UK slipping into cult of the military
Insightful article from the Guardian:
The only place you could be sure of seeing a British soldier used to be outside a pub in a garrison town at chucking-out time. Now there are soldiers on talent shows, parading in sports stadiums and singing on daytime television. The narrative is always the same: sacrifice, suffering, redemption. As individual tales they can be inspirational, but what they represent collectively is more worrying. Britain has been drawn into a deep sleep about war and nowhere is this slumber more pernicious than in the militarisation of popular culture.
Read more (including the comments, which are pretty thoughtful):
I’ve been of the same opinion as the author for a while, that the more direct experience of WWII had inoculated the British against militarism, which explained the cultural differences between the US and the UK with respect to the place of the military.
Now it seems the inoculation may be fading.