To think there are a lot of people out there who have no grasp of WW2 history

[Stripyseagulls]

My grandfather fought in WW2 and I have visited the Normandy sites & it’s extraordinary how moving they are.

Today on Facebook/Twitter I have seen loads of really disturbing posts saying stuff like ‘our war hero’s didn’t fight world war 2 to live in a country full of muslim/ foreigners’ etc. Really really disturbing and horrible.

Aibu to think people don’t understand history and that the war was fought to defeat facism and these kinds of beliefs. Hitler didn’t start off gassing people- it was a long propaganda campaign against religious and ethnic groups that ended up with the holocaust.

Aibu to be disturbed by the lack of understanding of why the war was fought and what it was fought against. I find some of the attitudes in the UK today so troubling.

Agreed OP, this is why BREXIT has been so upsetting. The EU was set up to PREVENT future wars like this. Yet people felt so threatened.

Totally agree OP, and it worries me that in the not too distant future we'll have nobody left who remembers what it was like to live through the war.

Germany does a great job of educating children about how Hitler came to power, so that people will recognise it when another threat appears. Unfortunately others aren't so well informed, and the rise of the far right across Europe, America, Brazil, etc, is very very worrying.

I've been reading a bit about generational theory recently, which claims that there is typically a major crisis once every 80 years (roughly). The generation of young adults at the time are a 'hero' generation who resolve the crisis and build a better future for their children, but it gradually falls apart over time. Largely due to individualism and the greed of subsequent generations (e.g. baby boomers). There are four generation 'types' and the cycle repeats itself every 80 years. The old 'hero' generation were those who fought in the war and worked to preserve peace when it was over. The current 'heroes' are millenials who will be dealing with the impending crisis (climate change, rise of fascism, war?). Obviously it's only a theory and it has flaws, but it's very interesting and it's easy to imagine history repeating itself, unfortunately. :(

@sakura it really worries me that we don’t seem to have had the same type of history education in the UK- people seem so ignorant of facism and how Trump has very similar beliefs. It’s scary

Well, as much as WWII gives us important lessons, it is fading into history now. More and more time is passing, that generation is fading fast and for young people, it’s part of history, rather than a real event. They don’t have grandparents that lived it.

Totally agree OP, and it worries me that in the not too distant future we'll have nobody left who remembers what it was like to live through the war.

it’s part of history, rather than a real event. They don’t have grandparents that lived it.

Yeah. My parents were born at the end of WW2, and my grandparents were all dead when I was very young. It may be history but generationally its one or two. As a world the lessons of the past are being ignored and it's only a matter of time before someone chances their arm. This time nuclear weapons will surely feature too. IMO, everybody should visit Auschwitz and stand in a gas chamber.

In the context of the time, it's a fairly safe assumption that those who fought for Britain. Where fighting to maintain Britain as it was in those time. Predominantly white Christian.

They went to fought to liberate countries to give those people their territory back and to protect our own country from invasion.

You only have to look at the opposition to immigration in the post war period to realise how many people viewed "foreigners".

It doesn't really serve any good purpose to rant on about who they weren't fighting for, this or that.
But reality is those who say they were fighting for the country to be "full" of foreigners are probably correct.

When i was young, i had my grandparents who had direct experience of ww2.

There arent many people left alive from ww2 so collective memory fades.

A child today is unlikely to know anyone who experienced it

The level of general ignorance and disinterest about Britain's recent history, specifically Northern Ireland, is shocking and has been highlighted by Brexit and the border discussions.

The British education board should hang it's head in shame, There is no excuse not have have a reasonable grasp of the past 100 years.

People have very little grasp of history in general. As well as learning from it it also shows what shaped our country and culture.

I guess it’s naive to think given our county’s long history the only thing that should shape it is ww11. It’s just a very small part of our history.

There’s more contemporary shows of leaders and countries vilifying and trying to annihilate minorities that young people could probably relate to more. But WW2 is undoubtedly the blue print of why we need to crush these sorts of regimes in their infancy.

What I think we can really learn from ww2 is the selflessness for the greater good, the lack of the cult of the individual that seems so prevalent today.

Unfortunately as it does slip into history these things become more remote, just as say the napoleonic war would have affected a couple of generations then it slips into history this will also to a certain extent.

When I was a child, the veterans fromWW2 were still relatively young and most of the attention went to the WW1 veterans (I think the silence around the horrors our troops faced in ww2 was still very loud at this point). Now WW1 seems to be slipping further back in people’s minds.

Oh and I would revisit your Facebook friends list

Sakura7
Germany does a great job of educating children about how Hitler came to power, so that people will recognise it when another threat appears. Unfortunately others aren't so well informed, and the rise of the far right across Europe, America, Brazil, etc, is very very worrying.

Germany has its own share of neo-Nazis and far-right people in spite of all the educating that they do. It also has a lot of older adults who claim untruthfully that their Good Party Member or Hitler Jugend parents were in the German Resistance and lucky not to have died for it, and so feel able to deny any sense of responsibility -- and are fairly unpleasant about "foreigners" "invading" their country (when talking about women and children fleeing from a war).

