Eighty-one years ago, this week the Second World War ended in Europe.
Four major powers — the United States, Soviet Union, France and the United Kingdom — along with troops from Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark and Brazil put troops in the field to fight Nazi Germany. They came together because they understood that one-party dictatorship, state terror, suppression of free speech, and aggressive nationalism were not just bad for the world — they were incompatible with the ideals that made them free people.
They were committed. They sacrificed their youth so that, to paraphrase Lincoln, their nations might live. Or as Churchill put it: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
That cost was enormous:
Soviet Union 11,000,000
Yugoslavia 300,000
United States 185,000
United Kingdom 265,000
France 210,000
Poland 240,000
Canada 45,000
Australia/NZ 30,000
Italy 30,000
Greece 20,000
Brazil 1,000
But it was not just the warriors who paid the ultimate price for this war. Nearly fifty million civilians died during the war.
Numbers this large are hard to comprehend. Consider this: if the entire population of the United Kingdom were to vanish today, that would still fall short of the total lives lost in World War II.
Their sacrifice was not in vain. It created a better world.
It created NATO. An organization that has kept Europe from fighting each other for over 80 years. The greatest sustained peace on that continent since the dark ages.
It ended colonialism. At the end of 1945 there were only 50 countries. Today there are over 193 nations within the UN. I am not saying that American democracy led the way. But our example of country that used to be a colony now being the most powerful nation on the planet did not hurt.
It created the greatest economic boom in the history of mankind. It ended the Great Depression. It retooled the United States and the world through the Marshall Plan. The GI Bill created the largest and most powerful middle class in the history of the world. It built institutions — the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, and GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) — that established free and fair trade so that nations would become economically interdependent, and interdependence would reduce the appetite for war. Harming one nation would harm them all.
I am ashamed to say that eighty-one years later, the United States has lost the thread — not only on why we fought World War II, but on the institutions and alliances that have kept the peace ever since.
Let’s start with the statement the White House released on VE Day. It was not about the sacrifices made by all of the Allies. It was about how great the United States was, to the exclusion of others’ sacrifice. Perhaps its most ominous line is this: “Their feat reminds us that the freedoms we cherish were paid for by sacrifice and must be resolutely defended both inside and outside the country.”
Who are we fighting inside our country?
I believe the only people those soldiers would recognize as the enemy today — the ones who fit the definition they fought and died to defeat — are the people currently controlling our government.
Let’s boil it down.
We fought WW2 to overthrow a one-party dictatorship that concentrated power in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else. How is that different from the state-mandated gerrymandering that has already been enacted in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, Florida, and Ohio — and is now being actively pursued in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia? These states are not even pretending otherwise. The stated goal is to keep the House and preserve Trump’s grip on power. You can’t quite call it a dictatorship yet — but it isn’t what “Willy and Joe” fought for. (If you don’t know Willy and Joe, they were the battle-worn GI characters in Bill Mauldin’s legendary WWII cartoons — the best portrait of the ordinary American soldier ever drawn.)
But gerrymandering is just the mechanism. The deeper assault is on speech itself. In WW2 we recognized the suppression of free speech as an existential threat to freedom — the thing that had to be stopped before everything else fell. The current administration has threatened Kimmel, The View, Colbert, Comcast, CBS, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Pulitzer Board for the crime of speaking their minds. Has anyone gone to jail? Not yet. But when companies and individuals are frightened into silence, the jail is the fear itself. Free speech doesn’t require a prison cell to die.
And then there is the matter of what the state does to its own people. Our soldiers fought and died in WW2 because they understood that state-sponsored terrorism against citizens was wrong. Sending people to concentration camps was wrong. Discriminating against people because of their race, creed or color was wrong. Today our government practices all of those things. It explicitly or implicitly declares the country has one religion: Christianity. ICE terrorizes, brutalizes and murders citizens with impunity and anonymity. MAGA serves as a street-fighting force in precisely the same way the SA served Hitler’s rise — doing the dirty work the state prefers not to put in writing.
Which brings us to expansion. Hitler’s aggressive nationalism found its ultimate expression in his Lebensraum — “living space” — the doctrine that Germany had a natural right to seize the territory of lesser peoples. It was the justification for invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. There is no meaningful difference between that logic and this administration’s use of military force in Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Ecuador — or its openly stated desire to take Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Canada by whatever means necessary. (I have left Iran off this list because the nuclear argument is at least worth debating separately — though I will note: if it truly was about nukes, why did he tear up the Iran Nuclear Deal the moment he took office?)
Here is my point.
We celebrate VE Day to honor a victory over fascism. The men and women who made that victory possible — who gave everything Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion — did not do it so that eighty-one years later we would debate whether what is happening here at home meets the technical definition. They did it so we would know it when we saw it. And so we would have the courage to say so.
