Britain must re-learn the lessons of VE Day
On the 80th anniversary of VE Day, it’s not enough to simply remember World War II – we must face today’s challenges with the same spirit of unity, resolve and sacrifice, says James Price
The editor of these fine opinion pages turns to me when she wants someone to really ham up a topic, presumably even to dial things up to ‘full gammon’. But it’s hard even for a red-faced, patriotic stereotype like me to know where to begin with a topic as enormous as the allied victory in the Second World War.
The defeat of the Nazis has become a religious tale and a re-foundational national myth across the Anglosphere. It has superseded religion in modern Britain, and almost every other story we tell about ourselves. At times, I find myself begging politicians and journalists to study any other period of history, as the comparisons with the 1930s and 1940s become so frequent.
Victory against Nazi Germany is the justification for students on college campuses to punch each other in the face, it has created the go-to slur against political opponents and it is readily called upon by all sides in debates of all kinds.
This is far from always a bad thing, of course. In a world of murky grey, a tale of a Manichean struggle is a wonderful way to teach children about morality and bravery. It is indeed a warning about what can happen in a civilised society if rotten ideas and rotten people are given too much power.
Lessons of history
But all of this can both minimise the events as they actually happened, and allow people to litigate modern arguments that are so far removed from the actual events of the 1940s as to obscure the real lessons that history should teach.
And those lessons are important. One is to reject relativism in our modern age, for evil is real and must be fought with arms, not just words. Another is that this wonderful country of ours has been one of the most moral and decent forces in the history of mankind. We should be less hard on ourselves.
But another lesson is that we should stop living off our victory against evil, and start living up to it. It cannot have escaped the attention of City PM readers that Britain is suffering the most almighty slump. Mercifully, most of our problems do not come from bombs overhead, or u-boats beneath the waves. They are self-inflicted. We can therefore, by summoning up the spirit of our forebears, sort out our economy, rediscover our self-pride and self-discipline and of course, secure our coastal borders just as we did against invaders back then.
Ultimately though, we should stop for a moment and feel immense gratitude for the sacrifices of both the living and the dead. In 1933, the Oxford Union held a debate on whether its members would fight for King and Country. They voted no. But many of those same students, and many millions more, went on to do exactly that when their country called.
Yet today in Britain, we are mostly familiar with poets from the First World War, like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who cut against the natural inclination in every patriotic breast that it is indeed a noble cause to lay down one’s life for one’s country.
I understand the sheer scale of pointless death in the trenches could lead to such a take. But VE Day is the ultimate rebuke to the idea that sacrifice isn’t a noble thing. I pray we never have to re-learn that lesson the hard way, but in the meantime, an unpublished poem V Day by Edmund Blunden, frames that victory so well.
Their will, their skill, now intimately known
And those their leaders of one mind to frame,
Vast strategies from which escape was none,
And all their actions rise to future fame;
Be theirs sweet peace, dear love, kind rain and sun,
The life for which they marched and sailed and flew,
Reunion, restoration, freedom deep and true.
Thank you to all those who sacrificed for our freedom, deep and true.
James Price is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute