The Ultimate VE day

In the aftermath of Europe's commemorations of VE day, Timothy Garton Ash - author of Free World, writes that although "our memory wars will never end.. a common future is possible". From the Guardian:

After a continent-wide round of commemorations to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe, it's clear that the peoples of Europe have a shared past, but not a common one...

On these warring accounts of the past, futures are built. "Who controls the past controls the future" was the Orwellian formula for a totalitarian regime. In Europe, we no longer live in totalitarian times - even in an increasingly undemocratic Russia and the grim dictatorship of Belarus. So today's milder version is "Who shapes our view of the past can influence the future"...

Thirdly, while we will never agree on a single version of the historical truth about these events, we can agree on a lesson from them. This lesson for 2005 is the promise of 1945: Never again! In order to keep that promise to ourselves, we need to shape not a common past but a common future. A Polish student from the town of Oswiecim - that is, Auschwitz - explained on German television the other day, in excellent German, that his Polish-German-Jewish bridge-building work was aimed not at the old-fashioned goal of "reconciliation", but at building a "common future". Exactly so. And that's what we are doing, with the spread of freedom and the enlargement of the European Union.

The trouble is that we Europeans are leaving it to President Bush to tell this story for us. And he spoils it, both because of the crude Manichean tones of his rhetoric, and because his advocacy associates the great story of the spread of freedom in Europe too closely with the policies of a particular US administration. So why don't we tell it for ourselves?

The Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili - leader of his country's "rose revolution" in 2003 - has said we are witnessing a "second wave" of liberation, inside the former Soviet Union, starting with Georgia and Ukraine. Speaking on CNN the other day, he corrected himself, suggesting it was really a "third wave". I make it the fourth. The first wave rolled over western and northern Europe in 1944-45; the second swept through southern Europe, starting in Portugal in 1974; the third liberated central Europe, starting in Poland in 1980 and reaching the Baltic states in 1991; now the fourth wave, if wave it is, may be building in eastern Europe.

I remember seeing in Berlin, the day after the Berlin Wall came down, a fresh graffito: "only today is the war really over". Now we are waiting for the day when we read those same words scrawled on a Moscow wall, in a democratic Russia finally liberated from the weight of the past. That would be the ultimate VE Day.

FreeWorldWeb - 'This website offers an opportunity for readers of Timothy Garton Ash's book Free World and his weekly columns, or anyone else who wishes to join in, to exchange ideas about how we can work towards a free world.'.

VE Day? What VE Day? - Daphne Caruana Galizia writes that Malta "ignored the occasion, behaving as though Victory in Europe Day has nothing to do with Malta, or as though we were out of the equation or part of the Axis powers. While all the political and geographical heirs of the Allied Forces celebrated, we watched like mere onlookers."

Who's that next to the Maltese Prime Minister? - from the Guardian