Don’t mention the war

Peter Hitchens says a rosy-hued invocation of the Blitz spirit was a hopelessly misguided metaphor for the Covid pandemic. The really admirable virtue of the Second World War was Britain’s courageous defence of liberty at almost any cost

I RECENTLY PUBLISHED A BOOK WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN VERY DANGEROUS if anyone had read it. It was called The Phoney Victory, though quite a lot of the few people who bought it wrongly think it was called “The Phoney War”. I can only assume this is because they have wholly missed the point of it. I conceived of it perhaps ten years ago and finally delivered it in the spring of 2018. It had two aims. The first was to question the myth of the Second World War — which has become a British national religion and the prism through which almost everyone now views foreign policy. I especially wanted to explain why the British action of deliberately bombing German civilians was wrong and unjustifiable under Just War principles.…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July 2023

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