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Keep Calm And Carry On

Here’s an interesting phenomenon from Britain, reported by Jon Henley in the Guardian. Apparently, the above image–an old government poster brought out in 1939 to keep the population calm in the event of a German invasion–has, since the financial crisis began, started popping up all over the country — and even in the U.S. embassy […]

Calm

Here’s an interesting phenomenon from Britain, reported by Jon Henley in the Guardian. Apparently, the above image–an old government poster brought out in 1939 to keep the population calm in the event of a German invasion–has, since the financial crisis began, started popping up all over the country — and even in the U.S. embassy in Belgium.

Writes Henley:

The Lord Chamberlain’s Office at Buckingham Palace, the prime minister’s strategy unit at No 10, the Serious Fraud Office, the US embassy in Belgium, the vice chancellor of Cambridge University, the Emergency Planning Office at Nottingham council and the officers’ mess in Basra have all ordered posters. Even David Beckham has the T-shirt, we are told. …

Dr Lesley Prince, who lectures in social psychology at Birmingham University, is blunter still. “It is a quiet, calm, authoritative, no-b****t voice of reason,” he says. “It’s not about British stiff upper lip, really. The point is that people have been sold a lie since the 1970s. They were promised the earth and now they’re worried about everything – their jobs, their homes, their bank, their money, their pension. This is saying, look, somebody out there knows what’s going on, and it’ll be all right”

But will the people of Briton stay calm again in a deep depression? In the latest issue of TAC, Theodore Dalrymple gives plenty of reasons why they–and the other peoples of Europe–might not. (Subscribers can read it here).

Perhaps, however, faced with economic doom, the Brits might avert social upheaval thanks to that curious “emotional unity”–the bond that Orwell described in 1941 in his great essay, “The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”– which this poster is designed to elicit.

Of course, Britain is a very different country to what it was in Word War II. For all its modern problems, though, the nation does still seem to possess, to an extent, that “invisible chain” — that revivifying and strangely British blend of sentimentality and common-sense. The popular and nostalgic revival of this curious piece of old patriotic propaganda suggests as much.

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