Seventy-five years ago the leaders of Europe took momentous decisions that would change the course of the Second World War.
I could have sworn the leaders of the USA and Canada (and Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and one or two other places, of course) also had a small part to play in D-Day.
More explicit themes here:
Britain must not turn its back on the world made possible by D-day
says M Kettle in the Grumnisi (I had the keyboard in an unusual place):
there is a more political reason why this week could be the start of a less unified approach to marking the liberation of Europe at the end of the war against Hitler’s Germany. The reason is that Donald Trump’s US and Brexit Britain, though both still immeasurably and justifiably proud of the roles their predecessors played in this epic climax of the war in the west, are each in their own way turning their backs upon the European order that the invasion of 6 June 1944 made possible.
Reading the runes as skilfully as ever, Kettle sees that:
In recent decades, Normandy has overwhelmingly been the main place to commemorate D-day. But now here is Britain mounting a large parallel event. Fair enough, in one sense. Britain was the base from which the war in the west was won. It is easier for the 90-year-olds to get to Portsmouth than France. But it is also as though Britain is choosing to reassert a closed-off version of its own national wartime myth alongside – and even in opposition to – the previously more established international one...This marks another stage in both the systemic impact of Brexit and, at the same time, the older, slow decline in the potency of Britain’s own postwar myths – a process that itself had much to do with the Brexit vote.
The zeitgeist speaks to him, avoiding the need to actually talk to anyone involved or read any research (he couldn't even be bothered to track down one veteran interviewed on BBC News who regretted Brexit -- no-one interviewed any who might have been pro-Brexit):
These evolving fractures ensure that the solemn events this week cannot just be commemorative business as usual. Instead they mark a change. They embody the chronic uncertainty of the times. They cast an unavoidably unforgiving light on the way that the electorates of both the US and Britain have each taken deeply disruptive decisions that threaten the international order of which their governments still imagine themselves to be mainstays....
It's that unholy alliance between Trump and Brexit again:
Donald Trump’s isolationism and indifference to international institutions such as the EU and Nato mean these will be the most uneasy D-day commemorations for years...But the Britain that Theresa May will represent in Normandy on her departure from office is a destabiliser of the postwar order too....Britain has protested against its commitment to Europe while readying to break the relationship unilaterally. It has talked the language of rules-based governance while spurning the obligations of rule enforcement. [pretty abstract concern this -- it would make a nice slogan on a bus
However, hope springs eternal, as long as we have the right leaders:
But these fractures can be healed. These retreats can be reversed. To see how this can happen, consider instead the approach of two people from different ends of the 75-year spectrum being marked this week...Last week, Angela Merkel went to Harvard to deliver the end of academic year commencement address to the university’s graduating students. She did not mention Trump by name but, in her remarkable speech, told the students not to act on impulses but always to pause and think, to always ask themselves whether courses of action were right rather than easy, and to resist the temptation to “describe lies as truth, and truth as lies”. Above all, Merkel said, be “open-minded instead of isolationist”....And on the very first anniversary of D-day in 1945, with the war barely won, Eisenhower addressed a cheering crowd in London. He told them that “you, and others like you through all the united nations” had won the victory. And he urged that the bonds between nations – “into which scope must be brought Russia, France, China and all the other great countries” [not entirely about the EU then] – should never be broken
No comments:
Post a Comment