The Patriot Post® · D-Day Reflections

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. That day, Allied Forces launched the largest invasion force in history. Over 5,000 ships, 13,000 aircraft, and 160,000 troops assaulted the beaches of what Adolf Hitler called “Fortress Europe.”

Many young people do not know why this event was significant. Why did we need to invade Europe and see more than 10,000 men die on those beaches and nearby countryside?

Axis Forces (Germany and Italy) held most of Europe under their iron fists. Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party, or “Nazi” Party, had grown from the early 1920s by promising to regain all that Germany had lost after the “Great War.” The socialists promised the German people many things if they would just vote for them. Voters agreed, and the rest is history.

Socialism promised so much. As Hitler’s party gained more power, they wanted even more. In the end, Germany and Europe would suffer massive devastation. Worldwide, the death toll was in the tens of millions. Fifteen million soldiers would die on the battlefields of Europe and Asia. At least 45 million civilians died. In China, the civilian death toll could have been as high as 50 million. We will never know the true total cost in lives and human suffering.

So, why do we need to remember? Why not just put it out of our minds and move on? If we forget how this terrible worldwide tragedy happened, we will eventually make the same mistake when the next “messiah” rises up; when they promise to take care of our every need and get us everything we deserve. For Hitler, it was more territory, more conquests, more glory, and, especially, retribution against Germany’s WWI enemies.

Those on the far Left now run the very institutions they occupied and protested against during Vietnam. They don’t want generations of our youth understanding the terrible price socialism caused worldwide. Nor do they want this generation to know the price this nation paid to purchase freedom for millions living under the bondage.

Sir John Dalberg-Acton stated it well over 150 years ago: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Every dictator in history starts out promising utopia but reaps disaster. That is why my generation and those who preceded us, the “Greatest Generation,” are dumbfounded when so many young people are clamoring for “socialism” when history shows every time it is implemented there will be a tragic price to pay.

WWI was the war to end all wars, yet just 20 years after “The Great War,” the world was once again suffering the results of socialist tyrants. Or, in the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel nearly 200 years ago, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

I thank God that today we have available to us resources like The Patriot Post, which is teaching this generation that true freedom is worth fighting for. We must equip this generation with the truths that have endured since the founding of our nation over 240 years ago. We must not forget!

Something to think about?