JCC VE Day - Grab your patriotic European flags

75 years since the end of WW2 in Europe.

Europeans, wave your flags in an orderly manner.
Americans... do you even have a VE day? What is up with you?

 

In Italy we rather celebrate the Liberation Day the 25th of April, which is the day of 1945 in which the insurgency was proclaimed against the fascists and Mussolini and the other leaders were sentenced to death.

 

Definitely not an awkward Victory Day owing to a dispute between the Prague mayors and the Russian government over the removal of a statue of General Koněv, definitely not causing extended arguments in the press about whether or not the country "had to be liberated", definitely no assassination threats, no sirree.

 

UK was supposed to have all kinds of celebrations but the bulk were cancelled due to the plague. There was a 2 minute silence at 11AM for those who died in the war. The Queen will be addressing the nation (pre-recorded) at 9PM and there have been special programmes on BBC One and the news channels.

 

It is all too easy to forget that while for western Europe, May 1945 was the end of half a decade of Nazi oppression and war, for Eastern Europe, it was just the beginning of 45 years of life under Communist oppression. For them, WW2 ended in 1990.

 

May 9th is the real victory day

 

May 7th is the real victory day, with formal capitulation of the Nazi armies signed in Reims. It took effect on May 9th, with a deliberate delay of one full day to the effective end of the hostilities to permit a repeat ceremony in Berlin at the insistence of the Soviet Union. Prague exchanged oppressors on the 9th of May, the last capital to be taken out of the Nazi yoke.

To endure a very brutal beginning to the occupation, with quite a few killings and thousands of rapes. I'm not surprised they weren't too keen to keep Konev's statue - that's what his arrival brought, after the Nazis had already surrendered.

 

It's not up to you, a Western Europe citizen, to make this call.

 

Well, I’m an Eastern Europe citizen, and he’s not wrong.

 

Well, part of why it's a current issue at the moment is that old statue stayed up in Prague 6 until a little over a month ago. Their mayor took it down during our lockdown (I believe there was a vote in favor of its removal about a year ago, don't quote me on that), Russia got pissed, now somebody in the Putin regime may or may not be trying to have that mayor killed. That's then renewed the various debates around the manner in which the war ended, particularly with the holiday. But it also means tensions are high at respective embassies. Overall: not great.

 

You agree with the utterly insane statement that living in the Soviet Union was equivalent to staying in WW2 for more than 40 years?

 

I don't for a second believe that Lordban was being literal.

 

I've been working a lot with my German, Polish and French counterparts recently.

The UK is the only one which trumpets our victory to the extent we do. Germany understandably doesn't do anything whilst Poland and France kinda pay a little notice towards it but don't have the big parades we have recently gone for.

Whilst the 75th anniversary is certainly one to remember with a little more pomp and circumstance, the UK has gone more and more heavy duty with the "celebrations" since the Tories got in power 10 years ago and in all honesty I find the drumbeating distasteful.

Our papers make minimal to no reference of all the help we received, we look at the Battle of Britain as some amazing triumph driven by British forces when a significant portion of our forces were Polish (who with Brexit we are now looking to remove from the country).

the streets round me are covered with British flags and bunting and Twitter is off on one celebrating British exceptionalism and the minute you say that you agree but that we had help you get piled on by the xenophobes and racists who fall to the drumbeat of blitz spirit etc...

The end of WW2 should be remember sombrely, recalling those who fell across all countries and should be a time to celebrate how we have attempted to improve relations across Europe in the intervening years. It should be a time to remember that war is utterly wasteful and that fascism is an abhorrent ideology.

Then I see Brexit, the far right championing it and I wonder if we ever actually learned and improved anything.

 

There has in fact been quite a bit of talk about putting an end to the 8th of May being a holiday altogether here, resurging every now and then. It meets more resistance from the fact that would mean removing a national holiday than it does for what the day commemorates, and the commemorations nowadays tend to attract less public attention than those for the 11th of November.

You are, yourself, deforming my statement, as well as making an odd slip by presenting Czechoslovakia as an integral part of the Soviet Union, which I suppose you didn't intend to do. And you know very well that the fall of the Iron Curtain is a direct consequence of WW2 and meant occupation for another 45 years. It's not liberation when what happens is trading one occupation for another, even if the war is formally over. And that's exactly what happened in Eastern Europe: another occupation begun.

So when the people I know from Eastern Europe tell me that for them, 1945 was no liberation - and some of them were alive back then - I am inclined to take them at their word for it, and don't sugarcoat it when talking about it.

Yea. Some legacies of the past can be very long lived and hurt a long time afterwards. And of course, in Czechoslovakia, there was the repetition of the Prague Uprising and subsequent re-invasion... It's a complicated and often ugly past, and it must be a mess to process for events that are recent enough for a lot of people to remember their experiences, and for them to be passed on as firsthand stories... And it's invariably complicated by a good number of opportunists trying to overinflate their real importance in resisting the fallen oppressors, and eager to muddy the waters. And that's before foreign bullies like Putin get involved...

 

Those who forget their history (or try and rewrite it), etcetera, etcetera...

 

Or, or! the postwar order was never as sustainable as people thought it was

 

Well, considering its first pillar of the postwar order crumbled long enough ago that many adults today (and some people here) don't have memories of it when it happened, it's certainly proved unsustainable a long time ago.

What used to be a thing was a majority of people remembering how the bloodiest war in human history came to be. That's my generation's and my parents' generation's failure - we, by and large, failed to learned those lessons from them, and unsurprisingly are failing to pass them on.

 

Swizterland or Qatar?

 

Oh hai Stalin!

 

The postwar order was supposed to be something that we could work with and improve upon over time. It's just that certain powerful interests decided they didn't want to do that, and would rather see the return of fascism than pay an extra nickel to improve the world.

 

This is interesting