Tomorrow will mark the seventieth anniversary of The Longest Day. Starting at 0530 hours on Tuesday, 6 June 1944, Anglo-American and Canadian forces invaded the beaches of Normandy, France to begin the achingly slow and sorrowfully sanguinary quest to expel and crush the demonic thuggery of Nazism from and on the continent of Europe. It was accomplished with a cost measured in the deaths of tens of millions of humans, civilians and military personnel alike. No mindless boast about a "war to end all wars" was heard at the conclusion of this particular global mayhem. Germany's surrender on 7 May1945 that was followed nearly four months later by the remaining member of the Axis, Japan's, brought relief and genuinely joyful celebrations. But the dawn of the Atomic Age, the fragmentation of colonialism and the commencement of sullen bellicosity between Western democracies and the Soviet Union's Communist empire, together with so many other elements of social flux throughout the world, meant an undiminished pace of change, uncertainty and opportunities aplenty for new dark forces that adroitly picked up the baton of the newly fallen totalitarian giants. In short, peace was something that coiuld not be leisurely savored. The struggles continued, kaleidoscopically and unrelentingly as the world lurched from one drama to another: the nuclear arms race, the triumph of Communism in China, the Korean conflict, the many upheavals in the British, Dutch and French empires, the ancient enmities in Palestine, the Indochinese civil wars and on and on.
The conflict with Communism, commonly known as the Cold War, proved finite but only after more than forty years of anxiety of a special kind: one that disturbed the waking as well as the dream lives of so many, with the menace of the mushroom cloud and the contemplation of mass annihilation both routine causes of psychic suffering for those whose threshold of pain for dealing with such possibilities was too low to focus healthily on life affirming endeavors.
However, the economic colossus that was the United States under a strong and great leader, Ronald Wilson Reagan, began to grind down the corrupt and inefficient Soviet system. First, detente in the 1970s led to the gradual wearing away of the Russian political structure. An arms race that the Soviets could not sustain and a restive populace, exhausted with the dearth of creature comforts and the consistently meager availability of all kinds of products and services capable of raising one's standard of living, all contributed to the relatively peaceful end of Marxism as developed by the Kremlin's bureaucrats and politicians. This "breather", briefly seen as true hope for world peace, was not just short lived. It had been overlapped at least ten years earlier by the Iranian revolution and other forces of Muslim fundamentalism that made it clear that a profound animus was being directed toward the West as well as toward what had been the Second World or the Soviet Empire.
Now, nearly thirteen years after the recognition that we were truly in a war with Islamo-Fascism, …T.B.C.
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