Normandy Seventy Five Years On

Anniversaries are strange things. Especially when this is near the point of leaving living memory. Of the world leaders remembering the day, only Queen Elizabeth II is a veteran of that war. Unlike our president, and many leaders she served in uniform. Most vets of that war are in their nineties, and precious few remain. In five years we may have lost all of them. Normandy is about to enter fully the realm of history, where all we know about it is what is written in history books, left in newspapers and newsreels and in the old, fading photos that we all know.

Anniversaries are also a moment where older people are remembered as giants. We tend to forget the issues that were present in the society that fought Germany, Italy, and Japan. Nor do we remember why. The far right nationalism that led to that war is on the upswing. Our own president is a symbol of that rise.

White supremacy is increasingly becoming accepted in the greater society. It was in retreat. We have rising hate crimes and people who honestly believe that the Holocaust never happened. They also think that we fought on the wrong side of World War Two.

The boys and let's be clear about this, it was mostly white boys, stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944. It was, to use the words of Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D Eisenhower, the beginning of the great crusade. By the end of the war, the horrors of the Holocaust were clear to the world. So were the beginnings of the new world order that gave us peace and prosperity for seventy-five years.