Lest we forget . . . Today is the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day, Victory in Europe. Sixty years ago today, the Germans surrendered to the Allied forces in Europe. The second World War was over, at least in that part of the world. The war in other parts of the world would not end for a few more months at which time some 68,000,000 people had died. For the younger readers out there, yes, that’s 68 million dead. More than 40 million were civillians.

Many, many people were involved in the liberation of Europe against the Nazis. While we tend to focus on what the Americans did there and the people America lost, other nations helped win that war as well. It was the Soviets who liberated Auschwitz, the Canadians led the raid on Dieppe, and so on. More than 12 millions allied soldiers lost their lives in WW2, just under 300,000 of those American. 57 million civillians also died, 6,000 of them American. There was also, of course, the Holocaust, which took the lives of nearly 6 million Jews. Everyone paid the price in that awful time.

Take a moment to check out this Wikipedia entry. The numbers are staggering.

Sixty years seems so long ago. I would not be born for another 15 years, and yet that time feels frighteningly close to me. Why care about those events of long ago, the younger readers might ask?

Well, I think George Santayana had it right when he said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Think of all those lives lost in that awful time and Santayana’s quote becomes a terrible warning against forgetting. Throughout the world, the kind of ideals and politics that led to the second world war and the atrocities that accompanied it, are on the rise. Lest we forget is a quote we see on cenotaphs throughout the world. That too is a warning against ignoring the past. It’s also a plea to remember those who gave their lives so that people like me could write about it today.

Lest we forget that the events of those sixty years past gave rise to the world we live in today. Lest we forget that the freedom we enjoy is also easily lost. It was long ago and far away, but the forces that tore our world apart aren’t gone forever. If we forget, they will rise again and more good people will die. Many more.

I’d like to close this strange blog entry (strange for me) with a short poem by a gentleman named John McCrae, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a doctor from Guelph, Ontario, who died in 1918, in another great war, the first World War. It seems somehow fitting to my discussion that people called it “the war to end all wars“. Apparently, we hadn’t learn the lessons of history well enough.

In Flanders Fields (1915)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Wow, two days of blog entries that have nothing to do with Linux (other than the fact that I am writing this on a notebook running Linux and that the server hosting this also runs Linux).

— Marcel