To wonder why the Brits are so obsessed with WW2?

[MrsSchadenfreude]

My Mum is 87. She was 12 when the war ended and went through it in London. She remembers being terrified and hungry and getting grief because her grandmother was German. Other elderly relatives don’t have lovely memories either, apart from relief when it was all over. So why do we glorify it all, at every opportunity? Why do we always look back instead of forward?

I'm not sure we are obsessed by WW2 in the same way that we were even into the 1970s. With very, very few veterans left from that conflict and even the people who were children at the time, now very elderly, I think we are probably in the last few years of really making a thing about it.

It is important though in our history and even today - would the NHS and welfare state have come into being without it? And so many families torn apart by it. And as people have said up thread still reminders of it today even in our architecture. Lots of examples of 'spaces' in rows of Victorian and Edwardian housing 'in-filled' with 60s/70s homes replacing buildings bombed out of existence.

Important to remember for lessons we've learned and for honouring those who died.

You might as well ask why the US is obsessed with frontierism, why France is obsessed with secularism, etc. Some collective memories become cultural touchstones.

I think it’s been hijacked a bit. Especially this year, when there are so many people keen to just break lockdown, stand in their streets, jiggle and drink.

Those of us quietly remembering/ watching a documentary indoors, (who in a normal year might be at a proper commemoration event) are less visible than the “any excuse for a party” crew.

More broadly, it’s all on the brink of passing out of living memory, so it & it’s meaning is “up for grabs”.

Twenty years ago we still deferred to the wartime generation about how commemorations went. They set the tone. Now that’s almost gone.

And Brits played a key role too at certain stages, not least a HUGE contribution to intelligence cracking German codes etc..

Yes, and look at how appallingly Alan Turing was treated, despite his massive contribution to that.

I don't think we're obsessed but we realise the importance of remembering the past and remembering how others suffered. It's not that long ago really. My grandparents and my father lived through this.

I'm with you, OP. My grandmother's family were German and the shame was such that I only found this out after her death. Nobody ever spoke about it. She would be 100 this month.

Was it Bill Hicks who said "What kind of fucked up country needs a WAR to feel good about themselves?"

I can get on board with the defeat of the Nazis because they were the sort of obvious evil that makes it easy to feel glad of victory. However, it's not as clear cut as we're led to believe: even our Queen used to do Nazi salutes with her lovely mate of Hitler uncle as a little girl, and Churchill was very much on board with the idea of Aryan supremacy and Eugenics.

It's time to move on with lessons learned imo, like the rest of Europe have managed to do.

Why do we always look back instead of forward?

Because as the Sex Pistols sang, there is no future in England's dreaming.

WWII was the last moment before Britain's imperial decline became manifest. Until we break with this image of ourselves as a world power, and accept that England is now a small nation of middling importance, we are doomed to fetishise the past.

I agree op. Their are a lot of people in this country who prefer to look back and celebrate past "victories" rather than look forward to the future, especially this bloody awful government.

I don't think we should ignore what's happened in the past, of course, but all this covering the house in plastic bunting and singing Vera Lynn songs... ffs.

BoJo and his pals will be absolutely loving all this - anything to distract from the utter mess they have made of dealing with covid 19. And what could be more worrying than the situation we are in now with possible mutations of the virus in the near future, why are we not concentrating all our energy on how we are going to deal with that?

even our Queen used to do Nazi salutes with her lovely mate of Hitler uncle as a little girl

No, there is footage of her joining adults in mocking in his salute when she was a child, and he had not yet been revealed to be a genocidal warmonger. Years before the war. Years before kristallnacht. Months before the Nuremberg Laws, even. Not long after Hitler had come to power. When she was about 8 years old.

I CBA to even address “lovely mate of Hitler uncle”. Whatever it means. Either gibberish or broken English.

You sound like a bot TBH.

