It is indeed - he did say something about the movies…

The Economist just posted this btw www.economist.com/the-world-ah...

Yep. And Nick Robinson not so much.

A lot of it stolen from Adrian Gregory archive.org/details/sile...

34/ All of it compressed into two minutes of silence that feels timeless, natural, universal.

That is what we inherited. /ends

33/ It endures because it found a way to create solidarity without requiring anyone to believe in what was being commemorated.

We participate in structures whose origins are lost. The English colonial fathers in Cape Town, the mutinying soldiers at Calais, the striking workers in Glasgow.

32/ The lost imperial history of Remembrance: it emerges at empire's moment of maximum fragility.

Human crisis, political crisis, imperial crisis – all converging. The silence answered all three by requiring nothing except shared grief.

But only for deaths that served a greater, political purpose.

31/ Today we inherit the ritual. We stand silent, in universal respect for sacrifice, rarely asking: whose sacrifice? For what? Who decided which losses were nationally significant?

The silence works because it makes those questions feel inappropriate.

Grief demands solemnity, not interrogation.

30/ The practice spread empire-wide not because everyone actually observed it, but because the "claim" that they did idealised the unity it so desperately craved.

"Throughout the Empire" was less fact than aspiration. But observance made it true.

29/ The silence arrived at the twilight moment of imperial weakness – when Britain could no longer command compliance, when workers and soldiers were in active revolt, when wars raged across five continents – and that's precisely why it worked.

It needed no political justification, just emotion.

28/ But what you were mourning, who counted as mournable, whose sacrifice was nationally significant – all of that remained encoded in the infrastructure.

The cenotaphs, the war memorials, and the civic ceremonies.

The silence was also an act unity that made hierarchy feel like shared humanity.

27/ The ritual worked by taking something saturated with specific imperial loyalties – an Anglo-South African elite mourning Oxford-educated sons – and presenting it as universal human mourning.

Who could object to honouring the dead? The form felt neutral. Everyone silent together.

26/ This isn't to say the silence was cynically designed. The fathers' grief was genuine. The ritual met real human needs.

But grief happens within political structures. Those structures determined whose losses became publicly speakable, whose became marginal, and whose remained invisible.

25/ The genius was that it bypassed justification entirely.

You didn't need to believe Britain fought for democracy.

You didn't need to agree the sacrifice was worthwhile.

You didn't need to share political interpretation.

You only needed to grieve. And the grief was real.