Here is a taste of SMU’s Jeff Engel‘s piece at The Washington Post:
Lives were lost every day of the war — in the Soviet Union, one life every four seconds — but D-Day holds a special place in American memory because it marked the beginning of the end of our nation’s last clear-cut conflict between good and evil. “Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history,” President Ronald Reagan once explained on the wind-swept cliff above the bloodiest beach of all. We’ll hear similar invocations this week about bravery and sacrifice on behalf of this noblest of causes, and how we must aspire to such greatness today.
Those exhortations will be hollow if we fail to remember the real purpose behind those hallowed deaths, which was not merely the destruction of an evil regime but construction of a world capable of preventing its return. Today, nationalism, xenophobia, trade barriers and just plain hate — all the elements that produced World War II — once again dominate global politics. Even the war’s simplest lesson, that Nazis are bad, finds critics, a development that would undoubtedly surprise and sadden the men of Omaha Beach and Point du Hoc. That is a shame. It is also dangerous, because “lest we forget” is not merely about remembering grand deeds of old. It is also a warning.
D-Day was nothing less than the down payment on an investment Americans had debated since their inception: whether this country should build bridges to the rest of the world, or walls. The former brought costs but perhaps greater benefits. The latter meant isolation behind our splendid ocean moats, or at least engagement only when it suited our narrow needs alone.
Read the entire piece here. Engel’s piece also echoes some of Queen Elizabeth II’s words earlier this week.
A more insidious meme is that “Nazi = German” and “German = Nazi”. With that in play, you can be as Nazi-like as you want in attitude and as long as you don’t speak Hochdeutsch, salute from the shoulder, specifically target the Jews, or hoist the Hakenkreuz, then everything’s OK. I’ve seen that combination in action.
Is this interpretation of the Allied victory tenable, though? Did the Allies really go to war to destroy fascism and build a liberal international order, or to preserve and extend their own sovereign interests? Engel says 4 people died a minute in the Soviet Union and in the next paragraph he says that “real purpose behind those hallowed deaths” was building a more just and humane world order. I don’t think this is what the Soviets were up to…
And if a liberal international order was a goal of at least the US/UK, then wasn’t this only because this concept had evolved since the nineteenth century as a goal perceived as serving their own hegemonic interests — a desire for an “open door” across the world in which their industrial and financial capitalist institutions could have free reign, and which the autarkies of Imperial Japan or Nazi Europe (and, after 1946, of the Communist world) threatened?
I am still perplexed at the tendency of historians to see great power machinations — grand strategy, market dominance, territorial expansion, military supremacy, access to raw materials, cultural imperialism or whatever — behind almost every other modern war except the Second World War. Why did the countries that between them had conquered India, Africa, much of the northern Eurasian landmass, the North American landmass, Mexico, the Caribbean basin, and the Philippines suddenly become enlightened moral crusaders in 1939/42?
Was it ideals that won on Normandy, or simply that the Allies had, thanks to two hundred or more years of rehearsal, become better at organized violence than the Nazis’ actually somewhat unpracticed (albeit catastrophic) militarism — organized violence that, alas, consumed the lives of the honorable fallen on the beaches of Normandy, and consumes us still.
One of my writing partners (the self-educated son of a steelworker) had an uncle who piloted a landing craft at Omaha Beach.
According to my source, said uncle said he “saw more people die in one day than he’d ever thought lived in the whole world.”
Source also had another uncle who almost lost a leg at Anzio and one who was at Saipan and Okinawa. He’d talk about Saipan (including Suicide Cliff) but never about Okinawa.
“You’ll always have Nazis among you,
You’ll always have Nazis among you;
Next time they won’t come in brown shirts or boots,
They’ll come speaking softly in three-piece suits;
But you’ll always have Nazis among you…”
— Donna Barr, Desert Peach: the Musical (closing aria), 1992