We will fight them on the centre ground, we will never remember: the Second World War, psychocultural repression and liberal configurations of modern British identity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that a form of what Sigmund Freud termed ‘abnormal repression’ [(2014). Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Read & Co. (Originally published in 1910] writ large onto British cultural memory is essential to understanding several phenomena: firstly, the UK’s popular amnesia about the Second World War, a process that echoes Michael Billig’s proposition that ‘Historians creatively remember ideologically convenient facts of the past, while overlooking what is discomfiting’ Billig, M. [(2014). Banal nationalism. Sage, p. 38]; secondly, how such repression has informed contemporary political debates about British imperial and neo-imperial actions to Brexit to ‘rising anti-Semitism’ [Lentin, A. (2020). Why Race Still Matters. Polity]; and thirdly, how a dialectic between these first two phenomena are patterning a British national identity proposed by the political centre. As Ernest Renan observes, mass-forgetting is ‘a crucial element in the creation of nations’ [(1990). What is a nation? In H. Bhabha (Ed.), Nation and narration (pp. 5–22). Routledge, p. 11].