Remembering to Forget: Supporting and Opposing the War on Terror through the Myth of the Blitz Spirit after the July 7th Bombings

Abstract

The ‘Blitz spirit’ is a popular story of Britain during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. This paper reviews the Blitz spirit as a myth before a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) examines how this myth was retold in British newspapers after the July 7th bombings. I firstly analyse Blitz spirit discourses that evoked unity between Britain and America in the war on terror. I then argue that evocations of this myth became more complex, often criticising Tony Blair for his moral incompatibility with Second World War or Churchillian analogies. Both discursive positions used a myth that remembers and forgets details in a popular story from the past. This paper argues that whilst the Blitz spirit was a problematic feature of post-July 7th media, it did not serve one ideological purpose. Through a nuanced approach to Roland Barthes’ model of myth, I argue that an ideological battleground occurred when a myth from the 1940s recurred in 2005.