The Teddies Review - Dec 2021

our imperial perceptions or shifting that narrative. Where our remembrance culture fails is more in what is left unsaid. We hear little of the subjugation of the far-flung parts of the Empire which have been less covered by the history books, of the peoples for whom the valiant struggles of the British Army were not heroic but brutal, for the areas where the aim of battle was not liberation, but oppression.

the annual ceremony at the Cenotaph in Westminster. But whatever he felt or reflected on did not change his mind - British forces took part in the invasion and hundreds of them died in a conflict whose consequences are felt every day across the Middle East. Yet all those present knew that by remembering the sacrifice of former wars, their leader would be forced to contemplate the deaths and losses his decision would entail - the inevitable cruelty which ordering force entails. Much of the criticism of that war, fair or otherwise, was that it was a fundamentally colonial endeavour supported by a leader with a misplaced notion of Britain’s place in the world. Today, that notion is shaped much more by our idealisation of the past than by cynicism about the present. Dogmatic pacifism is no way to respond to a world where religious extremism and authoritarianism reign supreme across much of the globe. To confine any western power to impotence is to deny any real chance of the opportunities globalism has opened up across the last sixty years. Yet Britain is not the same country it was sixty years ago. It is high time to consider whether the flag waving and bombastic rituals of our today are true of the yesterday we so love to depict.

Present decline calls for a retelling of historical glory. Much of this country’s current status in the world is shown in how far our past is embedded into the national psyche - far more than the present, or in whatever aspirations to come. To admit that the Empire was a negative force would be to acknowledge an element our collective memory has so far forgotten. Like all of us, societies create myths to legitimize their present. The tales of glory and great sacrifice in a noble cause obscure the real reasons for going to war, as well as the less celebrated story of those who fell victim to imperial spoils. It is by telling their story - not merely that of the trenches, the ‘guns of August’, and the f lowing fields of Flanders poppies - that we would find a picture much more worthy of reflection.

By Patrick Maxwell

In late 2002, while deciding on the drastic course of invading Iraq, Tony Blair took part in