contagion that infects people who are morally immunocompromised, and today it poses a far greater threat to human beings than any merely biological virus. It always attracts thugs, sadists, and those who lust for power, groups that, once revolutionary fervour gives way to dictatorship, always outnumber true believers. But it also exploits the universal human longing for social validation and fear of being cast out. These risk factors are exponentially amplified by the tribalising social and news-media feedback loops that now fill the vacuum left by a permanent moral order, inherent in nature or revealed by God —notions that, owing to the seductions of technology, were arguably doomed at modernity’s inception.

The inevitable consequence of ideological infection is brain rot. Besançon justly remarks that “it is not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology”. Intelligence, after all, is an ongoing attentiveness to reality that is inconsistent with wilfulness and fantasy. Nor can it take root in the sterile soil of widespread cultural repudiation. This is why all ideological regimes are without exception plagued by sheer ineptitude.

Just consider: the anti-Jewish decrees of April 1933 stripped a quarter of Germany’s physicists of their livelihood, including 11 who had earned or would earn Nobel prizes, and left German research in atomic physics in shambles—  a lucky break for the Allies. Trofim Lysenko, a barely literate agronomist who won Stalin’s ear, vilified the work of the geneticist Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, as “fascist, bourgeois-capitalistic, and inspired by clerics”. Thousands of biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed for opposing Lysenko’s crackpot theories, which exacerbated famines that killed many millions of people in the U.S.S.R. and China (where Mao adopted his methods in the Fifties). Up to 70% of the U.S.S.R.’s active engineers were arrested and sentenced without trial in 1930, while Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan to build heavy industry was in full swing. Not to be outdone, China has now painted itself into a corner with its brutally tyrannical zero-Covid lockdowns, which immiserated its population and destroyed the economy but cannot be fully lifted without destroying the credibility of the Communist Party.

And then there is the gross incompetence of the Biden administration. While ideologically-induced stupidity may not fully explain this phenomenon, it’s a huge contributing factor. The administration’s ineptitude is already provoking what looks to be a strong political backlash, and if we are very, very lucky, we may be able to avoid major disasters before the 2024 elections. But a new government will make little difference. The rot has penetrated every essential institution in the United States, and the long-term picture is bleak. Nor is there solace in the fact that we Americans are by no means alone. Whoever said misery loves company wasn’t thinking about the ideological endgame of liberal democracy.

But such is the nervousness that hangs over the monarchy’s future, in any rendition of the national anthem there is a palpable charge on the words, “long to reign over us, God save the Queen”. In that moment, one can sense a shivering fear that the Queen’s death may open the path to a troubling future where the forces stacked against the British monarchy, from outside and in, begin to overwhelm it — without there being any unifying idea about what could come next.

The Queen’s being was not always fused in this way with a near ideal form of British monarchy. The joyful festivities for the Silver Jubilee bank holiday in June 1977, for example, felt as much about a country needing to remind itself that one purpose of a monarchy is to create such a national occasion, as a celebration of the Queen herself.

Since Victoria’s reign established the idea that the monarchy’s legitimacy had, in part, to rest on public affection, the British have not continuously loved quietude in their monarchs. There was nothing austere about Edward VII: he ate excessively, smoked too much, gambled, and had a string of mistresses. Queen Victoria feared her son would bring down the monarchy. But after Edward VII died in May 1910, throngs of people waited through the night under a deluge of rain outside Westminster Hall to see the coffin of a man who appeared, at least, rather to enjoy being King. When it came to his funeral procession, the crowds were much larger than they were for his mother.

But the present Queen is a successful part of a continuous story about duty that began with the monarchy her grandfather George V established. She is the last of a family trio. Although Edward VII did as much for the modern monarchy as his parents, his reign belongs to another world, one in which the British monarch still had real political influence. During the constitutional crisis of 1909-10, Edward VII successfully demanded a general election before the Liberal government could pass its budget after its defeat in the House of Lords, and then another before it could expect to legislate to remove the Lords’ right of veto — although he did not live to see that vote.

In Europe, he sought to check German power, leaving the Kaiser convinced his uncle was “Satan”, standing between Germany and its world destiny. By visiting Paris in 1903, against the advice of British officials, and transforming in just four days French public opinion of him, he played his part in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Working his other nephew, Tsar Nicholas II, while influencing the appointments of the British ambassador in St Petersburg and the Russian ambassador at the Court of St James’, he was also instrumental in realising the 1907 Anglo Russian Entente.

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As the pre-1914 European world approached its dissolution, Edward VII, as elder statesman of a continent-wide royal family dominated by Victoria and Albert’s descendants, appeared a peacemaker. A popular song in 1909 proclaimed “as long as there’s a King like good King Edward there’ll be no war”. On the King’s sudden death, the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky declared: “We have lost the mainstay of our foreign policy.” In France, Edward was mourned in the republican corridors of power in Paris and in provincial towns. When the moment of crisis arrived in August 1914, leaving the Kaiser to contemplate the terrible necessity for Germany to wage war against both Russia and France to achieve any of his ambitions, he complained bitterly that “the dead Edward was stronger than the living one”.

No European monarch could ever have such hope and dread projected onto them again. By the end of the First Word War, Edward VII’s second son had turned Prince Albert’s House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha into the Windsors, surrendered the use of all German titles, and refused asylum to the Tsar and Tsarina, both his first cousins, to protect the British monarchy from the sins of association. Instead of continental leadership, George V ­— who had become heir on the death of his older brother from the Russian flu — offered Britain the idea of a monarchy based on dutiful, quiet service and a largely domestic royal family.

Of course, the Windsor monarchy was still bound to the empire in the Twenties. George V wanted to be an imperial king replete with imperial ceremony; before the war, he had insisted on travelling to Delhi to be crowned Emperor of India. But, whatever its creator’s imperial emotions, the post-1914 monarchy had, in a world where European decline was inescapable, to be detachable from empire. A good part of the Queen’s achievement has been to facilitate that imaginative separation while, through the Commonwealth, preventing the monarchy falling into British parochialism detached from the wider world.

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Above all, the emotional rituals of the new Windsor monarchy were tied to the rituals of remembrance created by the losses of the First World War. These liturgies were reinvigorated by the Second World War both in its national mythos of virtuous sacrifice and the imperial mobilisation of the Indian Army as the largest volunteer force in history. On 11 November 1920, George V unveiled the Cenotaph as part of a procession to Westminster Abbey for the funeral of the Unknown Warrior. On entering the Abbey two-and-a-half years later for her wedding to the future George VI, the then Duchess of York – the future Queen Mother – laid her bouquet on the tomb in honour of her brother who fell at the Battle of Loos, beginning a tradition for royal brides, upheld by the Queen and later the Duchess of Cambridge. At her own request, the Queen Mother’s funeral wreath was placed on the grave. The fusion of the seasons of monarchical life with the national remembrance of war is why the Queen’s absence from last year’s Cenotaph service was such a watershed moment. Nothing could state more potently that her reign is coming to an end.

