Fireside Chat: On the 80th Anniversary of VE Day
Join us tonight at 9pmET/6pmPT for the discussion. Want to ask a question directly?
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Today, May 8, marks the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany to the combined forces of the United States, Soviet Union, and other forces who joined to free Europe from fascism. The Soviet Union, in some of the bloodiest battles ever fought, lost over 27 million people in their war against Germany, and bore the brunt of the conflict with the support of the U.S. and other allies. Tomorrow, Russia will officially celebrate Victory Day in what they call the Great Patriotic War.
Heads of state and government from all around the world will be participating in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s crucial and historic victory against the forces of fascism. That includes China, Brazil, Egypt, Slovakia, Serbia, and many others.
The historic link-up between the forces of the United States and the Soviet Union at the river Elbe, 80 years ago, led to the creation of the ‘Spirit of the Elbe’ “dedicated to the peoples of all nations resolving their differences without war, and should be an eternal beacon to light the future courses of all Nations working together for the mutual benefit of all people.”
Unfortunately, the commitment to “Never Again” repeating the same mistakes which led to world wars in the 20th Century have been deliberately ignored by an unholy imperialist alliance between Global NATO and the City of London and Wall Street, which after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 deployed itself against Russia, using Ukraine and other proxies as battering rams to balkanize, and if necessary destroy Russia with nuclear weapons.
We can either destroy ourselves in a thermonuclear war, which now threatens to emerge in three separate hotspots of the world—Ukraine, Southwest Asia, and India-Pakistan—or engage in creating a new ‘Spirit of the Elbe’ among all nations in the world, cooperating for mutual benefit and economic development. That was the post-war vision of President Franklin Roosevelt, which American economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche dedicated himself to following and making a reality during his wartime service in Calcutta, India. He recalled that mission in an article, written in 2010 and published in EIR, “IT WAS NO CONSPIRACY! MacArthur & Eisenhower.” He wrote,
“Today, I am among the mere handful of those few still living veterans of a certain past military service, who were part of what some people today would call, mistakenly, “a conspiracy.” Today, we few represent that handful of those veterans who, today, had lived through that awful morning when the news had come, that our greatly beloved President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. Ours is simply the patriotism of those, among us at that time, who had reacted with a certain, special devotion to that sense of patriotic mission to which we had been called during what was, still then, the ongoing great, long war.
That was, at first, no more than the silent oath to which I committed myself when the news of President Roosevelt’s death reached the few of us who would be gathered that evening in a military encampment at Kanchrapara in Bengal, India. When we met quietly in the dusk of that evening, there, I replied to that group of fellow-soldiers who came to me to ask their question. My words from that past are carved in memory still today: “We have been led, until now, by a great President, who has now died. The new President is a little man, and, I am afraid for our country, now.” One remembers things like that.
Today, I, for one, am still standing. Let my thought tonight seem to touch your shoulder, “patriot,” as someone, long ago, had seemed to touch my own. There was no “conspiracy” beyond doing one’s duty, even still today, when a silent trumpet calls those few, old, soldiers who never really die.”
Those immortal men and women who either fought directly against fascism or contributed to that fight back home should be the inspiration for what we must do today, as citizens and patriots of our own nations and the world as a whole. Our program today will focus on that
Speakers: Dennis Speed and Jose Vega
