EIGHTY years after Germany`s Third Reich formally accepted defeat, the enduring reluctance on all sides to draw lessons from the causes and consequences of World War II has sparked fears of history repeating it self.

Echoes of the 1930s have been rumbling for several years, amid growing popular support across Europe for Nazi-adjacent political forces that thrive on ethno-nationalism and xenophobia. The Russia-Ukraine war is the largest conflict the continent has endured since May 1945. And the slogan `never again!`, widely voiced in the aftermath of the unspeakable Holocaust, rings hollow amid Israel`s genocidal campaign against its designated Untermenschen, the Palestinians.

Vladimir Putin`s onslaught against Ukraine in February 2022 appears to have been based on the assumption that Kyiv would fall within days. It is reminiscent of Adolf Hitler`s confidence in June 1941 that the Wehrmacht would overrun Moscow within weeks. In both cases, formidable resistance thwarted the aggressors` designs. The Nazis were able to capture vast swathes of Soviet territory and advance to within a few kilometres of Moscow partly because Josef Stalin was confident the Germans wouldn`t attack until they had conquered Britain, ignoring Soviet intelligence indicating that the Nazis had abandoned their plan to occupy the UK and were paused for a massive assault against the USSR.

It was hardly a secret that Hitler and his cohorts saw `Bolsheviks` as their primary foe; communists and socialists were among the first to be incarcerated in concentration camps later `upgraded` to extermination factories populated mainly by Jews alongside Roma, homosexuals and other `undesirables`. The Führer, who admired the American version of racial apartheid, might not have been surprised to find that a sizeable proportion of the ruling class in the US sympathised with his antisemitic and anti-communist tendencies.

The former was manifested in the US reluctance to accept Jewish refugees during the 1930s-40s, and in racist jibes thereafter; today`s weaponised antisemitism is intended to silence critics of a fascistic Israel or Zionism, rather than to safeguard Jews. The latter was coalescing into the Cold War even before Hitler was defeated, and helped spawn the curse of McCarthyism, which has endured in various forms. Donald Trump`s tendency to label anyone who disagrees with him as `far left`, `Marxist` or `communist` presumably owes much to his ideological tutoring as an impressionable younger man by his vile lawyer Roy Cohn who was once a chiefcounsel to the obnoxious senator Joe McCarthy.

Trump has recast tomorrow`s Victory in Europe (V-E) Day as Victory Day for World War II, perhaps unaware that for the US the war continued for another three months and concluded only after the gratuitous experiments with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. American forces did indeed belatedly play a key role in defeating the Nazi regime, after which a number of Hitler`s enablers, some of whom had been engaged by the CIA as anti-communist agents, were welcomed to the US as refugees. Many others found their way to exile in Latin America.

Back in the 1940s, Stalin realised after initial setbacks that it was best to leave battlefield decisions to his generals, while Hitler continued to micromanage military strategy. Moscow`s pleas for a second front to the west of Germany went unheeded for a long time; D-Day in 1944 was a gamechanger. It was at least partly motivated by the fear that the Red Army, by then stead-ily pushing back against the Wehrmacht with the help of partisans, might overrun Europe.

The postwar arrangement left much of Eastern Europe in the Soviet grip, while the rest (albeit not uniformly) owed allegiance to the US. Some 100,000 American troopscontinue to be based across Europe, mainly in Germany, alongside nuclear weapons even as European populations have begun to view Trump as the biggest threat to their security and stability. Fear of Putin, meanwhile, has unleashed a rearmament drive.

Both Trump and Putin gaze upon the far right political forces in Europe with varying degrees of admiration.

In the category of lessons unlearnt, though, perhaps the ugliest contender is the indulgent attitude of all too many European governments towards the Nazi copycats in Israel as they pursue a policy of extermination. Besides, shouldn`t their support for Ukraine be focused on seeking avenues for peace instead of prolonging the war? Likewise, the unmatched Soviet sacrifices that won WW2 ought to have reminded Putin that aggression never pays.

The few remaining veterans and Holocaust survivors probably won`t be around for future anniversaries of V-E Day, but most would probably agree that all commemorations ought to avoid displays of martial supremacy and instead be dedicated to emphasising the virtues of peace. • mahir.dawn @gmail.com