Jon Snow said it reduced him, for the first time during an interview, to tears. Hale and hearty veterans of D-Day were interviewed for insights into how they felt, what friends they had lost, how afraid they were during the landing on Normandy beaches.
The world and its mother were represented. There were leaders from the USA and Britain, of course, from France, from Canada, around a dozen prime ministers including even the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The one absentee was Russia.
How come? The exact figures are disputed, but it’s generally accepted that around 8.7 million Russian military personnel died in World War Two. The number of Russian civilians is put as high as 14 million. After the Battle of Stalingrad, the German advance in Eastern Europe and Russia was halted. The Soviets lost nearly three thousand aircraft, over four thousand tanks and over fifteen thousand guns. Well over a million Russian soldiers died. But they won the Battle of Stalingrad, deemed by many historians to have been the most important victory in the entire war.
So why wasn’t there a Russian representative, maybe even President Putin himself, at the commemorations? Well, you see, the Americans don’t get on with the Russians now. Certainly the British don’t. So what you do is, you do a bit of rubbing out and substitution in on the history tale, so that the Russians really are no longer part of the conflict. It’s called rewriting history. Neat, eh?
The other thing which yesterday proved conclusively is that engaging in violence, in this case violence on a scale we can barely comprehend, is a noble thing. Those who landed on the Normandy beaches, intent on killing as many Germans as they could, are remembered with ceremony, gratitude and a tear in the eye. So that’s cleared that up: violence to achieve political ends is a glorious thing. For a while back there, we were getting mixed signals.
It’s good to have that cleared up.
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