Gus John | 80 years after victory in Europe…

On VE Day, May 8, King Charles, head of the Commonwealth, made a speech in which he said: “Now, as then, we are united in giving utmost thanks to all those who served in the Armed Forces, the uniformed services, the Home Front – indeed all the people of this country, the Commonwealth and beyond whose firm resolve and fortitude helped destroy Nazism and carry our allied nations through to VE Day. That debt can never truly be repaid; but we can, and we will, remember them.”

Who exactly will we remember and how will we actively remember them? The answer to this question has been the same for the last 100 years, including from VE Day in 1945 until now. We remember and valorise white service personnel to the exclusion of the millions of Africans and Asians whose lives were also sacrificed.

Most of the population are even now unaware of the vast number of African and Asian people who saw active service in the British and allied armed forces in the Second World War, including one million African Americans.

The people of ‘the Commonwealth and beyond’ were subjected to, what the historian, Professor David Olusoga called, ‘apartheid in death’. It is an apartheid they also experienced in life as they risked death in the British, American and French armed forces. The racism that defined Britain as an empire and characterised its treatment of black folk, enslaved or otherwise, also determined the roles they were to play in the armed forces. Black and Asian people made up some 75 per cent of the supply chain, as well as doing the most menial tasks even in service to white folk of the same rank as themselves.

The jingoistic language of triumph over the evil of Nazism and of the preservation of freedom across Europe and its colonies was problematic in itself and remains so. Moreover, it feeds into the racism of the far right, and into that toxic mix of nativism and white supremacy that seeks to enshrine notions of Britishness, nationality and belonging.

The history of African enslavement, colonisation, neo-colonialism, theft of land, territorial expansion, displacement if not elimination of populations, provides ample evidence of the persistence of notions of racial purity, white supremacy, racial inferiority and the right of might and power to rule over the racially minoritised and to determine their fate. Arguably, all that is needed to align those features to German-style national socialism are the belief that to square the circle, populations racialised as inferior should be eliminated and that the individual should be totally subordinate to the State. But then, there are other ways of eliminating populations than by herding them into gas ovens.

MURDEROUS REPRESSION

The experience of African and Asian people in ‘the colonies’, despite this sanitising and unifying notion of the Commonwealth, with the British monarch as its head, proves that the moral superiority that Britain and its allies project to this day as having triumphed over the evils of Nazism and safeguarded our freedoms, is itself jingoistic. Apart from the fact that the First World War occurred 30 years after the Berlin conference carved up Africa – without Africans having any say in the matter – and that the European nations gathered in Berlin were inevitably going to engage in wars with one another to advance and preserve their interests, the Second World War was definitely not about the preservation of Africans and Asians as designated inferior races facing the same fate as Jews.

In his VE Day speech, the King also said:“In January, as the world marked the liberation of Auschwitz, I met survivors whose stories of unspeakable horror were the most vivid reminder of why Victory in Europe truly was the triumph of good over evil. All these moments, and more, combine to lead us to this day, when we recall both those darkest days and the great jubilation when the threat of death and destruction was finally lifted from our shores”.

The threat of death and destruction may have been lifted from British and European shores, but Britain and Europe were certainly not deterred from visiting such upon the very nations that had provided so many of their population to fight and die so that good could triumph over evil.

The fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester in 1945. Among its main demands were that Britain should cede control of its colonies to the people of those countries as sovereign nation states and that it should eliminate the ‘colour bar’. In other words, those ‘citizens of the of United Kingdom and its colonies’ who had risked their lives defending Britain and Europe from Nazism, should not be facing the same treatment as if they were being ruled by Nazis.

However, wherever colonies sued for independence from Britain and its European allies, they were met with murderous repression from the colonial power in question, whether in Africa or the Americas (e.g., massacres in Kenya, in Algeria, in Namibia and in India).

Indeed, Europe and the USA have such a wealth of historical experience of engaging in massacres that it is small wonder that massacres as a form of collective punishment in Gaza are not only normalised but actively facilitated by them.

APARTHEID IN DEATH

During Holocaust Remembrance Day in January of this year, as in every year, the words ‘Never Again’ were used repeatedly. What was troubling about that was that no speakers, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer, made any connection between the Jewish holocaust and what led to it and contemporaneous events in Palestine. Similarly, in all the chat during and about VE Day, no mention was made about ‘apartheid in death’ and why it was that African and Asian armed services personnel were not represented in all those iconic pictures of VE Day celebrations in 1945, or enumerated and named in war graves across the globe.

VE Day 2025 took place during a government-commissioned Curriculum and Assessment Review. Announcing the review last summer, the Government stated that the review “would seek to make the curriculum more inclusive and reflective of the diverse society in the UK. This involves revising the content to include a broader range of perspectives, particularly those of marginalised communities”.

The Department for Education and the Imperial War Museum issued guidance to schools on how they could mark VE Day:

“ As part of a national callout to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the Imperial War Museum has launched a new schools resource for KS2 learners. Schools can use this resource ahead of VE Day, as well as on the day to explore themes around the ‘when’, ‘what’, and ‘why’ of VE Day”.

Astonishingly, the ‘who’ is missing from that list of themes. Could that be because it was felt that teachers would struggle with the ‘who’ question, both in terms of how African and Asian service personnel were marginalised in active service and how their memory was erased in those celebrations and since?

A great number of those fallen heroes live on in the memories of their descendants who have made Britain their home. The inclusive curriculum, encompassing ‘the perspectives of marginalised communities’ that the Government hopes its curriculum review will build will do well to focus on righting this egregious racial wrong.

Professor Augustine John is a human rights campaigner and honorary fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.