When President
Obombast (see the list of domanisms, lower on this page) spoke on the
sixty-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion (6 June 2009, for those of you
in US public schools), he, being a leftist, couldn't pass up the opportunity—as
he seemingly cannot pass up any other—to denigrate the country that he
(mis)leads. The occasion obviously did
not call for such commentary, but many genuine patriots have perhaps overcompensated
for the tenor of his remarks in their responses thereto. The "America"-worshipers write and
speak as though US participation in World War II were an episode of selfless
voluntarism, on the part of gallants from the enlightened New World, for the
sake of rescuing the hapless, benighted Old World; the reality doesn't quite
match this. As one of the victors of World War I, the USA had a responsibility
to act as a guarantor of the peace established at the end of that conflict, but
instead sat idly on the sidelines of world diplomacy as Hitler campaigned for
the National Socialist party by promising to "tear up the Versailles
Treaty"; during the era of appeasement, our refusal to give up on
isolationism made our policy toward the Third Reich more contemptible than that
of either the United Kingdom or France, who at least were active in
statesmanship; we entered World War II not until December of 1941, and then
only because Japan forced us out of our neutrality and because Germany and
Italy made the mistake of supporting her by declaring war upon us. (It ought to
be noted that the country with the best claim on having saved civilization from
the Nazis is not the US but the UK—A European
country!—which did not need to be attacked in order to join the fray but rather
declared war in response to the invasion of Poland, and, with her Commonwealth,
stood between the Axis and the rest of the world until Hitler abandoned his
plan to attempt an invasion of Great Britain and instead turned upon his ally
the USSR. Had Uncle Sam gone to war as
early as the British did, his intervention probably would not have been the
decisive factor that we Yanks like to believe it was; in 1939, our military strength
was rated below that of Belgium, a country that the Wehrmacht overran in just a few weeks.)
The purpose of this uncommon commentary,
naturally, is not to slight the sacrifices or the valor of the US troops who
landed at Utah or Omaha Beach or who fought in any other theatre of the Second
World War. Neither is it to imply that
we Usans (see the guide to domanisms) are pacifistic voluptuaries by nature;
before the bombing of the base at Pearl Harbor, one-tenth of the Royal Canadian
Air Force consisted of US citizens who chose not to sit out the war. It is, rather, to lament the fact that many of
my fellow Obamaphobes would react to our President's anti-patriotism with
equally distasteful spread-eagle bluster.
(The adjective "spread-eagle" is a delightful 1858 Americanism
that I've lately discovered, meaning "boastful or jingoistic about the
U.S.") It is partly because so many
Yanks think that the mere fact of being "American" gives us a sort of
innate moral superiority over everyone else, and that, if the USA didn't exist,
the rest of the world would wither away and die, that so many Europeans
consider us to be bumptious nouveau
riches. Surely we can honor our troops
without forcing ideological interpretations upon Operation Overlord or any
other event of US history.
