Re-membering Remembrance

Although the two minutes’ silence on Whitehall itself passed without incident, disorder broke out around it. Those who claimed to be defending the memory of those lost in the wars tried to force their way through police lines, threw bottles and a metal barrier, and clashed with officers. Nine officers were injured, and more than ninety counter-protestors were arrested over the course of the day.

We might have expected the significance of Remembrance to weaken over time, as those who fought or served in the wars passed away. (There are no longer any veterans of World War One with us, and only a few thousand who served in the Second World War). We have also now passed the great landmark anniversaries — the centenary of the First World War and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Second. Yet, although the number of people who are mourning loved ones lost in the wars has fallen, many still participate in Remembrance services to pay their respects.

And, indeed, over the past two decades, what some commentators call “poppy pressure” has steadily intensified. It has become effectively obligatory for public figures — politicians, broadcasters, footballers — to wear a poppy in the weeks before Remembrance Sunday, and ‘gotcha’ journalism pieces shame those who forget or decline.

When he led the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn’s conduct at the Cenotaph was scrutinised year upon year: whether he bowed deeply enough in 2015, whether he appeared to jig on his way there in 2016, whether his coat was sufficiently formal in 2018. Footballer James McCLean says he has received death threats for his decision to not wear a poppy.

Remembrance has grown more visually saturated, too. In many areas, there are now poppies on every lamppost, metal “Tommy” silhouettes on street corners, knitted soldiers on postboxes, and “Lest We Forget” banners in front gardens.

What accounts for the growing salience of Remembrance? And how might the Church help the nation to remember well?

From living memory to cultural memory

Part of what has happened is the kind of memory which is at the heart of Remembrance is changing. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann drew a distinction which is helpful in this respect: between communicative memory and cultural memory. Communicative memory is the memory held by people who experienced the events themselves, which they pass on orally. This lasts for about 80 to 100 years. Cultural memory describes how a society institutionalises those memories- in rites, monuments and texts – so that they can endure much longer than a human lifetime.

But because cultural memory is somewhat detached from the people who lived through those events, and because it is reinterpreted by each generation for its own context and purposes, cultural memory also becomes something to be claimed and contested.

As Remembrance has been passing from communicative to cultural memory, it appears to have become more, rather than less, central to Britain’s national story. Historians such as David Reynolds, in The Long Shadow, and David Edgerton, in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, have shown how, in the later twentieth century, Britain came increasingly to narrate itself through the world wars — through themes of sacrifice, endurance, unity, and “standing alone”, however mythologised.

One reason, we might imagine, why the world wars have become particularly significant in our national self-conception is that other chapters of our story are no longer straightforward sources of pride – often, instead, flashpoints in our culture wars – most notably, because of the entanglement of so many of our institutions with the transatlantic slave trade, and the oppression of the British Empire. By contrast, although it still requires some historical distortion, the second world war in particular is widely viewed as a ‘good war’, in which both right and victory were on our side.

In other words, as the memories of the world wars pass out of the hands of those who lived through them, they become easier to claim. And, given their central place in our national self-identity, there is plenty of reason to do so.

Remembrance as Shared Infrastructure

Faced with the sense that the temperature around Remembrance is rising, that it is becoming a culture-war flashpoint, there can be a temptation to step back from it. There can be a concern that we have tipped over from mourning war to glorifying it, or that it is being used to express an exclusionary, militaristic form of nationalism.

Of course, the Church of England is deeply involved in Remembrance Day, and so cannot simply withdraw from it. But, beyond that, we would suggest that it presents an important opportunity for articulating a positive, inclusive sense of national identity.

Shared rituals are part of how people come to feel they belong to a nation. In a previous post we explored David Miller’s argument that a shared public culture – common stories, reference points, and rituals – is part of what establishes a national identity. Remembrance is surely part of that public culture – a national moment of communal simultaneity, known and largely observed across class, region and generation. We sought to argue, in that post, that a national culture is active – its content flows from participation, and therefore, the greater the participation, the larger the proportion of people who will feel a sense of national belonging.

And elsewhere we have written that healthy patriotism does not require a flattering account of the national past and is willing to look at wrongdoing carried out in the nation’s name as well as its genuine achievements. And, that it is oriented towards the common good, asking what responsibilities the nation bears toward the wider world.

With this in mind, and thinking about how Remembrance, as it completes its transition into cultural memory, could help shape our collective future, a distinction drawn by the Franco-Bulgarian thinker Tzvetan Todorov, between literal and exemplary memory, is useful.

Literal memory, according to Todorov, preserves the singularity of what happened – it is treated as incomparable to any other historical event – and asserts an unbroken line of identity between the protagonists of then (both victims and oppressors) and the people of now.

Todorov’s concern was that this form of memory traps the rememberer. You never get past the original wound: you either perpetuate your status as a victim, sometimes to secure material or symbolic advantage, or you slide into cycles of revenge. Literal memory binds a group to its particular suffering, inclines it to condemn everyone associated with the original aggressors, and leaves it closed to the suffering of others.

Exemplary memory, by contrast, also begins by honouring the singular event but then moves from the particular to the general, first defusing the raw charge of the original episode and then setting it within a wider family of comparable cases. The event becomes a model for understanding new situations involving different actors; one draws a lesson from it, so that the past becomes a principle of action for the present. This, for Todorov, is the liberating and morally productive use of memory: it lets your own suffering teach you to recognise and resist injustice done to others.

Seen through Todorov’s lens, the scenes in Whitehall in 2023 were literal memory in action: the counter-protestors were asserting a direct connection to, perhaps even ownership of, the memory of the war-dead, and were unable to see a resemblance between those historic events and the current ones to which the pro-Palestine marchers wished to draw attention.

Exemplary memory, by contrast, honours the particular – individual names and stories – but allows them to widen our gaze.

The Commonwealth Fallen

Another reason why we do not believe we as the church should withdraw from Remembrance is that, in a very practical sense, the world wars offers a national story which is particularly appropriate for a diverse modern Britain.

In the First World War, around 1.5 million Indians served in the British armed forces, and roughly 74,000 of them died. In the Second, the British Indian Army numbered some 2.5 million men — the largest volunteer force in military history — and tens of thousands more were killed. Hundreds of thousands of African troops and tens of thousands of Caribbean men fought in the wars. The war dead whom we honour each November were, in their ethnic and racial diversity, far closer to the Britain of our contemporary cities than to any imagined homogeneous past.

This has, until recently, not been properly recognised. In 2021, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission reported that over 100,000 casualties, predominantly African and Middle Eastern, were never commemorated by name, and in some cases not commemorated at all. But this is starting to be remedied with, for example, a Sikh war memorial unveiled in Leicester’s Victoria Park in 2022 and Leicester’s exhibition of “The Forgotten Army”, a bronze of five figures representing the Gurkha, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu soldiers of the British Indian Army. There is also soon to be a Muslim War Memorial in central London.

This is where those who lead Remembrance services carry both a particular responsibility and a particular gift. They can tell the stories of the Commonwealth dead alongside the British, and draw the exemplary lesson for those present. They can hold lament and gratitude together, refusing the drift towards glorification of war that so many fear. They can pray for former enemies and for all the bereaved. And they can find ways to gather the whole community, so that the way we remember the past lays the foundations for a hope-filled future.

Those who descended on the Cenotaph in 2023 thought they were honouring the war-dead. We believe there is a better way.