Last year, a TV listing in The Guardian described the glossy Second World War drama series Masters of the Air as ‘an addition to the Band of Brothers universe’. Intentionally or not, the phrase was oddly penetrating. Masters of the Air is instantly recognisable as the product of a franchise, one taking place in a specific Spielbergian Second World War of sensitive young men fighting Hitler with stoical heroism and devastating cheekbones, solemnised by the testimony of their real-life historical counterparts. It began twenty-seven years ago with Saving Private Ryan, and it is as familiar now as any other cinematic extended universe.

The Guardian listing also nailed something about the cultural memory of the Second World War itself. The Band of Brothers universe is one strand of a wider franchise, a kind of Second World War Extended Universe that for decades now has shaped the fabric of national self-image, cultural expression, and politics.

This summer marks the eightieth anniversary of VE Day. Back in March, John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last surviving pilot of the Battle of Britain, died. The tributes in Parliament and in press statements had an air of rote dutifulness about them: he was a hero, of course, a protector of our freedom, the last of ‘The Few’ — but there was more pressing business to be getting on with.

The approach to VE Day, too, seems strangely muted this time around. The week before Hemingway died, Hannah Ingram-Moore, the daughter of Captain Tom Moore and keeper of his legend, was busy completing the public disgrace of her family by making a hilariously untutored round of media interviews. Complaining of how poorly she’d been treated, she announced three forthcoming self-published books: one on grief, an autobiography, and a book on resilience. Here was the war myth reduced to its shabbiest level of wounded narcissism, whining self-justification, and resentment. Bunting, it would seem, is in short supply.

Five years ago, of course, things were different: the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE came at the height of the first Covid lockdown. During those feverish, unreal early months of the pandemic, the war was omnipresent: as a mythical framework for what we were experiencing, as a convenient model of sacrifice and collective effort, and as a means of disciplining our responses to the trauma we were undergoing.

The Queen, addressing the nation near the end of her life, invoked her first radio broadcast (in 1940) during the Blitz; a restored Spitfire painted with the names of first responders (and with ‘THANK U NHS’ blazoned on its undercarriage) toured the nation, buzzing hospitals where patients lay dying in isolation and medical staff were undertaking terrifying feats of courage and endurance. In Wales, a mural juxtaposed a brave tommy facing the battlefield, its sky dark with bombers, alongside a figure in scrubs facing down a swarm of giant hovering viruses. The cult of Captain Tom took off — a bizarre and creepily coercive riot of lachrymose sentiment, flag-waving, and pompous solemnity.

When VE Day 75 itself came around, the advice of the government — never clear at the best of times — seemed to be that, for this one occasion, social distancing might be relaxed a bit; the news showed footage of bunting-draped victory tea parties, conga lines of neighbours in war-themed costumes, and a man racing down a suburban close dressed, rather heroically, as a Spitfire. At my childhood home, which I’d retreated to for the duration, Union Jack bunting blew in the front door. I kicked it out again, and briefly worried that I might have been seen doing so.

If there was a hysterical edge to this, a persistent sense of camp and playfulness, it often seemed to betray a certain anxiety. The symbolic vocabularies of the war, the bunting and tea parties and dress-up, seemed to be deployed with a manneredness and overstatement that both acknowledged their ridiculousness and dared you to laugh at it. The success of the Captain Tom campaign was predicated on a knowing and theatrical mobilisation of cliché, combined with a certain moral blackmail. Captain Tom Moore’s authority came precisely from the fact that he was at the end of his life; his death was the natural culmination of the whole event, and its imminence the ultimate guarantor that however cynical or fabricated the whole thing sometimes seemed, however strong the whiff of opportunism or fraudulence, it would be indecent to draw attention to it.

The memory of the war has, of course, a long history of being invoked in times of crisis and catastrophe, sometimes to good ends, often to provide excuses, but always with more or less of a disciplinary edge. From the fifties on, memories and fictions of Boys’ Own–style derring-do — public-school saboteurs, brilliant escape artists, Orde Wingate and Patrick Leigh Fermor among the hill villages — took the edge off the grey terror and greyer compromises of the Cold War. The war was our warrant of rightness as we dismantled the empire and faced the anger and contempt of the people we’d colonised, the last guarantee that we weren’t villains; its shared trauma and sacrifice formed the symbolic foundation of the welfare state.

