To not want to 'celebrate' VE

This is all so navel-gazey

THANK YOU!!

YABU. Have some national pride for goodness sake.

It’s not a celebration, it’s a commemoration. War is always bad, but the liberation of Europe - delivering it from Nazi occupation - and ridding us all of the Nazi tyranny is a cause which we should be proud of and never forget. Nor must we ever forget the millions who died, particularly servicemen and women.

Not least that they secured a freedom which means 80 years later we enjoy a peace and quality of life that generation could only have dreamed of. It’s important our children understand this.

I think you’ll find for the vast majority in the country it was just another day with no celebrating/commemorating or other acknowledgment of VE Day.

The BBC is not a state broadcaster. We don't have one.

This is pretty an important thing to note in light of the question of whether we should celebrate VE Day.

Despite being a leftie, I think it's right we should celebrate VE Day and also to celebrate that others are free to disagree and write openly on a public forum today.

i also think it’s right to realise their are many complex issues and emotions arising from the history of the War.

I think VE Day has become a kind of intergenerational touchstone memory of a time contemporary Britain feels was its best historical moment, on the winning side of a ‘good’ war. And precedes things that have confused Britain’s sense of itself, like immigration.

Yes because of propaganda. The Allies were the right side.

You honestly think a country with a generous welfare state, no capital or corporal punishment, the most generous abortion time limit in the world, LGBTQ rights and equal marriage, and great maternity rights is ‘far right’?

The far right is already risen, for fuck's sake. What is anyone doing about it?

The virtue signalling is coming from our politicians and state broadcaster, while we make plans for an actual fascist to come over for a state visit and play some golf. It's hypocrisy. Of the highest order. And when it suits, we'll be sending young men off to fight again somewhere else 'for freedom, to make the world a better place'.

I'd bet a £ to a penny that the majority of servicemen who fought would be appalled at where the world is currently and would be wondering what the fuck they fought for. Those still alive who were at the Cenotaph today are remembering their fallen friends, not celebrating anything.

It was right to celebrate the end of WW2 in 1945, now we should just remember. My father was a prisoner of war in Germany and never spoke about it..I find all the dressing up, dancing to swing bands and music difficult to reconcile with the vile reality.

If the Allies had lost it would have been them in the dock for war crimes and the narrative would have been about how good triumphed over the evils of firebombing civilians and using atomic weapons on them.

I'm with you OP. There are wars going on all round the world - the most appalling situations with many civilian deaths. In such circumstances, it seems improper to be engaging in what seems very much like a celebration. Of course, the people who were alive then very much wanted to celebrate - but that was then and this is now.

Agree. I don’t even see these posts as their truth - if Nazism rose again tomorrow they would be bloody celebrating its end when the time came. This is virtue signalling and nothing more.

Do what you want to do. No one really gives a fuck!

I felt today's TV coverage became a bit too focused on the Royal family. I appreciate that they are figureheads for the country but I don't think today should have about them. My eyes were drawn to the veterans sitting around them and wondered what their thoughts and emotions were today.

I have an unpopular opinion on our commemorations of anything related to the World Wars; they seem to have a tendency to become a bit too Keep Calm and Carry On/Victory Rolls/scones and jam/Glenn Miller/Union Jack/Blitz spirit themed. During the D Day commemorations last year, there was a touring exhibition of knitted scenes from a day where over 4000 service people were slaughtered. Knitting??!

I always feel deeply moved by these commemorations but sometimes I just feel uncomfortable. I can't adequately explain why though!

Presumably your relatives think the Allied victory was a good thing, because it ended Nazism. It involved horrific destruction and loss of life. That’s what happens in a war.

Again the celebration is not ‘hurrah we flattened Dresden’, it’s ‘we did what we had to and came through it’. I don’t know anyone who thinks the war was all buns and bunting.

There are specific days (not just one, multiple) where we commemorate the Shoah. One was just last week.

Of course, its tinged with sadness either way - but say what you want about the allies not bombing the train tracks, at least they did fight against Hitler.

I think WW2 was very different to other wars in that sense, in that truly the world was fighting against pure evil. Also civilians were really part of the war, the bombings, evacuation, being involved in war work, being called up, rationing...there was huge civilan loss of life.

Umm the country was on rations and whole towns blown to smithereens. The entire nation collectively suffering from PTSD and trauma. Why would you think this was appropriate? We were rebuilding the country and people’s lives.

It is all a bit bizarre. Nobody really did much about it in the decades immediately after WWII but for the past 30 years, with progressively fewer people around who were actually alive at the time, we seem to have had the growth of this mad cos-playing movement with bunting and trifle and the like.

I’m not participating in the commemorations. Obviously, I’m very well aware of the sacrifices made by so many people in WW2 and of the scale of the horrors committed by the Nazis, which meant that the war had to be fought & won.

But, because my heritage is 100% Irish, I have no family connections with the British military, so these anniversaries always seem to be for those who lost relatives or who do have military links. I would feel like an imposter if I did participate.

I think ‘What Britain would have been like’ is fairly easy to imagine from the experiences of occupied France.

A skeleton government, perhaps in collaboration.
The systematic rounding up of Jews and other minorities.
A rapid and fearful assimilation of the new situation by the population.
People turning against people in their eagerness to either fit in with or oppose the new world order. Remember how quickly that happened in Covid?

We all like to imagine that we would have been a Resistance fighter, but history shows probably not.

The wounds still lie deep in many French communities.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/apr/25/comment.bookscomment

Bloody well said, my grandfather was in tanks and was of the exact same opinion. He was a desert rat in WW1 and was in France for WW2… he did his duty but he said he saw the absolute worst of humanity and didn’t understand people ‘acting dizzy’ - quiet relief and gratitude rather than bunting and cucumber sandwiches.