Category Archives: Second world war

Armistice Day is the perfect time to call for a ceasefire in Gaza

Posted on by symonhill

I wrote this article for the ‘i’ newspaper, who published it on Monday 6 November 2023. The following is a slightly longer version of the article.

In Dr Strangelove, a satirical film about the Cold War, the US President objects when a brawl breaks out in a government conference room. “You can’t fight in here!” he shouts. “This is the war room!”.

I was reminded of this scene when Rishi Sunak criticised plans to hold a march on 11 November calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and Israel. The Prime Minister could perhaps have tweeted, “You can’t campaign for an armistice! It’s Armistice Day!”

What’s most remarkable about this controversy over Remembrance Day is how little remembering is involved. We are in the middle of a festival of forgetting. Sunak has perhaps forgotten that the original message of Armistice Day ceremonies after the First World War was “Never Again”.

The PM accused organisers of the pro-Palestinian protest of being disrespectful and provocative, but marching for a ceasefire is not just compatible with Remembrance Day. It is exactly the right day on which to campaign for peace. We can honour the victims of war by working to prevent war in the present and future.

If Sunak and his allies were to study history a bit more, they might remember what happened after Armistice Day in 1918. The Treaty of Versailles impoverished millions of people in Germany. British and French rulers drew lines on maps of the Middle East with little regard for the views of inhabitants. In 1922, British veterans protested against poverty by marching past the Cenotaph on Armistice Day with pawn tickets pinned to their jackets instead of medals.

The failure to learn from war in 1918 prepared the way for further conflict, violence and poverty. Now ministers talk of “respecting” Remembrance Day while selling weapons around the world – including to Israeli forces killing thousands of children in Gaza, committing atrocities as vile as Hamas’s murder of Israeli civilians.

It would be generous to say that Sunak and his allies have forgotten the purpose of the march planned for Saturday. A less charitable view would suggest they are deliberately misrepresenting it. Security Minister Tom Tugendhat told BBC Breakfast, “I do not think that a protest on Remembrance weekend next to the Cenotaph is appropriate.”

The march will not be near the Cenotaph war memorial – the focus of national remembrance events. That was never the plan and organisers have said the route will avoid the Whitehall area completely. The march will also start long after the two-minute silence at 11am. Sunak conveniently forgot this when he warned of a “clear and present risk” that the Cenotaph could be desecrated.

Sunak’s dog-whistle was heard. The commentator Douglas Murray was soon claiming that protesters “plan to defame our war-dead and desecrate the Cenotaph”. There have been calls for the march to be banned, raising the prospect of police arresting thousands of people for a peaceful demonstration. Far-right activists on social media are urging each other to “defend the Cenotaph”.

In reality, a lot of people who march on Saturday will also take part in Remembrance events. The day after demonstrating for a ceasefire, the Peace Pledge Union will hold the national Alternative Remembrance Sunday Ceremony, laying wreaths of white poppies to commemorate all victims of war – British, Palestinian, Israeli and every other nationality.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman stirred up tensions and misinformation by describing peace protests as “hate marches” last week. But go along to one of these marches and you will see Muslim, Jewish, Christian and secular peace groups. They oppose Israeli bombing for the same reason they oppose Hamas: because they object to the killing of innocent people.

These groups have condemned the small percentage of protesters who show support for Hamas or antisemitism. Such people have no place at an anti-war march and organisers and speakers must continue to denounce them.

Braverman has also encouraged the idea that police have been soft on protesters, with help from the right-wing press. We saw the consequences last week, with a sharp rise in arrests at anti-war protests. In one of the most shocking incidents, police disrupted a prayer service held by Jewish peace campaigners taking part in a demonstration calling for a ceasefire.

With far-right types turning up at the Cenotaph spoiling for a fight, police under pressure to arrest peace protesters and government ministers misrepresenting a peace march, Sunak and Braverman will have blood on their hands if violence breaks out on Remembrance Day.

