All we’ve heard about for the last week is a) the fact the British Army is now so small that it couldn’t quite fill Old Trafford, b) the threat of conscription, and C) Gen Z’s total disinterest in fighting for their country.
Last week a YouGov poll asked people under 40 what they would do if Britain was threatened with an invasion; alarmingly, 30 per cent said they would refuse to serve if called up. If only a third of the young and able are prepared to serve in the armed forces, to protect their country, then it obviously prompts the question why?
In the 19th century we derived much of our national pride from the imperialism of empire; in the 20th, from being on the winning side in two world wars. Nowadays, neither politicians nor teachers appear to know exactly what fundamental British values are anymore, so it’s hardly surprising the young feel compromised by our past.
And it’s all because of the Second World War. People of a youngish disposition now think of our greatest ever conflict as little more than an historical interlude, no different from the War of the Roses, the Boer War or Guy Fawkes. When your modern warfare frame of reference includes Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the idea of stepping up for your country is probably not uppermost in your mind. If you’re looking forward to an unsupervised life, there’s not going to be much room for patriotism. And if you can’t remember the remnants of the Second World War, and the long tail of relief that came after it, then you’re not going to understand the threat of a third global conflict, existential or not.
The war casts such a long shadow over the popular imagination that it has become an alternative national narrative
The war casts such a long shadow over the popular imagination it has almost become an alternative national narrative. It is still a pillar of popular entertainment — just look at Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air (the hot TV show) or the film adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest (the film of the week) — reinforcing the notion of the war as a legitimate subject for fantasy and veneration, a binary exchange between good and evil no different from The Lord of the Rings.
There is a massive cultural aspect to all this, too, as the arc of post-war pop culture begins to near its end. Culturally, everything since the mid-Fifties happened because of the war: the rise of the teenager and the first iterations of rock and roll; the Angry Young Men and post-teenage indolence; the surrealist comedy of Spike Milligan and the Goons; the sexual revolution and the birth of satire; David Bowie and the crawl of the suburban aspirant; plus punk, social liberalism, and nearly everything else besides. Every culture spike has been an aftershock, a reaction to the torment of the war, while freedom, once fought for, has now become a birthright.
People forget that the only way creatives such as Milligan — who had actually fought in the war — could cope with the abstract lunacy of military life was to make art that was equally as bonkers; out of fear came laughter and anger, the only forms of defence. Everything that came after was a reaction: no Second World War, no Tony Hancock, no Satisfaction, no Tommy, no Dark Side of the Moon. There would have been no Peter Blake, no Pop Art, and no Mods. (Just look at the red and blue target the Mods appropriated as their symbol. The roundel became an icon of mid 20th-century British culture not just because it was used by the RAF, but also because the Mods adopted it as a benign symbol of cultural identity.)
The shadow of war radically affected family life, social cohesion, and class barriers. Life may have been more complicated afterwards, but the freedoms on offer had never been available before. However, that’s all over now. Today there is no class rebellion, no pop cultural insurrection, and no plot points. When post-war, post-punk bands are heritage acts — Jesus, when Kylie Minogue is a heritage act — where does that leave the culture? In a different place, that’s where, somewhere uninhibited by the past. As the Second World War finally comes to an end, we are at a post-imperial inflection point, and Gen Z know it.
