newsTime for VE celebrations to fade away and for Britons to stop living in the past?
Time to end the Lambeth Walk and to face up to 0ur isolation in Europe and subservience to America.
The right-wing journalist Peter Hitchens says that it is important to honour the dead but not to live in the past. That’s something many British historians, journalists and politicians find hard to do.
By TREVOR GRUNDY
When the well-known Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens tells you that it’s time VE Day celebrations fade away and that the British people should stop living in the past it’s a good idea to take in what the man’s talking about before you cancel your subscription and reach for the sick-bag.
“Let the VE Day celebrations fade away. It’s time Britain stopped living in the past,” were some of startling words that ran alongside his May 9 article in Britain’s best known and most widely read tabloid.
It came the day after the 80th anniversary of VE Day (1945) to mark the end of a war in which at least 52 million people died, 27 million in Russia and parts of eastern Europe following Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Peter Hitchens said that he is proud of his family’s contribution to the Allied victory against Nazism and Fascism. He said that he’s still “reduced to jelly” when he sees old films like The Cruel Sea and In Which we Service.”
He argues that his special pleading about the need to stop living in the past leaves him neither unfair nor heartless.
“Leave them to the Russians from now on. The current state – as a despotic aggressor – is so ignominious that they need all the borrowed glory they can get from the past.”
But are they the only people who live on borrowed glory?
Winston Churchill with his brother Jack – symbols of an age of long ago. Both Roosevelt and Stalin treated the British prime minister as a figure of fun at the end of a war that enslaved Poland and lost Britain an Empire.
Peter Hitchins says things that most historians, journalists and politicians refuse to discuss. They are the consequences of the Second World War.
What a price we paid, said Hitchens.
“Within a few years the Empire we had supposedly fought to preserve had melted away, including Burma, which William Slim’s superb armies had fought so hard to wrest back from Japan.
“And what of Poland, whose independence we had gone to war to save in 1939. On June 8, 1945, a grand victory parade was held in London to commemorate the courage of those who fought. But Polish soldiers are airmen, ferocious fighters whose bravery had done so much to secure victory, were not even allowed to take part.
“This is perhaps the harshest illustration of the way we had become subservient to Stalin, the wicked mass murderer and tyrant whose enormous armies had ensured Allied victory in Europe. Stalin intended to turn Poland into a subject province of his Communist empire and wanted no reminder of pre-Communist Poland’s fighting prowess.
“Our victory, preferable as it was to defeat, was not an unmixed triumph for the forces of good. We had beaten one monster by allying with another. There are many lesson to be learnt from this if we wish to learn them.”