VE Plus 80

At 0241 local time on Monday 7 May 1945, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) signed the unconditional surrender document at Supreme Allied Command HQ in Reims, France, effectively ending the war in Europe. With Adolf Hitler dead by suicide and his top lieutenants either dead or in flight, with Germany in ruins and with no resources (much less the long-promised “super weapons” that would save the master race), they were running out of options.

Hitler’s heirs had been equivocating for a few days with the Western Allies over the unconditional surrender requirement, largely to delay the inevitable so as allow tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians to flee westward and not be in Soviet-held territory at the moment that everything was officially frozen. They were also laboring under the pipe dream that they could somehow convince the Anglo-Americans to team up with them and drive eastward to take on their natural and mutual enemy, the Soviet Union.

Because the representatives were all old-school military, they expected to treat soldier-to-soldier with the Allies, with all courtesy attendant upon their rank. I don’t know whether they’d thought that clean uniforms would somehow cause SHAEF command to disassociate them from (among other things) the previously unimaginable horrors of places like Dachau, Bergen-Belsen or Mauthausen. But Eisenhower had visited Ordruf, part of the Buchenwald installation, and he refused to set eyes on Jodl and his entourage until after they’d signed the unconditional surrender.

Whereupon he curtly informed Jodl, "You will, officially and personally, be held responsible if the terms of this surrender are violated, including its provisions for German commanders to appear in Berlin at the moment set by the Russian high command to accomplish formal surrender to that government. That is all."

He refused to salute the Germans.

(They were rather like the German representatives to the Versailles Conference of 1919, who—by the time they arrived—had convinced themselves that Germany was no more culpable for the outbreak of war than everyone else, that the other nations at the conference recognized that and that they would therefore be engaged in a somewhat technical exercise in diplomat-speak for a while, after which everything would return to status quo ante bellum. It never ceases to astonish me how delusional people can be, or how predictable their subsequent disastrous mistakes can therefore be.)

Later that day, German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov and American, British and French representatives signed an identical document in Berlin, drawing a very final line under German resistance.

(And in less than two years, both Jodl and Keitel would be hanged as war criminals at Nuremberg. Their membership in the comrades-in-arms club hadn’t saved them from accountability for their actions while in Nazi service.)

By that time, word was seeping out that Germany was kaput, and—despite Stalin wanting to delay the announcement—Churchill proclaimed the surrender to a Britain that was already half-delirious with relief and hope, and the Western world partied like it was 1918.

In almost six years of war in Europe, 40 million people had died, half of them civilians. Millions were homeless, hundreds of thousands stateless. Pretty much everyone was somewhere on the hunger-to-starvation spectrum. Entire cities had been razed, libraries and museums burnt and looted. Nations had been bankrupted.

And they still faced the continuing war in the Pacific against Japan, which would go on for another four months.

But for a few hours on 8 May there was literally dancing in the streets; laughing, kissing, comradery. In London, Buckingham Palace was lit by floodlights for the first time since 1939, and two searchlights shone a huge “V” above Saint Paul’s Cathedral. For a city that had spent almost six years in blackout, this was proof that people would once again be able to sleep through the night.

Just not that one.

Eisenhower’s message to his troops included these words:

"Let us have no part in the profitless quarrels in which other men will inevitably engage as to what country, what service, won the European war. Every man, every woman, of every nation here represented has served to the outcome. This we shall remember—and in doing so we shall be revering each honored grave, and be sending comfort to the loved ones of comrades who could not live to see this day.":

Naturally, on VE-Day + 80, Cadet Bonespurs (coming, as he does, from generations of draft dodgers, and ignorant as a slug) has latched onto the notion that the United States alone “won the war that ended in May.” And he and his minions are scurrying about federal archives and websites to reshape history to their outlook. I assure you that—while our commitment was total and we prevailed in two theatres of operation—we were deplorably late to the fight because entire swathes of Americans favored isolation and followed the America First movement. And we had so much ground to make up.

We really need to learn from history.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

On the streets

It’s time for another installment of vanity plates. Haven’t had one of those for a while. 

Most of those above are pretty self evident. This one may be a name?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Fluffy antidote

I confess that I do not know what this shrub is, but in a world where the president of the United States, within 48 hours, proclaims that he’s not a lawyer, but he doesn’t think he needs to uphold the Constitution and then that he’s going to “save” Hollywood by imposing a 100% tariff on any foreign-made films coming into the country—because the “imbalance” is somehow a national security risk…I appreciate finding these flowers on my daily walks.

(Oh, yeah—I forgot about him reopening Alcatraz as a federal prison. It’s just too much for me to keep up.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Well, just look

Today I’m grateful for the flowers I see all around me—plants, shrubs, trees. They’re filling my environment with beauty, and that’s not nothing these days.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

From the lark to the nightingale

Okay, we’re going to take a bit of a turn for today’s earworm. A turn to imperial Vienna, where in 1882 Johann Strauss the Younger wrote an orchestral waltz celebrating Spring. “Frühlingsstimmen” (“Voices of Spring”) actually sounds to me like a frolic in a green field, and that’s even without the coloratura soprano added in.

