TedTest

From the Ted Talk by Keith Lowe: Why we need to stop obsessing over World War II

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Hello everybody. Audience: Hello. Keith Lowe: Fantastic! This is like a schoolroom or something. (Laughter) My name is Keith Lowe. I am an historian of the Second World War and its aftermath, and even I have to admit that I've chosen a pretty crowded field to study. I went into my local bookohsp recently, and this is what I saw. Thousands of books about the Second World War are pheibusld every year, and, actually, to tell you the truth, this is only a very tiny selection of what's on offer. We in the West, and, actually, increasingly people in other parts of the world too, we are just a little bit obsessed by the Second World War. We have whole TV stations which seem devoted to it. We write books about it, we write novels about it, we make films about it. We have university courses which are devoted to the Second World War. Whole museums are built to house World War II collections. Even our politicians like to get in on this act. Whenever there is an important anvrserinay of the war, they tend to gather and creatommome it, and make speeches. So, for example, at the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, June 2014, 17 heads of state took time out of their scueehlds to come and spend the day on the Normandy beaches. Seventeen! This included people like Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, the choelanclr of grmeany, Angela Merkel, and so on. From my own country, we sent not only our Prime Minister, but also Queen Elisabeth II, who is - I mean, she is now in her neniites and largely retired from public life. What other inatnaonirtel event can do all this? Even international summits struggle to get so many world leaders into one place at the same time. My qtsiuoen is: Why? What is it that all these world leaders, in fact what is it that all of us, think it is that we're remembering? Why are we all so obsessed by the the Second World War? You might think that somebody like me would be pretty pleased with this situation. As long as the World War II irdtsuny is bmnoiog, I am always going to have a job, right? But actually there is something about it that I find really a little bit disturbing, and I don't know whether that is just because I have an inherent distrust of a lot of politicians, or whether it's because I've been trained to always question everything. But it strikes me that a lot of the rhetoric that gets thrown around about the Second World War, particularly by people like politicians and jtoinraulss and diplomats and so on, a lot of it doesn't seem to be about the Second World War at all; it seems to be about something else. I'm not sure if I've exactly put my fneigr on pilcersey what that thing is, but it seems to be something like a way of fostering national pride, or just trying to get plopee to feel good about themselves. Along the way, it seems to me that the Second World War has been turned into a little bit of a caotron, where everybody knows who the good guys were, and everybody knows who the bad guys were. There is pourcies little space left aonmyre for any of that difficult grey area in between. To give you some kind of an idea about what on earth it is I am going on about, let me tell you a story from my own country, from batriin. In Britain, we like to think we are the real heroes of the Second World War. We tell stories about how we sootd alone against the niazs, about how we endured the bnibomg of the Blitz; how we kept calm and carried on, and eeluanlvty fought our way back into Europe and liberated it. We still call the Second wrlod War "Our Finest Hour", as if it is some kind of golden age in our history. So whenever there is any kind of anniversary, or irtnopmat event based around the Second World War, we Brits really go for it. One of these events happened quite recently, in the summer of 2012, when we opeend up a brand new war memorial right in the middle of central London. It was a mmorieal to the men of bobemr Command, the men who flew the panels over Germany, dropped bobms and so on. This is what it looks like. As you can see, it's not exactly a shy and retiring piece of architecture, it's actually quite huge. It's by far the largest war memorial that we have in London, and I can tell you there are a lot of war memorials in lnodon. As you walk into this thing, there is an inscription which tells you that it's dedicated to the 55,000 men of Bomber Command who lost their lives during World War II. Now, when this first opened, in the summer of 2012, I went along to have a look, see what I thought of it, have a walk around. There is something really quite mniovg about it actually. You step in through these great big pillars, and, up on the wall, you can see carved into the sntoe, there is a quotation from Winston crhihlucl saying exactly how much we owe to these men who lost their lives. Parts of the memorial are built out of an actual World War II aircraft that was shot down during the war. So they put a lot of thought into this. It's actually really quite inspiring. So as I was walking around this mmunoent, I couldn't help but feel this real surge of pride. I felt proud of these men who had given their lievs for something that I hold dear. I felt proud of my