The BBC have a very moving picture of an old, old man crying at a VE day remembrance service in Europe.
WWII is refered to as a ‘just war’ to allude to the idea that a declaration of war can be on morally solid ground. But even if that were the case, justification is not the same as success.
If 40 million deaths and many more injuries, homes lost and lives ruined and half of an entire race wiped out in genocide is not an unprecedented disaster then what the hell is? The allied victory in the Second World War was entirely Pyrrhic.
For me, remembrance is second hand, of the lessons I learned from my grandparents’ generation who lived through WWI and WWII. Remembrance of a 16 year old boy with shell shock, shot for desertion to the allied refusal to bomb the railroad to Auschwitz.
Because of the fact that what has later been sited as one of the justifications for war was later ignored, I find it immoral when people refer to the second world war as a ‘just’ war.
Even if a war could ever be justified, all wars are clearly shit, and the war-weary wisdom of a generation that knows this first hand is dying out.