Victory Day and the American Will: 80 Years After Hitler Fell

Eighty years ago, the guns fell silent in Europe. Nazi Germany surrendered. And the United States, bruised but unbroken, stood as the colossus of liberty amid the ruins of fascism. President Trump’s proclamation declaring May 8, 2025 as Victory Day for World War II does more than memorialize a date. It rekindles the sacred fire of national memory. It calls us not only to look back, but to look inward.

Victory in Europe was not inevitable. It was not the product of moral relativism or international consensus. It was the victory of sovereign nation-states, led by the United States, asserting that liberty was worth fighting for. When America entered the war in the wake of Pearl Harbor, it did so with a resolve that shattered totalitarian dreams. More than 250,000 Americans laid down their lives to preserve not an abstract idea but a tangible world, one where children could grow up free, not indoctrinated, where speech was a right, not a crime, and where governments answered to their people, not the other way around.

President Trump’s statement rightly frames World War II as “the apex of the eternal battle between good and evil.” This is not hyperbole. It is clarity. And clarity is rare in an age that treats all values as fungible, all histories as suspect, and all heroes as problematic. When we celebrate Victory Day, we do not indulge in nostalgia, we declare fidelity to the principles that animated the American war effort: individual liberty, national sovereignty, and Western civilization itself.

Trump’s invocation of peace through strength is not a slogan, it is a strategy rooted in history. It was Ronald Reagan who famously reminded us that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to deter it. May 8, 1945, did not occur because tyrants lost interest in conquest, but because the free world outproduced, outgunned, and outwilled them. The lesson, like the date, must not be forgotten.

Yet forgetfulness is the disease of democracies. We are prone to amnesia because comfort breeds complacency. Too many in our own nation, particularly in elite institutions, regard the American soldier not as a liberator but as a symbol of imperialism. They do not see Omaha Beach, they see colonialism. They do not honor the flag, they deconstruct it. In their eyes, the very victory we commemorate is a source of shame rather than celebration.

This is why Trump’s proclamation matters. It is a moral reassertion. A reminder that the American republic, despite its flaws, stood athwart the tide of history and said "no" to the most genocidal regime the world had ever known. To borrow Churchill’s phrase, if we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we risk losing the future. Victory Day reminds us that some judgments are not only permissible but necessary.

The President’s emphasis on honoring the “Greatest Generation” is not a mere gesture. It is a rebuke to the entitlement and cynicism of our time. Those men, most of them scarcely out of high school, did not demand safe spaces. They volunteered for battlefields. They didn’t burn the flag, they raised it, on Iwo Jima, in Sicily, at Bastogne. We are their heirs. And an heir who squanders his inheritance is worse than a thief, because he presumes ownership without earning it.

Victory Day also draws a line in contemporary policy. Trump’s commitment to ending endless wars, coupled with his reverence for military sacrifice, forms a coherent doctrine: the lives of American servicemen are precious, and war should be waged only when victory is possible and liberty is at stake. This is not isolationism, but realism tempered by patriotism. Unlike the neoconservatives who believe every foreign skirmish is an opportunity for nation-building, and unlike the globalists who treat national borders as relics of a bygone age, Trump’s vision is anchored in a Jeffersonian understanding of limited entanglement.

The date also demands introspection. If we are to celebrate the end of fascism abroad, we must also confront its spiritual cousins at home. Centralized power, censorship, politicized justice, these are not merely academic abstractions. They are the early symptoms of the disease our forefathers died to defeat. Today, they manifest in the bureaucratic deep state, in the surveillance state, and in ideological conformity masquerading as diversity. Victory Day must remind us that tyranny need not wear a swastika or carry a Palestinian flag to be dangerous. It can arrive in the language of equity, in the guise of security, or in the robes of judicial activism.

President Trump’s proclamation offers a powerful counterpoint to such trends. It reminds us that the American spirit is not a historical artifact, but a living force. “We renew our commitment,” he writes, “to keeping America and the entire world safe, secure, prosperous, and free.” These are not empty words. They are a mission statement.

If 1945 was the conclusion of a righteous war, 2025 must be the continuation of a righteous vigilance. We cannot protect what we do not revere. And we cannot revere what we do not remember. Victory Day is not about triumphalism, but about gratitude, gratitude for the men who stormed Normandy, who marched through Berlin, who came home with wounds both seen and unseen, and who asked for nothing but the chance to live as free men in the country they saved.

Let the cynics scoff. Let the revisionists rewrite. The truth does not depend on academic approval. It lives in Arlington, in the faded letters sent home from foreign fronts, in the grainy footage of liberation, in the tears of a widow at a folded flag. And now, it lives in the words of a president who dares to say what many have forgotten: that America was great when it was good, and it was good when it fought evil without apology.

On this 80th anniversary, we do not simply honor the past. We recommit to the future. A future where America does not apologize for its victories, does not abandon its allies, and does not outsource its moral compass to international bureaucrats. The victory in Europe was not merely military, it was civilizational. And it must be remembered not once every decade, but every day.

The fallen demand no less.

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