In its post-1914 casting, the monarchy was far from constitutionally irrelevant. George V played his part in normalising Labour governments, and effectively demanded that Ramsay MacDonald form the National government when MacDonald came to the Palace to resign in August 1931. Until the Conservative party changed its leadership rules, the monarch had the formal discretion to choose a Conservative Prime Minister on the departure on an incumbent, a power the Queen exercised when she chose Harold Macmillan in January 1957 and Lord Douglas-Home in October 1963. But during George V’s reign, a great deal of constitutional service became passive: dealing with boxes without active responsibility for their content and performing the constitutional ceremony of the opening of Parliament.

In this requirement for quiescence lay a problem that would haunt George V and perhaps does the Queen. It is not only the monarch who must accept an inert role, but the heir after years of waiting for the Crown to be theirs. In George V’s case, his eldest son’s temperamental constitutional unsuitability was thoroughly compounded by his unwillingness to make a conventional marriage and have children.

But Edward VIII’s short reign paradoxically strengthened the Windsor monarchy. Once George VI acceded to the throne, he was helped by the very fecklessness of his older brother. What story could more demonstrate the idea of necessary duty than one where the stammering second son had to take the Crown from a once-idolised brother and remake himself as a public man? During the Second World War all aspects of the Windsor monarchy became one when that King and his Queen partook in the national experience of aerial assault by working in Buckingham Palace during the Blitz and refusing ministerial advice to send the young princesses to Canada.

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The Queen’s inheritance of George V’s monarchy was complex. As was the case with her grandfather and father, the duties of the Crown should not have fallen upon her. But by the time she was born in 1926, her father had, given his brother’s attitude towards marriage, good reasons to suspect they eventually could; and her grandfather hoped, while she was too young really to comprehend what was happening around her, they would. If she shares with them an ability to accommodate duty foisted by circumstance, her temperamental dislike of excess has had to work, not in an age of war but amid rapidly rising consumerism and then a turn to performative public displays of grief. To heighten the dissociation, the appetite for communal expressions of emotion began in the days after Princess Diana’s death, when the Queen’s self-containment was the very opposite of the new aesthetic.

Given this divergence between the monarch and the times, it is perhaps unsurprising that the wholehearted affection felt for the Queen has only come in the second half of her life. This is in part the effect of the sheer duration of her endurance. But it is a function, too, of her character. She has absorbed change she had little reason to like, and so reinforced the story of duty to which the House of Windsor laid claim. Precisely because the country is significantly more secular than when she came to the throne, her Christianity is also an asset. Where the religious rituals of national life might appear hollow, she plays her part blessed by faith. Since some of the symbols are complex in a multi-national Union that was never a spiritual union, she also appears at ease in the ambiguity, seen at worship as she is at Sandringham in a church of which she is head and at Balmoral at Crathie Kirk, a church where she is not. As the United Kingdom has become more divided, she has simply carried on as head of state, as if as long as she performs her duty, the country will be more than it seems on the surface to be.

But the idea of the domestic royal family has been a greater burden for the Queen than it was even for her grandfather. If, on the other side of her reign, lies a great unknown, it is one she has played her part in bringing about. What she has given of her own qualities to the kingdom coexists with mishaps with her heirs. In marrying her third-cousin for love, she inserted the Windsors back into the part of Victoria and Albert’s continental diaspora that had made it back to Britain through the wreckage of the First World War and its aftermath. But no more European royal weddings would materialise. Instead, Prince Charles was left caught between the idea he could marry for love and the eventual necessity of a near arranged domestic aristocratic marriage he was ill-equipped to tolerate. Meanwhile, the Queen’s longevity means that there have been three generations of spares to pain and embarrass her. Like George V before her, the Queen will not to live to see where the story of her life as royal parent of Prince Andrew and grandparent of Prince Harry ends.

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For a moment, the future can wait, as it did for George V. His Silver Jubilee in May 1935, six months before his death, turned out to be an emotional occasion. After the crowds had lined the streets to see him and Queen Mary process to a service at St Paul’s, he took to the radio to declare: “I can only say to you, my very dear people, that the Queen and I thank you from the depths of our hearts for all the loyalty — and may I say? — the love which this day and always you have surrounded us.” After driving through the East End, he said, “I’d no idea they felt like that about me.”

The problem he bequeathed the monarchy as a father had an unexpected resolution: Mrs Simpson was the strange grace note in the story, the contingency that spared the country a disastrous monarch during an attempted conquest. Since Andrew and Harry are not heirs who can be broken or redeemed by the Crown, there will be no resolution to the contrasting problems they cause; the Queen must pass them unabridged to Prince Charles.

Beyond his brother and youngest son, Charles will inherit a Crown that has reached a stasis by very virtue of the Queen’s remarkable success. She was sufficiently formed by the Second World War to be George V and George VI’s spiritual heir. But no child or grandchild of hers could ever have been like her, whatever kind of parent or grandparent she was. She must know the future monarchy, if it survives, will be one that has of necessity again been reinvented.

By giving unflinching service according to the Windsor character script and rituals she has emphatically answered the question of what purpose a constitutional monarchy still serves. There will not be such a sharp rejoinder to republicanism ever again. This will be Prince Charles’s burden. It will also belong to us all who are the Queen’s subjects. If we want the monarchy to continue, we will have tacitly to give our consent to leaving the Age of Elizabeth Windsor behind.

Usually — and appropriately — sombre, this year’s commemorations were agonised and dramatic. They kicked off with Berlin’s mayor banning Russian flags from war memorials. Then the city government banned Ukrainian flags — after all, they thought, violent pro-Russian activists might try and tear them down. Instead, Berlin police were filmed confiscating an enormous Ukrainian flag and it was viewed millions of times on social media.

Meanwhile, Olaf Scholz did not visit Moscow on Victory Day, as German Chancellors often do. But nor did he visit Kyiv, despite being invited to do so by Volodymyr Zelenskyy. By evening, the popular German sociologist Harald Welzer was debating Ukraine’s ambassador on a television chat show. What the ambassador did not understand, Welzer told him, was that the 45% of Germans against delivering heavy weaponry to Ukraine might have family memories of conflict. They simply wanted a negotiated ceasefire. Wouldn’t weapon deliveries merely prolong the agony? The memory of World War Two was being used by a German intellectual to argue for a ceasefire with a dictator. Who could have predicted that in 1945?

The new reality has proved to be an unpleasant one for Germany. Russia’s invasion brought out the worst in some Germans. Heated opposition to weapons shipments to Ukraine mirrors the Querdenker movement that took, hysterically and counterproductively, to the streets during the pandemic. Across the political spectrum, and in nearly every segment of society: church leaders, artists, intellectuals, far-Right Putin fans, old-school peaceniks, trade unionists, and huge numbers of social democrats. What unites them all is a special brand of German navel-gazing. “Lumpen pacifism” is the best way to describe it.

This crowd isn’t bothered that the German peace-through-trade policies of the last few decades have failed. Shortly after the war began, Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a “new era” in which Germany’s defence budget would increase to a level proportionate to the country’s size. But on the path towards providing ever-more military aid to Ukraine, he’s wobbled through a minefield of national anxieties: from the chilly prospect of Russia turning off the gas pipelines, to worries about nukes, to good old-fashioned queasiness about supporting violence on the battlefield — in eastern Europe of all places, as if the Wehrmacht still had boots on the ground there.

