Ve day

This week we celebrated VE Day. When Pericles remembered the dead from the war against Sparta in his famous Funeral Speech of 431 bc, he was not celebrating victory – the war would end in 404 bc with Athens’s surrender – but doing something quite new: he was reflecting on what Athens stood for and why it was worth dying for. Pericles began by ticking off a number of important features of dêmokratia, ‘people-power’: the system ran in the interests of the many, not the few; men of distinction were given scope to win promotion on the grounds of merit (‘people-power’ was always thought to deny them that opportunity); but

President Donald Trump has again demonstrated his less than impressive grasp of history with a statement on his Truth Social site on the 80th anniversary of VE Day – the end of the Second World War in Europe – claiming that the US ‘did more than any other country by far’ to win the global conflict. In terms of cold statistics, it was the Soviet Union that did most to defeat Nazi Germany, suffering the colossal loss of 24 million military and civilian lives before the Red Army entered the ruins of Berlin to end the Third Reich. The US lost a total of 418,500 dead in fighting Japan and

Admitting defeat 8 May is celebrated as VE Day, but it is also a date which marks a significant English military defeat. It was the day in 1429 when the Earl of Salisbury’s forces were driven from Orleans by Joan of Arc, an event which provoked an English retreat from the Loire Valley and marked a turning point in the Hundred Years’ War. The event is marked in Orleans with an annual Fête de Jeanne d’Arc, featuring a parade through the city led by ‘Joan’. Upwardly mobile Residents on the Isle of Wight were urged to install an app on their phones which is being used in a pilot scheme