Eighty years ago today, in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, the largest invasion fleet in human history crossed the English Channel and launched an unprecedented, world-turning assault on Nazi-occupied France. Remembering the enormity of that moment is as critical for America now as it has ever been.
Eighty years ago exactly, on June 6, 1944, some 160,000 troops from the United States, Canada, Great Britain and other allies descended upon these shores in Normandy by air, land and seat to liberate Nazi-occupied France.
The fighting was brutal and the casualties enormous – more than 4,400 Allied troops were killed – but the unprecedented show of unified military power would mark the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany’s grip on Europe.
“It is difficult to underestimate or undersell the significance of D-Day and what happened on D-Day,” said Charles Djou, secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission, which manages and operates 24 American military cemeteries abroad. “Everything in this world turned on that day. And the fact that we succeeded on that day has made America and the world, the West, what it is.”
The heroes of D-Day “kept freedom alive,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said. “You saved the world. We must only defend it,” he said. “Gentlemen, we salute you.”
The significance
D-Day stands as one of the greatest turning points for humankind in world history. It wrote the note of doom for the fascists who had overrun Europe in the second quarter of the 20th Century, abusing the law and using goon squads to seize power, manifesting fear and terror to maintain it, and visiting the most horrifying atrocities on all “others” they deemed sub-human.
The autocrats of the mid-20th Century, whether the fascists in Germany, Spain, and Italy, or the imperialists in Japan, or the Stalinists in Russia, or the Maoists in China, all in their own ways sought to fasten the planet to the same kind of strong-arm authoritarianism that has defined most of known human civilization, through empires, feudalist oligarchies, monarchies, theocracies and dictatorships.
Standing against the forces of fascism at D-Day were the forces of the Enlightenment, and Western Civilization, and Representative Democracy, embodied in the bold heroism of the Allied troops, and the decisive planting of America’s stake as a leader on the world stage. Meanwhile, armies from Russia and China bogged the Germans and Japanese down, enabling the ultimate victory at Normandy.
Today across the world we see strong-arm authoritarianism emboldened again, in Russia and North Korea, in the Middle East, in today’s autocratic rule of the Chinese government, the corrupt, petty dictatorships strewn about Asia and Africa, and in extremist right-wing reactionary political movements in South America and in Hungary and throughout Europe.
And, ever so shamefully, we see it here in America, under the obnoxious guise of Making America Great Again, setting out to systematically destroy all those qualities that ever made her great in the first place: A self-governing constitutional republic of checks and balances cemented in the rule of law and the rights and liberty of the people — by the people, for the people.
These forces would wish all humanity return to the nationalistic isolationism of the past, to undo the post-World War II alignment of Western Civilization, to allow strong-arm authoritarians to seize power and dismantle institutions so that they no longer serve the people and the rule of law, but serve one man and one political party.
Their aims would roll back global cooperation and commitments, to instead perpetuate a crude dog-eat-dog world of autocrats jockeying for land and resources and using civilian lives as chattel and cannon fodder.
They’re playing a high stakes game of raw power that can be found throughout all of history. But what makes their movement here so un-American — this attempt place one man above the rule of law, above the constitution, above the people, and above any and all obligations beyond himself — is that they are attempting to regress America to a mean that our foundation, history, and national identity has been one long existential exercise in defying.
In 2024, we face another historic inflection point. The eyes of the world are again upon us.
Those American soldiers who stormed the shores of Utah and Omaha beaches in the prime of their youth, they faced absolute terror; a violent, explosive maelstrom of brutal chaos, bloodshed and destruction that would traumatize any one of us for life, were we lucky enough to survive. Many did not.
Many sacrificed their lives that summer in service to an ideal — the ideal of American representative democracy forever as a bulwark against the forces of tyranny and totalitarianism.
We must always treasure their sacrifice, and never insult it by abandoning that ideal, for which they gave everything, for which those young men laid down their lives and gave their very existence.
And Today
Some of the veterans who came back to France on Thursday, June 6, 2024, for ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day had been among the first to arrive and fight. A crowd estimated at 10,000 to 12,000 attended the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery, including four-star officers, more than 150 members of Congress and dozens of members of the French Parliament. Other ceremonies also were scheduled and were expected to draw 25 heads of state.
An ocean breeze floated across the American cemetery, fluttering the small American and French flags on each of the graves of nearly 9,400 Americans killed in the war. Sunlight lit the white marble crosses and stars of David that mark each burial site.
Just off the shore, Navy battleships stood guard in the English Channel. Men in military fatigues looked out over the sea from the grassy hillside where allied soldiers advanced and encountered German machine-gun fire.
One by one, Biden and first lady Jill Biden met with veterans ahead of the ceremony from a glass-backed gazebo overlooking Omaha Beach, where many of the soldiers came ashore eight decades ago. Biden saluted, took photos with each and handed them a coin that he said had been especially minted for the event.
Edited from these sources:
My Grandpa Dewey and Grandpa Harold knew exactly what to do with Fascists. Both were combat veterans in WWII. Both were absolutely traumatized for life and I saw it as a kid. They literally drank themselves to death because of what they experienced to stop the Fascists. Grandpa H was hollow-eyed and haunted, that ‘1,000 yard stare’ made famous in WWII…it was so empty of life sometimes, and then I would see him staring at my Japanese step-mom and it would be burning in hate so intense that it scared me. I have old photos of him with it. Still gives me chills at the look I remember, and I haven’t pulled out those photo albums in years and years.
Both, I would hope, would be sickened by what they see going on with King Bone Spurs and the US version of the brownshirts called ‘MAGA’ threatening everything they went to war for.
I won’t go into how Fascism rose in the US in the 1930s with huge marches of Swastika-bearing men supporting Hitler, the 1934 Coup by the wealthy Wall St. bankers, and then after WWII the government’s Operation Paperclip that flooded our land with high-ranking Nazis along with the invention of the CIA and NSA in 1947. Those are for another rant, eh? We’ve got enough trouble at the moment. Have to stay focused!
sealintheSelkirks
Fascism takes many forms. Putin and Trump are certainly both fascists. I asked myself which of those two is worse. I actually came to the conclusion that Trump is the greater of the two evils.