To not want to 'celebrate' VE

You are on to something thing there .
Fewer people around who were actually there to disrupt the cosplay today

How does it compare to what the British did across the Commonwealth and to the First Nation people of the USA? Have you watched the films set in NZ, the nightingale, Van Diemen's Land etc. Or the Dutch in the Congo etc? Or how we allowed the poor, indentured servants, children, the disabled etc to be transported, experimented on and worked/starved to death? The great Irish Famine? The Armenian genocide? How does it compare to the dying rooms that were in operation on China not so long ago? Or the treatment by the Japanese, the torture, Unit 731? Or what happens today across Africa and the ME? The rich are terrified of communism, the religious leaders are terrified of secularism. There's a massive agenda to why the Russians have been so demonised.

..proving my previous point, perfectly. 👍 twisting and turning.

It is and always will be a significant mark in history. Its origins won't ever change so why would how it's marked be subject to change? This thread is another example of twisting and turning something just for the sake of it AKA virtue signalling. Acknowledge or celebrate it or don't.

I agree with you OP and it’s refreshing to read some very thoughtful opinions on this thread

I also find VE Day mildly jingoistic and lacking in nuance. The veterans themselves mostly don’t want to talk about it .

I object to the Windsors and politicians using the day for stolen valour . On a side note - Charles’ father’s family supported Hitler as did most of the German aristocracy. Hitler wouldn’t have risen to power without their support . Yes I know Philip fought in the war but the wider more complex truth about the royals and the background to war is ignored .

The young men were conscripted - that’s what I think of when see the bunting .

I think the jingoistic elements have been creeping in for a while and it’s partly done to ‘cope’ with the UK’s vastly reduced standing in the world .
The poster who said Britain lost the peace is so right .
But that immediate post war generation built the NHS and raised education standards across the country. They were looking forward .
Now we only look back at past ‘ glories’and the Windsors dress up to distract us

There's a difference between celebrating the end of a war and celebrating winning it. Of course it's possible to do both, but when the celebrations are just about having won, that seems wrong. And I agree that the emphasis seems to be shifting towards that.

Please can you lay out the diplomatic strategy you would’ve used to prevent the outbreak of the war? As you clearly have excellent military credentials and insight where thousands of highly experienced diplomats have failed?

I agree OP. My kids will have to do stuff at school (dress in British colours - hopefully they’ll educate them appropriately about ww2 too) I’m personally uncomfortable with anything glorifying war particularly given the state of things at the moment. I agree with a pp who said ‘commemorate but not celebrate’. I understand at the time there were millions celebrating, but we haven’t been through those same hardships and I don’t feel like it’s a good excuse now for street parties etc. and the way the media go on about it. Anything the people in power can through at us to distract us from the real issues going on and keep us quiet/happy.

I will be celebrating. The end of the war in Europe ought to be marked.

Yes, my Grandad and his 3 brothers were all prisoners of war. Their parents received 4 telegrams saying each son was “missing, presumed dead” but all returned home. However, not one ever took part in any war commemoration ceremony throughout their lives as they hated remembering, hated the war and were extremely traumatised by it. All long dead now but the pain they felt lived on much stronger than the pride.

@SALaw There are many examples of those who saw it firsthand not getting into the spirit of it all. Miserable buggers, spoiling it for younger generations.. If the government and the BBC had listened to veterans properly beforehand the ‘celebrations’ would have been much more muted. They don’t listen, they don’t learn.

While the rest of Europe remembered respectfully, we were doing pretty much the equivalent of ‘Two worlds wars, and one world cup’ bollocks’.

I see nothing wrong with celebrating the resulting peace and freedom with have now. I think some posters are mistaking it for a celebration of the events themselves when it isn’t. I still think this is a navel gazing thread - if you don’t want to celebrate then don’t, but virtue signalling about how concerned you are about the victims of Dresden etc is just 🙄

I feel uncomfortable that such jaunty celebrations are planned for our village when so many of them voted for the far right last week.

You’re not alone. The BBC had a woman who had worked on bomber planes during the war. After the flyover the interviewer said something like “your face lit up when you saw the planes”. The woman corrected her to say these are planes that caused devastation. She was then asked why it was important to have these events to mark VE Day and she said “well…since you’ve asked me I’ll tell you that it does feel like this is glorifying war” and went on to say how horrendous all wars are. They were a bit flustered by her not saying how wonderful it all was.

