V-E Day Should Be a Day of Celebration, Not Solemn Remembrance

Y ou’re unlikely to hear me say this often, but the Russians have this one figured out.

Although the regime in Moscow observes the allied victory over Nazi Germany in the only way it knows how — with insecure displays of martial muscularity — at least it understands that V-E Day deserves to be celebrated. Over the decades, observance of V-E Day in the West has assumed a more muted, solemn tone. That is, when it is remembered at all.

Victory Day semiotics serve a dual purpose for Vladimir Putin, as they did for his Soviet predecessors. The militarism on display throughout the Russian Federation induces patriotic sentiments, sure. But the promotion of imagery that promotes Soviet-era nostalgia and the drafting of children and adults to perform mock military parades also acclimates Russian society to war.

The West should have no use for self-conscious and manipulative displays such as these. But neither should the West indulge the self-doubt apparent in its failure to mark the triumph over Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich with commensurate pomp.

To his credit, Donald Trump has encouraged prideful American celebrations of the contributions it made to collapsing the National Socialist enterprise. And yet, he, too, masks his diffidence with Russian-style bravado. The “victory was mostly accomplished because of us, whether you like it or not,” the president stressed. There’s a lot to like in Trump’s trolling remarks, as a provocation that directly undermines the Russian state’s modern origin myth. His assertion is, however, subjective and arguable, and it makes collateral damage of our allies’ contributions to the defeat of Hitlerism.

The United States should, however, celebrate the end of World War II in Europe with great fanfare. We need not languish in esoteric debates over who contributed what to German’s defeat. The United States may have only helped win the war, but it was most certainly the primary victor in the peace that followed.

Historians debate the value and necessity of the concessions the Western powers made to the Soviet Union at Yalta, but the errors of the Roosevelt era were swiftly revised amid the necessity presented by Moscow’s expansionism.

The United States was the author of the 1948 Berlin Airlift, which challenged a Soviet attempt to throttle Western access to that divided city not through military confrontation, but a herculean display of logistical and soft power Moscow could not match. America committed to the Marshall Plan, which helped stave off what looked at the time like the imminent rise of Communist-aligned popular governments in Italy and France. The United States took the lead in establishing NATO, the longest-lived military alliance in history. Washington confronted the crises in Turkey and Greece which, if mishandled, might have delivered both states into Soviet hands.

While the Soviets were sending tanks into Poznan and Budapest, the U.S.-led West was integrating Ankara, Athens, and even the West German government in Bonn into NATO via popular consensus. Whereas Moscow exported Soviet communism at gunpoint, the West promoted its values through peaceful means; smuggling freedom into the Eastern Bloc through radio broadcasts and banned literature, and demonstrating its superior model via rock music and blue jeans.

The Soviet decline was masked in the 1970s by spiking oil prices — an outgrowth of the Arab League’s efforts to muscle Israel’s allies into giving up on the Jewish State. All the while, its economy atrophied and its capacity to innovate degraded to the point that technological innovation came only as a result of reverse engineering pilfered or purchased Western goods. Not that the Soviets could integrate those innovations into industrial or agricultural practice. To do so would threaten the viability of the quota system, in which industrial managers were compelled either to just hit their targets or wildly miss them lest they be compelled to repeat that performance next year.

Still, even in the depths of America’s “malaise,” the Soviet system in Europe was coming apart. By 1980 and with the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the cracks in the Warsaw Pact had become impossible to ignore. Left-wing Western protests against the Reagan administration’s defense-related initiatives misdirected Western observers and masked the Bloc’s coming dissolution.

Well before the Berlin Wall was torn down by the East Germans imprisoned behind it, the Soviets affirmed their surrender in the Cold War by adopting Western-style economic reforms and social liberalization. Communist governments in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were long gone by the time Michail Gorbachev capitulated.

“President Bush said something about America’s allies wanting to stay in Europe,” Condoleezza Rice recalled of one of the last fateful meetings between the two superpowers off the coast of Malta in 1990, “and Gorbachev said ‘We want the United States to stay in Europe, too. The United States is a European power.’” With that, the last of the thorny postwar questions left unsettled in May 1945 was decisively resolved in America’s favor.

The generations of Americans who devoted their lives to engineering these outcomes must be honored. V-E Day isn’t merely a remembrance — a wistful recollection of the meeting on the Elbe and the grim fate the architect of the Final Solution meted out to himself beneath the streets of Berlin. It is the day that set the stage for the Europe we know today — whole, at peace, and Western in its political orientation. That is deserving of fireworks, parades, and cultural fanfare of the sort that is reserved for civilizational achievements.

And yet, it looks like the 80th anniversary of Nazism’s demise will pass without such pageantry. Patriotism seems increasingly to have become a casualty of our partisan age. Displays of unalloyed national ostentation are, to the arbiters of national discourse, coded as exhibitions of support for the party in power — a condition that excludes half the country in their celebration. This bodes ill for America’s 250th birthday next year, but it shouldn’t. A proper reverence for the wonders bequeathed to us by our forebearers isn’t thoughtless jingoism. Rather, it is an expression of the esteem due to the engineers of those marvels — a veneration woefully denied the miseducated and propagandized.

Make Victory in Europe Day Great Again doesn’t exactly lend itself to a pronounceable initialism (“MVEDGA” rings far too Slavic for my taste). But if that’s what it takes, it’ll be worth it. America’s irreplaceable contribution to winning that world war and preventing another deserves to be the object of adoration. Anything less is ingratitude.