This past week the world solemnly paid tribute to the various nations, their generals and troops, who were instrumental in liberating Europe from the Nazi oppression. It was a sacrificial effort in which many citizens and soldiers alike gave up their lives so that the rest of us could live ours in freedom from want and slavery.

We might have expected that such ultimate selflessness might have conferred upon our societies the wisdom to truly value life and liberty.

Unfortunately, in the years following World War II, much of Europe turned its back on its hard-won freedom and voluntarily succumbed to a new “dictatorship of relativism”, that is no less evil than the fascism that preceded it. This new tyranny recognises nothing as being definitive and the ultimate goal consists solely of satiating one’s own ego and desires.

We have seen the contemporary results – nihilistic yet impeccably democratic legislation that repudiates life itself! Did those who come before us die, just so that we could negate the very lives they gave up, by our legalisation of various drugs, prostitution, same-sex marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, abortion and euthanasia?

Sixty years after VE Day, it is Europe that cries for liberation from the tyranny of modernity being imposed by liberal governments as they seek new and ingenious ways of undermining morality and embracing nihilism. Is this the direction Europe wishes to take as it embarks on a new European Constitution?

I suggest that the initial step to halting this demoralising slide toward an anti-life state philosophy is available to us today.

This will take a great effort on the part of us all. We need to re-examine the assumptions that we permit to serve as the foundation of our own individual lives.

We must ask ourselves what purpose the sacrifices of so many on our behalf served – did they die in futility so that we could wallow in our life-repudiating self-absorption?

Perhaps, in time, and through the promotion of a “culture of life” Europeans will come to experience a new liberation based on the realisation that it is not war but truth that sets us free.

Paul Kokoski

Ontario, Canada