June 6 2013

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Sixty-nine years have passed since they hit the beaches at Normandy. To say that those men “lived in a different time” has become a cliché. They lived and died in another century, one that is becoming less recognizable with each passing year. What is not usually acknowledged is the deliberate attempts to airbrush out our recall in the West of this vast undertaking, or to change it to something different than the way the participants viewed it. They are strangers, those soldiers; not our relatives, our forebears, or the objects of immense bottomless sorrow for those who were killed.

There is a woman in our church whose father’s plane crashed into the South Pacific on a morning patrol. She was about six years old when her father died but to this day, more than seven decades later, she cannot talk about what he endured without crying. She thinks of how often her father’s squadron was cut off from supplies of food and water. She thinks his plane crashed because he was starved and thirsty and disoriented. She cannot let her father’s suffering go; it is all she has left of the flesh and blood part of the man who loved her mother and who adored her. Nancy is not alone; there are many others like her, still mourning. They grieve not for what they missed, but for the suffering their fathers endured and that they are helpless to assuage.

Haven’t you noticed that when someone is killed almost the first coherent question from the survivors is a quest for reassurance that their dead loved one didn’t “suffer”. It makes the loss somehow bearable if you can pull that comforting cloak around your shoulders: “it was quick. She never felt it”.

We saw that phenomenon among the survivors at the Boston Marathon Massacre. Sad to say there is graphic proof that many of those killed did indeed suffer. Of what comfort is it to know that your mother or sister exsanguinated on that sidewalk, and that it ‘only’ took five minutes or less?

Survivors like Nancy are tortured by the knowledge that the suffering was indeed prolonged, that their fathers or brothers endured months of hunger, or dysentery caused by the lousy chalk holes that caught what little rain water fell. Such images plague them. What is worse, though, is the way the world has averted its attention, has learned to view the war through a socialist lens that shows us a place in which that war – or any war – need not have happened. For Nancy, and people like her, it feels as though it’s time to go. They don’t want to be a part of this cowardly new world; they yearn to rejoin the ones who left them behind.

Sixty-nine years. These present days in England must be a sponge soaked in gall and offered to those few survivors lying in their NHS hospital beds. Many of them must need little encouragement to shuffle off. This is not the country they sacrificed to save. As the years pass and the choking tendrils of the Marxist-socialist Lie wrap themselves around every lamppost…

Back then, General Eisenhower could say something that can’t be said now:

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened, he will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

– Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

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Did you notice how little attention was paid to this past Memorial Day? I didn’t post anything because it was too disheartening – what we didn’t see. And I fear our national holidays will continue to wither on the vine, that the vine itself is desiccated, cut off from its root.

Celebrate what?

Despite it all, I hope for the younger generation. They are fighting different kinds of wars under different rules and their commemorations will of necessity be different also. On Memorial Day I talked with a young man I’ve known since he was born. He served in Afghanistan and he’s glad he survived. He doesn’t regret going, but he is concerned about America’s lack of understanding of foreign policy. He wants to change that, but not through political means. Thus he will do graduate work and establish a relationship with importers and exporters to broaden the exchange of goods in this state. A solid and honorable career with no need for guts or glory, even though he has both.

I am so very glad he won’t be a lawyer. Not now, not anymore. Google the suicide rate for lawyers in Kentucky. An isolated phenomenon but look for it to spread, just as it is in medicine.

11 thoughts on “June 6 2013”

  1. I look for suicide rates to go down. The world is entering a time of difficulties, and the US is far from exempt. Suicide rates generally go down in hard times. Peoples’ minds are concentrated on their immediate problems, to the exclusion of brooding about why Kathy was mean in her post on Facebook. Or why Jack got that undeserved promotion. Or whatever.

  2. Hi Dymphna,
    As an Australian, I’m glad to note that the attendance rate for our ANZAR Day (commemorating Australian and New Zealand service in the First World War) service this year has actually set a new record: http://www.news.com.au/national-news/australia-celebrates-and-remembers-on-anzac-day-2013/story-fncynjr2-1226629003721
    So not all of our old values are lost! Perhaps some of those disenchanted with the United States should consider emigration to Australia? We’ve got a very promising conservative government set to enter Parliament quite soon. Naturally, our own Leftists disapprove, but I’m pleased to say that they have a dramatically weakened foothold in Australia at the moment. I still believe, given the call, the youth of today would fight as faithfully as they did in WWII. I hope it never comes to that, but no amount of propaganda can change our bold national characters as English speaking people. (Though Britain frightens me…) Thank you for a good post!

