When Victory Is Being Defeated

Eighty years after the guns fell silent across Europe, Victory Day is marked by solemn ceremonies and wreaths laid at memorials. Yet, as we commemorate the end of the Second World War, the meaning of “victory” itself demands urgent re-examination. For today, the world’s children are still paying the price for wars they did not start, and only we can end them.

I was moved to tears seeing, in the Imperial War Museum, a pile of children’s shoes. Each pair once belonged to a beautiful life interrupted. Today, the tragedy persists. In Gaza alone, over 14,500 children have been killed in less than a year. In Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, and beyond, the numbers increase to one in five children worldwide now lives amid conflict. If victory leaves only children’s shoes behind, if it means generations haunted by grief, then victory has lost its meaning.

Global military spending reached $2.718 trillion this year, a record high, increasing at the fastest rate since the Cold War. Meanwhile, the cost to end world hunger ($330 billion) or provide universal basic education ($175 billion) remains but a fraction of what we spend on destruction. Our priorities are upside down. This is not victory; it is surrender to an illogical culture.

Women, the invisible weavers of the fabric of survival, often unpaid, abused, and disrespected, carry the weight of reconstruction-patching wounds, nurturing trauma-scarred minds, and holding together the threads of families, communities, and countries. Women’s energy investment in looking after life is the very foundation of peace. Yet, we are rarely at the leadership table when the future is negotiated and decided.

History will measure our civilisation not in its conquests, but in its care for the most vulnerable. If victory means children’s shoes are all that remain scattered on Earth, if it means generations haunted by loss, then victory itself is being defeated.

We call upon expanding our emotional and linguistic definition of victory. We honour those who choose life over violence, who build rather than destroy, who insist that every child’s future is sacred. People all over the world are already leading this transformation, concerned with the security and wellbeing of the children. We look for alternatives, co-create new narratives, mend history, love beyond borders, heal, refuse to give up, and hold the world with many humanitarian, caring hands-walking side by side, demanding from our representatives to represent the interest of peace.

True victory will come as soon as all our voices are equally heard, including the voices of children, happy and safe, learning that new ways are possible, free and unafraid, when victory is being defeated. Now, the collective conscience is calling for worldwide peace and total disarmament, so our generation can add new steps to our shared humanity’s journey. Peace is upon us when we realise that peace is up to us, women and men, side by side, rebuilding and healing, midwifing our utopian worldwide peace born out of a dead dystopia. The breadth and the breath of life are everyone’s right, this is the rationale for Worldwide Peace: a human right.