For those who have previously read and commented on my D-Day posts, I offer my somber greeting on this annual memorial to the patriotic men and women of the “Greatest Generation”, those who served across the world in our armed forces as well as the civilians at home who stepped up to manufacture the war machines necessary for victory in World War Two. America was a nation united, not by ethnicity, religion, or political affiliation, but rather by a public culture of genuine belief in the worth and dignity of every human being and the liberal values embodied in our Constitution, laws, and social norms. And they possessed the willingness to make any sacrifice to preserve those values. For that, they willingly went abroad to fight and die to deter and defeat the tyrannical plague of Nazism and fascism that had spread across Europe and the Far East, and threatened to engulf the entire world in a vicious and racist authoritarian blight, cynically punishing freedom of thought and expression and individual liberty unhampered by any effective opposition. The latter had been eliminated through the mechanisms of propaganda based on dissemination and continuous repetition of lies, half-truths, disinformation, dehumanization of opponents, along with the weaponizing of social institutions: the churches, the judiciary, schools and universities, corporations, and the media. The goal of those measures is to create a public perception that sees what the authoritarian regime wants the public to see, substituting that false perception in the place of reality. And only that manufactured perception–no matter how bizarre or contrary to fact–is hailed as truth and truly patriotic. Anyone in opposition–no matter how soundly developed and grounded in fact their position–is deemed an enemy of the people. No criticism of the regime or the Fuehrer, the supreme leader, can be tolerated. By definition, what the leader deems good is good for the state. The leader is the state.

That is what the Greatest Generation fought to eliminate from the world: the tyranny of authoritarian government, the loss of liberty and freedom of expression, the assault on human dignity. That’s what the Founders worried about, by the way, and thought about long and hard, applying the grim lessons of European history to their deliberations. They devised a Constitution with safeguards against the unrestricted accumulation of power in the hands of an unaccountable government. They gave us a democratic republic, but they cautioned us to take care lest we lose it (Ben Franklin, 1787).

A true democracy can tolerate in its midst diversity of opinion and even that which it finds offensive. That’s what freedom of speech and assembly means. What a true democracy cannot tolerate is the insidious transformation of constitutional government and the rule of law into irrelevancies to be ignored or weapons to be deployed against critics.

Do you ever wonder if the Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves?

I won’t belabor the point any more. Memorial Day was one week ago, a day when we remembered the fallen from all of our wars. Today remember the generation of World War Two, who fought the ugly blight of totalitarianism and hateful racist policies that saw the murder of countless innocent people across Europe and Asia.

Remember the heroism of D-Day, 6 June 1944, the beginning of the end of the Second World War.

If interested, read my previous D-Day posts for other details.

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IN MEMORIAM (uncles, father-in-law, father):

George Marrash, US Army, WWII, DOW France, 1944

Tony Marrash, US Army, WWII

Sam Sadie, US Marine Corps, WWII

Louis Gramesty, US Army, 8th Air Force, WWII

Elias T. Marrash, Auto-Ordnance Co., Thompson Submachine Guns, WWII