One of the historically remarkable things about 1945 is precisely how late Germany’s surrender actually came. As the fighting finally ended in May 1945, the first best option was simply to erase Germany from the map. The Allies learned that forcing Germany to a mere unconditional surrender had been a mistake. In fact, the reverse is closer to the truth. The height of historical reimagining is reached when French and German diplomats look back to 1945 and piously assure each other that this was the moment when they learned to get along better and not to repeat the mistakes of the vindictive Treaty of Versailles.

In imaginative rearrangement, Bretton Woods comes to figure as a postwar conference at which world powers agreed on a cooperative world economic order, rather than a wartime meeting-coinciding with the breakout battle at Normandy and the destruction of the Army Group Center on the Eastern Front-of a victorious coalition presided over by the United States. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoke Roosevelt’s waves of bombers, powered of course by high-octane aircraft fuel, while passing over the fact that those aircraft were meant to rain down fire and destruction on the cities of Europe and Japan.

The Blitz is invoked as an image of national solidarity while denying the rather harsher truth that the civilian casualties in London, Birmingham, and other southern cities of England were as bad as they were because of the threadbare air raid precautions deliberately adopted by a cost-conscious Conservative government. Particularly in what might be called reformist discourse, the war stands as a moment of collective organization and mobilization-but with the violence taken out. If China and Russia instrumentalize the war for the purposes of revived nationalism, the weird thing in the West is the peculiarly bloodless quality of people’s collective memory. But it should be a moment to reflect on their distortions and how this use of history threatens to warp present-day politics. The occasion of Victory Day (or Victory in Europe Day), celebrated on May 8 in the West and at the turn of midnight on May 9 in Russia, will be an opportunity to repeat such gestures. If the United States could do that then, why could it not do a green industrial revolution today? Among both advocates of global financial reform on the left and defenders of mainstream multilateralism at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, references to the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 are de rigueur. Roosevelt’s call in 1940 to construct a giant air fleet. The last 18 months have seen repeated references to the war as a moment of collective mobilization. debt-to-GDP ratio is now expected to exceed levels reached during World War II. In the scramble for ventilators and personal protective equipment, countries have invoked the model of the war economy. Since his miraculous hospital recovery, Prime Minister Boris Johnson seems to want to be both Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee at the same time. In Britain, references to the war have been everywhere. It is ironic in a sense because, at least in Anglophone countries, COVID-19 has catapulted the war back into the public mind. In 2020, public health concerns kept them away. In 2015, the Western states had absented themselves from the mammoth 70th anniversary parades in Moscow and Beijing. For the first time in many years, Moscow was also expecting substantial delegations from the West. The latest generation of Russian military hardware was to have been on display. It was to have commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and the heroic fight of the Red Army in particular. One of the casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic is the great Victory Day parade that had been planned for Moscow’s Red Square for May 9.

Germany victory day