As the world today celebrates the eightieth anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day--the end of the Second World War in Europe--it is good to pause and reflect on what that means.
For nearly six years Europe had been at war, a war that claimed an estimated 20 million European lives, nearly one third of whom were civilians, murdered in industrial-scale concentration camps, for no reason other than their ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation.
There was still a great deal of fighting ahead in the Pacific war against Imperial Japan (the invasion of Okinawa had only just begun), but the war in Europe was over.
The surrender of Nazi Germany ended that fascist regime's continent-wide terror campaign. But the defeat of a nation is not the defeat of an idea. The danger of fascism, and the hatred and prejudice on which it feeds, has never been defeated. The dictatorship of Franco, which Hitler and Mussolini made possible, remained in power for another thirty years. Fascist cliques in Greece, Chile, Argentina, and many other places around the world have sprung up over time, with the resultant ruin. Greed knows no nationality, nor ethnicity. There is no place that is immune. Vigilance, and the willingness to resist dictatorship wherever it appears is the only defense - the only way to honor those who have suffered in the past, and who sacrificed so much to end that horror eighty years ago.
