Exodus and Remembrance

Purposeful identity as a strategy of survival

In recent days I have been seeing a lot of old images. I have been looking at pictures of London as it was, and Britain as it was. It is just a tiny fraction over a century since the Cenotaph, which honours Britain’s war dead, was completed and unveiled. It is a starkly simple monument, with an elegance characteristic of its era, and fitting to its purpose.

It is only a century.

A century, in the life of old nations, should be a little thing. A span that can be seen from end to end by a single fortunate human being. And yet the world, and this nation, could hardly have changed more in that period, could hardly have been altered more radically if we had lost both the great world wars of the 20th century.

When the Roman was a young, hungry upstart, the splendour and power of Greece was already old. In the days of the Roman Republic a Greek dictator named Pyrrhus determined to chastise the growing Roman threat, and did so in a fashion that was technically a victory. But the victory came at such cost, and inflicted such ruinous consequence, that it was the loser who was strengthened, and the victor who was ultimately defeated.

Rome would never quite shake off a sense that the Greeks were their cultural superiors, modelling everything from their theology to their art to their building on the earlier power, and for centuries still treating Greek accomplishments with respect. But still they made Greeks their slaves. They had them as the tutors of their children, but they could whip them too.

That was, remember, how a succeeding power treated an old one that they deeply admired.

It’s hard not to look on Britain’s greatest victories in the 20th century in a similar light. Britain played a leading part in the defeat of German ambition, twice, and had the clear moral victory of eradicating both Nazism and, in a subordinate role to the US, the Communist Soviet Union. But these three great achievements were pyrrhic triumphs. They cost an Empire and superpower status, but worse than that, they seem ultimately to have cost us our soul, and our own homeland too.