| Start: | May 8, '09 5:00p |
| Location: | Wherever Goose-step Marching Is Considered 'Trey Declasse" |
What was left of the Nazi government surrendered on this date in 1945 to The British and Her Commonwealth Nations, The Soviet Union, Free French forces, and the United States, the last big power in the fray (better late then never) but with millions of "ordinary" men and women pulling their own weight!
Music is from Duke Ellington's "Jump For Joy" (1945)
Sobering stuff to remember always.....
ReplyDeleteWe are of like minds on that one, Astra.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this reminder of what happened to fascism when it made a break for it in Europe during the 1930s and 40s. The video inspired mixed emotions in me Doug. On the one hand the triumphalism of the victors and the sense of slaying a serpent, that had been striking all within reach and spreading it's venomous doctrines far and wide is hopeful. On the other hand the tragedy of Berlin in ruins a skeletal city whose population had been decimated by firestorms before death and injury encroached upon them street by street and from all directions is a vision of hell.
ReplyDeleteIn my view Natzism was an artificially created and nurtured ideology... supported by rogue traders, who like the pirates of old were the privateers operating outside the public gaze and with the implicit approval of their own governments. The forerunners of Halliburton, Blackwater and Exxon Mobil and doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons, power, influence and profit.
Nazi Germany was the attack dog of global business interests whose job was to weaken and destroy Soviet Russia.... a modern regional variant would be Israel and it's role in intimidating the Middle Eastern oil sheikdoms for the similar geopolitical and strategic business reasons.
My final feeling after watching this clip is anger, because not one single Nazi bomber would have left the ground were it not for Standard Oil....the German army was sponsored by Coca Cola and international corporate interests in the IG Farben made mass production of Zyklon B for the death camps a target of their business plan.
"Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national in view of its relationships with I.G. Farben - after the United States and Germany had become active enemies."
-- Judge Charles Clark, September 22,1947
A pyrrhic victory you might say when we look around us today, but a moment of hope all the same when people thought they knew why they had been fighting and were celebrating the defeat of a malevalent superpower.
A German coke poster from 1939 that proclaims "Thirst requires nothing else"....this may indeed be true?
I would have to agree--trade has never "followed the flag" and World War II was no exception. Trading with the enemy--or soon to be enemy-- was fair game for too many American companies.
ReplyDelete(I somehow doubt Coca-Cola has that poster who put up displayed in any little museum of Fizzy-Drink Americana down at HQ in Atlanta.
Standard Oil in the 19th Century was a hydra-headed predatory entity under J D Rockefeller which, by the way it expanded and destroyed competitor oil companies across America like a giant suction valve, by hook and crook, hammer and tong, could have been a primer for the Third Reich plans across Europe.)
Add to that Henry Ford's toxic anti-semitism and the Ford Motor Company operations in Germany and occupied Europe, and so on. Hitler's brown-shirts must have got a lot of support as a non-communist mass movement from big business, thinking he could be tamed from his racial theories running amok in time. So wrong. And, as you say, one should never forget the horrors visited on those whose major "crime" in the Spring of 1945 was to be a Berliner or German of any age or gender. And how quickly this feeling of unity among former allies was gone.
V-E Day stands for me as a day as much of reprieve as victory, a chance common people can learn something from war-that it hardly solves the underlying problems and simply lays the groundwork for another conflict (Hot or Cold War) that allows politicians to hold semi-ignorant people in a state of paranoia. And the costs! So much in treasure that could be better spent creating real civilized societies.
A short lived time. It seems humans cannot live without trying to kill each other.
ReplyDeleteSadly that's all too true Fred.
ReplyDeleteVery true...it's something that has been since the dawn of time.
ReplyDeleteRight Jack... only the territorial size of armed conflicts, the sophistication of weaponry and figuring out who profited from the war in the first place has got more complicated from the Stone Age Days.
ReplyDelete