People also forget that it wasn't just white Christians who fought in either WW1 or WW2. There are memorials on the Downs in the south of England where Hindu soldiers who had died of wounds were cremated. Look on the list of Victoria and George Crosses for the names of the Sikh, Muslim, Hindu and Gurkha service members who won it.

That goes for nationality too. Free French, Polish and Czech fought in WW2, as did Indians, many in the Battle of Britain. Free French commandos landed ahead of the British on D-day. Many Polish had to remain in the UK as the USSR had overrun Poland yet they get told to go back to Poland by wankers.

I think it doesn’t help how the media and cultural trends it perpetrates gives such a false impression of war, particularly WW2. All the “we stood alone”, “it was our brave (conscripted) tommies wot won it” stuff just turns me right off. All very militaristic, and jingoistic. Far from the reality of war or even historical truth.

There is nothing to celebrate in war. No glory. Far from standing alone, the USA and Russia lost millions of lives and the Second World War culminated in the worst war crimes and terrorist atrocities in the history of the human race with nuclear attacks on Japan who were in the process of surrender.

I don’t like all the commentator stuff due to the crass and dishonest tone of it.

*commemorative.

It is not necessarily the young ones are the ones with distorted view of the Great Wars. It is more likely that regular viewers of nostalgia WW2 (propaganda) films on Forces tv and such like think that we stood all alone and won easily.
Even yesterday a lot of column inches were spent on how if you add Canadians to the English, then English soldiers outnumbered Americans on D-day.

I would amend your thread title to read more simply “no grasp of history.” So many of my students arrive at university with only the vaguest notions of historical events, timelines, currents, causes and effects. And presumably they are among the more academically engaged of their generation.

100% agree. I was thinking about this on the way to work today funnily enough. It is worrying that people forget the wars, why they happened and what they were against. I suppose it is easier for me as my grandparents fought in the war and they used to talk about it with me.

From what I've seen the ones who actually fought are very much proEU - they lived through war and appreciate the value of peace

The currently older generation are those born afterwards

I think it's more twats who think both wars were like a game the 'we won' that are the problem. When you see a 90+ year old man talking about remembering all the dead bodies floating past him in the water it makes me angry to see idiots the generation or afterwards using the horror they endured to talk a load of old crap about WWII. They have decided to live in reflected glory that they don't deserve.

Also, take this opportunity to have a Facebook cull/change your privacy settings. I haven't had any of that on my Facebook and I'd immediately unfriendly anyone who put it on.

I think it doesn’t help how the media and cultural trends it perpetrates gives such a false impression of war, particularly WW2. All the “we stood alone”, “it was our brave (conscripted) tommies wot won it” stuff just turns me right off. All very militaristic, and jingoistic. Far from the reality of war or even historical truth.

But at one point of the war we did "stand alone". The Americans had not yet agreed to come into the war (they did after Pearl Harbour) everyone else had been invaded and occupied and we were on the brink of being invaded and becoming part of German territory. If it had not been for the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain we would definitely have been invaded at that time.
I don't think we are "celebrating" war with these commemorations, we are celebrating remaining free, we are mourning and honouring the dead and the chief purpose of these commemorative events is to never forget how terrible war is and to try never to let it happen again. And, as someone has said upthread, the allies included many diverse religions and ethnic backgrounds, black and white. I consider myself lucky, being a 1950s child, that I learned a great deal about the war from different viewpoints, having a father and other relatives that served in WW2 and grandfathers, one of which served in the Great war in France (near the Somme) and the other of which served in both wars, having lied about his age and joined up at 15 to escape his bad home life (he was in action in the Middle East). 1950s children knew much about the war as it was the main topic of conversation amongst our elders for years and years (not surprising) and even our comics were full of stories set in war time/war backgrounds. I remember playing Nazis and Tommies with my older siblings and friends when small and, as I was indeed very small, coming away with the idea that a Nazi was a sort of tomato.

Complete WW2 tangent. I used to regularly walk past the house Reginald Mitchell was born in. WW history was rather important in that area given this connection.

One of the things I noticed about the commemoration yesterday was mention of British and Commonwealth forces. Something we should not forget.

I agree with the OP and the person who noted that Brexit has made this worse.

I am in favour of a bank holiday to remember those who died in war, which if nothing else will keep the memory of the horrors alive once those who witnessed it are long gone.

I think people on all sides try to use
ww2 to further their own modern agenda.

Whether it's they didn't fight for a Britain to look like this.
Or, they fought so we could achieve a peaceful multi cultural Europe.

In simple terms Britain fought to stop a nazi invasion. We fought to maintain our territory. For your average Tommy it was that simple.

The political structures which came post war are a different kettle of fish.

.............and here we are in 2025, 80 years after 1945, and the posts make an interesting read.