Updated: Trump corruption as blatant and brazen is not a surprise. What is more concerning is the failure of the American legal system to deal with it. And the seeming acceptance of that still by a significant millions of American voters.
From yours:
Text update: "The original instrument of surrender was rejected by the Soviet army. It didn’t mention the Soviet Union explicitly, and they had some other objections to it, and so the final instrument was negotiated during the day of May 8—was agreed about shortly before 10 p.m. on the 8th of May—and went into effect a little past 11 p.m. on the 8th of May. Eleven p.m., May 8, was, of course, the early morning in Moscow, May 9, and so this chain of events has left ever afterwards a question mark about what is the exact and proper date of the end of the Second World War in Europe: whether it’s May 8—as it was in Berlin and where the Allied armies were—or May 9, as it was in Moscow.
Of course, the war itself would continue for more months. As the Germans surrendered in the West, American forces in the Pacific were fighting a brutal battle on the island of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the whole war—certainly, I think, the bloodiest battle of the American Pacific campaign. And no one knew on the day that the Nazis surrendered how long that war in the Pacific would last, except for a handful of Americans who were party to the secret of the atomic bomb. Most Americans—most people—assumed that there was probably another year of fighting ahead, an invasion of Japan, and many thousands, maybe many hundreds of thousands, of American casualties and Allied casualties, too, because the American army that entered Japan would be supported by Commonwealth forces: Australia, British, Canadian. But the atomic bomb did explode. Japan did surrender, and the war came to an end—a final and formal end—with the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September, 1945.
So this is a time of commemoration, and in this time, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, issued a very strange post about the event on the 8th of May. He wrote:
Many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II. I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I. We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything—That’s because we don’t have leaders anymore, that know how to do so! We are going to start celebrating our victories again!
Now, that post was such a perfect crystallization of the Trump style: bombast, boast, all of it making Trump himself the center of a story that he had nothing whatsoever to do with. The statement is unwise and unattractive in all kinds of other ways too. It denigrates the sacrifices and heroism of others. And it turns the tragedy and horror of war into a triumphant narrative that was completely alien to almost all the people who experienced it as nothing but a tale of suffering and waste and cruelty and misery."
It's called 'feeding your frenzy for nationalism' isn't it, Donald. All wannabe strongmen do it. So far you are failing in America, but it takes real effort to build a Kingship, doesn't it Donald.
How to make America not-great again, in one easy lesson: You take all those things that America helped to create which brought about a more just and peaceful world and which helped America become a leader of a better world, ana you rip them to shreds.
More excerpt: The story of how we turned the chaos and trauma of the Second World War into something better—and not Americans alone but Americans working with allies, working with defeated adversaries—that is not as dramatic as the battles of World War II. I don’t know that people are going to make successful documentary series out of trade negotiations in food aid and the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But those achievements were great, and they are the things that at the eighth-decade interval require us most to be mindful, because they’re the things that are most in danger of being lost. You know, they’re marble and bronze statues that commemorate all the horror and bloodshed of the war. But those quiet victories of peacetime that built a better world, we’re in danger of forgetting them because right now, the United States is, step by step, unraveling its own great achievement.
You know, Winston Churchill described the Battle of Britain, in 1940, as Britain’s finest hour. If Americans are looking for a finest hour of their own, it’s not anything that happened during the war—when America was, by the way, a late entrant. It’s the five, seven years, 10 years after the war, when Americans and others learned from the mistakes after the First World War and built a better world that we still enjoy. Now all of those lessons have been forgotten, and Donald Trump is single-handedly determined to repeat all the mistakes that after the First World War put the world on the path to the Second World War: protectionism, isolationism, narrow nationalism, lack of forbearance, lack of mutual understanding, lack of any understanding of America’s place as a leader—because of its values, because it’s a country that is admired and trusted, not just because it’s a country that is strong and powerful and feared.
We should think of the 8th of May, and the Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day, as the beginnings of our modern story. And maybe the message that we need to hear from leaders is not a message of self-congratulation and self-celebration but a message of rededication to the work that was done after the end of the war to build a better world that those of us who grew up in it had the privilege of enjoying and that we are at risk of not bequeathing to the generations that come after us.
And now my conversation with Anne Applebaum. But first, a quick break.
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