It feels like I live in the middle of a culture war. On one side is a kind of state-sponsored amnesia. It’s pervasive. It’s an Oscar-winning movie perpetuating the idea that Winston Churchill stood alone, at the Darkest Hour, as Nazi fascism encroached, with Britain a small and vulnerable nation isolated in the north Atlantic. In reality the United Kingdom was at that moment an imperial power with the collective might of Indian, African, Canadian and Australian manpower, resources and wealth at its disposal.
It’s also Poland passing a law so that errant historians, survivors or Auschwitz guides who raise the inconvenient fact of Polish complicity in atrocities now risk up to three years’ imprisonment. It’s Tennessee in the US legislating against the removal of Confederate statues when, as the former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu puts it, they “purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitised Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for”.
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