MusterMark
And that is precisely why we need to go through Brexit. Once we appreciate our insignificance, perhaps we can be a part of a larger, collective plan again. I was definitely brought up to think as a Brit I am superior and Germans are bad. I’m not yet 50. I hope dd is getting very different messages. Thinking this way actively encourages wars, racism and misogyny.

It really wasn’t just one man. It’s very naive to think it was.

People forget that Hitler was elected because anti-Semitism was widespread all over Europe in the 1930s. Here in the UK, Mosley had a fair amount of support, so we weren't immune to it.

Perhaps we should forget the jingoism and remember instead what horrors happen when one group is vilified because of their race or religion.

That would be the best tribute to those who made such huge sacrifices.

My grandmother was a child in the war, she didn’t like to dwell on it, but it really affected her.
WW2 was horrific. I really hope I don’t have to explain why, that should be common knowledge. As a collective effort, the world won against Nazi Germany. Definitely not the Americans - American history is different to the rest of the worlds! Americans are bought up to believe America is holier than thou, they have to pledge allegiance to the flag at school etc. Their history books are full of inaccuracies.
It’s celebrating the end, and the changes that came with it. Now people generally don’t like the welfare state, council housing, the NHS consensus may be changing on, however, it was awful beforehand. The war changed the attitudes of women, it was concluded women are in fact capable of more than wife and mother.
The war affected many, in more ways than one, the war changed a lot.
There’s plenty of lessons to learn from the war and shortly after it.

Russia was allied to Hitler at the start of WW2 so not always on the side of the British.

In the 30s the British government did have a policy of appeasement and didn't want another war.

We had a huge war debt that we had to pay back to the America and Canada till 2006

Both my parents were babies in the war so barely remember

But yes a lot of propaganda too

Do you understand that we are celebrating the END of the war, not the war itself

That argument doesn't work. No-one suggests we would be celebrating the end of the war if we'd been on the losing side.

In the sense that Germany doesn’t commemorate it? (They do.) Or do you mean of Europe’s had become one vast Nazi-controlled territory, that then we wouldn’t mark the anniversary of our defeat?

You haven’t thought this through, have you?

And I am grateful that I don't have to send my ds to war

If I was a different generation it could have been very different

I'm sorry op but what an insulting post.

This is typical of mumsnet though and thankfully not said or thought by most in real life.

Lakie
After the liberation of the Jews, the Germans and to a lesser extent (in the U.K. at least), the Japanese became vilified by us. We could then be absolved of any disordered thinking after all we defeated Hitler and sent Mosley packing. AntiSemitics, or some at least, went underground. Some, who were just angry redirected that anger at the Germans. And of course many in the country were grieving and angry. Who here has heard the expression “the only good German is a dead German”?

This 2012 article is quite a shocking read into the mentality of some.... www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2137652/Patrick-Moore-says-hates-Germans-70-years-Nazi-bomb-killed-fianc-e.html

You should form a little club with the OPs of the various histrionic “I’m ashamed to British” threads @MrsSchadenfreude

The woke position that rejects all commemoration of the two WWs, and attempts to rewrite history, is just as self-deluding as the jingoistic interpretation that wants to repurpose the wars,...by rewriting history.

This is the era of contested truth. People on both sides vigorously dodge objective facts and expertise. Everyone is pressurised to pick one of two polarised positions, on very subject. It is tedious.

In my opinion it's when we forget that history tends to repeat itself. It should always be a reminder of how things should never be again.

Have a thought for the Channel Isles they were occupied during the war.
No wonder they celebrate Liberation day

We didn't even win World War 2.

America won it.

I like street parties & think it's important to say thank you to those who lost their lives fighting fascism.

However I am soooo irritated by our f**king incompetent government trying to compare the current lockdown to the blitz and our idiot of a PM posing as Churchill. Makes my blood boil! 🤬🤬🤬

The Royal family are German

The UK royal famt are German.

They changed their name from Saxe - Coburg- Gotha to Windsor after the first world war.

All hail our german overlords. I still think it is laughable that British society accepts a royal family

Collective effort