80th D-Day Muse-ings

As ever, the message is muddled

In case you’re wondering, King Charles has interpreted the meaning of this, the 80th anniversary of the storming of the beach in Normandy thus: ‘…free nations must stand together to oppose tyranny’…‘they did not flinch’. They being the thousands of young men whose lives were cut short that day, among them some 80,000 evil Nazis. Oh, and we should ‘emulate them’. Does he mean we should go to war again?

On June 6, 1944, I was a three year old toddler living in Naziland. An innocent bystander to the great and ghastly events unfolding around me. They were so ghastly that I spent a good deal of my life forgetting that I was German born or indeed had anything to do with the Fascist disaster. I became Canadian and I was all in.

Only lately have I begun seriously thinking about what happened, not just to me but to everyone. You may call it hubris, but I have actually come to some conclusions that King Charles apparently doesn’t share. If nothing else, his pronouncement given while wearing a field Marshall’s uniform, is nothing more than a military declaration, one that says we should just keep fighting wars with weapons that kill everyone who happens to be an innocent bystander or indeed, a conscripted soldier who may or may not understand what he is fighting for. War is good, it gets results. We won.

With all due respect your Highness, I beg to differ.

Because we are about to lose the Second World War and not in a good way to something known as ‘cultural Marxism’, woke mobs, bureaucratic overreach, and that old thing that always gets us, Hubris. The Germans know a bit about it. They produced a harrowing ultra realistic movie about the cult of the Fuehrer, Downfall.

It shows the dire consequences of elevating a mere human to god-like status. This is something the Greeks knew well; after all, they invented the concept of the tragic hero who fails because he doesn’t accept limits of any kind. That is exactly what Hitler did. Not that I want to draw him as some kind of ‘hero’, but his life story is that of a man who began with ideas about lifting up his struggling nation, to make ‘Germany great again’, and who in fact, succeeded. For a while. Until he began believing in his own highly sophisticated propaganda, and raved that the Germans deserved to perish because they had not risen to meet the challenge he had so generously given them, which was to become UEBERMENSCHEN. Gods, in other words. People who were born to rule, who were superior by birth. Superior because they belong to a certain group. The roots of identitarianism can be found here, and I don’t need to remind you that this is a virus that is flourishing among us today.

We are far from having defeated the ugly race theories that underpin Fascism; we have in fact adopted them in slightly different form. If you insist on seeing the world through the lens of ‘race’, you get Neo Fascism. Look around: most of our cultural battles are now about who is ‘privileged’ and who gets to be punished for things that someone in their group did. Group-think is very popular in certain circles and it’s just another weapon that has proven far more effective than actual bombs because the way people think, what they believe in, is what wins wars in the end. We are about to lose World War Two while already contemplating the next world war. An awful lot of propaganda regarding the Ukraine war has already done its dirty work; convincing people that Putin is simply a re-incarnation of Hitler. Intelligence, nuance and what we have done to bring about this explosive situation is routinely deep sixed. It must all be kept simple and in black and white, folks. Propaganda is alive and well all over the west and it seems only a minority has figured this out.

I recently got my hands on an example of just how sophisticated Nazi propaganda was. One of my oldest friends sent me a book Was Weisst Du Vom Deutschen Osten, or What do you know about the German East? Far from being aimed at the simple Folk, it is aimed at the intelligent and somewhat educated Everyman/woman though the ‘Du’ instead of the ‘Sie’ is telling. You only call close friends ‘Du’. No doubt the authors were aware of what they were doing when they decided to address the German people in this way.

It’s a perfect example of what can be done to convince people that they are A) under threat and B) that they need to get ready to fight for their freedom. To the drumbeat of such high minded words young men have gone to their graves since civilization began. And it is always preceded by propaganda of this sort. Endlessly, the book tells the tale of a heroic Germanic People that has always been under the mortal threat of Asiatic Hordes from the East. And that it is a cultural as well as moral duty of the Germans to stand up and stop this incursion into lands that have ‘always’ been theirs. In some ways, this story is true, in others demonstrably false, but it is by braiding together strands of lies and truth that the story gets stronger and more convincing the longer you read it. Also, there are dozens of black and white images of all kinds including well known works of art to prove the point that the Germans are a highly cultured people. That they are inherently superior to those hordes from the East, not to mention the Jews. It’s all there, an entire world view that hangs together, makes sense and emboldens anyone who doubts this tale.

The fact that we are doing it again is a terrible reminder that nobody ever learns any lessons from History. We’ve had more than 80 years to learn this particular lesson and I see no evidence that it has sunk in.

But it is always a personal story in the end. In one of those synchronous events that seem to be happening a lot lately, I met my first Ukraine Refugee today. She was doing my nails and told me that she had learned her trade in Poland, where a lot Ukrainians go to work and to school. She and her husband decided to flee to Canada because war is an ever present threat. Pretty, intelligent and young, her English was marginal but we managed to establish that we had something in common: a love of beauty, a deep dread of war and violence and sadness at what is going on at the eastern borders of Europe. Elena misses her family in Odessa, she said. No, she didn’t think they would ever come here. She would have to choose if she was going back or staying here without them. Perhaps never seeing them alive again. And she didn’t think that the west was blameless in starting this war. It began a long time ago, she said.

So, your Highness, this is the story that I would like you to consider when you trot out your high flown ideals, your heavy weapons or your brave soldiers to go to yet another war. It’s easy to start wars; much harder to end them. And judging from your words today, you are content to continue and perhaps widen the war in Ukraine. Because we must ‘fight tyranny’. Yes, we must. It’s just a question of which tyranny we’re talking about here. Stirring up fear and glorifying horrifying battles is tyranny we are all familiar with. His Highness failed to consider that undeniable fact.