Broken News: Britain officially no longer interested in World War I

LONDON--With the passing last week of Harry Patch, the U.K.’s last surviving veteran of World War I, Great Britain has formally declared that it is no longer interested in the "War to End All Wars." While not a constitutional ban, the declaration is intended to limit discussion of, reference to, and glorification of the conflict, which began 95 years ago this week.

"We simply felt the time was right, as World War I has been approaching irrelevancy for years now" said Nigel Covington, Oxford professor of history and adviser to Parliament. "In fact, most British schoolchildren believe that World War I was retroactively invented to sell World War II as a sequel. And now that that codger, Patch, has shuffled off the mortal coil, we won't have to be looking over our shoulders for cranky veterans."

The declaration, cleverly entitled Bye-mar Weimar, calls for popular historical focus to shift to World War II and the ensuing collapse of the British Empire as its far-flung colonies declared independence and set the country on its path to global insignificance. Initial estimates suggest the country will save upwards of £25 million ($1.4 trillion U.S.) in education costs. The elimination of such a large chunk of the history curriculum is also expected to produce impressive gains in standardized test scores.

"Well that's that, then," clapped the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, the Right Honorable Ed Balls, MP, upon hearing of the death of his country's last surviving World War I veteran. "Finally we can get on with putting all that nasty war business behind us and reclaiming valuable page space in history books that are increasingly failing to educate our children on things they find relevant: wars that have been made into games, miniseries, and blockbuster movies.”

Striking a strident pose, grabbing the lapels of his jacket, and affecting a Churchillian air, Balls continued, “It is in these times that we must be brave enough to jettison what has happened too long ago for us to bother caring about in order to truncate all those bits that seem to repeat and echo other, more exciting parts of history."

Analyst opinion remains divided on this controversial measure, with some decrying the apparent lack of respect for a global conflict that claimed over 15 million lives.

"What utter fucking rubbish," opined Cambridge World War I historian and Professor Emeritus Dr. Roland Wright. "This was the first truly global conflict in all of human history, and one of the deadliest wars ever fought. How in the hell can we collectively ignore it?"

Defenders of the policy point to the fact that, apart from flagging public recognition, many of the war's belligerents no longer even exist.

"Go ahead and tell someone your family is from the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Kingdom of Bulgaria. You'll be laughed out of the bloody room," said Covington. Asked to address the potential savings of striking the conflict from public imagination, he then added, "On the bright side, at the rate our American cousins are dragging us into military conflicts; we'll have enough new, more easily remembered material to be able to drop World War II from the curriculum as early as 2015."

He continued, “Ask any American about the early 20th Century and they’ll just tell you it was the period after the Civil War, when people in grainy film footage moved really fast and rode those bicycles with one large front wheel, just before baseball got interesting.”

If America is unable or, less-likely, unwilling to create enough new wars to fill sufficient paragraph space, the Labor Government has begun preliminary talks with William Shatner to license his TekWar series of novels and opened negotiations with Lucasfilm Ltd. to acquire the teaching rights to the Star Wars saga.

“It says there right in the beginning: ‘A long time ago...' That means it's history,” said Secretary Balls, MP, confident this gambit would hold up against legal challenges by the more "fact-obsessed" sectors of the British populace. “Frankly, laser swords and lessons about ancient trade disputes within the Galactic Senate are more interesting than Frenchmen shitting in their own bunkers during the fighting of what children refer to as ‘the war they haven’t made any video games about.’ As for licensing TekWar, isn’t learning about the future one of the most integral parts of history education?”

Education officials for the Ministry for Children, Schools, and Families plan to have the requisite pages ripped out of the over 8 million history textbooks spread around over 25,000 schools in time for the new school term. For the 2010-2011 school year they hope to have received order on new course books where the period from 1900-1923 is addressed with the phrase “And nothing much of interest happened during this time.”