Readers debate the connections between the slaughter of two world wars, the peace that has ensued for the past 72 years, the European Union and Brexit

I agree with Zoe Williams (Dunkirk offers a lesson – but it isn’t what Farage thinks, 31 July) that fellowship is a valuable lesson from Dunkirk, but fellowship is even more powerful when combined with another quality on display in 1940: pragmatism. Winston Churchill deployed a powerful blend of fellowship and pragmatism against Nazi Germany, playing to the nation’s heart with his rhetoric of fighting on the beaches, but not letting his passions run away with his brain. After Dunkirk, he warned the nation that “wars are not won by evacuations”.

Though he despised the ultra-pragmatism of the appeasers, Churchill was not fighting just for some romanticised dream of mighty little England, but for liberty, perhaps the greatest blend of head and heart in politics.

If the evacuation from Dunkirk should teach us anything, it is that fellowship and pragmatism, heart and head, should be combined to form a common strength. Our politicians have not grasped this yet. The leave campaign invoked only the heart (or purported to, rather) while the remain side mainly appealed to the brain. They were pragmatic about the economic benefits of the EU, but did not emphasise the common humanity that should become stronger, not weaker, in times of toil.

Brexit has betrayed Churchill’s sentiment that wars are not won by evacuations. A response to this travesty must be found, but it will not be discovered merely by being sentimental about the past. Politicians, especially those leading the Labour party, must raise the gauntlet and fight for a collected, pragmatic vision of British identity, one not dictated by Nigel Farage.

Gabriel Osborne

Bristol

• Zoe Williams has written an opinion piece too far in claiming Dunkirk for the anti-Brexit cause. My feeling is that Dunkirk should not be appropriated by either side of the Brexit debate.

Having just finished David Reynolds’ brilliant The Long Shadow – The Great War and the Twentieth Century, I was struck by the way that the memorials and commemorations that followed the first world war were designed to be inclusive of drastically different perspectives on the war. The responses of those for whom the end result had not been worth the bloodshed, carnage and loss of life, and those who still held to the official war aims and a sense of “victory”, were both respected.

That inclusive approach from the most divisive conflict of all is surely still the right one to take today. The views of the fallen themselves in both world wars were no doubt far from unanimous, but one thing we can be reasonably sure about is that they were not fighting for only half of the country.

Andy White

York

• As I finished reading Zoe Williams’ article and went on to the Ypres letters (The tragedies of Ypres remembered, 31 July), I became more and more distressed and despairing. I was born in 1941, and my husband in 1936, so we are possibly the “oldsters” referred to in Zoe’s article (Dear Zoe, I love you dearly and have done for years – you are firmly in the tradition of the great Guardian women columnists), but we are too old to be “baby boomers”. I was brought up on Dunkirk, I see the little ships on the Thames from time to time, and my father’s best friend was captured at the abortive raid on Dieppe (he spent years in forced labour marching round Poland, returned in 1944 weighing 6 stone – he was 6ft; are they forgotten?). We have two teenage grandchildren living in south Wales. Mark Walford’s letter is right: the European Union is the monument to all those who suffered or died in two world wars, and is the main reason we all (including the grandson who is of voting age) voted against Brexit. Please do not assume that all older people want a return to an imaginary UK. I am a European.

Janet Jones

Surbiton, Surrey

• Zoe Williams ends her article: “The glorification of war is only possible if you don’t think too deeply about its reality; the glorification of peace is only possible if you do. So, yes, everyone should see Dunkirk; but the ‘oldsters’ need it most”. I, an oldster in my tenth decade who saw returned disconsolate troops packed in a train destined for who knew what, know what it was like. Williams should have written “middle-agesters”.

A letter from Mark Walford in the same paper claims that the real monument to the dead of Passchendaele is not the Menin Gate, it’s the European Union. He’s right.

Think deeply about the glorification of peace rather than of war.

Peter Le Mare

Allithwaite, Cumbria

• Mark Walford gives another outing to the assertion that the European Union should get the credit for the peace that has prevailed in western Europe since 1945 – in other words, that there would have been war if the EU had not existed. This claim can be sustained only by shutting one’s eyes to one of the major facts of 20th-century European history. Hitler and Mussolini got away with it as long as they did because they knew that the democracies – France and the UK – would do anything rather than fight. The second world war was started by dictatorships, and could only have been started by dictatorships, because any government constrained by public opinion knew that war was the ultimate vote-loser. That war ended the west-European dictatorships. The implication that, if the European Community had not existed, the nations of western Europe after 1945 would have decided that they wanted to have bombs falling on them again only has to be made explicit to be made unbelievable.

Jeremy Paul Dixon

Addiscombe, Surrey

• Mark Walford asserts that the European Union has been responsible for stopping the pointless slaughter of Europeans. But even leaving aside the slaughter in the Balkans in the 1990s, how could this claim be shown to be true? Is he assuming that every few decades people set about killing each other and that they haven’t for 72 years must be down to the EU?

Firstly, the second world war was not about people opting for senseless slaughter. The fascist axis, principally Nazi Germany, sought to conquer Europe (and then no doubt the world). The rest of humanity resisted them to defeat fascism and paid the price – for example nearly half a million British lives lost (including peoples of the empire), 20 million Soviet lives lost, and so many others.

Secondly, humans have demanded more say over their lives. Even with the limited democracy that we enjoy we set our face against war, and so do most European people. We increasingly see through the lies of warmongers.

People, whether in the EU or not, determined not to be drawn into pointless slaughter and never to tolerate fascism – these are the guarantors of peace.

John Rigby

London

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