As we mark the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, it is clear that the moral wounds it inflicted on Western culture have not healed. Recent incidents, such as the rejection of Remembrance Day poppies by Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU), or Southampton University Students’ Union’s (SUSU) threat to paint over a mural dedicated to war heroes, are symptomatic of the sense of malaise and confusion regarding the memorialisation of the First World War.
In a sense, however, this hostility towards the memorialisation of the war, as an expression of antagonism towards a cultural legacy, has its roots in the First World War itself. Because although it was principally a military conflict, it also served as a catalyst for the emergence of a powerful mood of alienation from the values and cultural practices of the past.
This should not be underestimated. The Great War, as it was then called, fundamentally undermined the cultural continuity of the West. Disconnected from the past, Western societies found it difficult to develop a compelling narrative with which to socialise young people. As a result, the phenomenon known today as the ‘generation gap’ acquired a powerful significance — precisely because it was not simply a generational gap. Rather, it was a cultural gap that opened up between the post- and pre-war eras which, in the decades to follow, was experienced through generational tensions as the problem of identity.
The Decline of the Wes...
Best Price: $8.38
Buy New $52.74
(as of 04:25 UTC - Details)
It is worth noting that both the Cambridge and Southampton student activists invoked contemporary identity politics to justify their distaste for remembering those who sacrificed their lives on the battlefield of Europe. Embracing the anti-white affectations of contemporary identitarians, Emily Dawes, the SUSU president, took exception to a mural that depicted an ex-soldier receiving a degree on graduation day. Dawes declared that this ‘mural of white men’ should be taken down or daubed over.
In today’s political landscape, where the obsession with identity is so prominent, it is easy to forget that the politics of identity is a fairly recent development. Concern with identity first emerged in response to the cultural confusions that took shape during the increasingly bloody but apparently pointless slaughter on the battlefield of the Great War. The traumatic upheavals unleashed during the course of this four-year-long conflict called into question the moral and intellectual premises of Western culture and civilisation. For many, the war served as the ultimate symbol of moral exhaustion and Western decline. In the immediate aftermath of the war, writes a contemporary historian, we can see the ‘gradual disintegration of Christian confidence in Western cultural values’ (1).
Moreover, assumptions of white superiority were dealt a deathblow on the battlefields of the Great War. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler warned that the ‘unassailable privileges of the white races have been thrown away, squandered and betrayed’. Spengler added that ‘the exploited world is beginning to take its revenge on its lords’. Spengler’s views resonated with a wider mood of cultural pessimism. Those who had previously taken the superiority of the white race for granted now talked of the war as an exercise in racial suicide.
