The Critic Magazine

Don’t mention the war

I RECENTLY PUBLISHED A BOOK if anyone had read it. It was called , though quite a lot of the few people who bought it wrongly think it was called “The Phoney War”. I can only assume this is because they have wholly missed the point of it. I conceived of it perhaps ten years ago and finally delivered it in the spring of 2018. It had two aims. The first was to question the myth of the Second World War — which has become a British national religion and the prism through which almost everyone now views foreign policy. I especially wanted to explain why the British action of deliberately bombing German civilians was wrong and unjustifiable under Just War principles. I examined the common beliefs about how and why the war began, and about how it was conducted.

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