This is not a fringe movement limited to sandal-wearing Easter Marchers. On April 29, a group of intellectuals and artists spoke out against sending arms: they published an open letter to Scholz in Emma, a magazine edited by veteran German feminist Alice Schwarzer. “The delivery of large quantities of heavy weapons could make Germany itself a party in the war. A Russian counter-attack could trigger the collective defence clause under the Nato treaty and thus the immediate danger of a world war.” An online petition supporting the statement has been signed 225,000 times. Whether he realised it or not, Scholz’s initial reluctance to send heavy weapons to Ukraine was in accord with these sentiments.

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Many of the names on the list are admirable. But the participation of these ‘Professor Doktor’ types reveals a truth about numerous German public intellectuals: they exude ivory tower arrogance. Too many are out of touch with reality. They dismiss the massive responsibility Germany carries in this war — Europe’s largest economy has spent two decades prioritising lovey-dovey vibes with Putin over the security needs of Ukraine, long seen as a buffer zone between Russian and Western Europe.

One of the signatories was the actor Lars Eidinger, famous for his Hamlet. Unsettled by the backlash, he posted on Instagram (in English): “As an eighteen year old man I refused the so called service with the weapon in front of a jury of the German military, the so-called Bundeswehr. The essential question I had to answer was, when one of my beloved ones is threatened with a gun and I had the chance to kill the aggressor — how would I react? My answer was: I would not shoot, to not service the spiral of aggression. I still believe in this ideal today.” In short: “Blood cannot be washed by blood.” You’d hope a man so familiar Shakespeare might have grasped something about human nature. But no, at 46, Eidinger hasn’t progressed much since his days as a teenage conscientious objector.

He belongs to one of the last age groups to face mandatory military service, which was discontinued in 2011. By the Nineties around 50% of young men were opting out, citing moral reservations, and choosing Zivildienst (civilian service) instead. Which is fine, of course, but that sentiment lives on through today, particularly among West Germans shaped by peace-time entitlement and “never again” convictions. As pathological as it might be to cling to such views today, many share Eidinger’s beliefs.

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After reunification in 1990, Germans in West and East, consciously or subconsciously, internalised Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis. Perpetual peace, as Immanuel Kant imagined, was now a no-brainer. In the bright capitalist future cleansed of 20^th century ideological extremity, a united Germany, cloaked by the EU, would gently spread a soft-power message of trade, democracy, and Eurovision throughout the continent. International law would keep nations in check. Conquest and savagery were relegated to the past.

The entire West fell for this, but the Germans more so than any other nation. It let them finally move on from their war guilt. There was an assumption that geopolitical power struggles had vanished with the Berlin Wall. Cosy trade arrangements would turn Putin into a loveable Euro-softy! But this era is over; it died when Russian paratroopers rained down on Hostomel Airport in February. Yet the peaceniks — like the Lutheran Bishop who said it was a good thing for Germans to be “helpless spectators” — are still getting air-time. Other people’s countries are easy to give away aren’t they?

On April 22, a journalist asked Scholz why he’d been timid about heavy arms. He concluded: “I am doing everything to prevent an escalation leading to a third world war. There must be no nuclear war.” Many Germans agreed. In an ARD TV survey carried out the same day, 40% of Germans favoured restraint so as not to provoke Russia.

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Then, at a May Day trade union rally in Düsseldorf, Scholz changed his mind. He delivered an uncharacteristically passionate speech and a new decisiveness: “We will support Ukraine so that it can defend itself. I respect your pacifism but it must seem cynical to a citizen of Ukraine to be told to defend himself against Putin’s aggression without weapons.” He was booed by many in the audience. Other speakers said the money should be ploughed into the German welfare state instead.

Germany’s allies in Nato were bewildered. Scholz changed course a few days later, and announced that about 50 Geopard anti-aircraft tanks would be sent to Ukraine. The decommissioned vehicles are 40-years old and the only ammo that could be found for them has to be shipped in from Brazil, but better than nothing. Things are evolving. In his Victory Day speech, without a crowd to boo him, Scholz promised to send more heavy weapons to Ukraine. If there is a lesson from Germany’s history, it is surely the one he outlined on Sunday: “No more war. No more genocide. No more tyranny.” More tanks and personnel carriers will be delivered to Kyiv.

But intellectual leadership is missing. On the same day the Emma letter was published, the 92-year-old philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued for a slow, deliberative approach to the crisis. As Scholz had previously intimated, Habermas feared potential nuclear war more than the actual bloodletting suffered by Ukrainians. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the American historian Timothy Snyder tweeted in late April. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”

The most resolute support for Ukraine has not come from Germany’s intellectuals, or the chancellor’s office. Surprisingly, it is the German Greens, who partially grew out of the peace movement, who have become the hawks. For years, they drew attention to Germany’s potentially lethal dependence on Russian fossil fuels. The party’s figureheads, economics minister Robert Habeck and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, have been particularly vocal about Germany’s duty to sufficiently help Ukraine drive back the Russian invaders. Baerbock, in a visit to Kyiv, said that Germany aimed to cut its imports of Russian energy to zero, adding “and that will stay that way forever”.

This is the new reality. Germany will be Europe’s most preeminent military power within a decade. It will cut its energy ties with Russia. And it will be supplying Ukraine with powerful weapons in the months to come. Whether Germany’s pacifist lobby can stomach this, and whether they will be able to stop it from happening, is less certain.

Within 24 hours, Ukrainian soldiers were reporting bullets missing them and a housewife in Kyiv brought down a drone with a tin of tomatoes (not, as some sensationalist early accounts reported, a jar of pickles). Coincidence?

Michael Hughes has form: five years ago, he was behind the binding ritual against Donald Trump, which involved the burning of an unflattering photograph of the President (a visually appealing photograph, it was made clear, would not be suitable materium). This ceremony had the option, as the President turned to ash, to chant either “So mote it be” — a ritual phrase in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism or Wicca — or, if preferred, “You’re fired”.

And even this hocus-POTUS was not unprecedented: magic regularly plays a part in resistance. The English occultist Aleister Crowley, for example, claimed to have invented Churchill’s V-sign as a magical foil to the Nazis — in his Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram, V represents Apophis, the destroyer, whose slaying of Osiris is symbolised by the swastika — although the general consensus among historians is that the V stands for Victory.

Crowley repeatedly tried to offer his esoteric services for King and Country, but each time was told that “the Director of Naval Intelligence presents his compliments to Mr Aleister Crowley and regrets he is unable to avail himself of his offer”. It seems that the only person, apart from Crowley himself, who suggested that he should play an official role in the war effort was Lord Haw-Haw, who said that his celebrating a Black Mass in Westminster Abbey would be as effective as Britain’s National Day of Prayer. Crowley, of course, took this as a compliment.

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Francis Young’s new book, Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, sees Crowley as the last person to make a serious attempt to fill a role which has been a surprising constant in British history — magical advisor to the rulers of Britain. Merlin may have been a myth, but figures like John Dee, Elizabeth I’s astronomer, self-consciously placed themselves in his tradition. And even when belief in magic has disappeared from the body politic, the role has not: Dominic Cummings, that “wizard” known for practising the “dark arts”, is accused of bending people to his will through powers that no one really understands, or even can prove exist.