It sits badly with me.my own father ,stepdad and grandfather fought.none wanted to talk about it.The Nazis were a dreadful group of people. However we seem to have been dining out on this victory for ever!
Putting up bunting and tea parties seem to miss the mark somehow. There has only been 1 year of world peace since

My mum was 11 when the war ended. She has very strong memories of VE day.
My grandmother never spoke about the war and would walk away or turn off the TV if it was mentioned. She was deeply traumatized by it and just wanted to forget it ever happened.
I think it's important to mark
Armistice Day but that's it.
It's all too ukip/reform for me. I loathe the obsession we have with it.

I’ve barely heard of it tbh I’m sure it wasn’t as big a deal when I was at school. In any case my DC’s school is making a big fan fare about it so I’m sure she’ll teach me tomorrow after school

OP I’m ambivalent.

My grandparents all lived through that war and my Dad was born soon after it…all the GPs doing their bit but my paternal grandfather said it was an utterly shit time and he was glad to put it behind him. My dad had a ration book all through primary school, so Grandad and Nanny grew vegetables in their back garden and kept chickens or they would have struggled with food poverty. So the years after the war weren’t brilliant. My grandparents died in the 1990s.

My own thoughts are, it’s 80 years ago. On the one hand yes, let’s commemorate freedom from oppression but on the other hand, do we have to make so much fuss?

YANBU. My parents grew up in a city that was badly bombed during the war, and had some horrific experiences. Their experiences massively shaped the rest of their lives and ours as well, and the war has always felt very real to me. I feel completely out of step with most other people I know who are much further removed from it, and I don’t like what feels like the fetishisation of the 1940s. A lot of the “celebrations” just brought back trauma for my DM in particular, and I guess her emotions affected me. I am planning on doing something that is much more about remembrance of the toll of the war took on people rather than treating it as a reason to party.

But surely when something evil happens, celebrating the end of it is exactly what you do want to do? You can surely see there's a difference between celebrating that and the thing itself?

I put up Union Jack bunting and lit a candle at my village war memorial. Of course i don’t support unnecessary military action but what other recourse was there against the Nazis? For many countries, the WW2 posed a direct threat to their very survival not just their sovereignty.

So much gratitude for those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

VE day to me marks the end of immense suffering.

Hindsight is always 20/20, what was done was done but it was certainly not done without long consideration or a great deal of controversy.

The group who remember WWII may be diminishingly small but they are still with us. Had it not gone to war in 1939, there is a high chance that we would be in a very different country and world by now and not necessarily for the better. The UK gave a lot more than just lives to stop the war machine, it lost an empire, it's global position, and put itself in a huge amount of debt and the changes in our whole society from millions of children growing up without fathers and father figures in formative years left deep scars and changed some things for the better too. Even our cuisine changed. But this is a drop in the ocean to the price that was paid. Post war the people were exhasted, hungry, and angry, it took decades to start to recover, we still haven't fully recovered even now, we live with it's effects. That's why people remember and why the want to remember because to have freedom in societies you have to make sacrifices, most families made the ultimate sacrifice, that is worth remembering for some even if others don't agree. If that means some people want to go out and fly some bunting and have a party, or quietly stand and think of loved ones, or just go live their life, that is up to them.

You do as you please but please let others choose to commemorate, celebrate, or ignore as they wish.

I'm not saying you should participate at all, but I don't think these anniversaries are only for people with military links. It was a world war, people in countries all over the world were being bombed and were terrified of invasion. It was not something that was only experienced by people with family in the armed forces.

I don't particularly care if there's never another bunting and jam event or anything big on TV, although I think things like the flypast that can be seen from all over London (where my family were both evacuated from and bombed) are still probably not a bad thing to have, along with church services and so on. After all, they are entirely optional, no one has to pay attention if they don't want to.

I don't understand how people can look at VE day and see the celebrations then and now as somehow just celebrating war rather than the end of a war. Scale back events as the decades go by, sure, but rewrite history as if somehow we're now all so wise now and can see that war is bad and people then couldn't? It's insulting and naive. Do people think somehow that we who have never experienced a world war are somehow less likely to start one than our great-grandparents? I think it's probably the other way round.