(I find it rather amusing that the first soprano to sing it was Bertha Schwartz, whose stage name was Bianca Bianchi.)

Here we’ve got Kathleen Battle singing it. Open your windows and let this flow all around you.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Welcome, May!

Let’s celebrate May Day with some views of Spring in the People’s Republic.

A couple of weeks ago, I was forced into a detour from my normal walking path because some golfer parked his cart across the bridge over a creek that runs through the course. I confess that I was grumbling, but then look who flew over to say hello:

Here's someone I met on another walk:

And here is a beautiful shrub I’m unacquainted with, but it gave me joy throughout April:

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

The darkness drops again

When William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, the world was still picking up the pieces after four years of total war, and was awash in the global influenza pandemic. But here we are, more than a hundred years on, and it feels like it describes the past 100 days entire.

I don’t know what more I can say about it. Except that it closes out National Poetry Month for 2025, and it’s up to us to deal with that rough beast.

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

The awful grace of God.

We know Aeschylus as a tragedian and a poet, but he was also a soldier—veteran of the battles of Marathon (against Darius I) and Salamis (against Xerxes). So even when he wrote of mythical wars and warriors, he drew on his own experiences and knew what he was talking about.

The characters in Aeschylus’ plays are not, on the whole, happy. This is particularly true of the Oresteia trilogy, focusing on the family of King Agamemnon of Mycenae, one of the leaders in the Greek war against Troy. Not to put too fine a point upon it, everything we know about Agamemnon (starting with Homer’s Iliad) tells us that he’s a complete shit: arrogant, boastful, bullying, petty, inflexible and greedy. Yes, he came from an unhappy family (the House of Atreus), and there was that curse, but still—he really got up my nose when I was reading the classics.

Agamemnon is not the sort of guy who engages in introspection, and his ego prevents him from ever learning. This is a serious flaw, particularly in a head of state. And it leads to his violent murder, followed by the destruction of his family.

The observation about wisdom emerging from pain that Aeschylus makes in Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia, was not absorbed by the title character. Big cheeses typically don’t take instruction from poets. But these lines were chosen by Robert F. Kennedy in April, 1968, when he announced to the citizens of Indianapolis that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

God, whose law it is
that he who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite, against our will,
comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Here’s video of Kennedy's speech that day.

The delta between RFK and his eldest son is just beyond measure. Junior, like everyone else in this administration, does not learn, possesses no wisdom and live above suffering.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Every morning a new arrival

This is a National Poetry Month of resistance, but it also encompasses persistence and resilience. All three of these things are long plays. As much as we’d like to see our oppressors turned to dust with the flick of a wrist, the reality is that they didn’t arrive here suddenly, and it’s going to take time and considerable effort to boot them out and clean up after them.

I, in particular, need to remember this, because I am the most impatient person on the planet. I need to remind myself continually that—ghastly as this administration and its illegalities and cruelties are, and as much as we need to clear them away—just because I can’t snap my fingers and turn them all into dust beside the road while real wounds are healed, that doesn’t mean that the battle (much less the war) is lost.

We need to refresh ourselves from time to time. Meditate, be mindful; rest and recuperate.

So, for Gratitude Monday, let’s have something from the 13^th Century Persian poet we know as Rumi. “The Guest House” is very frequently quoted during mindfulness retreats, so it seems appropriate for today. It reminds us to invite into our lives and souls dark things as well as light, because everything—every thing—has something to teach us. And—I hope—to make us stronger for the necessary.

“The Guest House”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

 

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Unconquerable soul

When you think of people who’ve played the long game, who’ve showed steadfast courage and a generosity of spirit despite the most despicable treatment from their oppressors, I believe you would not cast about too long before you spoke the name of Nelson Mandela.

In the course of his revolutionary leadership in the struggle against apartheid, Mandela was denounced as a terrorist and spent 27 years in prison, before being released in 1992 and becoming the first black president of South Africa. As we are seeing today with the white male base of the Kleptocrat’s supporters, the attempts by the Afrikaners who had held power since the days of the Dutch settlements became more and more repressive with every successive wave of black African refusal to live as second class citizens in their own land. And Mandela was the most visible representation of the African National Congress.

One of his many remarkable qualities was his refusal to carry the terrible weight of bitterness or revenge—he could certainly be remorseless, but he was not vindictive. Even though he certainly had real, personal cause for grievance.

The poem “Invictus”, is the best-known work of the Victorian poet William E. Henley. It certainly encapsulates the Victorian mantra of maintaining the stiff upper lip, but also includes that kind of, well, master-of-fate mentality that formed the backbone of the British Empire. You really do have to have an underpinning of a complete belief in yourself in order to conquer, occupy and govern peoples literally around the world.

That belief also helps if you’re going to lead the resistance to the kind of oppression that people like the Kleptocrat, and the Bothas dish out.

And “Invictus” (Latin for, essentially, “unbroken”; literally, “unconquered”) was a touchstone for Mandela during his imprisonment. It has also served the same purpose for Aung San Suu Kyi, and American POWs held by the North Vietnamese, so it could do so for us, too.

“Invictus”

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu