Victory In Europe Day 8th of May 2025 : Hollow Victory Celebration After Almost 80 Years of Success and Peace

(May 2025, 27/5/25)
There was a Hollow Victory celebration this year, as 80 years have passed since that day in 1945, when the people celebrated around the world the end of that awful conflict started by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. The survivors vowed never to repeat the evils which led to that war. For that purpose governments were elected or reelected which would put the people who had sacrificed so much first. Even then half of Europe ended up under Stalin’s undemocratic and stifling rule, a price which had to be paid perhaps!

    Governments pursued policies to help people; whether it was the Americans lending large sums in the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe, and its shattered economies. Germany (or West Germany at least was encouraged to reopen, reindustrialize and trade. So was Japan. Their peoples were forgiven, even leaders who had been involved in the previous enemy regimes were tolerated and forgiven. In Britain the coal industry was nationalized, and the medical profession, turned into a Health Service for the people. Steps were taken with the World Bank to stimulate and encourage mutually beneficial trade between all nations. The United Nations was formed to adjudicate between warring parties and settle conflicts sensibly and fairly with the approval of the rest of the world. Decades of relative peace ensued, despite the Cold War between the Communist nations and the West. 
    There were policies and departments set up over the years to help people, many on the federal level and some on the State level in the US. 
    The US nearly got to almost 80 years from 1945 and then Donald Trumpenstein was elected back into the White House for a second time, after a gap of 4 years when, despite international disasters things still seemed a lot calmer than when he was in before. He hit the ground running with an administration which really did seek to change nearly everything about America. Virtually the first thing the new President did was to place one of his main financial campaign backers Mr Elon Musk into a new government agency called DOGE, set to audit and cut waste out of the Government, despite Mr Musk being one of the main beneficiaries of government private contracts for space activities (in his company SpaceX) but also for his Starlink internet/communications systems. With a team of very young computer whiz kids (in their early twenties, or late teen?) they marched into federal buildings where government department records were digitally housed and accessed them in order to slash the US government budget, making recommendations for cuts at breakneck speeds and getting their ‘employer’ Donald Trump to cancel the programs and jobs. Musk and his workers’ lack of knowledge about the departments and the methods of government soon became evident as firing emails or letters were sent to thousands of government workers in various departments. Large numbers of solid American government workers expecting to remain in secure jobs for the rest of their lives were being casually ‘let go’ by an incoming administration in the first few days of its rule. By so doing they sent a message directly to the American working classes that this was not a government for them. The political contract between the politicians and the working man and woman was now broken. Government was no longer going to be for the people, and on behalf of the people. The people were now to be mere cogs, to be discarded if they were of no use to the profiteers who now ran the Government.
    To make this breakdown in the post war ‘contract’ even clearer Donald Trump and his gang proceeded to mess up the American and the world economy, particularly those nations who had been their closest allies. The setting of high tariffs on all foreign countries, with the effect of shocking other nations into trade retaliation, and into potentially seeking agreements which might be beneficial in some ways for American industries, was soon followed by relaxations to lower rates of tariff, which signaled the opportunity for Trump and his business backers to make illegal insider trading profits when share prices improved. The effect of all the uncertainty on most businesses, whether American or foreign was damaging. Tariffs would surely put up the prices of foreign goods to the American consumer, or business purchasers. The American people would suffer from higher prices, and job layoffs. Businesses would suffer by losing markets, foreign and internal. Additionally , having scared and frightened, or angered most foreign tourists from coming to America in uncertain legal and economic times, Trumpenstein killed off foreign tourism, jettisoning large sums of money from the American economy.
    Unfortunately the right wing racism, the Nazi and Fascist authoritarianism, which the ‘Free World’ and Stalin’s very unfree Russia had fought against in World War 2, even seemed to have returned to the United States, that previous defender of democracy and international law, and economic plenty, had been taken over by interests which seemed more akin to their opponents in WW2. So after almost 80 years of victory, it seemed all of a sudden that America had fallen under the authoritarian cloud. How could the free world celebrate a victory that had been lost once again, without a shot being fired?