Terry Glavin on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. June 6, 1944, was the day the struggle against fascism finally turned in our favour:
They were fighting “in the cause of freedom,” Queen Elizabeth rightly pointed out, citing the remarks of her father, King George VI, in a radio broadcast on the eve of the Normandy landings, the first phase of Operation Overlord, as it was called, the liberation of Europe. It was not just courage and endurance that the struggle demanded of the free world, the king had said, but “a revival of spirit, a new unconquerable resolve.” And it was that spirit, and that resolve, that all those brave men took with them to the beaches of Normandy, the Queen said, and “the fate of the world depended on their success.”
Directing her remarks on the few surviving soldiers, sailors and airmen of that time, she concluded: “It is with humility and pleasure, on behalf of the entire country —indeed the whole free world — that I say to you all, thank you.”
This raises an awkward question. What degree of sacrifice are any of us prepared to make to defeat freedom’s enemies today? Despite commonplace histrionics to the contrary, neither Europe nor North America is threatened by the spectre of fascist tyranny. But tyranny is smashing its way across a great deal of human terrain today, nonetheless, and it is creeping quietly through the liberal world order that the triumphs of the Second World War established. [...]
It wasn’t the vulgar Donald Trump who thought up “America First” as a catchy campaign slogan. Credit for that belongs to the dashing aviator and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh, who effectively mobilized American “anti-war” sentiment against president Franklin Roosevelt until Pearl Harbor. And it wasn’t Barack Obama, whose signature foreign-policy legacy is the charnel house of Syria, who was the first to employ “nation-building at home” as a pretext for isolationism. Lindbergh deserves credit for that, too.
“I would be opposed to our entering the internal wars of Europe under any circumstances,” Lindbergh told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in February 1941. Sounds just like Trump, in any of his several snide criticisms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “I advocate building strength in America because I believe we can be successful in this hemisphere,” he said. “I do not believe that the danger to America lies in an invasion from abroad.” Which sounds just like any of Obama’s pretexts for urging America’s allies to stick with him and let Syrians choke to death on their own blood.
This isn’t a call to war, but it would do the cause of peace and freedom a great deal of good if the free world turned to “a revival of spirit, a new unconquerable resolve” of the type that Queen Elizabeth mentioned in her remarks in Portsmouth.
I have yet to hear a credible suggestion for Obama's motive on supporting the Arab Spring that overthrew the largely secular governments of Libya and Egypt and replaced them with movements aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. Now Glavin thinks that Trump's disinclination to go to war for ill-defined or non-existent reasons is "snide." This is not the kind of analysis that anyone can take seriously, not even for ten seconds. It's a compendium of grand-sounding catch-phrases empty of meaning.
Posted by: Michael van der Riet | June 07, 2019 at 01:01 PM