Not What We Died For

What happens to a nation and a people when they loose their history? I felt the need to stitch together these World War II veteran's reaction to modernity, with archival footage of WWI and WWII.

Roger Scruton: My father favoured rather a dynamic conception, according to which history is an aspect of the present, a living thing, influencing our projects and also changing under their influence. The past for him was not a book to be read, but a book to be written in. We learn from it, he believed, but only by discovering how to accommodate our actions and lifestyles to its pages. It is valuable to us because it contains people, without whose striving and suffering we ourselves would not exist. These people produced the physical contours of our country; but they also produced its institutions and its laws, and fought to preserve them. On any understanding of the web of social obligation, we owe them a duty of remembrance. We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.