Cummings himself said he wanted to fill government with “weirdos” — “wyrd” means, of course, having the power to control the fates — and super-forecasters, albeit ones with a background in statistics rather than traditional methods of seeing the future. An adept told me that he knew Cummings had no interest in astrology when he didn’t capitalise on the fact that, when we left the European Union, Saturn and Pluto were conjoined in the sign of Capricorn. This was happening for the first time since Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, making Brexit not just an echo of the Reformation but a rerun ordained by fate.

I’m not, of course, saying that Dominic Cummings is Merlin, only that people talk about him as if he were. To be fair, as Arthur C Clarke used to observe, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — which goes for the manipulation of big data as much as it does for “experiments” in previous reigns. Gunpowder, for example, was developed by alchemists, who had experience of sulphur and saltpetre; and the word for poisoning (veneficium) also meant witchcraft until the seventeenth century, when the ability of plants to kill was no longer believed to be an occult power.

And there has always been a political dimension to magic — especially in Scotland, where witch-hunting was one of the few ways in which the Scottish government could impose its authority on local magnates. Nicola Sturgeon’s apology for the witch trials last week omitted to mention their political role in legitimising the Scottish state. In England, it was much easier to prosecute someone for “compassing and imagining” the death of the king under the Statute of Treason than for actually committing treason.

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But political magic was never just propaganda. Even in the twentieth century, the Anglican exorcist Gilbert Shaw was convinced that the General Strike was the result of Russian adepts projecting psychic forces at Britain to foment unrest and lead to Socialist revolution. Luckily, he was conveniently close to the ley line along which this psychic pressure travelled, and, by exorcising an ancient tumulus next to his church, was able to cut off this occult communication. A week later, the General Strike was over.

Father Shaw — like most Anglicans with an interest in the Occult, he was an Anglo-Catholic — quickly became the Church of England’s leading expert on combating black magic, and claimed, like Crowley and many others, that his preternatural assistance played its part in defeating Hitler. There was no officially approved magic resistance during the Second World War — and there hardly could be, the argument runs, since the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was not repealed until 1951 — but many modern Wiccans believe that there were unofficial rituals.

Gerald Gardner, the grandfather of modern Wicca, reports that he was initiated into a coven in the New Forest who performed a ritual on 1 August 1940 — Lammas Day — to prevent the Nazi high command invading. Or, rather, to prevent them wanting to invade: as he wrote, “The witches met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler’s brain: ‘You cannot come across the sea, You cannot cross the sea, Not able to come, Not Able To Come’…  I am not saying that they stopped Hitler. All I say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea in his mind, and this was repeated several times afterwards; and the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come”.

The account is corroborated by the occultist Louis Wilkinson, who claimed that some of the more elderly participants died as a result of the psychic energy they expended — while conducting the ritual naked, in the middle of the night, in England. Whatever the truth of the story, the New Forest coven is an important part of the founding myth of modern Wicca, and I have heard contemporary Wiccans vigorously maintain that it was this ceremony that foiled Operation Sealion.

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The hex against Putin, then, like the binding of Trump, is part of a long but hidden tradition. But there are differences. The Cone of Power has, according to Gardner’s account, been raised on three occasions: to prevent the Armada invading in 1588, Bonaparte in 1800 and Hitler in 1940. These rituals, as recounted by Gardner, concentrated on changing Hitler’s mind, or telling Bonaparte to think again. Even the spell against the Armada was about persuading the Spanish (“Go On, Go On, Not Able to Land”), although, since they had already embarked by the time the ritual was carried out (by Sir Francis Drake himself, according to Devonian folklore), it appeared to take effect by creating the storm that scattered the fleet.

Modern magic has given up on the idea of changing anyone’s mind. Like modern politics, the aim is not to persuade your opponent, not to influence his thoughts, but to bring ruin and destruction upon him, breaking his bones and casting him down into dust and ashes.

Some magical practitioners question the wisdom of this, and not just because of the Law of Threefold Return, the Wiccan principle that the energy you put out into the world will be thrice returned to you. More worrisome is the idea that Putin has his own protections in place. Aleksandr Dugin, the nationalist philosopher known as “Putin’s Brain”, is known to have an interest in the occult, dating back to his days editing Elementy. On its second issue, the magazine’s cover star was the goat-god Baphomet, who has an important role in Aleister Crowley’s cosmology. The fact that Russian troops entered Donetsk and Luhansk on 22.02.2022 does suggest that Putin is receiving a certain kind of advice.

Perhaps the most profitable line of attack is not against Putin himself, but against his soldiers. When young Russian soldiers entered Konotop — known from stories as a place where old women have occult powers — they were told by an elderly Ukrainian woman: “Here every second woman is a witch. Tomorrow you’ll no longer be able to get your dick to stand”. As Nicola Sturgeon did point out, a fear of witches is often a fear of women; and their words were enough to terrify any Russian man.

Those unforgettable words, written in 1945, remained buried in the German psyche. A bottomless sense of guilt for the crimes of the Third Reich meant that for decades many Germans (mostly in the western half) harboured a deep suspicion about their own culture and country, a fear that a militarist, nationalist, murderous Germany could rise from the ashes of the war.

Hence, for decades, Germany pushed pacifism and disarmament coupled with trade and dialogue, a policy that took off with social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the late Sixties and Seventies, as West Germany began to import natural gas from the Soviet Union. When, in 1999, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who had lived in Dresden and was a fluent German speaker, replaced Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, Germany doubled down on Wandel durch Handel (change through trade). Volkswagen opened a large factory in Kaluga south of Moscow in 2007.

In 2011 — under the watch of ex-chancellor Angela Merkel — the Nord Stream 1 Baltic pipeline began to inject Siberian gas directly into the veins of German industry — circumventing transit countries like Ukraine, robbing them of revenue. Until the day of the invasion, Germany somehow imagined the controversial Nord Stream 2 would still open.

In December 2021, Putin phoned Merkel to thank her for “many years of fruitful cooperation”. In hindsight, what he meant was: thank you for filling my war chest. A day earlier, the Russian president had written to the incoming social democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz: “I count on engaging with you in constructive dialogue and working together on current issues on the bilateral and international agenda.”

In mid-February, as the Russian troop build-up suggested that Putin was really planning the unthinkable, Scholz took his turn at the end of that six-metre table in the Kremlin to talk diplomatic solutions — and flew back to Berlin, hopeful.

Then, on February 24 the sky fell in. Putin’s invasion of a large sovereign country two borders away (as the crow flies Kyiv is 748 miles from Berlin) shattered every illusion. The entire West was duped, but no country was more duped than Germany.

Germany was lost for words. The vocabulary required to describe what had happened lay beneath the ruins of the country’s beliefs about itself, Russia and the world. As Armin Nassehi, a sociologist at the University of Munich, wrote on February 25: “We seem to be completely blank to Russia’s aggression, not only militarily but also intellectually and conceptually.”