cnoruty, I felt proud of the British way of life which had produced heroes like this. And yet, there was this little voice in the back of my head which just wouldn't go away because I know that 55,000 men of Bomber comnamd died during World War II, but I also know that 500,000 Germans died beneath the bombs that these men dropped. A lot of those Germans were Nazis, and I dare say that a lot of them probably deserved it. But the vast majority of these people were just oardniry men, women and children, just like you and me. Are any of these people at all mentioned on this memorial? Of course they are not. If you would sgseugt such a thing in the summer of 2012, you probably would have been lynched. The Germans were our enemies during the Second World War. You can't mention the Germans on a British nntioaal monument. And yet not to mention them, to pretend that somehow this didn't happen, or even worse, that somehow it doesn't mttaer, that too makes me feel a little bit uooflnmactrbe. Okay, the Germans are a difficult problem, so let's just put them to one side for a minute, and let's think instead about the other nationalities. And here is where the story starts getting isttrieenng. Because if there is one thing that we Brits always forget about the bomber war, it's the fact that we didn't only bomb Germany. More than a third of British and American bombs dropped on eourpe during the war were dporped not on Germany but on those countries we were speoupsd to be liberating. As a cqeunnoesce, 50,000 French cilnaiivs were killed by our bombs. 10,000 Dutch civilians were killed by our bombs. Are any of these people mieetnond on this memorial? Of course they're not. And it was while I was thinking about that particular group, that it finally deawnd on me - actually something I probably should have realized right from the sartt - which is that mairleoms like this aren't dingseed to tell the whole story; they are only designed to tell those patrs of the story that make British people feel good about themselves. That's all very well and good, but it does come at a cost. And I couldn't help thinking when I was walking around this thing: This was the summer of 2012, this was the smeumr when the Olympic Games was coming to London. So at exactly the moment when the entire world was arriving in our city, the message that we were advertising was that we will remember our wartime dead, but we won't remember yours. It's like the exact opposite of the Olympic spiirt. It's not only the British who do this, of course it's not. Every nation does it, the Americans, for example. The Americans like to call their wrmitae veterans "the greatest generation that any society has ever produced", as if they have some kind of mloonopy on heroism or something. (Laughter) They backed it up with a thousand hloyowold moievs full of square-jawed aaimcern heroes defeating evil in the name of truth and freedom. The Chinese are the same. You know that in 2013 alone, Chinese TV cmepinaos produced over 200 TV dtaoatamrnizis about the Second World War, each of them tnlileg almost an identical story. Only, of course, this time, it's the janespae who are all the evil monsters, and the Chinese who are all selfless heroes. And, of course, I could say the same thing about the French or the Koreans or the Norwegians or the Greeks. We all do this. We all like to think that we were the heroes. We all like to think that we were the victims. But what we don't like to reembemr is those grey aears. And it's that which I find most uncomfortable about this, because, as far as I am concerned, it's the grey areas that make history interesting. In a sense, all good history is about the grey areas. But a lot of people don't seem to have time for complicated stories. They don't have time for difficult and uncomfortable emotions. In fact, I'm qkuilcy coming to the ciolouncsn that a lot of people don't really have time for hitrosy at all. What they really want is a myth. Now, you might ask yourselves: What does any of this matter? I mean, we all like a good story, don't we? If that story makes us feel good about ourselves, then so much the better. It's all in the past anyway, so what does it matter? But that's just the problem, isn't it? Because it's not all in the past. And there is a dark side to all of these sretios and myths that can be really damaging. When the former Yugoslavia tore itself apart in the 1990s, it did so with World War II sngos on its lips, and World War II ateiotcirs in its heart. When the Ukraine crisis borke out in 2014, unikriaans and Russians accused one another of acting like Nazis. And then, of course, Hillary Clinton weieghd in and seatrtd cmriponag Vladimir Putin to Hitler. These sorts of comparisons don't do anything to feotsr rational dtbaee. If you were in an argument with someone, the last thing that is going to calm things down is that you start accusing them of being a Nazi. If you don't believe me, next time you're in an argument with your wife or your husband, give it a try and see what kind of reaction you get. (Laughter) I can see some of you seem to have tried it. (Laughter) My point is that as soon as we start bringing the Second World War into any of our amuntegrs, we get so sort of carried away with our own national myths that all we actually end up doing is stirring things back up again. Let me give you a couple of examples. Take this economic crisis which has rocked the world since 2008. Here we are in Athens, and you all know about the economic crisis. All across Southern Europe, people have been suffering a real austerity, and largely this has been imposed by the European Union. But it's not always the European Union that gets the blame for this. Quite often, as the lsgreat and most powerful country in the union, it's Germany that gets the blame. Now, how has this been portrayed in the psers? Have we had a calm, rational economic debate about it? This is the way that the Italian press pyrtaerod the sutiaiotn in 2012: "Quarto Reich." (Laughter) "The Fourth Reich." This is the Italian way of saying that modern-day Germany is no better than the Nazis, as if there is a direct link between World War II and today. And take a look at that prtcuie. They've managed to dig something out that makes it look like Angela Merkel is making a Nazi salute. (Laughter) How about the geerk press? (Laughter) How have the Greeks portrayed it? Well, here is a Greek newspaper. (Laughter) from the same year, 2012, and you will notice a photograph of Angela Merkel once again, this time in a Nazi urfonim. Obviously, it has been photoshopped. But what about that headline in red? "Memorandum macht frei." This is a direct reference to the motto that was written above the geats of the concentration camps in peacls like Auschwitz and Dachau. The implication here is that the whole of Greece is going to become like one giant German concentration camp as a consequence of the economic deal they've had to do. Now, this is the sort of thing that makes an historian like me want to just give up and go and become a window cleaner or something. (letghaur) I mean, it's historical nonsense. None of these headlines have anything to do with the Second World War at all. They are about a modern-day problem, a modern situation. The only reason to mention the Second World War is to prkvooe an emotional response. If I have one message that I want you to take away with you today, it is this: Whenever you hear a politician, or a journalist, or a dipoalmt, mention the Second World War, I want alarm bells to ring. Because when puiblc feurgis speak about the Second World War, they are not talking about what actually hapnpeed, they're ivnknoig a myth. So whenever you hear a politician mention the war, I want you to ask yourselves what it is he is really trying to do. Is he trying to inspire you? - In which case that is relatively harmless. Or is he trying to fill you with fear? Is he trying to draw people together? In which case, again, that is relatively harmless. Or is he really trying to drive people apart? And above all, I want you to reimnd yourselves, and to remind everybody you know, that the Second World War is over. (Laughter) We live in a different world, with different values and different problems. These problems will never be solved, and they certainly will never be solved peacefully, if all we can think to do is to resurrect the Second World War. You know, history is a messy business, particularly the history of the Second World War. It's not there to make us feel good about ourselves; it's often ugly and uncomfortable, and desperately complicated. It's full of those grey areas. If we could all just laern to accept that, then this world, our world, would be a much more peaceful pacle. Thank you. (Applause)

Open Cloze

Hello everybody. Audience: Hello. Keith Lowe: Fantastic! This is like a schoolroom or something. (Laughter) My name is Keith Lowe. I am an historian of the Second World War and its aftermath, and even I have to admit that I've chosen a pretty crowded field to study. I went into my local ________ recently, and this is what I saw. Thousands of books about the Second World War are _________ every year, and, actually, to tell you the truth, this is only a very tiny selection of what's on offer. We in the West, and, actually, increasingly people in other parts of the world too, we are just a little bit obsessed by the Second World War. We have whole TV stations which seem devoted to it. We write books about it, we write novels about it, we make films about it. We have university courses which are devoted to the Second World War. Whole museums are built to house World War II collections. Even our politicians like to get in on this act. Whenever there is an important ___________ of the war, they tend to gather and ___________ it, and make speeches. So, for example, at the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, June 2014, 17 heads of state took time out of their _________ to come and spend the day on the Normandy beaches. Seventeen! This included people like Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, the __________ of _______, Angela Merkel, and so on. From my own country, we sent not only our Prime Minister, but also Queen Elisabeth II, who is - I mean, she is now in her ________ and largely retired from public life. What other _____________ event can do all this? Even international summits struggle to get so many world leaders into one place at the same time. My ________ is: Why? What is it that all these world leaders, in fact what is it that all of us, think it is that we're remembering? Why are we all so obsessed by the the