It Took The West 80 Years to Lose The Victory of WW2.

The 80th anniversary of Hitler's defeat in the Second World War is fast approaching. It’s not even May 8th, and Western politicians have already begun to cynically pimp out the memory of those times and the millions who died before Victory in Europe was achieved.

Yesterday, Keir Starmer used the “Never Again,” mantra about genocide to remember the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp on April 15th 1945. You can’t remember the horrors of history if you are callously repeating them. We are knee-deep in Israel’s 21st century genocide of Palestinians. So any talk of “never again” is just trolling the victims both present and past of genocide. It’s smug, crass and let’s be honest- something a nazi would do.

80 years after our victory against fascism in the Second World War, we’ve nothing to celebrate. However, we have much to be ashamed about.

Our ancestors tried their best to extinguish fascism first by the gun and then by building a Welfare State that would provide citizens with the right to a dignified life in a tolerant society.

21st-century Western society rejected those hard-won principles of universal human and economic rights. Instead, it surrendered its humanity, decency, and commonsense because the 1% deceived it into thinking wealth was wisdom.

12 years ago, my Dad called out the hypocrisy of neoliberal politicians who used World War Two to pretend 21st-century centrism was the reason the greatest generation sacrificed themselves in their fight against Hitler and Nazism.

Every year, the spring rains fall hard and heavy on a parched and hungry earth. Life is reborn from the long slumber of winter. For me, the beauty in this annual transformation stings as if I caught my finger on a thorn from a rose. These lengthening days remind me of another time when I was a young man. Back then, the sun's rays were just as warm and sensuous, but the splendour of nature being reborn was tainted with death. It was 1945, and Europe was still caught in the dying grasp of a cruel and unforgiving world war.

It was a conflict that consumed tens of millions of lives through military battles, air bombardment and mass murder. For five years of war, through defeat and bitter struggle, the calendar changed from humid summers to crisp fall days, to the bitterness of winter and then back to the optimism of spring. As clocks in every household and in every town square moved forward, day by day, marking our mortal time through this struggle between good and evil, soldiers were maimed or killed on all our military fronts, convoys sunk in the cold North Atlantic, cities reduced to rubble, and children left hungry orphans.

Across the world, death moved for too many years in lockstep with the season for sowing and reaping. We were a world at war, and for those of us in Britain the cost was enormous in lost and ruined lives. But it didn't matter because we believed that the cause was just and that whether we came from humble or refined stock. We were all in this war together.

There was a common and shared faith in ourselves and the notion that everyone's contribution, large or small, was essential to the war effort that saw us through those dark hours. It was what kept us bugger on until our fortunes turned and the war against Nazi Germany reached its bloody end in the spring of 1945.

In those heady days leading to peace, I was just twenty-two and as green as the grass that had started to shoot up across the silenced killing fields. As I travelled from liberated Holland to the crumbling remnants of Nazi Germany, I was sure of one thing: I was a lucky man. I had what was called back then a good war. I was one of the fortunate few; death had eluded me while I served in the RAF.

I felt blessed by luck because so many others- friends, neighbours, acquaintances and complete strangers were not so lucky. They were never going to see twenty-five or be able to raise a family and enjoy the fruits of peace. I knew, like the rest of my compatriots, that the dead had reluctantly sacrificed their existence to preserve civilisation for us, the living.

Perhaps that is why, even though I am now 90, each spring, I still go to my local cenotaph and commune with unfamiliar names etched in stone. I read out their simple epitaphs and age. I always wonder, what if these young men had lived? What would their lives have been like? Would they have found true love, happiness, a rewarding profession and healthy children? Would they have felt content with the democracy they had fought so selflessly to preserve? It has been almost 70 years since the guns of the Second World War fell silent and I am no longer sure if the dead would agree that their lives were worth the price of today's society.

To me, this brave new world feels all wrong, out of tune with what the men and women of World War Two accomplished with our "blood, sweat and tears". It just seems too flippant, too easy, and too profane in this present world; for our politicians, our media pundits, and our industrial military complex to intone the beaches of D-Day, Sword, Juno, Gold and Omaha as if it were the catechism for freedom when our individual and collective liberty is more at risk now than it has ever been since the end of Nazism.

We broke our solemn bond with those warriors of yesterday and forgotten that when the survivors of the Second World War returned to their homes, they were like a tide that raised all boats. My generation's shared experience of suffering, witnessing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and enduring unspeakable privations as both soldiers and civilians made us vigilant when it came to demanding our peace dividend. We knew what we deserved and that was a future that didn't resemble our hard-scrabble past. The Green and Pleasant land was for everyone after the war because we had bled for it and died for it. We demanded a truly democratic society where merit was rewarded and no one would be left behind because of poverty, poor health or inadequate education.

After the war, we revolutionized the Western world. We introduced the notion that all human beings deserved dignity, freedom of movement, due process before the law, and social safety nets to protect those affected by economic uncertainties. We knew the cost of not creating a just society was the end of democracy and a life sentence of misery for too many people in our country. We knew the price of failing to create and maintain universal health care was a return to a two-tier society where the few held dominion over the many.

Today, however, in a world where our reservoirs of wealth are as deep and enormous as all the mighty rivers of the world combined, our politicians, financial institutions and megalithic industries tell us we can no longer afford these human rights that men sacrificed their lives for: the freedom to live with dignity in a compassionate society. We are told by those in charge that we can no longer live with luxuries like healthcare, proper state-funded pensions, decent wages, trade unions and most aspects of our social safety network.

At 90, I am too old to take up the fight, too old to stand in demonstrations with a placard denouncing this madness. All I can do is bear witness to my times- and our heroic struggle fought so long ago against Hitler as well as his fascist acolytes who sought to wreck civilisation.

The problem with today's society is not a lack of money but the proper and just distribution of wealth. Governments have put the interests of city bankers, billionaires, and top-income earners before ordinary citizens.

I don't know if we will emerge from this present darkness. Perhaps humanity will retreat into the caves where our ancestors came because we were cowed by self-serving political parties and dubious business leaders.

I hope not, for the sake of the generations to come, but there is one thing I am certain of: had the politicians and business mandarins of today been in power in 1939, they wouldn't have had the bottle to fight Nazism. There would have been no Dunkirk, Battle of Britain, or Finest Hour. Our leaders today would have allowed the lights across Europe to grow dim.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities, which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living, tariff war crisis times. So, if you can, join with a paid subscription, which is just 3.50 a month, or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John.