Victory in Europe Day and Terrorism

Today is Victory in Europe Day, celebrating the cessation of hostilities at the end of World War II on 8 May 1945.

The war in the Pacific would drag on until 15 August 1945 when Japan surrendered.

The celebration is still universally held all over Europe and in Canada, but it has lost some of its importance in the United States, where Memorial Day at the end of May, honoring all American war dead, has somewhat replaced it.

What we should always remember about VE Day is that it ended a war that had engaged 100,000,000 men and in which more than 30,000,000 combatants were killed.

Nazism was a cancer at the heart of Europe and it took six long years to kill it. Its basis was the idea that some people are more human than others, and that many of the others deserved to be eliminated. The death camps are today’s silent witnesses to the decimation of more than 7,000,000 innocent non-combatant Jews who are not included in the above figures.

The very size of the effort in lives and costs is almost beyond comprehension, as is the fact that one man, Adolf Hitler, was able to gain cause over Germany and go on to subdue all of Europe before being stopped, largely because of the war machine created by America, and by the lives of Russians in eastern Europe who stopped Hitler when he tried to open a second front and failed, as Napoleon had failed before him.

Today’s losses to Islamist terrorism are small by comparison, but the fight is just as important. Ending attacks on innocent non-combatants, stopping the cancer of cultural hatred, finding common ground on which to build a world after terrorism is just as important and just as honorable as was the battle to free the world of Nazism.