Second World War? You might think that somebody like me would be pretty pleased with this situation. As long as the World War II ________ is _______, I am always going to have a job, right? But actually there is something about it that I find really a little bit disturbing, and I don't know whether that is just because I have an inherent distrust of a lot of politicians, or whether it's because I've been trained to always question everything. But it strikes me that a lot of the rhetoric that gets thrown around about the Second World War, particularly by people like politicians and ___________ and diplomats and so on, a lot of it doesn't seem to be about the Second World War at all; it seems to be about something else. I'm not sure if I've exactly put my ______ on _________ what that thing is, but it seems to be something like a way of fostering national pride, or just trying to get ______ to feel good about themselves. Along the way, it seems to me that the Second World War has been turned into a little bit of a _______, where everybody knows who the good guys were, and everybody knows who the bad guys were. There is ________ little space left _______ for any of that difficult grey area in between. To give you some kind of an idea about what on earth it is I am going on about, let me tell you a story from my own country, from _______. In Britain, we like to think we are the real heroes of the Second World War. We tell stories about how we _____ alone against the _____, about how we endured the _______ of the Blitz; how we kept calm and carried on, and __________ fought our way back into Europe and liberated it. We still call the Second _____ War "Our Finest Hour", as if it is some kind of golden age in our history. So whenever there is any kind of anniversary, or _________ event based around the Second World War, we Brits really go for it. One of these events happened quite recently, in the summer of 2012, when we ______ up a brand new war memorial right in the middle of central London. It was a ________ to the men of ______ Command, the men who flew the ______ over Germany, dropped _____ and so on. This is what it looks like. As you can see, it's not exactly a shy and retiring piece of architecture, it's actually quite huge. It's by far the largest war memorial that we have in London, and I can tell you there are a lot of war memorials in ______. As you walk into this thing, there is an inscription which tells you that it's dedicated to the 55,000 men of Bomber Command who lost their lives during World War II. Now, when this first opened, in the summer of 2012, I went along to have a look, see what I thought of it, have a walk around. There is something really quite ______ about it actually. You step in through these great big pillars, and, up on the wall, you can see carved into the _____, there is a quotation from Winston _________ saying exactly how much we owe to these men who lost their lives. Parts of the memorial are built out of an actual World War II aircraft that was shot down during the war. So they put a lot of thought into this. It's actually really quite inspiring. So as I was walking around this ________, I couldn't help but feel this real surge of pride. I felt proud of these men who had given their _____ for something that I hold dear. I felt proud of my _______, I felt proud of the British way of life which had produced heroes like this. And yet, there was this little voice in the back of my head which just wouldn't go away because I know that 55,000 men of Bomber _______ died during World War II, but I also know that 500,000 Germans died beneath the bombs that these men dropped. A lot of those Germans were Nazis, and I dare say that a lot of them probably deserved it. But the vast majority of these people were just ________ men, women and children, just like you and me. Are any of these people at all mentioned on this memorial? Of course they are not. If you would _______ such a thing in the summer of 2012, you probably would have been lynched. The Germans were our enemies during the Second World War. You can't mention the Germans on a British ________ monument. And yet not to mention them, to pretend that somehow this didn't happen, or even worse, that somehow it doesn't ______, that too makes me feel a little bit _____________. Okay, the Germans are a difficult problem, so let's just put them to one side for a minute, and let's think instead about the other nationalities. And here is where the story starts getting ___________. Because if there is one thing that we Brits always forget about the bomber war, it's the fact that we didn't only bomb Germany. More than a third of British and American bombs dropped on ______ during the war were _______ not on Germany but on those countries we were ________ to be liberating. As a ___________, 50,000 French _________ were killed by our bombs. 