It's No Accident, June 6, 2004
D-Day
Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the long-delayed opening of the second front in Europe in the war against fascism. Because of Reagan's death yesterday, we're all being treated to the rebarbative clips of his speech on this same day in 1984, as if that speech defines both D-Day and the Reagan presidency itself.
The real relationship between Reagan and the legacy of World War II was defined not by Omaha Beach but by Bitburg, where he laid a wreath in memory of the Nazi SS and proclaimed (in a speech written by Pat Buchanan) that the Nazis were "victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." Not Wehrmacht conscripts, mind you, but full-on members of the infamous Nazi death squads -- some of whom no doubt participated in the slaughter of US prisoners of war at the Battle of the Bulge -- were "victims too" in Reagan's eyes. How's that for "moral equivalence"?
Of course, Reagan's whitewashing of fascism was no one-time faux pas. It was intentional. He also infamously said that the "premature anti-fascist" volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had fought "on the wrong side" of the Spanish Civil War.
- - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!