The Second World War was also a war that could be redeclared against any convenient enemy and used to underwrite a range of reactionary nostalgias. Writing after the Iraq War and the Falklands War, respectively, Paul Gilroy and Patrick Wright both saw in its evocation a longed-for return to an uncomplicated war against evil fought by a nation that had not yet lost its bearings: an ‘ethnic myth’, as Gilroy put it, that even in the height of triumphalism could fulfil an admonitory function. For Wright, it was a war constantly being ‘redeclared — not against Hitler this time, but against the kind of peace which followed it’.

That peace was, of course, the peace in which the empire was frittered away, the sovereign homeland penetrated by various enemies (former colonial subjects, European bureaucrats), and the imagined unities of the nation, the patriarchal family, and the cultural community shattered. Both Gilroy and Wright wrote in times that, however fractured, were broadly triumphalist and economically hopeful: writing in 2015, Owen Hatherley anatomised the post-2008 vogue for ‘austerity chic’ as manifesting a ‘nostalgia for the state of being repressed’ that sublimated the trauma of the 2010s’ mounting crises by appeal to an aestheticised fantasy of national solidarity.

In all cases, the primary thrust of this nostalgia was deployed against others, whoever they might be: as Wright observed in 1985, ‘if Spitfires and Lancasters are in the skies again, they now fly against “socialism” and “the overweening state”’. In elections throughout the noughties and 2010s, Spitfires flew against immigration and the EU in campaigning materials (notably by the BNP and Britain First) and were a frequent prop of political theatre for virtually all parties.

Now, though, as the war itself passes out of living memory, these symbols seem oddly calcified and inert: as with any franchise that’s outstayed its welcome, the motifs are so familiar as to pass unnoticed, and we know all the beats before they happen. If the war universe seems ragged or exhausted now, it may be because the world the war inaugurated, and over which its memory prevailed, is coming to an end.

A couple of weeks before Paddy Hemingway died, Keir Starmer announced a swingeing cut to the overseas development budget, framed explicitly as a redeployment of funds to defence. Ostensibly a response to the US abandonment of Ukraine (and clearly designed, at least in part, to tickle the reactionary fancies of the impeccably brutish white voter who lurks in the imagination of the Labour leadership, providing a reliable stream of reasons that nothing good can ever happen again), the move also signalled something fundamental. The long post-war compact is over: Atlanticism is dead; the Cold War–era needs to pay, through the international development complex, a meliorist debt of conscience to the Global South; it’s time to revert to the lifeboat logic of the state in a rearming world and abandon long-term planning for peace in favour of tooling up for the next war. The European commitment to rearm, and its involvement in Ukraine, is framed persistently with reference to the war. But the invocations are disordered and fragmentary.

Meanwhile, a crisis of meaning is accumulating around the memory of fascism and the Holocaust. The invocation of the Nazi genocide to legitimise Israel’s genocidal violence against the Palestinians, the crude instrumentalisation of Jewish suffering as warrant for inflicting unlimited suffering on others, and the increasingly casual ways in which the spectre of antisemitism is conjured to police free expression, discredit the Left, and intensify state racism against Muslims and other minorities — all have left the memory of the war with a severely depleted moral centre of gravity.

As members of the US government give public Nazi salutes, and elites in Britain and elsewhere continue to try to outflank a resurgent far right by adopting their policies and endorsing their language, the whole point of the Second World War Extended Universe begins to look a bit flimsy. Its primary purpose, after all, was to furnish a moral warrant for a state ideology which defined itself, even if in a threadbare and hypocritical manner, as founded on the rule of law, a qualified pluralism, and a sense that it would be better not to have to Do That Shit Again.

If both the welfare state and multiculturalism are to be abandoned and pluralism replaced by various forms of managed democracy — if the basic assumption that everybody hates a Nazi has been eroded and undermined until it can no longer be relied upon — of what use is the Second World War?