Memory & war: Report from London
Markey, Eileen
Eileen Markey NENORY & WAR London, the Blitz & the U.S. London is abuzz with talk of war. It is featured in obscure movies on television. Its monuments fill a square in every neighborhood. The...
...For many Americans, war can still seem a noble call, something done bravely and far away...
...The opinions of ordinary Britons are more complicated than the "shoulder-to-shoulder" talk of Prime Minister Tony Blair...
...As in most of Europe, there is a general distrust of American intentions in Afghanistan...
...If Blair is haunted by Chamberlain, many of his fellow citizens seem to have digested the lesson of that mistake differently...
...September 11 gave an unwelcome taste of shattered churches, public morgues, checkpoints, and naked fear...
...President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have couched this new war in those terms: Evil must be challenged...
...The public conversation is imbued with pride at Londoners' bravery and steely resolve in the face of terror...
...It seems to be too much familiarity with war...
...While for Americans war has almost always been seen from afar, the British have had front-row seats...
...The glimmering skyscrapers of the financial district replaced acres devastated by German bombs...
...Commonweal 9 November 9,2001...
...I was a kid during the last war, and if you've been bombed, you don't ever want to bomb anyone," she said...
...The British never stopped talking about World War II, because it happened here...
...No, the last big one...
...It is ironic that here, where sixty years ago the world learned the danger of avoiding war, people are again reluctant to step into the breach...
...Ariel Sharon invoked the guilt of Munich when he rejected American entreaties that he stem Israeli violence in the occupied territories...
...They were bombed fifty-seven nights running in 1940 and twice war raged just across the Channel...
...A slight hint of this reluctance was demonstrated October 8, when close to a thousand protestors gathered in front of Parliament under the gaze of a statue of Winston Churchill and a phalanx of bronze generals from campaigns past...
...D Eileen Markey is an American journalist living in London...
...That the British understand...
...And it's not merely Saving Private Ryan and The Greatest Generation nostalgia, although "Band of Brothers" has been airing on prime time all month...
...The monuments that checker London not only commemorate soldiers, but thousands of ordinary civilians as well...
...Britain never has...
...The British understand the danger of appeasement, but they also remember the terrible burden of fighting a war at home...
...While Turner's involvement in the protest made her unusual, her stance is echoed by many less-vocal Britons...
...The United States has had the choice to toy with isolationism...
...Every war since 1950 has been fought to some degree with the justification that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's decision to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938 must never be repeated...
...The Bush administration angrily rejected Sharon's implication...
...The city is crowded with reminders...
...The United States, he suggested, was appeasing Arab states...
...Not this war of arresting Muslim suspects, freezing bank accounts, cobbling together a motley coalition...
...I think people are very frightened and don't know what the answer is," said Jean Turner, seventy-one, a retired architect who opposes the bombing in Afghanistan...
...Is this new war really meant to root out terrorists, or is it a drive to reposition the United States in Central Asia, or a chance for President George W. Bush's hawkish cabinet to play war...
...Under a purple-blue twilight sky, their colorful banners stood in stark contrast to the white marble of the government district...
...No, it's not a lack of bravery...
...And while Britain has been engaged in military actions over the past fifty years from the Falkland Islands to Kosovo, Britons seem more hesitant than their American ally to take up the latest call to arms...
...World War II is everywhere...
...Thirty-two thousand civilians died in London during the Blitz, and millions more lost their lives across the Channel in Europe...
Vol. 128 • November 2001 • No. 19
