General Category > South Tyneside Stop the War
Notes towards a new anti-war 'epic' ...
Phil Talbot:
Focussing in on Dunkirk - but not the 'Dunkirk Spirit' British 'nationalistic' kitsch sort of stuff. Instead, a 'rescue' attempt/effort, not a 'triumph' ...
Phil Talbot:
1940
Robert Hewison, Too Much, p301:
' ... the romanticism of the war years showed ... that people were searching for some kind of healing and reintegrating myth, "a myth", as John Lehmann put it, in 1944, "in which we in England felt we were about to recapture for one moment of astonishing intensity, in 1940, when everything seemed to be falling into place"
and what happened in 1940?
... a real threat of 'absolute' defeat - The End - avoided ...
and nb, unifying effects of shared external 'enemy' ... whatever the internal differences, common acceptance of need to see off external threat ... brings us together ...
... what separates 'us' from each other is seen as less than what separates 'us' from 'them' ...
+nb primitive nationalism ... and blood rites ... 'our blood' ... 'their blood' ... nations 'forged' in blood-letting rituals ...
All Nationalism involves some sort of 'blood letting'.
Gruesome quotes from/by Franz Fanon, etc, about 'slashing the hands that control us', etc
... shedding the blood of the 'other' ... killing the occupying power ... or preventing the foreigners from occupying 'our' land ..,
Phil Talbot:
Maurice Bowra [Homer, London, 1972, 80ff] - quoted in J.V. Luce, Homer and the Heroic Age, Futura p/b, 1979, p52 - suggests three possible reasons for people, or nations, being led to view their past as 'heroic':
1. when conquered [they] 'console themselves for lost grandeur by exalting the past to spread glory';
2. when leaving homeland for some new home overseas a people 'keeps touch with its past by glorifying it in legends';
3. when 'a political system disintegrates, and success and dominion give place to dissolution and decay'.
+
Britain and the 'heroic' age?
Dunkirk Myth?
Sense that, post-WW2, 'success and dominion' gave place to 'dissolution and decay' - or, at least, gradual decline into 'mediocrity'.
Dunkirk [& Battle of Britain] as last act of Britain's 'heroic age' - after which national imperialistic 'energy' used up; 'Dunkirk spirit' died; slow 'decline' [or 'civilization'?] ... expansion ends ... contraction begins ... contraction ends ... expansion begins ...
'Hard Power'? 'Soft Power'?
Phil Talbot:
cross-chan[n]ell small boats filled with people: asylum/freedom-seekers ... or ... economic migrants ... ?
Phil Talbot:
'... bring the troops home ...' [... end the overseas military 'adventures' ...]
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