44. THE HOLLOW CROWN - On The Emptiness of VE Day Celebrations

Today, May 8th, 2020, marks seventy five years since the end of World War II in Europe.

After nearly six years of ceaseless horror, one not alive on this day in 1945 can only imagine what it would have felt like to finally realise that the war was over. Celebration, after so long living in misery, would not even be something to think about - every tiny act of normalcy would be a mark of one’s liberation from life during wartime. To be able to hold a street party, without fearing the sound of sirens, of a bombing raid forcing you into hiding, would be an amazing treat. To be reunited with family members - soldiers back from the frontlines; children back from evacuation - would be truly momentous and joyful. And while, in 1945, these wouldn’t all be things done on May 8th in the mere moments after Nazi surrender, in the weeks and months to come each tiny sense of life returning to normal would all stem from the events of that day. One can understand, in the following years, a sense of how important it would be to mark the occasion. An anniversary of liberation and peace. To celebrate VE Day in the years following that dreadful war is a decision that makes sense both logically and emotionally.

My first real understanding of the significance of VE Day came in 1995, on its fiftieth anniversary. As with this year’s seventy-fifth anniversary, there was a bank holiday, and I remember being dragged along by my family to a street party as a sulky teenager. I remember my unease at the patriotic bunting even then, and the confusion I felt at what seemed like almost a glorification of those awful years of war as the country slipped back into a communal nostalgia of Spam sandwiches and rationing, air raid shelters and Vera Lynn. It was nice to have the day off school, and the barbecue was delicious, but it distinctly felt like we were celebrating something hollow. All these old songs about war being over, and I still had memories of watching the first Gulf War explode across my TV just a few years before. Grizzly reports of Rwandan genocide. Clashing wars of independence across Eastern Europe.

The Second World War might have ended - for some - on May 8th 1945, and it may well have been worth marking that day…but by 1995 the claim that we were celebrating peace and an end to war with our VE Day celebrations was untenable even to a child. It seemed like more of an excuse to have a party, fly the flag, and foster lingering ill-will towards Germany the longer the beers flowed and the drunker my elderly neighbours got.

This conflict - between marking a memory and maintaining its meaning, especially in the arena of war - is not new. I already wrote about Remembrance Day back in November, how the gesture of the poppy becomes more a disservice to the memory of those who died if the wearing of the symbolic flower is not accompanied by more concrete efforts to end war - and the causes of war - and what was nascent in my teenage memories of VE Day 1995 was that same sense of disservice. There we were, all singing “we’ll meet again”, and all around the world we were still sending soldiers off to die in unnecessary and brutal conflicts.

We had forgotten the true horror of war and turned that era into a nostalgic cartoon of patriotism and community spirit. We were celebrating a fantasy of a Britain that never was. Missing the point of the original street celebrations: the hope that life could return to normal and we would never fall into such hellish darkness again. The lucky escape of a death sentence when so many millions of others were not so lucky.

Relief.

Take away the strange circumstance of the COVID19 lockdown, which makes any opportunity to leave our houses and feel a sense of society compelling, and remember that before this year’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations were necessarily curbed by the limitations of social distancing, far grander celebrations were planned than sitting in our doorways to share an isolated picnic with our neighbours and singing “We’ll Meet Again” at 9pm. We were going to be shutting down streets, watching parades and military aerobatics, and turning the one-day memorial into a three day party, all done in the shadow of what our current government perceives as their most recent “victory in Europe”.

But what exactly are we celebrating?

Because just as 1995’s celebrations felt incongruous with the continuing battles fought all around the globe, since 1995 we have seen no further progression of peace and only the continued fanning of the flames of war.

To move from the merely rhetorical to the more philosophical, as an argument my thoughts go something like this:

1) The justification for celebrating VE Day is because it marks the end of World War II in Europe.

2) The end of that war is a cause for celebration because it caused the death of millions and the suffering of billions.

3) The end of a regime built on the specific prejudice and hate found in the Nazi ideology makes the end of World War II a further cause for celebration.