10,000 Dutch civilians were killed by our bombs. Are any of these people _________ on this memorial? Of course they're not. And it was while I was thinking about that particular group, that it finally ______ on me - actually something I probably should have realized right from the _____ - which is that _________ like this aren't ________ to tell the whole story; they are only designed to tell those _____ of the story that make British people feel good about themselves. That's all very well and good, but it does come at a cost. And I couldn't help thinking when I was walking around this thing: This was the summer of 2012, this was the ______ when the Olympic Games was coming to London. So at exactly the moment when the entire world was arriving in our city, the message that we were advertising was that we will remember our wartime dead, but we won't remember yours. It's like the exact opposite of the Olympic ______. It's not only the British who do this, of course it's not. Every nation does it, the Americans, for example. The Americans like to call their _______ veterans "the greatest generation that any society has ever produced", as if they have some kind of ________ on heroism or something. (Laughter) They backed it up with a thousand _________ ______ full of square-jawed ________ heroes defeating evil in the name of truth and freedom. The Chinese are the same. You know that in 2013 alone, Chinese TV _________ produced over 200 TV ______________ about the Second World War, each of them _______ almost an identical story. Only, of course, this time, it's the ________ who are all the evil monsters, and the Chinese who are all selfless heroes. And, of course, I could say the same thing about the French or the Koreans or the Norwegians or the Greeks. We all do this. We all like to think that we were the heroes. We all like to think that we were the victims. But what we don't like to ________ is those grey _____. And it's that which I find most uncomfortable about this, because, as far as I am concerned, it's the grey areas that make history interesting. In a sense, all good history is about the grey areas. But a lot of people don't seem to have time for complicated stories. They don't have time for difficult and uncomfortable emotions. In fact, I'm _______ coming to the __________ that a lot of people don't really have time for _______ at all. What they really want is a myth. Now, you might ask yourselves: What does any of this matter? I mean, we all like a good story, don't we? If that story makes us feel good about ourselves, then so much the better. It's all in the past anyway, so what does it matter? But that's just the problem, isn't it? Because it's not all in the past. And there is a dark side to all of these _______ and myths that can be really damaging. When the former Yugoslavia tore itself apart in the 1990s, it did so with World War II _____ on its lips, and World War II __________ in its heart. When the Ukraine crisis _____ out in 2014, __________ and Russians accused one another of acting like Nazis. And then, of course, Hillary Clinton _______ in and _______ _________ Vladimir Putin to Hitler. These sorts of comparisons don't do anything to ______ rational ______. If you were in an argument with someone, the last thing that is going to calm things down is that you start accusing them of being a Nazi. If you don't believe me, next time you're in an argument with your wife or your husband, give it a try and see what kind of reaction you get. (Laughter) I can see some of you seem to have tried it. (Laughter) My point is that as soon as we start bringing the Second World War into any of our _________, we get so sort of carried away with our own national myths that all we actually end up doing is stirring things back up again. Let me give you a couple of examples. Take this economic crisis which has rocked the world since 2008. Here we are in Athens, and you all know about the economic crisis. All across Southern Europe, people have been suffering a real austerity, and largely this has been imposed by the European Union. But it's not always the European Union that gets the blame for this. Quite often, as the _______ and most powerful country in the union, it's Germany that gets the blame. Now, how has this been portrayed in the _____? Have we had a calm, rational economic debate about it? This is the way that the Italian press _________ the _________ in 2012: "Quarto Reich." (Laughter) "The Fourth Reich." This is the Italian way of saying that modern-day Germany is no better than the Nazis, as if there is a direct link between World War II and today. And take a look at that _______. They've managed to dig something out that makes it look like Angela Merkel is making a Nazi salute. (Laughter) How about the _____ press? (Laughter) How have the Greeks portrayed it? Well, here is a Greek newspaper. (Laughter) from the same year, 2012, and you will notice a photograph of Angela Merkel once again, this time in a Nazi _______. Obviously, it has been photoshopped. But what about that headline in red? "Memorandum macht frei." This is a direct reference to the motto that was written above the _____ of the concentration camps in ______ like Auschwitz and Dachau. The implication here is that the whole of Greece is going to become like one giant German concentration camp as a consequence of the economic deal they've had to do. Now, this is the sort of thing that makes an historian like me want to just give up and go and become a window cleaner or something. (________) I mean, it's historical nonsense. None of these headlines have anything to do with the Second World War at all. They are about a modern-day problem, a modern situation. The only reason to mention the Second World War is to _______ an emotional