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The Germans had failed to fathom that, nearly 80 years after the Second World War, the existential threat to Europe would come from elsewhere. As the scale of Putin’s plans for Ukraine sunk in, Germany’s political consciousness began to shift. It was now clear that the support of Europe’s economic powerhouse for Ukraine (5,000 helmets!) had been shamefully inadequate. On Sunday February 27, Olaf Scholz — who up to that point had been viewed as a bland, ineffective chancellor — stood before the Bundestag and announced the most profound about-face in German foreign and security policy since World World II.

“In view of the turning point Putin’s aggression represents”, he said, “our standard is: What is needed to secure peace in Europe will get done”. A €100 billion defense fund for this year alone, twice the size of the annual military budget. Massive modernisation of the arsenal, structural reform of the decrepit, poorly organised armed forces. Germany would, for the first time since WWII, send weapons into a crisis zone. From now on the budget would surpass 2% of GDP — just as a blustering Donald Trump had demanded. A few sentences transformed Germany into the world’s third largest military power in terms of expenditure, surpassing Britain and France.

MPs cheered. Some cried. Scholz had turned Germany’s understanding of itself on its head. The widespread delusion that a country of 80 million smack in the middle of the continent could remain an over-sized Switzerland died for good.

Naturally, left-wing SPD backbenchers and their Green counterparts made their outrage heard but the leadership of the two left-of-centre parties stands behind the Scholz proclamation, as does the yellow partner in the “traffic light” coalition, the pro-business FDP. Unsurprisingly, the centre-right CDU is on board.

“In less than 96 hours”, wrote Die Zeit, “the political coordinates have shifted. The SPD has thrown 30 years of foreign and security policy overboard, the Greens have finally said goodbye to pacifism, the FDP has said goodbye to austerity at all costs and to the idea that the energy transition should not cost the state anything — and the CDU has said goodbye to the certainty that 16 years of Merkel were 16 good years”.

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Angela Merkel was no saint

By Maurice Frank

This government’s central project, climate neutrality, has been derailed. The idea that Russian gas could serve as a stop-gap measure until enough renewable energy sources came online was one more shattered illusion. The Green economy minister Robert Habeck must now cobble together a path to carbon neutrality that slashes dependency on Putin’s fossil fuels. To keep the lights on, Habeck, of all people, is mulling an extension of coal and nuclear plants. Security trumps climate.

Another observable effect is a fraying of the political edges. The Right-wing populist AfD is fractured and weakened. Their previous admiration for the Russian president isn’t a good look, neither is ranting about “globalist” institutions such as the EU and Nato. Their whining about “corona dictatorship” comes off as puerile when an actual dictator starts a war.

Meanwhile, members of the small Left-wing party Die Linke, with its roots in East German communism, have also struggled to condemn Putin and suppress their anti-Nato instincts. Some still insist that the alliance’s eastern expansion is to blame for the war, but they’re getting lonelier by the day. This line of thought resonates with ever fewer Germans. As one commentator wrote: if Poland weren’t in Nato, the Russians wouldn’t stop until they reached Słubice on the German border.

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British centrists' deluded worship of Germany

By Aris Roussinos

A minority of Twitter leftists warn of a new German militarism and the dangers of “shifting baselines” — the implication being that a better-funded, more effective Bundeswehr could result in aggression originating from Germany itself. In the minds of such people, Germany will always have an authoritarian, bellicose core, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

A dictator has spat in Germany’s face and is threatening the stability of its neighbourhood. “We have an enemy again, who turns the gaze on ourselves”, writes Nassehi, meaning Germany has finally woken to the obvious fact that it is a mature, responsible democracy firmly anchored in Europe. That neighbouring countries such as Poland celebrated Scholz’s sea change boost is significant.

A friend close to the SPD leadership explained that Scholz’s defense initiative will be deeply embedded within European structures and in coordination with Germany’s allies. It’s light years from the old German militarism.

Has Germany banished its ghosts once and for all? Was this the final milestone on its path to normality? There are grounds for scepticism. The VW plant has closed but Russian gas still flows through Nord Stream 1. One could argue that Scholz didn’t really change his mind, but was strong-armed by allies. Some point out that throwing money at the neglected Germany military won’t solve its structural problems. A writer in Berliner Zeitung says Germany’s “toxic pacifism” will rage on beneath the surface.

Ten days into the war, Germany is a changed country, no question. What another ten days could do, is anyone’s guess.

But now Batu Khan’s army had arrived in force, and the longed-for Hungarians were nowhere to be seen. On 28 November 1240, the besiegers set up their siege machines at the Polish Gate. The bombardment began immediately, day after day of shock and awe. On the eighth day the walls gave way, and the Mongols poured into the city, looting, raping and killing.

For hours the Kyivans fought to defend their capital, house by house, hand to hand. By the next morning hundreds of civilians had taken refuge in the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin, resting place of Kyivan princes since the days of Volodymyr the Great. So many people stampeded up the stairs towards the dome that the structure collapsed beneath their weight. There was no escape from the horror.

Nobody knows how many Kyivans died in the next few hours, though the total probably ran into the tens of thousands. Medieval chroniclers estimated that of 50,000 residents, only 2,000 survived. Formerly one of the largest cities in Europe, Kyiv was reduced to ashes. When a papal envoy visited the site six years later, he found it a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Of dozens of large buildings before the siege, just six still stood, and there were “countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground”. Kyiv, he reported, had “been reduced almost to nothing”.

Yet Kyiv endured, and Kyiv rose again.

That has been the story of Ukraine and its people since the beginning: a story of appalling suffering and indomitable courage, terrible cruelty and extraordinary resilience. Writing amid the news of Russian strikes on the Ukrainian capital, with apartment blocks in flames and civilians taking refuge in underground stations, it’s hard not to think of the resonances with the past. The gathering sense of doom, the desperate hopes for Western intervention, the unleashing of the terrible storm. Kyiv fell, and its people endured Mongol rule for more than a century. But their descendants never forgot who they were. They endured, and they rose again.

History is at the heart of today’s horrific slaughter. Vladimir Putin believes in history, apparently to the point of near-madness. He believes in his own importance as a great man, in his country’s unique nature and exceptional destiny. He is driven by a seething resentment at the ebbing of Russian power, his fury at its supposed encirclement by Nato conspiracies, his outrage at the collapse of the Soviet empire, which he believes “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

But Putin is also driven by his sense of Ukrainian history. To put it simply, he believes there is no such thing; or rather, that Ukrainian history is Russian history. Last summer, in an explicit warning the West utterly failed to heed, he published a 7,000-word essay entitled ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. In the very first line he wrote that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people — a single whole”. He traced their shared origins back to the state of Kyivan Rus, founded by the Vikings in the ninth century. Again and again he insisted that Ukrainians were not really Ukrainians, but “western Russians”. Modern Ukraine, he concluded, was a fiction, “entirely the product of the Soviet era”, artificially established “on the lands of historical Russia”.

Does anybody doubt that Putin means what he says? Just listen to his chilling speech on Monday evening, his declaration of war on his beleaguered neighbour. The message was exactly the same. “Since time immemorial,” Putin said, “the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.” Ukraine’s very existence, he insisted, was a mistake, an aberration by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the early Twenties.

