D Day

Another anniversary of D Day has past. I won't go through the specifics of the event, but simply write that D Day (Decision Day) was the turning point of W.W. II and the end of the Nazi attempt to expand into other nations and practice some very inhumane doctrines there. There are few survivors, civilian or military, of W.W. II, and as a result few people today note it or think about the slaughter that came about in the world's greatest conflict (per casualty numbers). That is a shame. Our technology and conveniences have robbed us of appreciation of and about previous eras that can instruct us well even today.

Much of the world saw that war as a reluctant crusade to exterminate the horrors and threats of Nazism and as a result, there were few people who protested fighting Germany and her allies because the evil was clear to all. Today such clarity in the evil arena is not what it used to be. With modern communication, and the protests and restraints on government that go with those protests, it is hard to imagine countries being able to mobilize such a great war again.

That's the good news. No doubt, for example, the west would have long ago attacked Muslim countries in response to their support of Islamic terrorists if this were the era of the 40's rather than the 2000's. The public today would instantly oppose a war of that kind today and freeze their governments from executing such a war. It's a nice restraint to have in preventing a foolish rush to judgment.

The bad aspect of this is that renegade nations and groups sheltered by them, as in Iran and many Muslim nations, feel less pressure to behave fairly knowing that an attack on them today is unlikely. In a sense, W.W. II was the last world war to be fought in a conventional way. Such a world wide conflict will be highly unlikely to happen again. And that has a bad connotation as well as the good one I mentioned. That is, nations now may act badly and aggressively against others with much less fear that they will be challenged and stopped in their acting out.

War should always be a last answer. Humans lose lives needlessly in them for wars are most often nothing more than temporary territorial changes. The humans who experience war return from those conflicts physically or emotionally injured, and the civilian population loses much as well. The carnage of D day and W.W. II should be a good reminder to us of that.