Taiwan marks VE Day for 1st time, signifying global connection: President Lai

Taipei, May 8 (CNA) The Taiwan government on Thursday held a commemoration ceremony for Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), joining the rest of the world for the first time to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

This is the first time that Taiwan is honoring VE Day, "signifying our growing connections with the international community," President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) said at a reception held in Taipei on the 80th anniversary of VE Day.

Lai said one of the major lessons of WWII is that "authoritarianism and aggression lead only to slaughter, tragedy, and greater inequality."

Even more importantly, the war also taught people that "those who cherish peace cannot sit idly by and allow aggression," he said.

"The outbreak of the war in Europe certainly had much to do with an authoritarian regime seeking to satisfy its expansionary ambitions, but its wider spread throughout Europe had much more to do with a lack of vigilance toward acts of aggression," Lai said.

Aggressors will not stop until "all democratic countries have fallen and the light of freedom has been extinguished," he added.

Eighty years after the end of WWII in Europe, Taiwan now shares the same democratic values as many countries that fought in the war and are now facing similar challenges, including the expansion of a new authoritarian bloc, Lai said.

"Lovers of freedom around the world, both individuals and nations, must work together now in tight solidarity, before risks turn into crises and before crises are taken advantage of by those with ambitions for outward expansion, to make sure that aggressors have no opportunity to advance on their ambitions," he said.

Also speaking at the reception, the European Union's top envoy to Taiwan, Lutz Güllner, said VE Day is "of utmost importance for us, as Germans, to remember and to learn from history."

On this day, people primarily honor the many lives lost, said Güllner, a German who heads the European Economic and Trade Office in Taiwan (EETO).

"However, we should also draw our lessons from this experience," he said. "It is our duty to ensure that this never happens again. Upholding the truth is part of this."

He said this means pushing back against "the distortion of historical facts, revisionism, and political instrumentalization."

VE Day commemorates the unconditional surrender of Germany's military forces to the Allies on May 8, 1945. For months after VE Day, the war continued in the Asia-Pacific region and only came to an end after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Victory over Japan Day commemorates the surrender of Japanese forces on Aug. 15, 1945, which effectively ended WWII.

The Republic of China (ROC) -- as Taiwan is officially designated -- previously only commemorated the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which was marked on Sept. 3, 1945. On that day, Japan delivered a letter of surrender to the ROC government, which was based in Nanjing at the time.

The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between the ROC and the Empire of Japan 1937-1945. It is considered part of World War II (1939-1945) and is often regarded in Asia as the start of that war.

The ROC was based in mainland China when the Second Sino-Japanese War began. It officially declared war against Japan, Germany and Italy in 1941, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

The ROC government, led by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正) of the Kuomintang, relocated to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) Chinese Communist Party, which established the People's Republic of China in Beijing that same year.

Taiwan's military announced in March that it planned to hold art exhibitions and a concert, among other events, to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.