So why do the Ukrainians persist in believing otherwise? Again Putin’s answer was simple. They have been tricked by the West and misled by their masters, a gang of “nationalists and neo-Nazis”. His operation, he says, is designed to bring the “demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine”. Never mind that Ukraine’s president, the former actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, looks nothing like a Nazi. Far from being a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, he comes from a Russian-speaking family. His grandfather joined the Red Army to fight the Nazis. His great-grandfather was killed in the Holocaust. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.

That tells you all you need to know about Vladimir Putin’s command of history. For he is wrong: comprehensively, utterly, inarguably wrong. It is true that Russians and Ukrainians have complicated family relations and shared historical roots. But they are not the same people, and Ukraine is not Russia.

Yes, both peoples are East Slavic, both are largely Orthodox and both look back to the ninth and tenth centuries, when the Vikings established the realm they called Garðaríki — the “kingdom of cities” — in what we now call Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia. But their paths diverged after the Mongol invasion, which is why the siege of 1240 matters so much. Imperial Russia grew out of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, one of Kyiv’s regional rivals, which flourished as a Mongol vassal.

But the lands of modern Ukraine did not belong to Moscow. To cut an incredibly contentious story short, they were eventually divided three ways. In the south, Crimea and its hinterland became an independent khanate, run by the Mongols’ Golden Horde and its successors. In the far east, the wide steppes known as the Wild Fields became the lands of the Cossacks — exiles, outlaws and adventurers, who take their name from the Turkish word kazak, “a free man”. But most of today’s Ukraine fell beneath the sway of the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest, most populous, most cosmopolitan and most tolerant countries in early modern Europe. And if you want to know why, in the last few days, Poland and Lithuania have been Ukraine’s staunchest champions, there’s your answer.

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Every detail of this story is bitterly contested; to leave anything out invites fierce criticism. But here’s a foolhardy attempt at a summary. For centuries, most of Ukraine’s largely peasant people were governed by the Poles, and had much in common with their Russian neighbours. But they were not Poles, and they were not Russians. At the time people called them “Ruthenians” — a word derived from that original Viking state of Kyivan Rus. But the word Україна, Ukraine, is old, dating from at least the 12th century. It probably means “the edge, the borderland”. And that pretty much sums Ukraine up. It was the land in between.

It’s perfectly true that over time, Ukraine turned to look eastwards. By the early 19th century Poland had been destroyed, while most of modern Ukraine, including the lands of the Cossacks and the capital Kyiv, had been absorbed by the empire of the Tsars. Not the far west, though: it was taken by Austria-Hungary, which is why L’viv looks so much like Krakow or Prague. Meanwhile, in the east, in the coal basin of the river Don, Russian workers poured into the newly built mines and steelworks, which is why so many eastern Ukrainians still speak Russian.

But that’s not an unusual story. At exactly the same time, a very similar thing happened here in Britain, where English workers moved into the mines and steelworks of South Wales. Today their descendants still speak English; you don’t often hear Welsh on the streets of Cardiff. But an anglophone Welshman is still Welsh. Like his childhood friends in the steel-making city of Kryvyi Rih, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was brought up speaking Russian. But he’s not Russian. He’s Ukrainian.

So was Ukraine invented by the Bolsheviks, as Putin says? No. Just look at its cities and universities in the late 19th century, when the Ukrainian idea flourished as never before. Intellectuals, poets, historians and folklorists became fascinated by their unique past and distinctive culture, just like their counterparts elsewhere. All over Europe, from Ireland, Germany and Italy to the lands of the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the Serbs and the Poles, people were part-uncovering, part-inventing their own national stories. So too in Ukraine, where the national poet Taras Shevchenko, the son of a serf, wrote verses celebrating the peasants, rebels and outlaws of days gone by.

But of course that didn’t fit with the Russian story. Under Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II, the Ukrainian ideal seemed a threat to the unity of the Russian Empire. Shevchenko was arrested and exiled, his poems suppressed. In 1876 the Ukrainian language was effectively banned. You couldn’t write Ukrainian books, put on Ukrainian plays or give Ukrainian recitals; you couldn’t even teach your children in Ukrainian.

Yet Ukraine endured. By the outbreak of the First World War, the national idea was probably stronger than ever. At first the Russians invaded the Austrian-held west, in Galicia, and tried to stamp out all traces of a distinct Ukrainian identity. Then they were driven back. The Russian Revolution and civil war brought chaos, and Kyiv changed hands 16 times in two years. But every rival contender — the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Hetmanate, the Directorate, even the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic — believed there was such a thing as Ukraine. That was why, when Lenin and Stalin created the Soviet Union in 1922, Ukraine joined as a separate republic. Everybody knew it wasn’t Russia.

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Vladimir Putin's dangerous madness

By David Patrikarakos

In the century that followed, Ukraine’s history was so awful, so horribly stained with sorrow, that it feels almost indecent to write it down. A famine in the early Twenties, then another horrific famine — the Holodomor, caused by Stalin’s collectivisation policies — in the early Thirties. Occupation by the Nazis in the Second World War, then the charnel house of the Holocaust, in which some Ukrainian nationalists actively took part. Reconquest by the Red Army; years of suppression and stagnation; the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union, the implosion of Ukraine’s economy in the decade that followed, the Orange Revolution, the Maidan and the annexation of Crimea.

Yet amid all this, Ukraine endured. In his speech on Monday night, Putin failed to mention that in the late Eighties thousands of people took to the streets of L’viv and Kyiv to demand language rights, greater autonomy and, in the end, independence. Nor did he mention that when the Ukrainians were given the chance to go their own way, in a free and fair referendum in December 1991, a staggering 92% voted for independence. Every single oblast, even Donetsk, even Luhansk, even Crimea, said yes. Even Russian-speakers voted for it. And no wonder. They were, after all, Ukrainian.

A complicated story, then. But in a European context, it’s not so unusual. Yes, Ukraine’s borders have been fluid; but whose haven’t? Just look at a map of Germany over time; or Italy, or Poland. Yes, many Ukrainians speak Russian. But that’s not unusual either. Some Finns speak Swedish. Some Germans speak Danish. Some Italians speak German. Do the Swiss all speak the same language?

And yes, Ukraine’s history is deeply, inevitably intertwined with that of its overbearing neighbour. It always has been, and always will be. But you could say exactly the same of Spain and Portugal, Germany and Austria, Britain and Ireland. Most people in Ireland speak English. Many read English newspapers. Many even support English football teams. But Ireland isn’t England. Ukraine isn’t Russia.

For Ukraine, doomed to what appears to be unending suffering, the future seems grim. When I began this essay, opening with those lines on the fall of Kyiv in 1240, the BBC headlines talked of overnight air attacks on the city. Now, while I have been writing, Russian tanks are rolling into the suburbs. Historians love to quote Mark Twain’s quip that history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. They rarely admit that sometimes it rhymes in dreadful, unbearable, heart-rending ways.

But the story of Ukrainian history isn’t just a story of endless defeat. It’s a story of endless resilience. It’s the story of a people trapped between mighty neighbours, who have always been themselves, with their own land, their own identity, their own history. You can bomb them and kill them, smash their cities and tear down their buildings, burn their books and suppress their language. But you can’t make them something they aren’t, and you can’t destroy their belief in themselves. That’s the story of the siege in 1240, and it’s the same story now. Kyiv fell. But Kyiv endured, and Kyiv will rise again.