  4. my father joined the reserves in 1937, went to war in’36.
    he served in iceland, north africa, sicily and was at the salerno landings in italy, travelling all the way into france.
    he has told me he would not fight for this country now.
    he is 93 and still pin sharp.

    • Many of today’s generation feel as your father does. What can it mean to serve in politically correct, multicultural army? One where the object is to make friends with the enemy, to win hearts and minds. That is a division of labor that cannot be done. From time immemorial soldier’s work was “hurry-up-and-wait”. The officers’ ranks were often filled with low-IQ time-servers and everyone felt the ennui that comes from military service.

      Now the ambitious generals -Petraeus is just one sad example – design campaigns that kill and maim our men. We should have been in-and-out of Afghanistan in 2001. They knew where bin Laden was but the point seemed to have been to show the Russians how to fail correctly – by spreading peace and love.

      As for Iraq, the first time Turkey double-crossed us in taking back the staging rights we should have pushed back sharply rather than losing men while trying to play work-around and ‘lets-all-be-friends”. The conflicts with the Brits re strategy should have been settled without worrying about hurting our generals’ feelings and thereby incurring the wrath of Congress.

      When the definitive book has been written on THAT one, we’ll all be dead and gone since we have to wait till all the self-servers have had their say. It could take generations for the story to be told. We may have to have advanced technologically so that we’re no longer dependent of fossil fuels.

      Will it take as long as it did for the truth to be told about the non-existent Islamic “Golden Age”? Will the truth be pushed under the rug anyway due to the exigencies of some larger “narrative”? Lord help us, I do hope they strangle that word. Never saw such a stopper in the mouth of Truth as the big fatmeat, Narrative.

  5. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » June 6 2013

  6. Hello,

    the greatest Generation made a comment about it:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229643/This-isnt-Britain-fought-say-unknown-warriors-WWII.html

    Just some quotes:

    But the truth that emerges from these letters is that the survivors of that war generation have nothing but contempt for his government.
    They feel, in a word that leaps out time and time again, ‘betrayed’.

    New Labour, said one ex-commando who took part in the disastrous Dieppe raid in which 4,000 men were lost, was ‘more of a shambles than some of the actions I was in during the war, and that’s saying something!’
    He added: ‘Those comrades of mine who never made it back would be appalled if they could see the world as it is today.
    ‘They would wonder what happened to the Brave New World they fought so damned hard for.’

    Many writers are bewildered and overwhelmed by a multicultural Britain that, they say bitterly, they were never consulted about nor feel comfortable with.

    But then political correctness is another thing they take strong issue with, along with politicians generally – ‘liars, incompetents and self-aggrandising charlatans’ (with the revealing exception of Enoch Powell).

    • It is about time to tell them, as Peter Sutherland has now revealed, believing it is much too late for Europeans to reverse the process, that the UN has for the last 60 plus years been planning the creation of the One World State ruled from the UN in New York and that this is what mass immigration into Europe has all been about and will continue apace in line with the UN’s Agenda 21 incorporated in the Lisbon Treaty which our governments signed up to without consulting us. Indeed that treaty even circumvented the no votes in The Netherlands and France with regard to previous treaties. In essence they just made a rude gesture at The Netherlands and France and laughed at them. They know we are now powerless and the One World elites have won with their islamic and other third world masses used to destroy our peoples and our countries.

      If you get a chance, tell those veterans and those who suffered during the War for our freedom. They may not believe you but they need to be told that every British government since 1945 has been leading them to their destruction with lie after lie after lie. You cannot blame the third worlders for behaving like third worlders, that is why it is the third world and for rushing in once the door was held open wide.
      Every British and other European politician is guilty with a few exceptions, notably Churchill and Enoch Powell here and the leaders of the so-called far right parties on the Continent and in Scandinavia.

  7. Was it worth doing it for giving Uncle Joe half Europa? What about Eisenhower´s death camps along the Rhine?

    All nonsense. Germany had to be destroyed. That was what the ruling elites had decided. Some Americans lost their lives 70 years ago, the current are as clueless as they were.

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