Thankfully, many other people will be honouring the war-dead by campaigning for peace.

Darkest Hour: War, class and Winston Churchill

Posted on by symonhill

It was not the positive image of Winston Churchill that put me off the film Darkest Hour. It wasn’t the representation of people calling for peace. It wasn’t the historical inaccuracies. It was the portrayal of working class characters, and in paricular Churchill’s brief interaction with a group of working class people on a tube train.

Darkest Hour is primarily about a decision facing the British government in May 1940: to keep on fighting, depite devastating losses and German millitary superiority, or to enter peace negotations with the Nazi regime. It was an unenviable decision, choosing between two horrendous possibilities. The film pits Churchill, who would “never surrender”, against those pushing for a negotiated peace, notably Edward Wood (Viscount Halifax). The film’s bias is clearly in favour of Churchill: an easy postion to cheer with the benefit of hindsight, removed from the millions who died as an invasion of Britain was prevented, more by luck than anything else.

When I was a child, Churchill was frequently presented as an uncomplicated hero. Nowadays, it is much more common to see him potrayed as a flawed hero. Many people are well aware that Churchill was rude, indecisive and an alcoholic. References are less frequent to his racist attitudes, brutality as Home Secretary and opposition to votes for women and free secondary education. However, there are people who recognise all this but still see him as the saviour of Britain during World War Two. If he’s no longer convincing as an unblemished hero, then a flawed hero is still a hero.

Darkest Hour portrays Churchill’s rudeness as a comical, almost endearing quality. Despite my problems with the film’s biases, I appreciated that proponents of a negotiated peace were presented relatively sympathetically and their arguments given a hearing. I was enjoying watching the film, until the scene around three-quarters of the way through in which Churchill spontaneously leaves his government car and travels on the London Underground.

In recognising Churchill’s flaws, the film acknowledges his elite background, mentioning early on that he has never travelled on a tube train. When he enters the tube train later in the film, he talks to seven or eight working class people, to discover what “the people” think about a negotiated peace.

The portrayal is patronising in the extreme. Improbably, they all have exactly the same view – opposition to peace negotations. They are uniformly deferential to Churchill, and offer their views only after he asks them a highly biased question in extremely simplistic terms. The fact that one of them is black seems to be an attempt to ward off assocations of Churchill with racism.

The aristocrats, royals and upper middle class politicians who argue with each other throughout the film are considered intelligent enough to have a range of nuanced views. The working class characters, allowed to appear only briefly, are given only simplistic statements to utter.

Historical inaccuracies are inevitable in films; some flexibility is essential to make the story flow. And I can cope with a film having a different bias to my own. What I can’t cope with is the absurd notion that Churchill decided to rule out peace negotations because of an encounter with “the people” – in the form of a handful of randomly selected individuals on a tube train.

The rights or wrongs of entering peace negotiations in May 1940 should certainly be debated a lot more than they are. More importantly, however, we need to address the way in whch World War Two influences our culture, our politics and our society. Every military action today is equated with World War Two by those who support it. Every tyrant opposed by UK governments is compared to Hitler (but not the many tyrants supported by UK governments). Everyone supporting peace or cuts to military spending is compared, with staggering inaccuracy, to people who backed appeasment in the 1930s. The portrayal of Churchill as a hero is magnified and mlutiplied by the refusal to recognise allied atrocities, as if the greater atrocities of the Nazis make all other actions OK.

Perhaps worst of all, the myth of Britain “standing alone” against Hitler is used to portray war as inevitable and right. This is possible only by blanking out all sorts of facts and possibilities from our collective memory.

That thoughts of World War Two should still exercise so much influence is perhaps unsurprising. This is no reason to be naïve about it, or to refuse to challenge one-sided narratives that continue to be used to justify war, nationalism and militarism today. It is a shame that a film as well acted and directed as Darkest Hour essentially serves as fuel to the militarist myth machine.