Banksy.

THERE’S A NEW BANKSY PIECE!!

Banksy is shit.

 I see you Banksy. I see you. With your supposed guerrilla art (remember the gorilla stuff – how we laughed). Oh he’s got two coppers engaged in a gay kiss. That’ll smash the establishment, that’ll make the Duke of Edinburgh choke on his swan smoothie. Fuck off. Banksy is shit. Another conman raking it in from the ever-gullible middle classes, forever in love with anything faux-rebel.

Remember those Keep Calm and Carry on T-shirts? They became very popular amongst the young chattering classes after the London riots of 2011. All those dickheads with dustpans, come to clear up the gentrified rubble they helped create, with their “not me guv” faces and their Elbow badges. This is Banksy’s audience.

By hijacking a slogan from World War 2, these people ironically set this country off on its fake-memory optimism that was necessary to make the Brexit they claim to abhor happen.

I was born a quarter of a century after the war ended. My grandad fought in it and never spoke of it. The television never stopped speaking of it. Every weekend there were war films on. The comic book ranks were filled with Commando and Tommy and various other animated stories of heroism. TV dramas like Colditz (which became a board game too I think) were common place. It was everywhere. We could even laugh at it (a bit) with Dad’s Army and Allo Allo.

Anyway, as a little kid we didn’t actually learn anything about World War 2 in school. The single most permeating cultural flavour in our lives and we knew nothing about it. Apart from taking in shorthand through TV and film that somehow Britain won the war against Hitler who killed Jews.

One could argue, quite reasonably, that it’s probably best not to talk about the Holocaust or Hiroshima or any of the many horrors of that conflict to small children. But we did nothing about it. We played War at playtime and the unpopular kids were Nazis and had to die if shot. There was a World War 2 German Action Man figure with a scar down his cheek – scars down cheeks being shorthand for Nazi Bastard.

I was the last kid to do O-Level History and I did the causes of World War Two.  We didn’t much do anything about the war itself, mostly just the build-up – Versailles, the Great Depression etc. We did Chamberlain’s appeasement. We did a lot on that. We didn’t do the Mitford sisters, Viscount Rothermere or the Royals performing Nazi salutes in home movies. That isn’t what we want our kids to know.

We didn’t do anything about the Blitz or Dunkirk. We didn’t do anything about British suffering, just our part in victory. And I sometimes think that this is part of why we are where we are today. The creation of the NHS, the welfare state, decent social housing, all of this provided the bedrock for the creation, generations later, of a mass middle class. They look at their degree certificates, their books, their Banksy prints and tell themselves that they know all there is to know about the world.

If we’d studied more the horrors of war, the actual suffering of ordinary British people, learnt from an early age the real narrative of the second World War, then I think people wouldn’t be so keen to latch on to it as some kind of cultural lodestone to show the way to future prosperity. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.  Or, as Banksy would probably say, Ignorance is Blitz and have some kind of ironic bomb blast illuminating a gorilla with a swastika armband on as a kind of arch comment against eating meat or something. On the side of a closed down bank to own the fash.

I just really hate Banksy is all.