Back in the 1950s my grandmother wrote her memoirs of childhood in Edwardian London, a story that ends in the summer of 1914, when she was 14. In contrast to the image we’re given of cheering men skipping to war, she recalls her father in tears at the breakfast table, lamenting that the politicians had failed. He foresaw total disaster (optimism runs in the family). She then finds that her brother has joined up, not out of excitement or glory but because he’s ashamed not to be in uniform; he survived, although broken by shellshock, and his elder son was killed in the next war. It’s clear from her recollection that a world is ending, and all the assumptions and beliefs from that childhood now look alien.
One of the many consequences of the 1914-1945 disaster was the total cultural and moral defeat of western conservatism; it brought on the academic attacks on the nation-state, the social and cultural changes of the 1960s, the European dream, multiculturalism, high taxes and statism.
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