Friday, June 06, 2008

D-Day: June 6, 1944

Today is the anniversary of "D-Day," the Normandy Invasion.

The anniversary is receiving nowhere near as much coverage as it did four years ago, which might be expected, and very little coverage from conservative commentators. Most of the coverage is biographical: personal stories from the individual soldiers who were there, and from those who are still alive.

Perhaps the lack of coverage stems from the ongoing killing in Iraq, which creates in many observers a feeling that wars never solve anything.

Some readers may be familiar with the Normandy invasion depicted in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan,

where young American men are cut down like so many cattle in their landing crafts by machine-gun fire. Where men run around with their severed arms in their hands, men are shot in the head as they take off their helmets to marvel at near misses, men drown from the weight of their equipment, and men are burned alive as their flamethrowers are hit with machine-gun and rifle fire.

And yet some American citizens, politicians, and pundits – in their zeal to "make the world a better place" by any means possible, and in their desire to get their way right now – are eager to destroy the homes, lives, and property of people living thousands of miles away, as well as the lives of an "acceptable" number of American pawns.

David Dieteman, "Warmongering Defined"

If we go back to the days when the U.S. Constitution was signed, and compare western civilization in general, and American government in particular, with what Europe is like today, it doesn't seem like World War II preserved anything good, or prevented anything bad. The days of small government and Christian character have been replaced with omnipotent government and atheism/multiculturalism.

Pat Buchanan asks, "Was It 'The Good War'?" His recently-published book Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, questions the necessity of WWII and the thousands slaughtered on the Omaha beaches: the Allied forces lost 46,000, with 173,000 wounded and missing.

John Lukacs in his monograph, June 1941: Hitler and Stalin, reports that "the best military experts throughout the world predicted the defeat of the Soviet Union within a few weeks, or within two months at the most" following Hitler’s invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941.
Paul Craig Roberts, "Anglo-American Ascendancy Lost in Unnecessary Wars"

Could it be that Roosevelt believed these "experts," and committed the U.S. to help defeat Germany so that Roosevelt's buddy "Uncle Joe" Stalin could continue building Russia's New Deal?

Who Won World War II?

Paul Craig Roberts says,

The Normandy invasion in June 1944 played little, if any, role in Germany’s defeat. By the end of 1942 Hitler had lost World War II at Stalingrad, long before any American troops appeared on the scene.

If this is true, then all the American deaths in the Normandy invasion were as necessary as the deaths in the Battle of Verdun, in World War I, in which

Germans and Frenchmen slaughtered each other relentlessly because their governments told them to. Germany "won" after losing 330,000 soldiers to France’s 350,000. It was all over a worthless piece of land, which, by the end of the battle, was littered with corpses and with about 1,000 rifle shells per square meter. Neither side gained any true strategic victory from the battle.
Anthony Gregory, "Forgetting Armistice Day"

Both World Wars could have ended in the spirit of Christmas, but war-profiteers refuse to learn the lesson of The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce. The real lesson is that there is no rational justification for not beating our swords into plowshares.

Iron Ink - Memorial Day -- The Honored Dead

Bush's invasion of Iraq in March 2003 bears an ominous parallel to Hitler's attack on Russia.

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