The forgetting of war is itself an act of violence: the extermination of memory and of history. And so it is doubtless right that the UK government should officially commemorate the First World War, which began a hundred years ago in the summer of 1914 and resulted in the loss of almost a million British lives.
But commemoration shouldn't mean the construction of an artificial memory which effaces the real, any more than it should involve the commercial and political exploitation of a past event; what Jean Baudrillard would describe as the capturing of leftover heat from a catastrophic occurrence in order to warm the corpse of the present.
Hundreds-of-thousands of dead soldiers, having marched through the mud in the name of King and Country only to end up buried in mass graves or sent home like Clifford Chatterley more or less in bits, should not now be made to march anew in the name of corporate-media spectacle and enforced public sentimentality.
The Great War was a tragic historical event with causes and consequences open to critical analysis and it should primarily be remembered as such. If, even as it unfolded, it gave rise to art, it is nevertheless mistaken to transform it into a universal myth or some kind of absolute point of reference that everyone is expected to feel moved by - including those who were not even born in the twentieth century, or whose parents have come from countries and cultures that had nothing to do with the conflict.
In a sense, therefore, the sequence of thirty-one war poems written by D. H. Lawrence entitled 'All of Us' and published in their full, uncensored form last year for the first time, is unfortunately named: for this sense of consensus or national unity has long-since vanished (if in fact it ever existed).
Nevertheless, the poems continue to speak to some of us and speak powerfully; i.e., without mawkishness, but with a good deal of genuine feeling, including horror and anger as well as deep sorrow and their publication provides a far more fitting memorial than that being planned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which seems to involve the dimming of minds as well as the extinguishing of lights on the home front.
Nevertheless, the poems continue to speak to some of us and speak powerfully; i.e., without mawkishness, but with a good deal of genuine feeling, including horror and anger as well as deep sorrow and their publication provides a far more fitting memorial than that being planned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which seems to involve the dimming of minds as well as the extinguishing of lights on the home front.
Note: See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
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