“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him...”
When we embarked two years ago on this decade of commemorations it was understood that it would be about remembering and honouring courage and sacrifices on all sides, and perhaps learning lessons, rather than glorifying or demonising particular narratives, or people.
That would make it possible to embrace in our collective remembering – “parity of esteem”– the likes of Carson and Redmond and Pearse, the Covenant, as well as the Home Rule Bill, the campaigns for women’s suffrage and for the rights of workers. And that most seminal of events, the 1916 Rising.
But our consensus on the need for a common understanding of commemoration as a shared remembering is sadly missing in London where the first attempts to mark the start of the first World War have been marred by a divisive political exchange on its nature.
Education secretary Michael Gove in the Daily Mail has denounced left-wing academics for propagating myths about the futility of the war and the incompetence of generals, that, fed by satires like Blackadder or the musical Oh What a Lovely War!, become part of the standard national discourse. “Our understanding of the war,” he argued, “has been overlaid by misunderstandings and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage . . . Many of the new analyses emerging challenge existing left-wing versions of the past designed to belittle Britain and its leaders. Instead, they help us to understand that, for all our mistakes as a nation, Britain’s role in the world has also been marked by nobility and courage.”
The problem is not that Gove holds such bullishly patriotic views or that he imputes the patriotism of others. The contesting of competing narratives is vital to bringing such events back to life. But his attempt to impose one narrative, to define what he calls the “right way” to remember the war as “uniquely horrific but plainly a just war” is a recipe for fatally undermining the “national” character of commemorations.
He is also wrong, as Labour’s Tristram Hunt has argued, “to position 1918 as a simplisitic nationalistic triumph”. And his suggestion that the sacrifice of 15 million lives, including thousands of Irishmen, was right and necessary to resist the new imperialism of Germany, is a grotesque post-hoc rationalisation of his own country’s imperialism.
We, too, will remember the “war to end all wars”, honour our dead, and commiserate with the millions internationally who lost family. And try to learn its ever-relevant lessons, not least of the post-Sarajeov drift of the Great Powers – as a recent writer called them, “sleepwalkers” – into catastrophic war.