The seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944 has not unnaturally attracted much attention with the French, US ,Russian and UK heads of state in government commemorating what is likely to be the last time the veterans mark the occasion(anybody old enough to have stormed the beaches that day is pretty much either dead or a pensioner by now).
For my part I am uncomfortable with the whole business of commemorating war, esp the virtual veneration of the so-called "Greatest Generation" of Americans who grew during the Great Depression and fought in WW and/or Korea.
Yes, they WERE brave(extraordinarily so in some cases) and we owe them an eternal debt of gratititude for helping to destroy the crazed regimes of Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini, but I for one am unhappy with the "Sgt Rock syndrome" to name a popular DC title and its soldier hero. For a start, the so-called "Greatest Generation" harbored racist, sexist and homophobic prejudices that are rightly held unacceptable nowadays( I am aware that these prejudices were not unique to America at the time byt Western societies asa whole but they STILL make me acutely uncomfortable).
Secondly, what makes the so-called "Greatest Generation" better than those Americans who fought King George III's Redcoats to secure the nation's freedom from Colonial rule, or did so to save the Union and free the slaves in the Civil War of 1861-65 or participated in the "long twilight struggle" against the Soviet Union during the Cold War or are doing so nowadays in the "War on Terror" as either Special Forces( US Navy SEALs, Recon Marines, Delta Force and other elite formations of the US military) or as CIA operatives???
Perhaps the best epitath to the brave men who fell on BOTH sides( no I am NOT implying a moral equivalence between Axis and Allied causes-only noting that a brave man is a brave man irrespective of the uniform he wears) is FDR's statement that "we fight not for conquest- but to put an end to conquest!"
Anybody else think as I do?
Terry
Log in to comment