Today marks VE Day – that’s Victory In Europe Day, when the Allied forces defeated the forces of Germany. This evening Queen Elizabeth will appear on your TV screen. should you choose to watch. She will no doubt link the courage of the British armed forces with the people today fighting on the front against Covid-19.
You will note that this is VE Day, not PE Day – Peace in Europe Day. There are no tedious little reservations – We were fighting the bloody Germans, and Victory was ours. There will be no apology or regret expressed for the 85 million people calculated to have died in the course of the war. There will be no hint of regret over the fire-bombing of the German city of Dresden (known as ‘the Florence of the Elbe’) in which 25,000 German people died. Many historians believe that the dropping of 8,400 tons of bombs on the city was totally unnecessary, since the Germans were on the verge of surrender already. There will be no mention of the Treaty of Versailles, when the Allies imposed such punitive measures on Germany at the end of the First World War, it created the fertile soil of pain and resentment in Germany in which Hitler would later flourish. And there’ll be no talk of ‘Never Again’. VE Day says we won, and didn’t we do well.
Which is odd, coming from a people as peace-loving and unaggressive as the British, a people only concerned with self-defence. Churchill rallied the British people with a speech in which he promised that, if the Germans did invade, the British people would fight them on the beaches, in the towns, in the fields. Why? Because Britain had a right to self-determination and sovereignty over its own affairs, not rule by another country.
I think it’s broken, Virginia. Even the sturdiest irony calculator cannot withstand the powerful ironic surges that will swirl around today, culminating in QE2’s speech. The linkage of the battle to save lives today with the battles to kill people over 70 years ago would on its own be sufficient to scupper an irony calculator a hundred times strong than yours. Sorry, my dear.
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