response. If I have one message that I want you to take away with you today, it is this: Whenever you hear a politician, or a journalist, or a ________, mention the Second World War, I want alarm bells to ring. Because when ______ _______ speak about the Second World War, they are not talking about what actually ________, they're ________ a myth. So whenever you hear a politician mention the war, I want you to ask yourselves what it is he is really trying to do. Is he trying to inspire you? - In which case that is relatively harmless. Or is he trying to fill you with fear? Is he trying to draw people together? In which case, again, that is relatively harmless. Or is he really trying to drive people apart? And above all, I want you to ______ yourselves, and to remind everybody you know, that the Second World War is over. (Laughter) We live in a different world, with different values and different problems. These problems will never be solved, and they certainly will never be solved peacefully, if all we can think to do is to resurrect the Second World War. You know, history is a messy business, particularly the history of the Second World War. It's not there to make us feel good about ourselves; it's often ugly and uncomfortable, and desperately complicated. It's full of those grey areas. If we could all just _____ to accept that, then this world, our world, would be a much more peaceful _____. Thank you. (Applause)

Solution

europe
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laughter
national
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command
hollywood
start
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bookshop
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Original Text

Hello everybody. Audience: Hello. Keith Lowe: Fantastic! This is like a schoolroom or something. (Laughter) My name is Keith Lowe. I am an historian of the Second World War and its aftermath, and even I have to admit that I've chosen a pretty crowded field to study. I went into my local bookshop recently, and this is what I saw. Thousands of books about the Second World War are published every year, and, actually, to tell you the truth, this is only a very tiny selection of what's on offer. We in the West, and, actually, increasingly people in other parts of the world too, we are just a little bit obsessed by the Second World War. We have whole TV stations which seem devoted to it. We write books about it, we write novels about it, we make films about it. We have university courses which are devoted to the Second World War. Whole museums are built to house World War II collections. Even our politicians like to get in on this act. Whenever there is an important anniversary of the war, they tend to gather and commemorate it, and make speeches. So, for example, at the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, June 2014, 17 heads of state took time out of their schedules to come and spend the day on the Normandy beaches. Seventeen! This included people like Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, and so on. From my own country, we sent not only our Prime Minister, but also Queen Elisabeth II, who is - I mean, she is now in her nineties and largely retired from public life. What other international event can do all this? Even international summits struggle to get so many world leaders into one place at the same time. My question is: Why? What is it that all these world leaders, in fact what is it that all of us, think it is that we're remembering? Why are we all so obsessed by the the Second World War? You might think that somebody like me would be pretty pleased with this situation. As long as the World War II industry is booming, I am always going to have a job, right? But actually there is something about it that I find really a little bit disturbing, and I don't know whether that is just because I have an inherent distrust of a lot of politicians, or whether it's because I've been trained to always question everything. But it strikes me that a lot of the rhetoric that gets thrown around about the Second World War, particularly by people like politicians and journalists and diplomats and so on, a lot of it doesn't seem to be about the Second World War at all; it seems to be about something else. I'm not sure if I've exactly put my finger on precisely what that thing is, but it seems to be something like a way of fostering national pride, or just trying to get people to feel good about themselves. Along the way, it seems to me that the Second World War has been turned into a little bit of a cartoon, where everybody knows who the good guys were, and everybody knows who the bad guys were. There is precious little space left anymore for any of that difficult grey area in between. To give you some kind of an idea about what on earth it is I am going on about, let me tell you a story from my own country, from Britain. In Britain, we like to think we are the real heroes of the Second World War. We tell stories about how we stood alone against the Nazis, about how we endured the bombing of the Blitz; how we kept calm and carried on, and eventually fought our way back into Europe and liberated it. We still call the Second World War "Our Finest Hour", as if it is some kind of golden age in our history. So whenever there is any kind of anniversary, or