By Catherine Salgado

Written by Catherine Salgado

On May 8, we will mark V-E Day, the anniversary of the 1945 end of WWII in the European theater, a date which President Donald Trump this week declared will be a national holiday to celebrate our “strength, bravery, [and] military brilliance.”

Donald Trump accidentally highlighted the fact that most of us Americans know very little even about our military history within living memory when he this week announced that May 8 will be celebrated as Victory Day for WWII and November 11 will be Victory Day for WWI. There was a great deal of backlash, not just from leftists, but even from conservatives. Strangely, those criticizing Trump seemed not to have done even a simple internet search to see why he chose those dates. November 11 is of course now celebrated as Veterans’ Day, but the entire reason there’s a holiday that day honoring veterans is because it is the anniversary of the 1918 end of WWI! By commemorating the armistice signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Trump is only clarifying the “Armistice Day” roots of the holiday and trying to remind us of the history behind the date we now call “Veterans’ Day.”

May 8, as I noted above, is “Victory in Europe” or V-E Day. While WWII did not end officially until V-J Day at the beginning of September (1945), when the genocidal Japanese Empire surrendered, the war in Europe ended on May 8, when the Nazis and Italian fascists had been crushed. And with all the false accusations and rhetoric about Nazis flying around now against Trump and his supporters, it’s understandable that Trump is choosing to emphasize V-E Day, the day on which our triumph over the Nazis was complete. This is the history that Trump hopes Americans will learn with the creation of these new holidays, just as he aimed to change the condemnable negativity surrounding Vietnam War veterans by establishing Vietnam Veterans’ Day.

The late, great Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who was born on May 8 (1895), once said, “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.” But we could make the same observation just as truly of the USA— that is, there are exponentially more people who hate what they wrongly perceive America to be than people who truly hate America as enshrined in our founding documents. Sheen, an expert at teaching and capturing both hearts and minds, was also a patriot, as we see in his quotes including: “we no longer have love of God [so] we no longer have love of country,” and “It behooves us all to take pride in the words that Washington spoke at Valley Forge: Put only Americans on guard tonight.” Indeed, we should take pride in those words, we should take pride in our history! That is exactly what Trump wants to inspire: patriotic pride.

Yes, we should have holidays celebrating specific victories in our history. In previous eras, Americans were regularly reminded of the greatest triumphs and heroes of America with such holidays as Independence Day, Constitution Day, Armistice Day, George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving. Schoolchildren were taught about the Revolution, the Civil War, the pioneering push West, the battle for civil rights, and more. The education was not always complete or perfectly honest (particularly about the Civil War) but most Americans recognized the most important names and wars and documents of our history.

That sort of patriotic education was gradually phased out or replaced with actively anti-American propaganda starting several decades ago, until we have reached the point now where most American students don’t know Washington or U.S. Grant or Frederick Douglass from Adam (or John Adams), where schoolchildren falsely think Thanksgiving celebrates genocide of indigenous peoples and where even many of our representatives, voters, and judges neither know nor care what is in the Constitution. How can we have a representative Republic with an ignorant, uninformed, unpatriotic, complacent population?

This crisis must be addressed if we are not to commit national suicide. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and Trump is absolutely right that we need to relearn our history and celebrate our triumphs. We must honor our Founding Fathers and military heroes, our military and political wins, from the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And if you’re interested in keeping track of all the key dates and events in our history, please read this column and encourage your friends to do so as well. Let’s fight the unpatriotic historical ignorance of our time and take pride in the words of George Washington and all our patriots throughout the two and half centuries of our magnificent Republic’s existence.

Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR