Why are we doing a two-minute silence for VE Day?

We won, for God's sake!

A national two-minute silence has been announced in government buildings for midday on Thursday, VE Day. In this, the government is following a precedent that—by now—is pretty well-established; a similar silence was imposed in 2020, and it may go back further than that. I got the email this morning that we would be having a two-minute silence at work, and it has actually made me a bit upset.

We today don’t remember the first half of the twentieth century, not in the literal sense of ‘remember’: those who were adults during it are almost all dead. As a result, our traditions of remembrance have become confused—most people aren’t quite sure what these historical events meant, even as they are quite sure that they are all very important and must be treated seriously. It’s led to bizarre emergent status games, a zero-sum jockeying for ‘maximum respectfulness’ that results in crude and actually quite disrespectful poppy idolatry around Remembrance Sunday. And now the same confusion leads to a misunderstanding of what VE Day is for, what distinguishes it from Remembrance and other events.

On VE Day in 1945, the country was anything but silent! People across the UK (and across much of the world) poured into the streets for impromptu celebrations as soon as they heard the news of Nazi surrender. In Glasgow, where I live, the crowds that flocked to George Square were huge, and their instinct when they got there was to dance! There were celebrations for several days up and down the country—sometimes mixed with trepidation and sadness, inevitably, but celebration nonetheless.

This is the correct way to mark VE Day. It is a day of celebration—maybe the greatest day of celebration in the secular calendar—and should be marked as such. Churchill, for one, immediately knew and announced to the crowds in London what the day stood for:

This is your victory! It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this.

He was right—and he was right whether he meant ‘we’ to refer to the British people, to all the Allied nations, or indeed to humanity as a whole. VE Day is a great day; not a sad day or a day of reflection or of quiet thanks, but a day of victory. It’s in the name: victory in Europe. We—Britain, the Allies, humanity—won.

Of course, we can and should remember those (too many) who died fighting for victory in Europe. And alongside them, we should remember the many millions who were not fighting but were killed anyway, including millions intentionally and deliberately murdered by the Nazis, before victory was achieved.

We should remember that beating the Nazis didn’t end the war, which continued in the Pacific; and we should remember that the resolution to the war was not a just one. Both East and West let many Nazi murderers, who should have been jailed or hanged, go free, as both sides rapidly reorganised themselves onto Cold War footing. The people of Eastern Europe—including the Poles, whose freedom was our casus belli in the first place and who contributed so much to the fight—fell under Soviet rule and wouldn’t escape for fifty years. The West let Franco away get with it and made him an ‘ally’ in the Cold War, damning Spanish Republican heroes (who’d been fighting fascism for longer than anyone else) to continued exile. Decisions made during the war probably ‘locked in’ the partition of India, and indeed more immediately caused famine in Bengal during the war. The list of tragedies and failures is almost endless, though there is no question about which was most important: failure to act more quickly against Nazism before the war, as well as further decisions made during the war, enabled the Holocaust to take place on the scale that it did.

But all this tragedy and ambiguity exists in the context of the more fundamental certainty, that defeating Nazism was a victory for humanity. The fact that we failed to do enough to stop the Holocaust only fully makes sense against background knowledge of the full scale of what the Nazis planned to do—and would have actually done, had we not defeated them. The hoary myths about the war ought to be supplemented by a deeper and sadder understanding, yes, but the hoary myths are (importantly) actually true. Britain did stand bravely against fascism! We did face up to Hitler to enable the world to move forward into sunlit uplands! The New World really did step forward to the rescue and liberation of the Old! We won!

There is a time to mourn and remember the dead. But back in 1945, the death and destruction that actually surrounded the people of Britain and Europe didn’t stop many of them from celebrating when the German surrender was announced. Sober reckoning could wait at least one day to embrace the relief and joy of victory. It’s now eighty years on; we are not literally surrounded by the war’s destruction any more. Why are we claiming to know better than those who lived through it?

It is right that we want to remember the evils that occurred. We remember the war dead on Remembrance Sunday, we remember the murdered Jews of Europe on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we can and should recall the wider importance of the war throughout the whole year. But VE Day is a special day, a great day, because it is the day we celebrate the fact that, after all the death and suffering, we won.

A one- or two-minute silence, like we have on Remembrance Sunday, is for reflection. But if you properly and fully reflect on victory, you’ll not want to keep silent: you’ll maybe even want to cheer or dance or sing. A wiser government, a government that better understood the meaning of our early twentieth-century history, would have understood this and approached the 80th anniversary of Nazi surrender appropriately—say, by announcing a national holiday, together with a massive state-subsidised piss-up where everyone takes the opportunity at midday to join together in singing ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’. (Just a suggestion; improvements welcome.)

In the event, our governments have seen fit to try to impose silence onto a day of celebration, apparently to ‘remember and thank those who fought for our freedom’. A better way to thank those who fought for our freedom would be to use that freedom and ignore the government. I will be briefly leaving my workplace at midday on Thursday, ignoring the demand for quiet remembrance, and having a lunchtime pint to celebrate. A small act, that no doubt I’ll be on my own for—but then, ‘to be free | is often to be lonely’, Auden wrote at the start of the war.

If you also work in a public building, I would encourage you to seriously consider if you’d like to do the same. And regardless of where you work, if you take liberty at all seriously, I hope you mark this Thursday, not with solemnity or remembrance for what we lost (that has its own allotted time), but rather with celebration, joy for what we won. The eighth of May is a great day; we have never seen a greater day than this.