“I’ve noticed nearly all the dead were hardly more than boys.”
Grantland Rice
The fiftieth anniversary of D-Day and the allied invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe provides a useful benchmark from which to reflect on contemporary history.
From hundreds of recent interviews with veterans who waded ashore at Normandy in June, 1944, it’s clear only the faces change from one generation to the next. As in prior wars, brave and, in most instances, frightened young American soldiers went in harm’s way to preserve those fundamental rights and freedoms on which our system of government was predicated. With World War II, in particular, America’s cause was just and an imperative.
In the years since, however, justification for American military intervention in such places as Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and the Persian Gulf has been less well defined. Politics, rather than any clear and present danger to our national security or way of life has prescribed such adventurism.
Still, as the returning veterans gazed out over the now serene beaches and cliffs of Normandy, their eyes revealed the same longing and pain their younger, Vietnam-era counterparts experience as their fingers trace the names of fallen comrades etched on a black marble wall. Both grieve for those whose lives were prematurely snuffed out because “older men declare war” while “it is the youth that must fight and die.”
Tragically, the defeat of Hitler and Tojo did little to limit the carnage man has historically inflicted on his neighbor. Since the end of the Second World War, tens of millions of innocent people have been slaughtered in political purges, civil wars and regional conflicts. In today’s paper alone, genocide in Rawanda, civil wars in Yemen and
Bosnia, violence by Arab and Jewish extremists, and the threat of nuclear confrontation on the Korean peninsula provide stark testimony to such continued madness.
George Santayana observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“ If he’s correct, perhaps, as with many aspects of human endeavor, education is our salvation. President Clinton echoed a similar theme at Omaha Beach, “We must have … educated citizens“.
But education can only be an effective tool in open societies where history is not constantly rewritten to legitimize or glorify the current regime. Yet, even in America, the most open society in the history of our species, this premises is challenged.
How else can one explain the plight of Joe Jensen, one of the first men to scramble ashore at Omaha Beach. In attempting to make plans to return to France for this month’s anniversary ceremonies, he was shocked and dismayed to discover his travel agent had little knowledge of D-Day and no idea of where Normandy was even located. So much for history!
Meanwhile, the president extolled the veterans, “The flame of your youth became freedom’s lamp“. He promised them his generation would, “commit [itself] to keep that lamp burning for those who will follow.”
Yet, back in Washington, his administration, in concert with Congress and a bloated federal bureaucracy, relentlessly chisels away at the individual freedoms of Americans … albeit in the name of noble causes. Lost on them are the lessons of personal responsibility, individual initiative and accountable leadership without which the Atlantic Wall might not have been breached.
Rather than embracing a minimalist government, embodying the spirit of Jeffersonian ideals and the political rhetoric Mr. Clinton and most other high governmental pols so willingly spew forth on the campaign trail and at solemn events like Normandy … their actions scream of pervasive and encroaching federalism.
The preservation of democracy and liberty, often more at risk in times of peace, requires an ever vigilant citizenry. It must continually reject the unrelenting attempts of statists who believe government knows best how to manage our individual and collective lives.
Only in that way, will we ensure those young men at Normandy and on other foreign shores “who gave their last full measure of devotion … shall not have died in vain.”
