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Show 20 Years Later 'Victory ' In Europe With appropriate solemnity and reminisscence, the world last week observed the twenthieth anniversary of the German capitulation in Europe. Today's college generation, either unborn or too young to remember the day when allied victory in Europe was secured, could sense only vicariously the vivid memories of war and victory that their elders summoned forth twenty years later. The prespective of a generation shows that the professed Allied goals for participation in the war, freedom and justice for the world, have not been secured. "Victory" in Europe cast the yoke of Nazi oppression and occupation from the nations na-tions of Western Europe, but the very terms of the surrender and occupation of Nazi territories by the Allies brought Eastern Europe under the sway of new less desperate and more calculating masters, whose hold, though relaxed somewhat since the end of the war, still denies the rudiments of freedom to millions of people. The "victory" is clearly incomplete in other parts of the world as well. Defeat of Nazism a generation ago in Europe may have little or no meaning today to citizens citi-zens of Tibet, Viet Nam, the Dominican Republic, or many of the fledgling nations of Africa where the relative rela-tive peace, justice and political stability of the Western nations are nowhere close to being realized. And the United States is certainly no place for self-righteous reveling over victory in Europe. Until a folk singer can sing a work song without being called a Communist, until a Negro family can travel, vote and work without suffering humiliation and being denied access to normal decency and respect, until law and order replace the redneck terrorism of sheeted criminals in the South, until the vicious circle of poverty, illiteracy, illit-eracy, hunger, substandard education, unemployment, sickness and despair is mitigated, and until the callous indifference of an affluent middle class to these poignant poig-nant manifestations of human suffering is replaced by active concern and commitment to their elimination, talk of "victory" in the past must necessarily pale at the evidence of impasse and defeat in the present. The battle for this victory may ultimately prove more trying and difficult than the struggle against Nazism. Any nation at war can characterize its adversary ad-versary as the embodiment of evil and itself as the embodiment em-bodiment of good. But the whites and blacks of democracy de-mocracy and Naziism have been replaced by the grays of Communism and a pot pourri of capitalism and socialism, so-cialism, a struggle whose impersonal economic overtones over-tones often overshadow its more dramatic moral and social contrasts. And within the United States, "victory" rests not in the expulsion of a dictatorship or in the adoption of a new economic system but instead in a revolution within the hearts all who are mors intent in-tent upon preserving the status quo than upon creative effort to bring about its improvement. A logical point of departure, prosaic and obvious as it might sound, is simply a desire to practice Judaeo-Christian id.eals of love and brotherhood toward one's fellow men. However Utopian and idealistic the goal of this ultimate "victory" appears, it must be the task of the postwar generation to take real steps toward its achievement achieve-ment and above all to prevent a relapse into the senseless sense-less barbarism of war which twice already has maimed the twentieth century. |