The Witness Chronicles II, June 5, 2024
D-Day in the context of today
This is a reader supported newsletter. Please consider helping out by upgrading to a paid subscription or donating a small amount through Buy Me A Coffee, a site for small financial contributions. Thanks, ME
Reflecting on the Eightieth Anniversary of D-Day in the Light of Our World Now
Our challenges pale in comparison but evil is still evil
My uncle, Frances Weiss, landed in Normandy 80 years ago. I do not know if he landed on D-Day or close thereafter but I know the task ahead was incomprehensible to us today. Our world can seem insane, for good reason, but the world at that point in time was on fire from one end of the planet to the other.
In an unconscious celebration of that momentous event I have been rereading the third volume of Wm Manchester’s monumental biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion. It covers the final third of his life and literally starts as he becomes Prime Minister when Neville Chamberlain and his cadre of appeasers realized they had been hoodwinked by Adolf Hitler as he raged across Europe, conquering everything in sight.
The book, which Manchester was unable to write due to dementia and impending death, was written from his thousands of pages of notes by a relatively unknown newspaper journalist, Paul Reid. His task was nearly unimaginable.
Manchester’s notes were a total mess and he was useless though he was able to choose Reid before descending into the nether world of Alzheimer’s disease. The trilogy, his masterpiece, would finally be completed many years after volume two was published.
I was skeptical about anyone’s ability to follow In Manchester’s footsteps. He was a masterful historian and writer. But this is my second time through this massive volume and Reid stepped up and delivered a worthy successor to the first two volumes.
I am an amateur student of WWII and I would argue that of all the books I’ve read on the war and it’s origins, these are the ones to read, but they are more than that. They are the history of an extraordinary life that spanned from Victorian England to the mod days of the early 1960s. They may be the best record of that lost time, because Churchill was in the thick of everything from a very young age.
The events of D-Day and beyond are almost unimaginable today. The world literally stood on the edge of total destruction, not just in Europe but across the globe. Today we face a very different kind of world but one that could equally blaze out of control, this time fired by the glow of nuclear weapons in the control of fanatics.
Putin, Xi, and Bibi all have them. North Korea likely has them and Iran grows very close, aided by Donald Trump’s idiotic decision to abandon our nuclear treaty with them, based on personal lack of interest in anything that did not boost his standing or that reflected well on his predessors.
In some ways, that action alone illustrates how one stupid man, nearly illiterate and mindless, could make a decision that years later causes mass destruction. Add in his appeasement of Vladimir Putin that it could be argued empowered him to attack Ukraine, and you start to see how bad decisions can escalate into global conflicts.
Understanding the big picture of an event like a world war illuminates current events, telling us that the unimaginable can start with a series of choices made by men and women who don’t know history or don’t care.
D-Day was the single largest undertaking ever done by mankind, more than the moonshot or the building of the pyramids. It assembled resources beyond imagination, thousands of ships, millions of men, complex supply chains, tens of thousands of parachute drops and other actions, and it all could easily have failed because of something simple as a change in the weather.
In this nuclear age, with its cold wars, and technologically advanced weapons and intelligence systems, wars will be what we see around us now. But they are just as pitiless as ever, as evidenced by the Hamas terror attack on Israel and the response that has killed tens of thousands, most innocents, destroyed an entire country, and continues to starve thousands while politicians play games trying to salvage careers.
We’re just as good or better at killing each other as we were eighty years ago. We never learn, even as we have the means to have an idyllic world without starvation, disease, climate change, or war. But it is not in our nature to solve problems together, just as it was not during the Second World War.
As my readers know, I write about contemporary politics. I am not an historian but history offers a context for my opinion pieces. Without it, my perspective would be skewed and my context limited. Any reading of history tells us that idealism, though admirable, is hopelessly naive because it fails to understand the nature of humans.
We celebrate the bravery of those who fought on D-Day, before and after. They had the advantage of a more clear cut line between good and pure evil, something seldom seen in human conflict. Joe Biden understands that line, Donald Trump simply does not care.
That difference alone should determine the outcome of this year’s election, but events like global wars tell us that nothing is fair, predictable, or always right. Far from it. We will never see a day like D-Day or have such a clear mission for all that is good in the world.
And even if we had such a choice, we have men and women who would spurn it in favor of their own agendas. That sad fact hits home as we think about the young men who jumped off landing craft, in the face of withering fire, to try and end a war against pure evil and who prevailed at terrible cost.
Keep them in mind when you think about the kind of leadership we need in this country and around the world.
~ I write The Grasshopper, an occasional letter on the creative life and it’s sister, mostly daily publication The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate. They share a free and paid subscription. I also write The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. I don’t paywall any content in these, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your support with a paid subscription helps make that happen.
If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!
Believe me, it makes my day. M