important event based around the Second World War, we Brits really go for it. One of these events happened quite recently, in the summer of 2012, when we opened up a brand new war memorial right in the middle of central London. It was a memorial to the men of Bomber Command, the men who flew the planes over Germany, dropped bombs and so on. This is what it looks like. As you can see, it's not exactly a shy and retiring piece of architecture, it's actually quite huge. It's by far the largest war memorial that we have in London, and I can tell you there are a lot of war memorials in London. As you walk into this thing, there is an inscription which tells you that it's dedicated to the 55,000 men of Bomber Command who lost their lives during World War II. Now, when this first opened, in the summer of 2012, I went along to have a look, see what I thought of it, have a walk around. There is something really quite moving about it actually. You step in through these great big pillars, and, up on the wall, you can see carved into the stone, there is a quotation from Winston Churchill saying exactly how much we owe to these men who lost their lives. Parts of the memorial are built out of an actual World War II aircraft that was shot down during the war. So they put a lot of thought into this. It's actually really quite inspiring. So as I was walking around this monument, I couldn't help but feel this real surge of pride. I felt proud of these men who had given their lives for something that I hold dear. I felt proud of my country, I felt proud of the British way of life which had produced heroes like this. And yet, there was this little voice in the back of my head which just wouldn't go away because I know that 55,000 men of Bomber Command died during World War II, but I also know that 500,000 Germans died beneath the bombs that these men dropped. A lot of those Germans were Nazis, and I dare say that a lot of them probably deserved it. But the vast majority of these people were just ordinary men, women and children, just like you and me. Are any of these people at all mentioned on this memorial? Of course they are not. If you would suggest such a thing in the summer of 2012, you probably would have been lynched. The Germans were our enemies during the Second World War. You can't mention the Germans on a British national monument. And yet not to mention them, to pretend that somehow this didn't happen, or even worse, that somehow it doesn't matter, that too makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable. Okay, the Germans are a difficult problem, so let's just put them to one side for a minute, and let's think instead about the other nationalities. And here is where the story starts getting interesting. Because if there is one thing that we Brits always forget about the bomber war, it's the fact that we didn't only bomb Germany. More than a third of British and American bombs dropped on Europe during the war were dropped not on Germany but on those countries we were supposed to be liberating. As a consequence, 50,000 French civilians were killed by our bombs. 10,000 Dutch civilians were killed by our bombs. Are any of these people mentioned on this memorial? Of course they're not. And it was while I was thinking about that particular group, that it finally dawned on me - actually something I probably should have realized right from the start - which is that memorials like this aren't designed to tell the whole story; they are only designed to tell those parts of the story that make British people feel good about themselves. That's all very well and good, but it does come at a cost. And I couldn't help thinking when I was walking around this thing: This was the summer of 2012, this was the summer when the Olympic Games was coming to London. So at exactly the moment when the entire world was arriving in our city, the message that we were advertising was that we will remember our wartime dead, but we won't remember yours. It's like the exact opposite of the Olympic spirit. It's not only the British who do this, of course it's not. Every nation does it, the Americans, for example. The Americans like to call their wartime veterans "the greatest generation that any society has ever produced", as if they have some kind of monopoly on heroism or something. (Laughter) They backed it up with a thousand Hollywood movies full of square-jawed American heroes defeating evil in the name of truth and freedom. The Chinese are the same. You know that in 2013 alone, Chinese TV companies produced over 200 TV dramatizations about the Second World War, each of them telling almost an identical story. Only, of course, this time, it's the Japanese who are all the evil monsters, and the Chinese who are all selfless heroes. And, of course, I could say the same thing about the French or the Koreans or the Norwegians or the Greeks. We all do this. We all like to think that we were the heroes. We all like to think that we were the victims. But what we don't like to remember is those grey areas. And it's that which I find most uncomfortable about this, because, as far as I am concerned, it's the grey areas that make history interesting. In a sense, all good history is about the grey areas. But a lot of people don't seem to have time for complicated stories. They don't have