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?
Blame it on Rio 
VE Day: The Thread We Lost
Eighty-one years ago, this week the Second World War ended in Europe.
Four major powers — the United States, Soviet Union, France and the United Kingdom — along with troops from Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark and Brazil put troops in the field to fight Nazi Germany. They came together because they understood that one-party dictatorship, state terror, suppression of free speech, and aggressive nationalism were not just bad for the world — they were incompatible with the ideals that made them free people.
They were committed. They sacrificed their youth so that, to paraphrase Lincoln, their nations might live. Or as Churchill put it: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
That cost was enormous:
But it was not just the warriors who paid the ultimate price for this war. Nearly fifty million civilians died during the war.
Numbers this large are hard to comprehend. Consider this: if the entire population of the United Kingdom were to vanish today, that would still fall short of the total lives lost in World War II.
Their sacrifice was not in vain. It created a better world.
It created NATO. An organization that has kept Europe from fighting each other for over 80 years. The greatest sustained peace on that continent since the dark ages.
It ended colonialism. At the end of 1945 there were only 50 countries. Today there are over 193 nations within the UN. I am not saying that American democracy led the way. But our example of country that used to be a colony now being the most powerful nation on the planet did not hurt.
It created the greatest economic boom in the history of mankind. It ended the Great Depression. It retooled the United States and the world through the Marshall Plan. The GI Bill created the largest and most powerful middle class in the history of the world. It built institutions — the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, and GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) — that established free and fair trade so that nations would become economically interdependent, and interdependence would reduce the appetite for war. Harming one nation would harm them all.
I am ashamed to say that eighty-one years later, the United States has lost the thread — not only on why we fought World War II, but on the institutions and alliances that have kept the peace ever since.
Let’s start with the statement the White House released on VE Day. It was not about the sacrifices made by all of the Allies. It was about how great the United States was, to the exclusion of others’ sacrifice. Perhaps its most ominous line is this: “Their feat reminds us that the freedoms we cherish were paid for by sacrifice and must be resolutely defended both inside and outside the country.”
Who are we fighting inside our country?
I believe the only people those soldiers would recognize as the enemy today — the ones who fit the definition they fought and died to defeat — are the people currently controlling our government.
Let’s boil it down.
We fought WW2 to overthrow a one-party dictatorship that concentrated power in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else. How is that different from the state-mandated gerrymandering that has already been enacted in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, Florida, and Ohio — and is now being actively pursued in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia? These states are not even pretending otherwise. The stated goal is to keep the House and preserve Trump’s grip on power. You can’t quite call it a dictatorship yet — but it isn’t what “Willy and Joe” fought for. (If you don’t know Willy and Joe, they were the battle-worn GI characters in Bill Mauldin’s legendary WWII cartoons — the best portrait of the ordinary American soldier ever drawn.)
But gerrymandering is just the mechanism. The deeper assault is on speech itself. In WW2 we recognized the suppression of free speech as an existential threat to freedom — the thing that had to be stopped before everything else fell. The current administration has threatened Kimmel, The View, Colbert, Comcast, CBS, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Pulitzer Board for the crime of speaking their minds. Has anyone gone to jail? Not yet. But when companies and individuals are frightened into silence, the jail is the fear itself. Free speech doesn’t require a prison cell to die.
And then there is the matter of what the state does to its own people. Our soldiers fought and died in WW2 because they understood that state-sponsored terrorism against citizens was wrong. Sending people to concentration camps was wrong. Discriminating against people because of their race, creed or color was wrong. Today our government practices all of those things. It explicitly or implicitly declares the country has one religion: Christianity. ICE terrorizes, brutalizes and murders citizens with impunity and anonymity. MAGA serves as a street-fighting force in precisely the same way the SA served Hitler’s rise — doing the dirty work the state prefers not to put in writing.
Which brings us to expansion. Hitler’s aggressive nationalism found its ultimate expression in his Lebensraum — “living space” — the doctrine that Germany had a natural right to seize the territory of lesser peoples. It was the justification for invading Czechoslovakia and Poland. There is no meaningful difference between that logic and this administration’s use of military force in Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Ecuador — or its openly stated desire to take Greenland, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Canada by whatever means necessary. (I have left Iran off this list because the nuclear argument is at least worth debating separately — though I will note: if it truly was about nukes, why did he tear up the Iran Nuclear Deal the moment he took office?)
Here is my point.
We celebrate VE Day to honor a victory over fascism. The men and women who made that victory possible — who gave everything Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion — did not do it so that eighty-one years later we would debate whether what is happening here at home meets the technical definition. They did it so we would know it when we saw it. And so we would have the courage to say so.
Here at home.
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About 34orion
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?