Over at The American Catholic, Donald McClarey has some nice posts about this anniversary of D-Day. As he always does.
I was going to wait to see how it was commented on in the press today, but alas, it wasn't. I found one article on the AP mentioning memorials. But that was it. On the outlets I found or watched, including local, there were none that bothered to mention it.
On the flip side, Google made sure the Good Banner celebrated the man who invented the espresso machine. Priorities after all.
At least it wasn't December 7 last year. There were some stories that briefly mentioned Pearl Harbor, but a surprising number of outlets focused instead on remembering the beginning of the Japanese American interment camps. So perhaps no news or remembrance is, in this case, a good thing.
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ReplyDeleteBreitbart had a great set of photos. If you ever saw Pointe du Hoc it would stay with you forever. A vertical cliff scaled by Army Rangers with Germans firing from the top.
ReplyDeleteI've not been there, but I've seen the photos. They don't call it "Bloody Omaha" for nothing. None of my family died in the war, but a friend of my dad's family was killed on D-Day. An exceptionally tall fellow, they said they comforted themselves by saying the Germans couldn't have missed.
DeleteIt's a pendulum swing. The Tech Industry is currently dominated by people that don't care about the Normandy Invasion, but that could easily change. We've seen such things happen before
ReplyDeleteWe'll have to wait and see. Growing up for most of my life, it was Vietnam as the main cultural reference point. WWII was increasingly passé. There were exceptions. The first part of the 80s was 'the 40th anniversary', and the 90s the 50th.That got some back to remembering the olden days. Though by the 90s, I remember quite a bit of partisan bickering. Also, in the 80s the theme was 'we must all reconcile' (esp. with Japan). By the 90s we were seeing more and more the focus on 'but we interred the Japanese, we segregated, we were racist.' It wasn't where it is now, but you could see the seeds beginning to grow. So we don't know, but I'm pretty sure it won't be anywhere near where it was.
DeleteTo be fair, where it was wasn't real great. Hitler, Mousilini and Hirohito (or whoever was the real power in Japan), were turned into such cartoon villains as to be nearly unrecognizable. The narrative I grew up with was "the Axis were clinically insane and wanted to conquer the world (or some equally vague Hollywood-like cliche)," when in reality all the powers involved had very specific, fairly rational geopolitical agendas, even if their methods were often far beyond the pale of civilized or moral warfare. Even the wakyer aspects (like Hitler's belief that a Jewish Cabal had created Capitalism and Marxism as a multigenerational 3 dimensional chess plot), had some basis in popular conspiracy theories of the time.
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