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“Living through the Blitz, edited by MO’s Tom Harrisson, makes clear just how much the ‘1945’ we now consume is a construct, a convenient fairy tale built up piece by piece several generations later. Most interesting for our purposes is its plentiful evidence that the imperative (in rhetoric, if not in the specific form of the unprinted poster) to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ actually had much the opposite effect. The patronising message infuriated most of the scores of mostly working-class diarists and interviewees whose materials make up the book. And rather than an alliance between the ‘decent’ people and their ‘decent’, benevolent public servants, Living through the Blitz finds a total divorce between the interests of each, with the civil service and local government desperately scared of the workers they were supposed to be sheltering from bombs.

For example, while the Labour left and radical architects were advocating communal shelters, central government had a firm preference for the privatisation of bomb protection. ‘Whitehall’, Harrisson writes, ‘had long declared that there must be no “shelter mentality”. If big, safe, deep shelters were established, people would simply lie in them and do no work. Worse, such concentrations of proletarians could be breeding grounds for mass hysteria, even subversion. The answer was the Anderson shelter.’2 That is, private shelters in back gardens, not necessarily safer, but less likely to encourage sedition.”
― Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia

“Люди, которые снятся,
Деревья, которым не спится,
Реки, которые злятся,
Руки, в которых влюбиться.
Мне бы с горы бы сгорая
Или в прорубь с сарая.
Мне бы как поезд об поезд,
Птицей об птицу разбиться.

1942”
― Геннадий Гор, Красная капля в снегу: Стихотворения 1942-1944

“L'autre fait notable, c'est qu'un médiatique a désormais le droit de plaisanter avec son outil professionnel, en certains cas. Un général, par exemple, n'avait pas le droit de plaisanter à la tête de ses troupes, ou un juge en prononçant ses sentences, et je ne sais même pas s'il est encore tout à fait permis au respon-sable d'une centrale où l'on produit l'énergie nucléaire de plaisanter, au sens propre du mot, à l'instant où il fait connaître ses directives. Mais il est littéralement hors de doute qu'un médiatique ne peut être privé de ce droit. C'est un salarié remarquablement spécial, qui ne reçoit d'ordre de personne, et qui sait tout sur tous les sujets dont il veut parler. Il porte donc, suivant sa déontologie, qu'il ne saurait trahir sans hideuse concussion, littéralement toute la conscience de l'époque. S'il n'avait pas le droit de plaisanter, où serait donc la liberté de la presse et, partant, la démocratie elle-même?”
― Guy Debord, Cette mauvaise réputation...

“Lancastrian workers, the dumb and dignified beasts of burden that line the Road to Wigan Pier, thronged tours by Soviet leaders, workers, soldiers and trade unionists in the UK after the Soviets entered the war in 1941. One delegation leader, Nikolai Shvernik, was mobbed by Mancunian women; after his speech at a munitions plant a woman climbed on the stage, ‘clung to his neck, kissed his forehead and then shouted “Come on girls, let’s all kiss him.”’ Moments later, ‘scores of elderly gray-haired women jumped onto the platform and struggled to kiss’ Shvernik. Management convinced the women to go back to their seats, and ‘in what may have been an attempt to cool their ardor, they all sang the Internationale’.”
― Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia