The myth of the “Blitz spirit” in British newspaper responses to the July 7th bombings

Abstract

Abstract The “Blitz spirit” is a popular story about the British public during the Second World War, uniting together with defiance and resilience to overcome the threat of invasion from Nazi Germany. Previous work has revised this wartime story as a propagandistic construction of national identity and popular memory. Therefore, this paper reviews the Blitz spirit as a myth. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) then examines how this myth was retold in British newspapers after the July 7th bombings in London. I examine how this myth was constructed and the ideological role it played after the attacks. Similar to previous revisions of the Blitz myth from 1940, I argue that social and political complexities after July 7th were often suppressed by messages that sought to evoke a sense of “Britishness” defined by a previous generation. Whilst the July 7th bombings were not a case of traditional warfare or attacks carried out by a foreign force, I argue that wartime analogies often supported military responses in the war on terror and evoked a foreign threat. Keywords: critical discourse analysisterrorismBlitz spiritJuly 7thmythSecond World War Notes 1. Guardian, Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Star, Daily Mirror, News of the World, People, Sunday Mirror, The Sun, Sunday Star 2. Coward was an English playwright who wrote the song London Pride (1941) during the Blitz whilst having, what he described as a moment of sentimental pride when sitting in a damaged, London railway station. 3. George W. Bush used a similar anaphoric technique in his speech after September 11th: “We're a great nation. We're a nation of resolve. We're a nation that can't be cowed by evil-doers (Kellner Citation2004, 6). Like Churchill and Blair, Bush used, “‘We’, ‘I’ and ‘you’ … as rhetorical devices to bind himself with the country” (Kellner Citation2004, 6). 4. Faridi (Citation2007, 77) describes the incident that saw Butt “beaten up and killed by a group of youths allegedly shouting ‘Taliban, Taliban!’”. A CAABU report in August 2005 published Scotland Yard statistics that revealed considerably high increases in racial and religiously motivated crimes. As Faridi (Citation2007, 76) has also found, “the worry is that there is a lot of under-reporting of attacks”. Faridi (Citation2007, 76) claims that post-July 7th crimes rose from 5 to 6 a week to about a hundred.