The author is a contributing editor at ft and wrote Chartbook Newsletter
Next week marks the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender. On May 8, a minute in Berlin time, the bloodiest war theater in European human history fell silent. If Vladimir Putin means what he said, the occasion will be marked by a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine, the bloodiest war in Europe's bloodiest 80 years.
Anniversary is arbitrary. They are essentially meaningful than birthdays, or in calendar quarterly reports business appointments.
However, like birthdays or quarterly reports, anniversary can be meaningful. They are markers of collective chronological order. When the state raises its head to unknown soldiers or market commentators in a hurry to share a common reading of non-farm payroll characters, their synchronized action defines them as a community.
Unlike birthdays that celebrate the progress of life, or publishing data that defines common moments, anniversary brings the past to the present. They empowered William Faulkner's famous line: "The past will never die. It's not even the past."
Ironically, the interaction of this concern today with the past will make us stand out from the commemoration, which will become even stronger.
The centenary of World War I was in 2014 shortly after Russia annexed Crimea. This made "sleepwalking" a huge resonance of the European war.
A year later, when commemorating the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Allied forces in World War II, the Western government downgraded its delegation to the march in Moscow and Beijing despite the highest blood prices paid by the Soviet Union and China. John Kerry was in the classic Atlantic mode, setting a wreath in Paris, while Poland welcomed the UN Secretary-General to Gdansk, where he fired the first shot of the war.
This year, by the 80th anniversary, World War II is getting deeper and deeper. This is shocking for the Gen X baby boomers and older members. One thing that defines us as accomplices is the war stories and bomb sites we grew up in. The war feels "close". The 80th anniversary marks our own aging. Meanwhile, in 2025, the current sound is deafening.
What does it mean to honor Donald Trump’s history in America? Do we live in an era of historical narrative that has been forcibly revised? Is the familiar heroic attraction to the global mission of the United States replaced by a new segregationism born of resentment and insecurity? Or is the depravity of American political culture so far away that it is in questionable meaning production and collective rituals? It's hard to understand, but although Trump likes military parades, he has a poor record in commemorating the fallen American warriors.
Historical commemoration has always been a matter of power and politics. Public historical commemorations depend on reasons that match the current narrative. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of World War II, this has reached a zealous pitching.
In the 1980s, in the cultural mobility encouraged by postmodernism, one of the central anxiety was to preserve the status of the Holocaust as an event that must be firmly fixed. Since then, these questions have been responded to a huge mobilization of political and legal pressures.
But this historical fundamentalism applies very selectively. Although the implications of the Holocaust are fixed, Gaza’s ancient history has been reduced to rubble and its future has been reimagined as a real estate fantasy. Meanwhile, the question of launching a war with Russia is whether Russia attacked Ukraine or Ukraine.
Putin's May ceasefire was clearly intended to attract Trump to commemorate Russia's victory on May 9. What kind of delegation we will be attending in the Red Square parade is unclear. But the fact that no one can say for sure how Trump decided proves how much our shared understanding of history and politics is wearing down.
Faced with the erosion of Maga's common sense, one can't help but ask if Faulkner's series will provide false comfort. Sometimes history does die. Sometimes the past has passed.