time for difficult and uncomfortable emotions. In fact, I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that a lot of people don't really have time for history at all. What they really want is a myth. Now, you might ask yourselves: What does any of this matter? I mean, we all like a good story, don't we? If that story makes us feel good about ourselves, then so much the better. It's all in the past anyway, so what does it matter? But that's just the problem, isn't it? Because it's not all in the past. And there is a dark side to all of these stories and myths that can be really damaging. When the former Yugoslavia tore itself apart in the 1990s, it did so with World War II songs on its lips, and World War II atrocities in its heart. When the Ukraine crisis broke out in 2014, Ukrainians and Russians accused one another of acting like Nazis. And then, of course, Hillary Clinton weighed in and started comparing Vladimir Putin to Hitler. These sorts of comparisons don't do anything to foster rational debate. If you were in an argument with someone, the last thing that is going to calm things down is that you start accusing them of being a Nazi. If you don't believe me, next time you're in an argument with your wife or your husband, give it a try and see what kind of reaction you get. (Laughter) I can see some of you seem to have tried it. (Laughter) My point is that as soon as we start bringing the Second World War into any of our arguments, we get so sort of carried away with our own national myths that all we actually end up doing is stirring things back up again. Let me give you a couple of examples. Take this economic crisis which has rocked the world since 2008. Here we are in Athens, and you all know about the economic crisis. All across Southern Europe, people have been suffering a real austerity, and largely this has been imposed by the European Union. But it's not always the European Union that gets the blame for this. Quite often, as the largest and most powerful country in the union, it's Germany that gets the blame. Now, how has this been portrayed in the press? Have we had a calm, rational economic debate about it? This is the way that the Italian press portrayed the situation in 2012: "Quarto Reich." (Laughter) "The Fourth Reich." This is the Italian way of saying that modern-day Germany is no better than the Nazis, as if there is a direct link between World War II and today. And take a look at that picture. They've managed to dig something out that makes it look like Angela Merkel is making a Nazi salute. (Laughter) How about the Greek press? (Laughter) How have the Greeks portrayed it? Well, here is a Greek newspaper. (Laughter) from the same year, 2012, and you will notice a photograph of Angela Merkel once again, this time in a Nazi uniform. Obviously, it has been photoshopped. But what about that headline in red? "Memorandum macht frei." This is a direct reference to the motto that was written above the gates of the concentration camps in places like Auschwitz and Dachau. The implication here is that the whole of Greece is going to become like one giant German concentration camp as a consequence of the economic deal they've had to do. Now, this is the sort of thing that makes an historian like me want to just give up and go and become a window cleaner or something. (Laughter) I mean, it's historical nonsense. None of these headlines have anything to do with the Second World War at all. They are about a modern-day problem, a modern situation. The only reason to mention the Second World War is to provoke an emotional response. If I have one message that I want you to take away with you today, it is this: Whenever you hear a politician, or a journalist, or a diplomat, mention the Second World War, I want alarm bells to ring. Because when public figures speak about the Second World War, they are not talking about what actually happened, they're invoking a myth. So whenever you hear a politician mention the war, I want you to ask yourselves what it is he is really trying to do. Is he trying to inspire you? - In which case that is relatively harmless. Or is he trying to fill you with fear? Is he trying to draw people together? In which case, again, that is relatively harmless. Or is he really trying to drive people apart? And above all, I want you to remind yourselves, and to remind everybody you know, that the Second World War is over. (Laughter) We live in a different world, with different values and different problems. These problems will never be solved, and they certainly will never be solved peacefully, if all we can think to do is to resurrect the Second World War. You know, history is a messy business, particularly the history of the Second World War. It's not there to make us feel good about ourselves; it's often ugly and uncomfortable, and desperately complicated. It's full of those grey areas. If we could all just learn to accept that, then this world, our world, would be a much more peaceful place. Thank you. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
world war	23
war ii	7
feel good	4
grey areas	4
felt proud	3
war memorial	2
bomber command	2
economic crisis	2
european union	2
angela merkel	2

ngrams of length 3

collocation	frequency
world war ii	7

Important Words

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