The Laughing Wolf

Da Da Da Duhmm!

A day late, but it might have helped if I had flipped my calendar over to the right month. Funny, I thought yesterday I had missed it, but listened to the the music while at the gym yesterday.

Friday marked an important anniversary, an event that courtesy of a great movie will be forever linked with the opening movements of Beethoven's Fifth symphony. For yesterday marks the day in 1944 when the U.S. and England, along with Canada and other allies, began the liberation of Europe. American and English troops bore the brunt of the fighting, with the American's taking the worst of it on Omaha beach. It was a day of courage, of quiet heroism, of agony, despair, and of individuals finding within themselves a greatness that transformed them and paved the way for those that followed.

If you have never seen the movie The Longest Day, go get it. Some of the people in it were there for real, and overall it is one of the best and most accurate war pictures ever made. Where license was taken, it was well taken and does nothing to detract from the history, and the real people.

In light of recent events, and the outright treachery of former allies such as France and Belgium, who were liberated by the sacrifice of thousands of American and English lives, and the more disquieting actions of those such as Canada, why we did we do it?

There is but one answer: It was the right thing to do.

Even knowing what was to come, it would have been done anyway just for that reason. The honor and integrity of the politicians and governments to come changes not the fact that it was the right thing. What mattered was the honor and integrity of the people of the U.S. and England, and of the leaders they had.

Mayhaps we should bring home the honored dead, those individuals who died doing what was right. Mayhaps they deserve to be buried in a place that respects them for what they did and honors them for it, rather than in a place that is spit upon, defaced, and otherwise vilified. But doing so will not change the fact that what they did was right, even if those freed choose to forget it. It does not and will not change the fact that doing so in the face of great evil is, and always will be, the right thing to do.

We can talk imperialism, imposing cultural values, and other serious talk all that we want. The fact remains that evil must be confronted, challenged, and defeated. Had we listened to such talk and such people at that time, Europe, Russia, and most likely England would have fallen, lest we be called imperialists or moral absolutists. There might well have been a real start to a thousand year reich, with death camps, liebensborn homes, and all the other aspects of racial purity and the like. Cultural relativism would have forbade criticizing such, and who knows where else it might have been allowed to take root?

Evil must be confronted and exterminated. June 6, 1944 was a demonstration of that, and of the price that is demanded in blood for freedom when evil is not challenged early. Iraq is a more recent example, as the mass graves testify so eloquently. For evil has learned that camps can be spotted and traced. Much easier these days not to have them, but just to go directly to the graves, be the victims young or old, dead or alive.

There is other evil in the world, and we fail to challenge it at our peril. Both at home and abroad we must challenge it. In our government and in others, in our lives and those of our families and friends, in our thoughts and in our dreams. If you remember nothing else from this day, this special anniversary, remember the terrible price of evil unchecked. Remember those who died, and those who went on to end a great evil last century.
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