However, while points (2) and (3) remain arguably true, we must consider both the consistency of our thinking and the impact of our celebration on the outcomes we believe we are celebrating. In other words - while the end of death and suffering for millions and the end of a prejudiced ideology may well be a cause for celebration, has the death and suffering actually ended; has the prejudiced ideology really been defeated; and does celebrating as if they have lead us to less death, suffering and prejudice, or more? Therefore,

4) If war continues to kill and cause suffering to many, and if the same prejudiced ideologies believed to be defeated continue to be held, then the rationale to celebrate VE Day become undone. Rather than celebrating peace, we are mawkishly clinging to a seventy-five year old example of momentary peace and ignoring the continuing brutality of the three quarters of a century that followed.

5) Furthermore, if the flag flying patriotism of such celebrations is more likely to lead us into future division and war than it is to bring peace, then such celebrations serve to undermine the very thing they claim to be celebrating.

I would argue that (4) can be settled with just a cursory look at the history of war in the last seventy-five years. From the Cold War to the war on terror to every regional and global conflict in between - while World War II May have ended in Europe on May 8th, 1945, war did not end. And the disturbing rise in vocal prejudice and active discrimination on both sides of the Atlantic in the post-Brexit, post-Trump election landscape, show us that the ideologies which led to the extermination camps are far from dead.

(5) is a bit more difficult to “prove”, but it certainly seems to me that to party as if war has been defeated when war still rages is an almost textbook example of propaganda. To wrap such historical and contemporary distortions up in the flag, suggesting that we are not just celebrating an end to war but a national victory for our army over another, is to confuse that sense of relief and liberation from the terror and futility of war felt in 1945 with a misplaced notion of heroism and pride.

We should be thankful to the soldiers who lost their lives to protect us, but the only true way to honour them is to acknowledge the horror of war and do everything in our power to ensure not a single other soldier dies, or kills, unnecessarily ever again. We didn’t have victory in Europe - “we” includes Europe, and every other human liberated from war. We have victory only when no one in any country has to suffer the horror of war.

To fly the Union Jack today is to fly a symbol of division (not least because our union is questionable across the four countries which make up the UK). It is the piece of cloth which says we are separate from the people over there with different colours flying on their piece of cloth. In war those different colours can mean life or death: do I shoot you or do I save you? It is also to forget that Britain didn’t have victory in Europe, the whole world did. And that “victory” came with its own horrors. The scars of aftermath. Picking up the pieces of a world destroyed. To fly the flag misses the point and spits in the face of meaningful peace. Because the true end of war isn’t about winners and losers, it is about all of us winning, together. Patriotism, in the form of flag waving jingoism, is the poison which sickens the well from which the water of peace tries to flow.

So I won’t be celebrating VE Day today.

I already celebrated VE Day in 1996, when I wrote my first anti-war song and played it in public.

I already celebrated VE Day in 1997, when my band put up posters around school asking “who is the bigger threat?”, Saddam Hussein, or our own government.

I already celebrated VE Day in 1998 when I protested against the war in Kosovo, in 2001 when I stood outside the US embassy with a crowd of others in protest to the unjustified war they wanted to start against Afghanistan, in 2003 when I marched In London with a million other people to stop another illegal war in Iraq.

I already celebrated VE Day when I called for non-violence at anti-capitalist riots at the end of the century and wrote articles and pamphlets advocating peace.

I already celebrated VE Day when I studied my masters degree in the ethics of war and spoke at conferences about how to unpack rare legitimate conflict from the multiple illegitimate ones.

I already celebrated VE Day when I refused to participate in any of the jingoistic nationalism which makes recruiting and manipulating soldiers and populations so easy.

I already celebrated VE Day whenever I teach just war theory, and its limitations, to my students, and consider with them the manifold alternatives to armed conflict.

I already celebrated VE Day when I chose not to wear the red poppy and wear a white poppy instead.

I already celebrated VE Day every time I challenge the prejudice and discrimination which sowed the seeds of Nazi ideology, or challenge the many actual self-identifying Nazis who still persist to this day.

I already celebrated VE Day just by living my life as a Jew (albeit a non-believing one) after the attempted extermination of my ancestors.

I already celebrated VE Day every time I chose peace instead of war.

Author: D.McKee

(Pre-order my new book - Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - HERE)