Defend the Great Victors—But Don’t Let Their Triumph Become Our Replacement Religion

The 81st anniversary of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day dawns with precious few left who still remember it. My grandparents lived through the Occupation of the Netherlands; two are gone, one can no longer find her memories, and the last remembers it like it was yesterday—a neighbor knocking on the window to tell them that they were free, the prayers of thanksgiving, the joyful village celebration that followed. 

Veteran journalist Ted Byfield told me that on V-E Day in Toronto, the conductors stopped the street cars and handed out beers. He died in 2021. Bud Anderson, the American fighter pilot and triple ace, informed me that V-E Day was “a big let-down” because he was stateside in Texas with his friend Chuck Yeager; the two flyers took their wives out to celebrate. Yeager died in 2020; Anderson in 2024. 

The Great War produced 20 million dead, the collapse of four empires, a score of throneless monarchs, the Armenian Genocide, and a continental powder keg with the Treaty of Versailles as a twenty-year wick. The Second World War produced 80 million dead, the Holocaust, and put half the continent behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain. The great standoff between the two victorious empires—America and the Soviet Union—began. V-E Day was the first day of the Cold War.

Having heard stories about “the war” firsthand all my life, it has been surreal to see commentators attack the so-called official narrative about World War II. This is usually shorthand for Holocaust denial of some sort but also a larger iconoclastic project that is a near-perfect microcosm of horseshoe theory. It isn’t just crackpot progressives claiming Churchill was a villain; you can hear that on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, too.