*

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the history of Ukraine in the latest episode of The Rest is History.

For Indian nationalists, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, the subcontinent was tainted by an Islam that has subsequently exported itself to Pakistan and Bangladesh. And secondly, it was part of the Raj, and thus tainted by Britain. It is politically unbecoming, then, to equate a sense of Indian-hood with what Marxist historians in the West and Hindu nationalists in India tell us was India’s slave status.

As a British historian researching India’s role in the Second World War, I’ve encountered this view repeatedly. And not just in India; to be fair, it is equally rampant in the UK, especially in parts of academia. But it is hardly logical. In fact, it is deeply unhelpful.

The problem is that the post-colonial interpretation makes slaves of Indians. It argues that they had no personal control of their destiny because their government was in the hands of others. When the British declared war, India became an unwilling participant. This argument, simply stated, is that the colonial government, together with its systems, structures, cultures and attitudes, were deeply and inherently exploitative, such that it cannot properly be argued that colonial intentions were anything other than unfair and abusive.

In this view, Indian men fought and strived against their will, even though they weren’t fully aware of it, as cultural coercion blinded them to the reality that they were fighting a British war against Britain’s enemies. The absurdity of this argument suggests, to give but one example, that the efforts of Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, to raise the pay of Indian Commissioned Officers to the levels of their British colleagues in 1943 and 1944 were for the purpose of buying their loyalty rather than of giving them equality with their peers.

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British imperialism didn't destroy India

By Razib Khan

It is also seriously suggested in some quarters that the offer of money likewise persuaded millions of otherwise impoverished Indians to sign up for war work during the industrial expansion of India. According to this narrative, illiterate peasants knew no better than to take the financial bribes offered in exchange for their labour. It is argued that others were forced by convention and the belief that family and personal honour depended on a military career. Millions of men thus became mercenaries of the British, subject to intense and relentless propaganda which bound their minds and wills in an unprecedented and highly successful, coercive, manipulation.

Rather than being taken as fact, these assertions must be recognised for what they are: exaggerations and political point-scoring, with the purpose of proving that the Raj was evil and that the Indians who willingly fought against fascism and totalitarianism weren’t doing so for India, but because they were forced against their conscious will to do so.

It needn’t matter that there is no evidence that 2.5 million men joined the Indian Army between 1939-45 as the result of what one leading historian described as a “propaganda offensive” by the British government which “secured the partial allegiance or at least acquiescence of part of the population”. This argument fails to explain why the men thus recruited were prepared to die for this compulsion, and why Indian soldiers went on to win 22 of the 34 Victoria and George Crosses awarded, for example, during the Burma Campaign.

Instead, it seems rational to conclude that most Indians who joined the armed forces did so because they had weighed up the options and assessed the nature of the sacrifice they were willing to make for the sake of the government in India, regardless of its political colour. In this sense, their decision was made on the basis of a conception of India much larger than the framework of politics as it existed within Indian polity at the time. Even before 1947, the threat to their conception of what India was and could be therefore far outweighed the rights and wrongs in their minds of colonialism, if the issue or argument ever surfaced at all.

The truth is that reality trumped ideology in the face of the imminent and existential danger to the Indian state by the Japanese. Most Indians accepted that the Raj was, rightly or wrongly, or for the time being, the legally constituted Government of India. Like all governments, it had supporters and opponents. Few who opposed it on nationalistic or self-governance grounds questioned its legitimacy, as that would have invalidated their own claim to be its successor in due course. Likewise, the Indian Army was India’s army, not Britain’s.

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As Professor Roger Beaumont has observed, “it is most interesting to weigh the charges that the Raj built its army in India as an oppressive instrument against what one sees in how lovingly and energetically the Indians have retained the model”. Rather, the evidence suggests that the theory of “prosaic oppression” and its common language of “unconscious bias and systemic structures of power” is a fabricated political construct that does not relate to everyday human experience in colonial India. The facts are being squeezed to fit within a fixed and unbending theoretical, political and ideological model.

It was true that India did not have political independence, but in every other sense the freedom to make social, economic and political choices within this environment cannot be said to have been constrained by such oppression that human agency was so deviously manipulated to suit ruling British interests. Young Indian men and young Britons both joined the Indian Army for the same purpose in times of peace; for adventure, employment, the lure of military glory, the age-old attraction of the sword.

Indians were no more victims of their polity than were Britons, both of whom were, of course, victims of the fascist militarism that dragged the world into a second great slaughter of world war. The tyranny to which some refer, if it relates to anything, can only do so to the prosaic constraints of ordinary civic society — such as obeying the law, as can be seen during the Quit India protests in 1942 — rather than that of an unbending and devious oppression.

Looking back at the imperial period through the lens of victimhood is therefore deeply problematic both historically and philosophically. It ensures that we never see the 350 million Indians of the time as they saw themselves, collectively or individually: as a people with acute political agency (as evidenced by the burgeoning nationalist movement), on a journey to self-rule. Likewise, it treats every Briton in India at the time, every level of power exercised and every action undertaken in response to a decision by London or Delhi, as oppressive. It also forgets that agency in imperial power relationships is never one-sided; for instance, it ignores the importance of Indian political, social and economic agency in the Twenties and Thirties (combined with Japan’s pricking of the imperial bubble) in enabling India to achieve independence in 1947.

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Our sense today of the size of the nationalist protest against colonial rule has almost certainly exaggerated its impact on ordinary people. This is not to underestimate its ultimate importance, rather the influence it had on the behaviour of men considering joining the armed forces, and the impact it had on those who had already enlisted. History remembers the noisy minority, whose views tend to be over-represented in any analysis of the past, while generally neglecting those without a voice.

Fortunately, nationalism and respect for the Government’s legitimate role in defending India (even a colonial one) were not mutually exclusive in 1942, or the ranks of the Armed Forces might have remained empty, and India’s door opened for the Japanese to march in. Perhaps it is precisely because the ranks of the army were so large between 1942 and 1945 that so much effort is generated today in post-colonial studies in explaining away why these men joined in such numbers and with such alacrity.

India, therefore, has every right to recover the history of the pre-1947 period, for it was then that the foundations of modern India were established. The Japanese in Assam and Manipur in 1944 and in Burma in 1945 were defeated by an Army that was 87% Indian. Victory in Asia could never have taken place without Indians coming forward in large numbers, and of their own volition, to serve their country. And that is surely something in which India can take great pride.

The French love of protesting at the drop of the hat is perhaps their defining character trait, but it reflects a deeper culture of political violence that goes deep into their history, and not just the revolution.

Theirs is a culture in which use of force is much more acceptable, and where authority has both menace and glamour. Last time I made the crossing back from France to England, the first UK Border Force man I saw was sat in one of those knackered old swing office chairs, with the word “Colin” written on A4 on the back; the whole veneer served to ensure that authority in England was something to not take too seriously.

It was a different matter two weeks earlier, crossing from Italy into France, where one is greeted along that slightly sensitive border by a parade of young French soldiers carrying machine guns and dressed in dazzling outfits, like a Jean Paul Gaultier advert. It’s designed to show that they mean business, and that authority should be admired and feared.

While our police spent much of their summer either on their knees in front of Black Lives Matters protesters, or running away from them, the gendarmes have a somewhat different attitude to demonstrations: since the gilet jaunes protest began at least 24 people have lost an eye as a result, while five have lost a hand; 315 have suffered head injuries, and two have died.

France’s frequent eruption of violence is baffling to its neighbours. They have short working hours, generous welfare and a first-class health care system (far better than Britain’s). The French live very long lives on a comfortable pension, and their disposable income is rising.. The French inhabit a country that to many of its neighbours feels like paradise, and so the Dutch expression“leven als God in Frankrijk” (live like God in France), but then historically that partly explains the readier resort to violence — you had to have a certain belligerence to occupy Europe’s most desirable real estate.

Next time you’re lucky enough to visit the country, take a glance outside when you’re driving through the Loire Valley and look at what you see – chateaux, lots of them. There are over 1,000 in that region alone, because chateaux tended to be built to replace older castles and strongholds, and western France was littered with them.

The geography of Britain ensured that a monarch based by the Thames was able to grow wealthy enough to rule over the entirety of England. The kingdom of Wessex united all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 927 and there was never any danger of the north being powerful enough to secede. Wales was slowly conquered and while Scotland was a different matter, it was never an existential threat to England.

The sheer size of France – four times that of England – made it much harder for Paris to establish dominance over the country’s natural boundaries, which are shaped by the Pyrenees and the Alps on two sides of the hexagon, the sea by two others, and by a vulnerable and ambiguous region to its east and north. The kings of the Franks ruled with the help of 12 regional lords, and until the revolution “France” was effectively the region around Paris.

The variance of France made it a country hard to unite, with huge divides in language and culture, likened by one essayist to “a horse whose four legs move in a different time”. Graham Robb in his brilliant The Discovery of France identified 55 different languages and dialects, and noted that in 1789 just 11% of the population spoke the national language. In Gascony and Provence people from the north were still called Franchiman or a Franciot (“French”).

France’s militarism is a legacy of Paris’s inability to create a monopoly of violence in a land which has been intensely fought over down the centuries. Medieval castles were a form of arms race between highly-independent duchies and counties, and the same was true of cavalry warfare, which largely developed in western France. The Normans, in particular, bred ever stronger and more aggressive horses, spending huge amounts of effort on mastering this form of warfare. The Battle of Hastings was won with a faked retreat, a tactic that requires a great deal of training and coordination; the Anglo-Saxons, in contrast, did not fight on horseback, which is why you probably knows lots of Williams and Roberts but not many Leofwines or Wulfnoths.

Cavalry was the foundation of medieval Europe, which is why French became for centuries the language of the ruling classes from Scotland to Jerusalem. It is why pretty much every single English word to do with war – apart, perhaps, from “war” itself – comes from French rather than Germanic roots.

It’s strange that those raised in the English-speaking world are taught a cliché of French army tanks that go backwards and joke about  “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, when, historically, France is by far the most war-like country in Europe.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

In his Decisive Battles of the World, Victorian historian Edward Creasy wrote: “If we were to endeavour…. to ascertain which European nation has contributed the most to the progress of European civilization, we should find Italy, Germany, England, and Spain, each claiming the first degree, but each also naming France as clearly next in merit. It is impossible to deny her paramount importance in history.” At the start of the First World War, the country had four times as many soldiers in uniform as Britain, and almost as many as Prussian-controlled Germany, which had 50% more people.

Even in the build-up to the Second World War, France was more aggressive than Britain towards Hitler, and many divisions fought bitterly against the Germans in 1940, with even the Dunkirk evacuation carried out with French support and the loss of 18,000 Frenchmen. But the country was fatally divided politically, psychologically scarred by the huge losses of the First World War, when 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, and facing an almost psychotically determined enemy.

In living memory, France has been engaged in two hugely costly wars, losing 20,000 men in Vietnam and another 25,000 in Algeria. These casualties dwarf the numbers of British troops lost either in the Northern Ireland Troubles (763) or colonial insurrections like Malaya or Cyprus, which had fewer British casualties still. Relative to their population, they were also much more devastating than Vietnam was to America.

The violence in Algeria spilled over into metropolitan France, which is one reason why President de Gaulle is believed to hold the record for number of assassination attempts, somewhere in the region of 25 or 26, and his survival is all the more impressive considering his giant stature. Britain’s own Queen Victoria survived eight, although some of these were quite feeble (someone firing tobacco out of a gun, for instance). When the OAS try to kill you, they really try.

While the last massacre of English civilians took place in 1819, Parisian authorities killed at least 40 and maybe as many as 200 people in 1961, there protesting the war in Algeria. Because of the way that the American narrative has completely captured the British imagination, this story is much less well known than relatively peaceful campaign for civil rights in the US. A similar event in California or New York would be the subject of countless films, songs and plays.

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Life is one big status game

By Ed West

During the Sixties, France even seemed close to a coup, and still today its military contains various elements who seem quite keen on overthrowing the government, something inconceivable in Britain. A coup would actually be quite popular with the French public, according to polls, although it’s hard to know if this is just performative Frenchness at work. But, then, this is a country which still holds military parades, and still takes military honour and valour seriously.

Everything in French history is much more violent than ours. There was nothing like the Albigensian crusade in England, a regional conflict that killed maybe a million people, although the Harrying of the North came close (done, of course, by you-know-who). The Jacquerie, France’s equivalent of the Peasant’s Revolt, was far more violent than the English uprising, both in total deaths and the sadism and cruelty involved. During the Reformation Mary Tudor was regarded as a monster for killing 300 Protestants, while her sister Elizabeth put to death 200 Catholics priests and their sympathisers. The French Wars of Religion killed an estimated 3 million. As well as the Terror, the French Revolution also led to what was arguably the first modern genocide, in the Vendée.

Religious violence has now made an unwelcome return, and in recent years it has been quite normal to see French soldiers patrolling the streets, often protecting cathedrals that previously suffered destruction at the hands of the revolutionaries. Britain and France share a similar sized Islamic terrorism problem, but the scale of the violence there is much more spectacular and terrifying, largely because there are so many more firearms available – 12.7 million vs 3 million – plus the ease of transporting guns over the border. Britain has such a disarmed population that it is something of a running joke online, with London police divisions tweeting out their latest confiscations of Swiss army knives and particularly vicious-looking spoons. It makes us safer, but there’s also something quite demoralising about it.

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By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

While there is something about the French readiness to protest and riot that is shocking to the Anglo-Saxon soul, it also quite admirable. Deep down, there is a great deal of respect for this belligerence, part of that wider Gallic battle with Americanisation, the modern world, and often reality.

We, though, are too timid and passionless to spend every Saturday blocking the centre of town, or driving a lorry load of slurry into the nearest government building; and if we protested like the French, we couldn’t do so with the same panache. Even the gilet jaunes movement managed a certain stylistic triumph while wearing high-viz vests, which in Britain are the very symbol of health and safety-driven inertia and defeatism. For us, the constant protests would get tiresome, the strikes would be a pain in the backside. And we’d look as cool as someone called Colin holding a clipboard.